Put our greatest living dramatist into a cage with a “challenging” modernist novel and what do you get? A ding-dong scrap and a bunch of questions. Has Ford Madox Ford been “Stoppardised”? Has “justice” been done to Parade’s End? Has the BBC beaten the opposition?
The questions matter. An awful lot of licence money is riding on it. Our money. Sir Tom Stoppard’s adaptation is, one is told, the most expensive the BBC has yet gambled on. The opening episode — with its flickering moves from set to set, outside location to outside location — spared no expense. And bank-breakingly expensive action scenes in a world war are still to come.
BBC statisticians will nervously scrutinise viewing figures, particularly the slump or rise next