Watching my novel reborn on TV

I was anxious what TV would have done to my baby in the BBC’s adaptation, but its new artistic guardians have treated it very well indeed A few days ago, watching a TV show, I got tears in my eyes. That doesn’t happen very often. For a start, I haven’t watched television for many years, and also, it takes a lot to make me cry. My own private sorrows can make me weep, and occasionally a song can penetrate my defences (June Tabor’s “A Proper Sort of Gardener” does it to me every time), but when it comes to novels or on-screen narratives, I’m tough to crack. Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required. Show me a tear-jerking movie, and I’ll sit stony-faced, analysing the hell out of it. “Oh yes, this is the bit where they hope people will start sniffling. Not badly done at all, I suppose, for this sort of thing. I’d rate it a 6/10. Maybe even a 7.” Yet a few days ago, sitting in front of the TV, I got choked up. Does it change anything if I tell you that the TV drama which moved me was an adaptation of my own novel The Crimson Petal and the White ? My wife and I watched it on a home-made DVD that was posted to us by the film-makers. It was episode four, the final instalment. We’d seen episodes one to three some weeks before, fresh from the cutting room. All four discs captured the production in an almost-but-not-quite-finished state, with missing voiceovers and the odd “note to self” jotted in subtitles, reminding boffins and dubbers to fix this or that. But the crucial things – the script, the acting, the direction, the cinematography – were all there. I was hugely impressed. Parental pride at seeing “my baby” up there? I don’t think so. The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after The Crimson Petal ‘s publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it. The production team responsible for the Spider-Man franchise had bought the option, and rumours abounded that Kirsten Dunst would play my heroine Sugar. I could not have been less interested. Receiving updates on it from my publishers was like receiving news about a fashion expo in Taiwan. Who cares? The producer emailed me, asking me a trivial question about the Victorian era which I interpreted as a feeler to test whether I might get involved in some capacity. Mindful that Hollywood has a long history of wasting authors’ time, flattering them into writing screenplays which then get rewritten by half a dozen hacks, I responded with polite standoffishness. The project never got off the ground. But listen: I want to tell you a story. Imagine a girl who’s been abused all her life, firstly by her mother and then by everyone else she meets. By the time she’s 19, she’s already been a prostitute for years. But she’s smart. Very smart. One of her clients falls in love with her (or does he?) and puts her intelligence to good use helping him run his business. Lots of other stuff happens – it’s a long story and I don’t have much space to tell it – but after a while, this prostitute finds herself looking after a six-year-old child. Mothering her, if you like. But we all know that the cycle of abuse is vicious. Will she poison the soul of this little girl, the way her own mother poisoned hers? Last week, I watched this drama being acted out on TV. I saw a young woman embracing a child and I could tell, looking into that young woman’s eyes, that she would sooner kill herself than harm that child. And my own eyes

Posted by on April 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.