Unfortunately my SOH doesn’t stretch to delighting in incompetence and dumb ignorance. Of course I accept that the world’s full of people who couldn’t organise a p*ss-up in a brewery, and why should they be able to? - but it depresses me to see them get careers as events managers.
If the director and everybody else involved thought it was remotely proper for a gentleman to ride open-necked to encounter a lady, they were utterly ignorant of Regency manners. And if they didn’t, but decided to show him “galloping ventre a terre” while bare necked, as Julie-30 suggests, to show “that his love for Georgiana was so great that he didn't care about proprieties”, they surely didn’t realise that Jane Austen’s entire literary output, from childhood onwards, was a defence of conventional propriety and a critique of the kind of Romantic sensibility in which young men with picturesquely disarranged locks and daringly loosened (or no) neckwear dashed around spurring their horses to unnecessary speed.
Ignorance of these basic facts isn’t a crime in the general population, but I think we’re entitled to expect it in someone directing a Jane Austen fanfic for the Beeb. Of course the world’s full of people who couldn’t organise a p*ss-up in a brewery, and why should they be able to? - but it depresses me to see them get careers as events managers.
This was thrown into relief for me last night when re-watching Shakespeare in Love – which took the known facts of Shakespeare’s’ career, the origins of Romeo and Juliet and the tradition of English theatre, tore them to shreds, mixed them up and made an Easter bonnet out of them - and is utterly brilliant. (Now SiL is full of real hommages – to Olivier’s Henry V, Zeffirelli’s R&J, Blackadder, Private Eye, Jacobean revenge tragedy, you name it.) And why is it brilliant? Because these were a bunch of talented witty people who completely knew and loved their material*, so they knew how to spoof it rotten without travestying it.
*With the sole exception of one G Paltrow. I’ve always been convinced that one of the things SiL is, is an extended joke played on la Paltrow.
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magpieskye
10 years ago
I don't think they were ignorant of the facts. Imo they deliberately chose to disregard them in favor of artistic interpretation. The costume designer also did the recnt Poldark. I read an interview in which she discussed her decisions for Poldark, which I strongly suspect were the same reasons she made the costume choices she did in DCTP. She disregarded historical accuracy in favor of her own inclinations, those of the actors (i'm amazed at how much input she asks them for!), and the art director, etc.
As for customs of the era, I recently read some cooments linked on the mb for The Crimson Field. It seems that despite hiring expert period advisors, the makers of that series repeatedly ignored their advice in favor of dramatic licence.
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syntinen
10 years ago
You've missed the point. There's nothing period-inauthentic about a Regency young man throwing propriety and his horse's well-being to the winds by galloping with sexily loosened neckwear to meet his lady-love; fashionable Regency romance literature was stuffed with young men doing things like that, and certainly there were plenty of young men doing the same in real life. But Jane Austen hated that attitude; her entire oeuvre is a manifesto for the importance of conventional good manners and common sense, and the silliness and dangerousness of the Romantic ideal. Anybody who can imagine a Jane Austen hero (as opposed to a Jane Austen cad, or a Jane Austen nincompoop) galloping up to a lady when there is no hurry, and appearing before her improperly dressed when he could perfectly well have stopped to straighten his neckwear, has either never read a Jane Austen novel or hasn't understood a word of what they did read.
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silverwhistle
10 years ago
It is a couple of removes from Austen, though: based on what is basically fanfic by P D James.
"Active but Odd"
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