A Dance to the Music of Time

Though nothing can compare with the books this is quite a fine stab, studded with the finest English talent of its period sensitively cast, and moderately faithful to significant portions of the books. The narrator's voice and perspective are well maintained though oddly James Purefoy is replaced by an excellent but jarring John Standing in the last episode while most of the other actors are cosmetically aged with varying degrees of success. Simon Russell Beale excels but does not dominate as the repulsive Widmerpool and the female characters live as they don't always in the books where they are seen through men's eyes. The music is well chosen and used from Coward's "Twentieth Century Blues" onwards and the use of visual art, including the eponymous Dance is apt.

No, I haven't read the books, but I have read Proust, and you can bet Mr. Powell read him too. Powell's first volume appeared thirty years after Proust's death, and a greater valentine can't be imagined.

Both "Dance" and "In Search of Lost Time" are panoramic multi-generational quasi-autobiographical narratives of the gentry they knew. Lower class types pop in from time to time, but they never take center stage for long. Both genteel epics run more than 3000 pages. Major characters are rarely single portraits, but are usually drawn from composites of two or three prototypes. Both works chronicle the human cycles of birth, education, coupling, re-coupling, decay and death.

In addition to writing earlier, Proust had the structural advantage of writing the beginning and end of his novel first, spending the rest of his life filling in the middle. It was a meditation on the nature of memory, and underlying all the gossip and melodrama is an awareness that there is a coherent thesis and philosophy tying the whole journey together.

At least as presented here, no such unifying ideas are discernible in Powell. We meet characters of greater or lesser interest, they do the things that people do (and sometimes don't do, and occasionally never have done in the history of the world). They learn, age, crack-up and die, but the whole thing just kind of trails off and rumbles to a stop rather than ends. We may have a good time getting there, but I wind up wondering why we made the trip.

In response to criticisms of the abridgment, we should note that Powell, as a former screenwriter, was not upset at the reshaping of his work for TV. Nicholas Coleridge reports: "Powell, himself, says that 'Somewhat to my surprise' he is happy with the adaptation. 'It seems quite alright to me,' he told me with faltering voice, on the telephone. 'I think they've done it as well as this medium possibly can.'"

Across the board, the actors are almost uniformly pleasing. Simon Russell Beale has been rightly cheered for his remarkable and daring Widmerpool, but Michael Williams (Judi Dench's late husband) is outstanding as Ted Jeavons, and Edward Fox steals every scene he's in, no surprise there. James Purefoy as Nick has to do a lot of listening, and occasionally he does it wonderfully well.

I was not upset at the recasting of half a dozen characters in the fourth film. Some of the young actors looked quite silly in extreme age makeup as practiced 10 years ago. I'd have been happier if it had been more widespread. It took me about 8 seconds to register that Nick and Isabel and Jean were played by different actors, and then I plunged right back into the story. I'm sorry for the viewers that were derailed by the substitutions, but I wasn't.

I am perplexed by the character of Pamela Flitton as played here in her unique patented performance by Miranda Richardson. She is a vicious, irritable, impatient, destructive, sexually voracious, uncontrolled and uncontrollable woman, everything that panics an English writer from Charles Dickens to Bram Stoker and onward.

Pamela is a crimson-lipped vampire straight out of Hammer Horror, and not one thing she does or says has a motivation. I hope the books are more coherent in explaining why, why anything.

BTW, the film "A Business Affair," from novels by Barbara Skelton, gives Pamela's prototype's side of the story, and I look forward to seeing it by way of further illumination. There's precious little to comprehend on view here. She just is.

Anyway, this is all professionally done and makes for entertaining viewing. It may not be the absolute best of its genre, but it's a long way from the worst. It is highly recommended to people who like British miniseries based on long novels.

OTOH, no one has ever made a good movie out of Proust, they're all terrible. There's a wonderful published screenplay Harold Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey, but it was never produced. If you want to spend a year reading 3000 pages, please start first with Proust, then take on Powell for dessert.

They don't make adaptations like this any more - no doubt for cost reasons and a lack of imagination and bravery at the TV companies. 7 hours of solid drama, yet full of incidental humour and some very fine characterisations.

Unfortunately it is flawed, and the flaws make it just very good viewing rather than the excellent series it should have been. The biggest flaws to my mind are:

1 The decision to replace Nick and his wife by new actors for Film 4 was totally wrong. Nick ages far too much in too short a space of time, and looks completely different. This creates a real problem of believability.

2 Still on ageing, some of the actors are 'aged' very well, whilst others (especially the ladies and Odo) seem hardly any different as the decades progress.

3 Film 4 is by far the weakest, though to be fair this reflects the books on which it is based. Perhaps it should have been cut further and the earlier years given even greater prominence.

4 Despite a great deal of pruning, there are still too many characters and insufficient narration for non-aficionados of the books to be sure all the time of who is who.

5 The scenes often seem to be a succession of dramatic deaths - difficult to avoid with the way the story has to be condensed, but very predictable nonetheless.

However, it's still pretty good, and light years removed from much of the dumbed-down drama on TV today.

At long last, Anthony Powell's 12 volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time has been dramatised for television. If Powell's "Journals" are to be believed, this is after any number of false starts spanning the best part of 20 years. The dramatisation was in four two-hour episodes, each covering approximately 3 books. They were shown on UK's Channel 4 TV in October 1997. The format of four 2-hour films was, in many ways, unfortunate as it severely constrained the amount of the action which could be shown, however given the exigencies of modern TV scheduling it was probably the only way in which "Dance" was ever going to get televised. As a devotee of the books, I was apprehensive about how they would translate into film. Just how do you condense 12 novels into 8 hours of television? However in my view the dramatisation worked extremely well, notwithstanding the necessary omissions. What helped the whole production was some interesting, and at times inspired and doubtless extravagant, casting which included: Edward Fox (as Uncle Giles), Zoë Wanamaker (as Audrey Maclintick), John Gielgud (as St John Clarke), Alan Bennett (as Sillery), Miranda Richardson (as Pamela Flitton)... some interesting choices!! Overall an interesting and enjoyable series. I just fear that having been done once that we'll never see "Dance" recreated in a different (better?) format and that Powell will remain relatively unknown in comparison with contemporaries like Evelyn Waugh ... which is in my view quite unjustifiable as Powell is a much better writer. Fortunately Channel 4 released these 4 films on video - which is excellent as they're well worth watching again.

It's possibly a bit late to post this question but as I have only now managed to see the video, here goes anyway. Does anyone know WHY it was deemed necessary to replace James Purefoy and Emma Fielding as Nicholas Jenkins and his wife in the last film of the series? Most of the other characters were left to age, convincingly or otherwise, even Widmerpool himself. Though Joanna David did at least bear a tolerable resemblance to how Isobel (Fielding) might have looked in later life, John Standing, excellent actor though he is, didn't look remotely like an aged James Purefoy. The changeover broke the continuum of events for me and was a constant source of irritation. What was behind this strange, irrational decision?