Wuthering Heights – Condensed Version

Boggart Blog has often slated politicians and senior civil servants for drawing big fat salaries without having done any work to earn them. There is one profession however who are worse than even politicians when it comes to being paid for doing nothing and yet these people seldom come in for criticism. They are newspaper television critics.

Come on, how often have you read a review of a new show and thought “that bugger wasn’t watching the same programme I saw”. In fact he wasn’t watching anything, he was down the pub with his mates. The review is a thinly disguised version of the TV company press release.

The show that brought this to mind was the dreary, plodding adaptation of Wuthering Heights shown in two ninety-minute episodes over the weekend. Wuthering Heights has never been a favourite novel of mine, not so much a book as a bucket of shit in fact. My favourite version of the story was Monty Python’s Wuthering Heights in semaphore. Heathcliffe is too obviously a stereotypical sexual fantasy for repressed late – Georgian spinsters and I could never see the appeal of whiney Cathy. I did once know a very sexy Kathy who lived on Wuthering Heights, or Withins Moor as it is known locally. Other than that, a Gothic angst-fest comprising three hundred pages of misery, resentment and alienation is not really my cup of tea.

There is not much to the story. Out on the wylie windy moor people stomp about a lot, or occasionally roll and fall in damp heather, the whole setting is shrouded in mizzle, that peculiarly Pennine weather that can’t make its mind up whether it is mist or drizze and so is know in the local vernacular as “that fine stuff that wets you through.” People scowl at each other. Every now and then a horse drawn carriage drives along a muddy track and someone dies.

Then there is a ghost haunting the male lead.

Why did that take three hours prime time tele. Kate Bush knocked the whole thing off in six minutes and still found time to do a bit of Marcel Marceau inspired dancing.

So, you might well ask, how did this travesty of a travesty attract glowing reviews. Well as already mentioned the critics did not watch it. Neither did we actually, we got bored after forty five minutes and put Dave on. Mock The Week was better even though we have seen it three times now.

One of the givaways in my paper’s review was that the critic described the actress playing Cathy as “newcomer Charlotte Riley.”

Newcomer? I had seen her two nights before playing female lead in a two year old episode of George Gently, starring Judge John Deed (TV drama is becoming very incestuous like Norfolk or The Dingles in Emmerdale).

As for Wuthering Heights, if they had crammed it into six minutes like Kate Bush did it might have been OK. Like this:

Fade in to shot of grey, bleak moorland shrouded in that fine stuff that wets you through. In the distance stands a grey mansion house, even greyer than the moors and the sky. Pools of grey light fill the windows. The camera zooms in and through the portal into the mansion’s interior. A grey, brooding man stomps about. Suddenly a window smashes and an arm reaches in, it is very pale grey and clothed in a grey sleeve. (It’s a ghost, see.)

The grey arm grabs the man’s coat and a ghostly voice says “Heathcliffe, it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home now – wooo – ooooo – oooo – oooo”

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle. People in grey clothes run about with oil lamps.

Cut to outside. The fine stuff that wets you through sweeps across the bleak moorland. Heathcliffe is digging a hole. The camera zooms in and we see he has dug up Cathy’s grave and climbed in the coffin for a quick bunk up with the skeleton. From this we know Heathcliffe has a lot of issues.

We jump back in time. The bleak moorland is clad in sere and yellow (oops, sorry. That’s Shakespeare) and the house is not grey, just greyish.

A serving woman speaks: “Ayup Mistrurnshaw,” she says to a fat man whose ruddy complexion says he has cardio vascular problems.

“Ayup Nellie,” say the fat man although the woman is not called Nellie but Raquel from Coronation Street.

“’oo’s yon raggy arsed little wazzock tha’s fotched whoam wi’ thi’ Mistrurnshaw?” asks the woman.

“Yon mon’s callt ’eathcliffe Nellie, ah fun ’im I’t gutter i’ Liverpoo’ gi’ ’im a wesh and some scran and ’ee can be a brether fer R Cathy and R ’indley.”

Cathy is thrilled with her new brother but Hindley says he’s a theiving little Gyppo bastard and punches him in the face. “’ee’s a cuckoo in t’ nest R Cathy,” Hindley tells his sister.

We jump forward several years. Cathy and Heathcliffe are no longer children while Hindley has grown into that weird looking guy from Torchwood. R ‘indley will be comin’ whoam soon says Mistrurnshaw. Cathy smiles, Heatcliffe scowls, Mistrurnshaw then clutches his chest and falls over. Hindley tells Heathcliffe he is a servant and hits him with a stick.

OK that covered the first forty five minutes. Anyone who stuck it out through the full three hours can pick up the Boggart Blog condensed adaptation if they wish.

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