I’m not managing to consume much live tv these days (or even catch up on the tv I’ve recorded – so much Dexter & United States of Tara saved on our DVR…) so I was delighted to catch the first half of the new Wuthering Heights mini-series last week on the ABC. Against all the odds, I even managed to catch the second half which screened on TV last night.

I love Wuthering Heights. It may well be my favourite classic novel of all time. It’s one of the few novels I discovered after being forced to read it at school which I went on to re-read voluntarily, because I love it so very much. I love the utter wrongness of its narrative structure, I love the fact that not a single character in the story is particularly endearing, and I adore the fact that so many people loathe it with a fiery vengeance. I even like the fact that there are just so MANY convenient deaths in the narrative that the Yorkshire moor itself is presented as a disease for which there is no cure. It’s grey and miserable and damp and people die like flies. And oh yes, there’s a very bitchy, selfish ghost haunting a man who thoroughly deserves it – even welcomes it, because quite frankly the ghost is better company than the people he has surrounded himself with. Even torturing them doesn’t cheer him up any more.

Wuthering Heights kicks Jane Eyre’s arse.

I enjoyed the new adaptation very much. It chopped the order of narration around differently to the book, and I did think for a while there that I had already missed a first episode. It was also exceptionally fast-paced, so if you made a cup of tea you could come back to find out that years had passed. Hard to fault it for that. They didn’t miss much out that was important (though I would have liked a touch more of the Catherine-Linton-Hareton triangle, Linton in particular was skimmed over rather lightly) and mostly cut out a lot of brooding and staring into the distance.

And of course, it cut out poor old Lockwood. It did not surprise me in the least, given that Lockwood isn’t really a character at all, but a narrative device used to transition between flashbacks in the novel. I was surprised how much I missed him, though, wet slice of cabbage that he is. Lockwood is the intruder whose sole purpose is to wander into the immense fucked-up soap opera on the moors that is the Earnshaw-Linton-Heathcliff family, and observe it as an outsider. His gossipy interest in the dark and brooding people he meets, his vaguely stalkerish crush on Catherine the younger, and his attempts to insert himself into the narrative are all utterly fruitless. Thus, it was ridiculously easy to slice him out of the story altogether when transitioning to a televised version. But I still miss him.

The whole cast were excellent. I liked that there was no attempt (cough, Laurence Oliver, cough, Merle Oberon) to make Heathcliff and Cathy remotely likeable or romanticised. Their self-absorbed and destructive natures were beautifully evoked by Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, neither of whom are actors I have ever noticed in anything before. Hardy had something of a Jonathan Rhys Meyer pout about him – he should go far.

Andrew Lincoln, an old favourite of mine, makes poor dull old Edgar Linton a bit more interesting than usual. Sarah Lancashire manages to make Nelly the maid somewhat less than annoying, which is a very impressive feat. Young Catherine and Hareton were appropriately daft as brushes. I particularly enjoyed Kevin McNally as Mr Earnshaw, and Burn Gorman’s Hindley was electric in his degradation at Heathcliff’s hands.

Also, they all had Yorkshire accents, and the costumes were fantastic – Cathy’s progression from bedraggled wildcat to fine lady was especially well conveyed through her frocks.

Definitely a cut above the Laurence Olivier version, in any case, which is about nineteen different kinds of dreadful.

Tags: adaptations, books that brood, literary classics, watching, wuthering heights