I just love it when suffragettes smear me with mustard!

Apart from the incredibly silly disrobing scene, with this remake of The 39 Steps, I was reminded of the old Wishbone classics that introduced vastly simplified stories to children, where the dog would play one of the characters. I had to double check to make sure, yes, this was Masterpiece Theatre. Alistair Cooke was surely rolling over in his grave tonight. There’s a change in direction of drama programming at the BBC, and this will likely impact what we see in America on Masterpiece Theatre (the BBC is not the only collaborator in WGBH co-productions, but a frequent one).

Masterpiece Theatre (now called Masterpiece Classic) just aired the BBC’s lackluster remake of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, The 39 Steps (Hitchcock’s version is ranked 4th of 100 in BFI’s list of the top 100 British films of the 20th Century).

Is this the same BBC that brought us the wildly original period drama I, Claudius? And the finely executed Bleak House and Little Dorrit?

Apart from the incredibly silly disrobing scene, with this remake of The 39 Steps, I was reminded of the old Wishbone classics that introduced vastly simplified stories to children, where the dog would play one of the characters.

I had to double check to make sure, yes, this was Masterpiece Theatre. Alistair Cooke was surely rolling over in his grave tonight.

If the BBC – and anyone else without enough imagination to find the lives that people led before our own time interesting – is so keen on “re-imagining” the classics, then why don’t they just come up with something of their own? And PBS, drop the title “Masterpiece Classic” because that’s a misrepresentation.

Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is one of those films that draws you in before you even realize there’s not a chance you’ll get up from your seat until it’s all over. Every minute is essential. Robert Donat’s performance is sheer understated perfection. And Hitchcock makes it look so easy, if you aren’t paying attention, you won’t even realize what he pulled off until you see someone else attempt the same material and fail miserably. At every turn you are reminded the choices of screenwriters, actors, directors that made the all difference – and made it a classic.

Nobody expected the remake to come close, but how much it fell short was remarkable.

From the Guardian, we hear the details of the new direction:

This change, which follows the appointment of Ben Stephenson, 31, as head of drama commissioning, will mean that there will be less of the likes of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Cranford, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda and Pride and Prejudice.

In their place the BBC is planning more period dramas along the lines of this week’s The Diary of Anne Frank and the remake of John Buchan’s spy novel, The 39 Steps, which was shown over Christmas…

A BBC drama insider said: “There is to be an evolution in the presentation of period dramas, moving away from classic 19th century so-called ‘bonnet’ dramas to looking at other periods of history. This will allow us to look at other times and places in British and world history. The aim is to give drama audiences something new and different to enjoy.”

And the Telegraph, where Emmy award-winning screenwriter Andrew Davies has some choice words about the BBC’s “downmarket” shift:

[Andrew] Davies [screenwriter of Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Pride and Prejudice (1995), and many other classic period dramas] blamed the “new breed” of BBC executives who are so intent on “slate-wiping and territory-marking” that they have abandoned interest in 19th century drama save for the most obvious crowd-pleasers…

“People like bonnets. I don’t think you can under-estimate that,” Davies told the Radio Times, adding that the BBC had a duty to deliver the classics to viewers.

“I’m rather counting on the fact that there is stil the BBC charter. The BBC has to justify its licence fee and the cultural value of transmitting the classics is one of the things that makes the BBC unique.

“That said, they’re certainly putting the stress on the 20th century. It’s the revenge of the controllers. The new breed don’t have anything like the power that, rightly or wrongly, someone like [former BBC head of drama] Jane Tranter had. So there’s an element of slate-wiping and territory-marking.”

…Ben Stephenson, the 33-year-old controller of drama commissioning, is also a recent appointment.

The new drama commissioner and producer of The 39 Steps comment, from the Telegraph:

… viewers were quick to point out a string of historical bloopers in its recent adaptation of The 39 Steps. John Buchan’s classic spy novel may have been set on the eve of the First World War, but the hero lived in an Art Deco apartment building. The car chase involved a 1924 Morris Oxford and a 1927 Wolseley, while the machine gun-toting bi-plane which chased actor Rupert Penry-Jones across the Scottish moors was years ahead of its time. Fans of the original story were also baffled by the appearance of a spunky female love interest…

[Ben Stephenson] said: “… We were creating a realistic world within a world – a world of damsels and heroes and a huge amount of excitement. That, for me, is the priority. Did it create that world? It absolutely did…

Other inaccuracies in the showpiece Christmas drama included a submarine appearing in a freshwater loch. Twenty-four viewers contacted the BBC to express their displeasure, of whom three pointed out the wrong choice of aircraft. The model used was an SE5a, which was not in use in 1914. Buchan’s original novel included a scene in which the lead character, Richard Hannay, was buzzed by a bi-plane but there were no machine guns and he was not shot at. Critics have pointed out that politically incorrect dialogue was removed from the adaptation, while the female spy character Victoria Sinclair, played by Lydia Leonard, was an invention of screenwriter Lizzie Mickery.

When the BBC drama was announced, producer Lynn Horsford said: “With this adaptation… we asked the writer to feel free to re-imagine it for a modern audience more familiar with James Bond and Jason Bourne…”

Where Donat and Carroll sparked like rock striking iron, Penry-Jones and Leonard generate all the heat of two dairy cows chewing wet grass on either side of a fence. So what kind of reviews were there for the remake? Scathing. Here’s one from The Herald:

Out with the old, in with more old. The first question anyone contemplating a new adaptation of The 39 Steps must ask is whether there is any point, in a universe in which Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie exists. And, as in 1959 and 1978, when John Buchan’s book was last brought to the screen, the answer remains a resounding: “No. Do something else.”

For 73 years, the 39 Steps we’ve carried in our collective conscious hasn’t been Buchan’s, but Hitchcock’s. Buchan might have come up with the spies, the murder, the danger and the chase, but it was Hitchcock who added the slyness, the strangeness, the fun, the sex, the thrill of it all. There is, for instance, no woman in Buchan’s novel. It was Hitchcock who gave us Madeleine Carroll, wet from the rain, taking her stockings off while handcuffed to Robert Donat’s hero. Right there you have a classic example of a film being much better than the book.

The tepid pace of the BBC’s new version, written by Lizzie Mickery, is set by the casting of Rupert Penry-Jones, late of Spooks, as Richard Hannay, the gentleman adventurer who winds up hunted by both British Bobbies and nasty Germans through the Scottish wilds, while attempting to avert the first world war.

At his best, Penry-Jones has a style reminiscent of the young Roger Moore, but without the vital, animating spark of self-deprecation. As Hannay, Penry-Jones is not at his best, and more reminiscent of a well-stuffed armchair on wheels.

Labouring in the shadows of Hitchcock’s film, Mickery has also invented a woman to get swept up in Hannay’s escapade, a young suffragette, played by Lydia Leonard. When you bear in mind that no such character exists in Buchan, though, you have to wonder why she bothered to construct such a very damp adornment.

Where Donat and Carroll sparked like rock striking iron, Penry-Jones and Leonard generate all the heat of two dairy cows chewing wet grass on either side of a fence. Perhaps The 39 Steps is simply too well-known, and maybe the idea is that, once they’ve got it out the way, Penry-Jones can return for a series of films adapted from Buchan’s other, less-familiar Hannay books, unburdened by association. From this evidence, though, there’s no reason why he should…

From cows chewing wet grass to mustard on beefcake; from the Guardian:

The romance scene is one of the silliest ever. “We should probably get out of these wet things before we catch pneumonia,” says Rupe. Yeah, the old wet-things-pneumonia trick. So they unbutton and peel off while flicking each other coquettish glances, then pull on freshly laundered pyjamas, provided by the inn. But then there are wounds to be tended to, so off comes his top again, and by the flicker of the firelight she rubs the mustard from the beef sandwiches into his burns, swooning for Britain. Oh Rupert, I want to smear you all over with Colman’s English and then lick it all off as if you were a hot dog …

Steady! Anyway, a little later Lydia is sadly shot to death by a German – then she falls into the loch, where she drowns, just so we know she’s properly double-dead. Rupert dives in after her, so we can see him wet again, but Lydia’s gone for ever. Well, until she reappears under the clock at 10 at St Pancras station. Happy day!

It’s all very silly. And, more importantly, it’s not as good as Hitchcock’s 1935 version, with Robert Donat as Richard Hannay. It doesn’t have the pace, the moodiness or the wit. What’s the point of doing something over and over again, if it’s going to get steadily worse? One hundred and ninety-five steps is enough, too many. No more please, I’m taking the lift.

And thus, quietly and largely unnoticed, a massive change of BBC policy is slipped out, a cultural volte-face in its approach to drama by the nation’s most important and influential provider of drama. And what’s with this “re-imagining” business anyway, David Lister asks, from the Independent:

…[Historian David Starkey said of such "re-imaginings",] “I think it is shameful for a national channel which has some claim to being a public service broadcaster to broadcast this kind of stuff.”

But if it gets viewers viewing, is accuracy that important? Apparently not, according to the new head of BBC drama, Ben Stephenson. In an interview he declared: “At the end of the day, the story of The 39 Steps is quite far-fetched. The question is: for the seven million people who watched it, did it feel authentic, did it create a sense of period?” There was more of the same from The 39 Steps’s producer Lynn Horsford, who said: “With this adaptation we wanted to stay faithful to the spirit and period of the book, but asked the writer to feel free to re-imagine it for a modern audience.”

And thus, quietly and largely unnoticed, a massive change of BBC policy is slipped out, a cultural volte-face in its approach to drama by the nation’s most important and influential provider of drama. It is the use of language that fascinates me most. A drama now should feel authentic; it should create a sense of period. What on earth does that mean? Why should it not be authentic and properly portray the period?

Ms Horsford’s language is even more worthy of a media studies module than Mr Stephenson’s. She asked the writer “to re-imagine it for a modern audience”. Can modern audiences not cope with authentic period drama? And what precisely does “re-imagine it” mean?

The New York Times was underwhelmed, too:

…the casting of the buff, blond and bland Rupert Penry-Jones as Hannay, signal the intentions of this 90-minute television movie. It’s going for the style of the British boy’s-adventure spy novel, pioneered by Buchan and perfected between the wars by Eric Ambler. But it wants to venture into Bond-Bourne territory too, which means antique-car chases, frequent gunplay, a surprise appearance by a German U-boat and Mr. Penry-Jones’s taking off his shirt.

Hitchcock and his screenwriters, Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, realized that a faithful adaptation of Buchan’s book, with its convoluted and implausible plot, lack of female characters and long interludes of parlor-bound chat, wouldn’t do. So they dispensed with much of it — including the physical 39 steps — and came up with their own sexy, giddy story, featuring new creations like the music-hall performer Mr. Memory, the doomed spy Annabella Smith and the spunky Pamela, who beds down with Hannay while handcuffed to him.

None of those characters are present in this new “39 Steps,” and more’s the pity. Mr. Penry-Jones, expected to carry the story in cultivated-action-hero style, is competent but mostly charisma-free. Once again a female character has been created to keep Hannay company, a Scottish nobleman’s suffragist niece named Victoria (Lydia Leonard). This time she’s an actual love interest, but the sexual subplot has less of a charge than Hitchcock gave to his scenes of mild impropriety 75 years ago. (Mr. Penry-Jones and Ms. Leonard are handcuffed, but not to each other.)…

At one point the filmmakers pay homage to Buchan and Hitchcock simultaneously. In the book the bad guys use an airplane to track Hannay across the Scottish countryside, a radical notion at the time. In the film Mr. Penry-Jones is strafed by a biplane, an obvious homage to Hitchcock’s 1959 “North by Northwest,” the template for the modern spy caper.

Apparently that’s the Hitchcock movie that really turns them on. But they don’t appear to have absorbed any lessons from it, either. Instead of suave and exhilarating and funny, their “39 Steps” is routine.

If only one could “re-imagine” the sorry state of American television, where the lowest common denominator rules. Perhaps the most damnable review of the BBC’s The 39 Steps of all is that after watching, some viewers thought the remake was an intentional spoof of spy movies. Which is the danger of dumbing down to attract the masses rather than putting out classics so well-done, the masses will not be able to resist – case in point, Little Dorrit which won 7 Emmy Awards for excellence in a dramatization that was quite close to the source material and historical period, and curiously enough, the actors all kept their clothes on.

There is one channel in America where one can see the ultimate The 39 Steps, Turner Classic Movies. There are countless other channels where one can see so-so action and adventure stories with clothes and bullets flying off and about. But where can one see new productions of truly well-crafted period drama? Once upon a time, the answer was PBS. If PBS stoops to conquer, one must ask the question, why do we need PBS at all, since there’s plenty of stooping going on elsewhere?

I’ll let Andrew Davies have the last word:

I think, in terms of doing the classics, [the BBC's] position is somewhere near what ITV’s was ten years ago. Which is, ‘yes, we’ll do them, but only if they’re big, popular warhorses’. So it’s going downmarket, I guess. I remain, however, fairly optimistic for the future of period drama because it’s just such a popular thing.