BBC Pride and Prejudice
The Fantastic Nineties TV Adaptation of Austen's Classic Novel
Ten years on, the BBC television version of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" is still well worth five hours of anyone's time.
The BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995 brought Jane Austen to a far wider audience than her novels had reached in the past, without compromising too much on the plot or the atmosphere of the original text.
In adapting Austen’s classic, Andrew Davies faced an obvious problem: one of the attractions of Austen is her prose style, and her dry, witty authorial voice. Indeed Austen was part of the first generation to develop the third-person narrator in English fiction to the state at which it would be used for hundreds of years after. The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, for example: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”, are spoken by the narrator, not by any of the characters. (Hugh Laurie, in his preface to The Plums of P.G. Wodehouse points out a similar problem with putting another fantastic stylist on the screen. How on earth do you play a line like “’Tinkerty-tonk’, I said, and I meant it to sting.”?)
Inevitably some of this voice was lost, but Davies managed to get in some of Austen’s authorial lines (including the famous beginning) by giving them to Lizzie Bennett, played by Jennifer Ehle. The cast overall was superb, with Davd Bamber as a memorably creepy Mr. Collins, and Adrian Lukis a shade too charmingly plausible to be trustworthy as Wickham. Benjamin Whitrow gave a brilliant character performance as Mr. Bennett, switching convincingly between the ridiculous, affectionate and stern sides of Lizzie’s father.
Colin Firth became an unexpected national sex symbol in his role as Fitzwilliam Darcy. The part was deliberately made a little more macho than Austen’s original, with Darcy shown fencing, galloping and diving into lakes, the latter involving a lengthy scene with his shirt plastered translucently to his torso. Still, given the situation Jennifer Ehle and Susannah Harker (Jane Bennett) found themselves in with their Empire line dresses, it seemed only fair that matters were evened up a little.
The production is very definitely BBC TV – it lasts for five hours, and doesn’t have the kind of production levels that would be found in the Hollywood film of Pride and Prejudice ten years later. However, this only adds to its appeal for many: not every prospect is picturesquely framed, not every emotion is reduced to the palette available in romantic comedy, and not every room is lit in comforting shades. The cold rooms, provincially genteel assemblies and sisterly bickering come across far better in this production, which still screens fantastically more than ten years after it was made.
