Shurely Shome Mishtake!

Statistician and Painter - never seen in the same room

Much excitement from eldest about the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End which started on BBC 2 last night. Of course this has mostly been the result of cool hero of said production being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch though she has already whistled through the (accurately named) teratology causing some "ahs" of recognition when the assistant at Waterstones eventually uncovered it in a back room somewhere. I did start it myself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the TV version but in one episode it overtook me by quite some distance. And here's a tip for you - while the dead-tree version on Amazon is £8 - the links from there to the Kindle editions show versions at between £4 and £5. Search instead for it in the Kindle store and you will find it for 77p. Much as I don't like spending for something I already have, I was wasting much time in looking up words in the Kindle dictionary anyway so I've saved a bit of time there.

The TV version is very good - without the dumb exposition of most such dramas but bearing in mind Tom Stoppard is completely at home writing about football or Quantum theory, I wasn't expecting much allowance for the Downton audience. Christopher Tietjens is an honourable man - the most honourable man in literature maybe - a man blessed with an intellect of superhuman proportions yet cruelly manipulated by his socialite wife. There may even be shadows of Cumberbatch's most famous role in that he has the analytic mind of Sherlock Holmes but without the limit of only retaining information which is useful to him. Tietjens is as comfortable with matters of statistics as applied to Government Social Policy as he is with all-things equestrian or the minutiae of local legal systems. And like Sherlock, Tietjens has a sidekick who in any normal company would be the cleverest person in the cast in McMasters, an equally-honourable man of supreme intelligence and social wit. A fellow statistician, McMasters is an expert on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a point highlighted by the producers decision to make the Actor who portrays him (Stephen Graham - last seen lusting after Sean Bean in The Accused) look uncannily like the subject of his monograph. There are shades of Goodbye to All That and even the Ghost Road Trilogy but Parade's End is more ambitious than either. It is described as an early modernist novel but to me seems like a link between mid 19th Century books and later more popular 20th century works.

And as a final tantalising link to another of my obsessions, I'm pretty convinced that FMF is The Nightingale of the PJ Harvey B-side to The Glorious Land.

Great TV - now can The BBC be persuaded to do a version of Arcadia?