9 September 2015

Embarrassing bodies: why the BBC’s Lady Chatterley made me squirm

The adaptation was – quite a rare feat, this – at once clichéd and anachronistic.

Poor old D H Lawrence isn’t terribly fashionable these days, though some people do think slightly better of him now than they did in the 1970s, when Angela Carter reduced him, in the course of a mere 3,000 words, to little more than a stocking fetishist. (You can read her brilliant essay “Lorenzo the Closet-Queen” in Shaking A Leg, her collected journalism, the latest edition of which comes with an introduction by yours truly.) Whatever his standing, however problematic (that is, misogynistic) his work continues to be, if you’re going to adapt it for television, you might as well have a stab at doing it properly. Change it too much and you’re left with something so crude – yes, even cruder than Lawrence! – that the whole exercise becomes pointless. Why not just commission a new drama instead?

The BBC’s new version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (6 September, 9pm) was written by Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio. In essence, his idea was to make the three central characters vastly more sympathetic and modern and then simply to disappear most of Lawrence’s other, more secondary creations, mere distractions all. Unfortunately, do this and you inevitably ditch the novel’s complexities and nuances. In particular, you lose its underlying preoccupation with social class, a system that its author sensed was in flux, the trenches having thrown up all sorts of in-betweeners (the novel was published in 1928).