From The BBC – For those of us who have a weakness for BBC period drama, next season is shaping up quite nicely. BBC One is continuing the BBC’s grand literary tradition with two novel adaptations on the slate for next season:
First up will be a six part series based on Jennifer Worth’s bestselling memoir, Call The Midwife. Adapted for the small screen by Heidi Thomas, Call the Midwife follows a new young midwife, Jenny, who joins an eccentric, lovable community of nursing nuns in 1950’s London. We’ll follow their friendships and the extraordinary true stories they encounter, as they are drawn into the lives and homes of the women and families they treat.
The Midwife Book Jacket:
An unforgettable story of the joy of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the hope of one extraordinary woman
At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over London-from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to the woman with twenty-four children who can’t speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side-illuminate a fascinating time in history. Beautifully written and utterly moving, The Midwife will touch the hearts of anyone who is, and everyone who has, a mother.
Second, and slated to air Christmas next year, BBC One has comissioned a three part adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations – a savy way to both capitalize on the Oprah’s Book Club buzz and mark Dickens’ bicentenary.
Adapted by Sarah Phelps, the BBC calls it’s new adaptation a suspenseful, thrilling, and visceral retelling that will capture the romance and warmth of the classic.
(Hhmmm, Dickens without Andrew Davies – I’m equal parts intrigued and wary…)
Great Expectations:
No other novel in the English language so epitomizes upward mobility, the rise from poverty to wealth, as Great Expectations.
Often considered to be one of Dickens’s best novels, it tells the story of young Pip who is mysteriously helped by two people: escaped convict Magwitch and the eccentric dowager Miss Havisham.
Here is storytelling at its best, alive with bigger-than-life characters, plot twists that turn on a dime, and scenes that burst off the page with color.
All in all, these sound pretty good – for those of us stateside, think of it as a peek at what’s coming next season on Masterpiece…
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