h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I really am going off Agatha Christie.Apparently the BBC have decided to take over now Poirot has finished on ITV.


Frankly I'm wondering when we are going to get new sources of drama on TV.Yes I love them and Jayne Austen's novels and Robin Hood's legend and Arthur but really can we have something new and give them a rest for a while.

The only thing the BBC did right was Being Human and to find some lesser pillaged works of Dickens.The one really interesting series they commissioned they cancelled even though it was Bafta Nominated..Yes I know Amazon have rescued it..But the BBC is the one TV producer that shouldn't worry about viewing figures and consequently should be doing new stuff.

So has anyone got any suggestions for new original TV series..I'd rather like The Faraday books by Graham Hurley myself.

And no I hate Downton Abbey because it's ridiculously unrealistic.

I´ll go for biographies: Beatrix Potter, Octavia Hill,Jane Austen...

I thought it was hilarious when the BBC trailed their "Original British Drama" - "The Musketeers"

Whatever goes over well in the UK eventually jumps across the Atlantic to be picked up by Public Television stations in the U.S. I imagine that Canada gets a fai9r share of them too. "Downton Abbey" is being shown in Boston, for instance. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are other authors who might be used. "Brideshead Revisited" has been done already. "Howard's End" and "Passage to India" have been made into movies; I don't know about TV adaptations. Maugham might work. There may be Virginia Woolf novels that haven't been adapted into anything yet. "Three Guineas" isn't a novel, but you could get a talented actress to portray Virginia Woolf and watch her have fun going up against the warmongers . There's a charming contemporary series of mystery novels about a ghost named Aunt Dimity, who advises an American woman who has moved to a small rural town in England where people seem to keep getting murdered. The gimmick is Aunt Dimity's old dairy, in which Dimity writes answers to the woman's questions. There's also a stuffed rabbit who never actually moves, but is often found in poses that the woman didn't put it in.'
'
Should I go on, or have I wandered off the track?

Aunt Dimity sold milk?

F.

Don't they say that there are only seven basic stories which appear in all possible guises, so eventually we are going to find some repetition, unless the film/book/TV drama is extremely skilfully crafted.

The BBC has done adaptations of some works by authors other than Dickens and Austen. Elizabeth Gaskell is one (Cranford, North and South, Wives and Daughters), George Eliot is another (Middlemarch), Stendhal (Scarlet and Black). But they haven't done them for a while. There are plenty of other 'classic' authors that haven't been adapted for a while - Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson spring to mind, not to mention Alexandre Dumas (the current Musketeers drama bears little relation to the books). I could go on for ages, so I'll stop there.

Yes, the BBC did an adaptation of the Miss Marple stories that many regard as classic. But that doesn't mean they should do a version of the Poirot stories. No, the production company didn't always stick to the story as written (the same is true of the recent Marple adaptations). But they got Poirot pretty much spot on (his moustaches weren't magnificent enough, IMO).

The Musketeers is actually new stories just with the old characters I'm led to believe - to be fair.

That's my point. The BBC have called the series 'The Musketeers' and given the main characters the names of Dumas' famous quartet but, as Orcus points out, with 'new stories'. IMO, it's a con. They could have called the characters Fred, Joe, Pete and Frank, but nobody would have watched it. People will tune in because calling it 'The Musketeers' gives them certain expectations. I'd love to have seen a decent serialization of one or more of the musketeer novels, but I'm dubious about this re-working.

Personally I know The Three Musketeers and Man in the Iron Mask so well I wouldn't bother watching yet another reinterpretation - whether the new stories are any good who knows, can't say I've watched it yet but I do kind of prefer it that they've written something new.

But hey ho - completely new everything is of course preferable (as long as it's quality)

Just so I wasn't criticising something I hadn't seen, I watched the first episode of The Musketeers on catch-up. The acting was OK, the production was OK, but I could see where the story was going before I was half way through. I suppose they didn't want the audience to have to work too hard the first time.

Yes, new is good, and it's also good to have a new drama that isn't crime-related. Obvious stories are not good. If this was a school report I'd be writing 'Could do better'.

The only really original series the BBC were showing was Ripper Street which was BAFTA nominated and the BBC canned it because viewing figures were low..

Seriously do the BBC have to worry about viewing figures if they are actually serving as a public broadcasting service?If money really is an issue stop playing the bonus and golden handshake game and provide the top notch programming expected of the organisation.

The fact that Amazon have taken over the series and are paying for it to continue must mean the viewing figures were still worth commissioning it.

It sometimes seems to me that we keep getting the same stories, but in a different way. The same plots keeping turning up in different places.

For example, a recent episode of 'Death in Paradise' - the episode in the parrot reserve. I worked out who had been killed, and who had done it, before they even found the body. And why? Because the build up to finding the body was a little show, arranged for the benefit of the rest of the group, in order to establish a false time of death, and therefore an alibi for the perpetrators.

Agatha Christie used pretty much the same scenario in one of the Marple stories, making the solution pretty obvious for anyone who knows detective stories.


Geggs

The new 'Musketeers' is an odd one. It seems more in the tradition of weekend family entertainment (see also Merlin, Atlantis, Robin Hood) all of which I think are trying to get the cross generational appeal of Dr Who. But I think it's on later, but doesn't seem to be taking advantage of being on later in terms of being a bit more complex. Having said that, I've not seen this week's yet.

But I think there's been a lot of very good original television recently. I've heard fairly persuasive arguments that we might be living in a golden age of television, as TV series start to overtake film in terms of prestige and perhaps even budgets.

Now I'm not sure that we need more Agatha Christie.. but there's an appetite for the kind of thing, nationally and internationally. I'd quite like to see an attempt at a TV adaptation of CJ Sansom's Shardlake novels, but it would be difficult and expensive to do properly, as what's really good about the books is the sense of time and place.

Independent television has had to invest in original drama (Downton Abbey, Whitechapel, Mr Selfridge etc) because their audience share shrank with the explosion in digital channels, with the subsequent drop in advertising revenue.

As Otto said, the BBC seem to want to recapture the success of Doctor Who and Sherlock by recreating stories that viewers would have heard of, presumably so their marketing department doesn't have to explain what the basic idea is to audiences.

But they still seem to stick to 'episode of the week' formula, when I'd prefer more character development and plot. (Still prefer the 1973 'The Three Musketeers')

<BB<

Fair point about Musketeers. I haven't watched it, just saw the promos and thought it bizarre to be calling it an original British drama.

For my mind, the best drama around comes from the States at the moment. Breaking Bad was insanely good and I've just watched The Newsroom which is similarly good.

Exactly! But the BBC has and can do better.

I do have to say that ITV's offering are barely above soap opera particularly Mr Selfridge.

To be fair, the BBC (or at least BBC4) has done very well in terms of importing non-English language drams - Borgen, The Killing, The Bridge, and Spiral - have all been brilliant. The Returned was C4, but wouldn't have happened without BBC4's success.

Also on the BBC, I'm enjoying 'Line of Duty' at the moment, though I hope the end matches the beginning. Ripper Street I've enjoyed, but is pretty preposterous and uneven. Same could be said for Peaky Blinders (with worse accents). The Fall was interesting - not so much a whodunnit as a weknowwhodunnititwashim - though I'd question the decision to end it as they did. I quite like the DI Gently crime dramas, which seem reasonably original to me. What Remains (with David Threlfall) was great, except perhaps the ending.

Costume drama....Garrow's Law, The Hour (sort of), Death comes to Pemberly over Christmas.

Plenty of good stuff, I'd say.

It's interesting how often the Musketeer story is reinterpreted. This version does share a few interesting features in common with the original that are usually changed - D'Artagnan's love interest is already married, and the Cardinal schemes on behalf of France, not himself. I'd like to like it more, but it's all a bit too 'boyband' for me.

Porthos is a more interesting character than the usual larger-than-life gluttonous buffoon, but for me D'Artagnan ought to be a gauche, rash, hot-head for whom 'honour' just means ego or not losing face. At least to start with.

I'm really enjoying Call the Midwife. Although they have now gone beyond the stories in the books its still good. I'm nit usually a fan if Period stuff like downtown ir Sherlock or Merlin.

I'm also enjoying BigBang Theory which is a US import. Apart from those, top gear , the voice and bake off/sewing bee I don't get to watch Mitch that isn't ceebebies these days!