TV review:
Vanity Fair
ABC 8.30pm Sundays

by Rob Gowland

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in 1811 and died in 1863 at the 
comparatively early age of 52. He contributed to Punch and wrote 
poetry, but it is his novels that are the basis of his enduring 
reputation.

The first of his novels, published in 1847, was Vanity Fair, a 
scathing satire that exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of a "high society" 
based on class and riches.

As a writer, Thackeray falls into the category of "critical realist". This 
was defined by the English Marxist writer Arnold Kettle in 1961 (in the GDR 
journal Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik) as "literature 
written in the era of class society from a point of view which, while not 
fully socialist, is nevertheless sufficiently critical of class society to 
reveal important truths about that society and to contribute to the freeing 
of the human consciousness from the limitations which class society has 
imposed on it."

Dickens was also a critical realist, but Kettle makes a significant 
distinction between the critical realism of Thackeray and that of Dickens 
("a supremely great writer, a writer in the category of Shakespeare and 
Chaucer").

"Within the general movement of Critical Realism", he wrote later in the 
same article, "it seems to me, there are certain writers who — though 
certainly critical of bourgeois society — remain in their overall 
sensibility essentially attached to the ways of thinking and feeling of 
that society.

"I would put Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray and George Eliot 
within that category. They are honest writers, they have many insights and 
attitudes highly inconvenient to the ruling class: I do not want to 
underrate their value.

"But their sensibility, for all its progressive aspects, seems to me in the 
end to be exercised, however critically, within the confines of petty-
bourgeois feeling: it does not, even in the case of George Eliot (the best 
of them), burst the buckles of bourgeois consciousness, though it certainly 
strains them.

"Whereas, in a basic and essential way, Emily Bronte and Dickens and Hardy 
do burst the buckles. The view of the world they express, the 
feelings they generate, are not socialist but they are more than what is 
generally meant by critical.

"And it would seem that the essential difference between these two groups 
of critical realist writers is that the latter write from a point of view 
which can be described not merely in somewhat negative terms as critical 
but in positive terms as popular, that is to say expressive of the 
sensibility of progressive sections of the people other than the petty-
bourgeois intelligentsia."

Thackeray, then, was a critic of bourgeois society, hoping not for its 
overthrow but for its multifarious ills to be exposed and as a consequence 
corrected.

And one must say that the new BBC serial of Vanity Fair certainly 
reveals the cant and hypocrisy, snobbery and greed of English bourgeois 
society in the early part of the 19th century.

From the opening sequence, when the proprietor of Miss Pinkerton's Academy 
for Young Ladies makes a point of fawning over the graduating daughter of a 
wealthy merchant while expressly snubbing her best friend, the penniless 
Becky Sharp. 

The pretty orphaned daughter of an artist and a French opera dancer, Becky 
has been tutoring in French at the Pinkerton sisters' Academy, but is now 
to take up virtually the only respectable position open to an educated 
woman with no income of her own: she is to be a governess.

Becky is very conscious of her enforced station in life. "I am poor and put 
upon" she observes early in the first episode of the serial, but it is 
clear she does not intend to stay that way.

In fact, she even rejects acts of kindness or charity in her single-minded 
determination to climb up the social ladder. To improve her position in 
life she schemes, cajoles, plots, lies and flirts. She is not above theft 
and routinely defrauds innkeepers and tradesmen.

In short, she lives on her wits and her charms. But whereas Thackeray made 
it clear that this aspect of her character was moulded by class pressures, 
the TV serial tends to give the impression that it is just Becky's 
scheming, social-climbing nature.

This is not surprising when we consider that the serial was adapted for 
television by Andrew Davies who wrote the BBC's most recent serial of 
Pride And Prejudice.

Davies demonstrated in that that he was capable of writing good television 
period drama but was not so good at grasping the essential nature and 
content of the work he was adapting (you may recall he thought Pride And 
Prejudice was about "money and sex").

Nevertheless, Thackeray has enough barbed portraits of venal, self-seeking, 
hypocritical or morally cowardly characters that his acid view of bourgeois 
society can surmount Davies' lapses of understanding.

Davies also follows the lead of other adaptations of Vanity Fair and 
makes the tale revolve around Becky Sharp. The book has several major 
characters, but the serial makes Becky central and all others peripheral to 
her.

This probably makes the work more amenable to coherent adaptation for TV, 
less diffuse than it might otherwise be, but it is also less rich, less 
varied in incident and character.

However, there are certainly plenty of characters for a serial as it is: 
there are some 75 speaking parts and around 2,000 extras.

Becky is played bewitchingly (it is important that we believe she 
would be appealing to men) but with considerable subtle depth by 
Natasha Little, last seen in the BBC drama series This Life.

Frances Grey makes her best friend, the sheltered, rich Amelia Sedley, 
naive and appealing without being silly or embarrassing, while her fiancee, 
the dashing, handsome George Osborne is played by Tom Ward with just the 
right ambiguity about his moral and ethical sense: he is a complex of 
emotions about Amelia, his own bachelor freedom, his overbearing self-made 
merchant father, his sense of honour and his attraction to Becky Sharp that 
we are genuinely surprised when he defies his father and marries Amelia.

Among the host of character actors who enliven each episode, one stands out 
above all: David Bradley as Becky Sharp's first employer, Sir Pitt Crawley, 
whose decaying mansion is as raddled as he is.

Bradley was memorable in the Dickens adaptation Our Mutual Friend, 
as the murderous riverman who becomes a lock-keeper, but his performance in 
Vanity Fair is a tour de force: gaunt, ugly, lecherous and pathetic, 
he is nevertheless strangely likeable.

The large number of talented character actors in the serial are a tribute 
to the strength of the English stage, although many of them have also been 
seen in television programs (I recognised two from the sitcom Waiting 
For God for example. But it is the stage that has given them the 
ability to make an impact in a small but tellingly realised role.

As with other BBC period serials, the costuming and settings have been 
realised with an exquisite eye for detail. To get the right look, the 
production was filmed on location in England, Wales, Belgium and the Rhine 
Valley.

The music is very curious, being sometimes oddly intrusive and loud. At 
first I thought it inappropriate, but became used to the way it was being 
used to counterpoint the action on the screen, almost to provide an ironic 
comment on it.

The serial was directed by Marc Munden and he displays a splendid gift for 
propelling his many-faceted tale with its multitude of characters at a 
surprisingly fast pace without it ever appearing breathless or confused.

His only fault is an occasional lapse into overly "artistic" editing, 
although at other times his artistic sensibility enhances the work no end: 
the clever transition from the pageantry and bustle of the embarkation of 
the British army and its civilian followers for Belgium to fight Napoleon 
to their arrival in Belgium is a subtle skilfully thought out piece of 
editing.

The battle of Waterloo is another very showy but highly effective 
demonstration of Munden's directorial and editing skills (helped by very 
good camerawork). In fact the camerawork is of very high quality 
throughout.

There are six one-hour episodes in Vanity Fair, and I can recommend 
it as superior viewing for anyone interested in good period drama. It 
starts on the ABC on Sunday February 7 at 8.30pm.