TV watch: Great Expectations

Congratulations if you managed to sit through the whole of the first episode of BBC 1’s total rewriting of Great Expectations without falling asleep or switching off. Apparently filmed entirely in the dark and featuring what felt like hours of close-ups of Pip’s face it was, surprisingly, boring. I waited until Miss Havisham appeared and switched off. I felt really depressed afterwards; just the Sunday evening’s entertainment you need after a gloomy wet day made even worse by the clocks changing. I’ve since read what is going to happen in future episodes. If you want to write a series about how terrible everything was in Victorian Britain with a subtext of how, even though the events took place nearly two hundred years ago, they’re all somehow our fault, by all means to do so. But don’t expect me to watch it and don’t call it Great Expectations.