The BBC

Very normal retweet from Maitlis

Claire Fox?

Nah keep scrolling... Dave Rich

They’re absolutely not letting up with this:

500,000 people could have died, by August, in the UK if no action was taken

Now it's hoped social distancing will limit deaths to 20,000

But that doesn't mean 480,000 lives are being saved, many people who die from Covid-19 would have died anywayhttps://t.co/hDYKsrCn8B pic.twitter.com/55Dsu3qeLU

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) April 2, 2020

And headlines saying people died "with" coronavirus, not "of" or "from". It's a weird look tbh

I can't remember bbc doing death graphs at the peak of "nothing is done" or herd immunity as they labelled it at the time. All the info was there to see from countries weeks behind us. Just no half decent journalists or editorial leadership. And now they are in the embarrassing position of being bigger fucking tory boot-lickers than both The Mail and the Torygraph. Their politics department needs burning to the ground.

Yeah they would have died anyway, so what https://t.co/FUaCyCLrl8 pic.twitter.com/N6FDD057nx

— Je téléphone à la police (@je_police) April 2, 2020

BBC News 2020, The Day Today 1994 pic.twitter.com/JeSRuuohF1

— Graham (@onalifeglug) April 3, 2020

Unsurprisingly, Boris Johnson's move to intensive care leads all the UK newspapers' front pages.

Have a quick canter through what they're all saying in our paper review, here.

Seems a bit off, given the context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skK3WoK5Z8A

weirdly good

bah but of course tiktok got there first - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqgBfEqkyaU

Hah, I love that.

BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE.

I'm afraid I haven't yet read the novel.

12 parts, 6 hours -- this is as much as they would give MIDDLEMARCH. Excessive?

It seems like it from 2 episodes, in which little happened. Not much drama, not much at stake, not much interesting said.

The two virtues or points of interest, to my mind:

1: intimate / sex scenes presented with a kind of tender realism

2: the odd tendencies of the heroine - it might be intended as 'autistic' to some degree, I'm unsure - to say very direct things and ask abrupt, literal questions.

Re: 2, that was the experience I got from the book, from both the characters - the directness, plus a difficulty dealing with emotions, an inability to come out and say what they really, simply, feel towards each other. It ended up being quite frustrating.

Loved the book. The show is highly watchable (don’t think it’s overlong, most dramas are six one-hour parters anyway) but it’s missing a lot of the comedy, and the lack of interior monologue makes the characters seems a lot more vacant.

I liked the book a lot but I completely see how someone could find it weak, I was a bit surprised at the universal acclaim. The paralysis in action and emotion caused by always overthinking everything was something I strongly related to.

Haven't watched the show yet.

I think Marianne's pathology is down to an unnamed/unnameable systematic abuse as opposed to anything ASD-related. She seeks out cold, overpowering men as part of her compulsion to repeat. That's how I read it, anyway. There's something to be said about Rooney's politics and how we function under late capitalism but I think it's a bit undercoded in the text.

I watched the first episode of this. It was fine but it's too close to my reading of the text and all the power of literature to be nebulous and slippery is lost in the exactness of the screen.

I agree that 6 hours is quite normal for a chunky, meaty adaptation - say of Dickens.

His books are, say, 700 pages long - NORMAL PEOPLE is 266.

Length isn't everything, to be sure. You could pack a lot in to a short book that would bear a long adaptation. But the comments above suggest that the TV version is actually leaving out lots of what's interesting in the book (thoughts, etc), while still being unusually long.

A comparison: Alan Hollinghurst's rich, brilliant THE LINE OF BEAUTY is 500pp - the excellent adaptation (2006) was 3 hours.

Take a brilliant, rich book of say 250pp: MRS DALLOWAY, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Can I see the BBC stretching those to 6 hours? I can't - in fact I can more easily imagine them as 2 hours over 2 nights.

None of it would matter at all if the length worked well for the adaptation but my sense is that the length is stretching it too thin, with too little happening.

But OK, it can be treated as a formal experiment of its own, an exercise in slower drama.

I don't think the BBC3 strand is the place for anything formal or experimental.

Been watching a couple of these each night with our tea the past few days and yeah it does feel dragged out a bit but there is somethingcompelling about it. Gf has zero patience for any "arty farty" stuff (her words) but is sufficiently gripped to stick with this. Good low key acting at least, particularly from the lead guy, reminds me of plenty of Irish pals I had at uni

Feel like Sally Rooney is one of those novelists where any decent adaptation would have to give it plenty of time, so much in her writing is in the gaps between what the characters do and do not say, a good director could do a lot with that, and the onscreen relationship does need to proceed slowly in order to make the subtleties of that work, slower than it does in the book.

6hrs does feel excessive mind, but it's not as if any of us are short on time right now.

Haven't seen any of this yet but looking forward to starting it tonight, even if Conversations With Friends might possibly have made the better adaptation. Does it merit its own thread? Just realised there isn't a Sally Rooney thread at all.

Absolutely

it's not as if any of us are short on time right now

I was surprised to find no SR thread on either ILB or ILE.

I agree with Kinder -- puzzled by the very prevalent idea that everyone has more time; my experience is that some people have less time.

What is true for me, though (maybe it's what DC meant), is that with not going anywhere in the evening I am watching more film & TV at that time of the day.

Yes lots of people I know have home schooling constraints piled on top of work issues as well, but I'm not sure that a serialised drama being six hours rather than three is going to make much difference to that. We are going to be at the stage soon enough when broadcasters run out of new drama to show, and potentially months of lockdown ahead.

hopefully we can get a lot more webcam shows of celebrities talking to their celebrity mates about being a celebrity during a lockdown just like the little people

I’ve been watching this during my seven-month-olds lunchtime naps

> when broadcasters run out of new drama to show

70+ years of archive, there's got to be something worth repeating in that. let people vote for it. but split it into bbc1 / bbc2 / bbc4 so i don't have to watch del-boy fall through the bar again.

(have the archers got covid-19 yet?)

they’re only showing a couple episodes a week to stretch it out

I'm not bothered about NORMAL PEOPLE being longer or shorter in relation to the pandemic.

I just think it's long by normal standards, eg cf metrics given above. And this will affect viewing experience - just as if the book were 600pp about the same material it would be a different reading experience.

I agree with Koogs that they should really start showing more good old material. Maybe they're already doing that to a degree. They did show WOLF HALL but I suppose that was in relation to the recent novel. They could go much, much further back. BBC4 in particular could show tons of old PLAYS FOR TODAY and 1960s DR WHO. Or start with BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF.

I agree with Vague that people talking to each other by computer is not making for good TV. Nor is Gary Lineker.

they are advertising new old things on iplayer, comedy box sets. but the comedy is absolutely fabulous and extras. and nighty night, and french and saunders. and 9 series of 2 packets of crisps.

(and some good things too)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/comedy-box-sets

I watched the first episode last night and it appears to be progressing at about the right pace. Adaptations - especially of big 19th Century novels - tend to truncate scenes and focus on key moments. The average length of a scene in a BBC Dickens adaptation is pretty short, whole chapters are usually condensed into a couple of minutes, and the adaptations themselves don't especially suffer from that.

But that approach would kill Normal People stone dead - without any interior monologue the relationship between the two main characters, the awkwardness and everything unspoken between them, needs time and space to convey itself to the viewer. It felt unhurried rather than padded out, although that may change later in the series. It's based around five or six fairly discrete moments in time IIRC and every one of those could easily get at least an episode.

Not seen either of the two leads before but they were exceptionally well-cast, the guy that plays Connell especially.

My feelings FWIW after 7 episode, 3.5 hours:

First hour rather frustrating, slow, not going anywhere very interesting.

Episode 3-5 then picked up greatly for me - perhaps just because it was Dublin and TCD and I enjoy seeing these familiar places. A little bit of the content of their interests was filled in also, eg: his English seminars.

By episode 7 I can still see the indulgent appeal but I'm starting to find the on-off relationship rather ridiculous as the basis of a drama - it could go on literally forever (like a soap opera I suppose).

There is a very strong sense of a drama about almost nothing - two people who are blessed with success (in episode 7 literally almost the only ones in the prestigious college to get prestigious scholarships) getting alternately moody about how much they like each other. I've perhaps never seen a more 'first world problems' story.

But then, I think part of me likes this, because I'd often like dramas to be more realistic and more about ordinary nuances. There are aspects of the relationship that are very recognizable to me, and thus offer insights. The sex scenes are part of this too. All this connects to the unusual length of the series, ie: I can see the case for making it so long, and maybe other series should be equally stretched out for better effect.

I have found, though, that Marianne has started to irritate me a lot. Connell remains more likeable perhaps. His restraint, refusal to engage, tendency to deflect, is well played and recognizable. I also quite like the fact that he combines being PHYSICALLY STRONG with (apparently) being intelligent - which means he has the best of both worlds (see above re: lack of problems and tensions) but also sort of avoids a stereotype of the sensitive weakling or the insensitive big oaf.

PS: an exception to the 'no real problems': Marianne has a brother who is universally horrible. In episode 7 it's explained that he's horrible because he's jealous of her success. But he was horrible before, when she was consider an oddball. His nastiness adds some 'jeopardy' and tension to the mix, OK - but it's so extreme, inexplicable, absolute, that it's out of kilter to everything else, like the basically realistic TCD crowd; it doesn't fit.

It's not that she is someone with no real problems (far from it) it's that those problems are never ever talked about because the two main characters are completely emotionally inarticulate.

(It may be that the adaptation has changed or dispensed with some key stuff in her past, I'll shut up until I've seen the whole thing)

LOL BBC website...

The increase brings Russia's total number of coronavirus cases to 134,686, the seventh highest tally in the world.

But Russia's mortality rate remains low relative to other countries, such as the US, Italy and Spain.

Though maybe I shouldn't be laughing.

A week from now that'll be "low relative to, er, the US".

One day I heard this rolling WS news report on how the French economy hasn't been fucked this much since '46. Yeah quelle surprise.. I wonder if this is happening anywhere else.

I've only watched 2 eps of Normal People, I'm assuming things actually happen in this at some point? I do actually like it, I'm mildly confused by how old they're meant to be (took til the end of ep 2 to twig that Dublin Murders cop was his mum not his sister). So far nearly everything Marianne has said has been about how she's not like the other girls too, yet seemingly confident. Perhaps that's less obvious in the book, idk? Anyway I'm sticking with it...

Yes, similar reactions to you, Kinder. I have 2.5 hours to go in this and will finally be able to get the measure of it after that - maybe end of this week. FWIW I do think that the episodes after the first two are an improvement.

the 80s tv adaptation of Brideshead Revisited is 11 episodes and runs 12 hours (first and last episodes are over 90 minutes).

the first six and last six episodes of Normal People are directed by different people and the first six seem to me to be much better crafted/ more aesthetically interesting. I really liked the bulk of it but the last few episodes strained my credulity and by the end I had completely soured on it to the extent that when I caught the Italian villa on terrestrial tv I was actually intensely irritated by it's solipsism and, imo, needless cruelty.

Italian villa episode, that is.

It's true about the odd change of director halfway through.

I think I liked episodes 3-5 best.

It's true that BRIDESHEAD was long - surely too long. That book is not vast (say 300 pages?) and it's almost completely dreadful anyway. The fact that, as you say, it received so much dramatised airtime now seems awful.

I'm glad to agree with Jed about these last episodes and the rubbish Italian villa nonsense.

Had no idea about the Normal People split - that explains a lot.

The stakes don't seem high enough in Normal People to justify the torment dealt to Marianne, in my opinion. I can believe that a mother could, irl, support a son who had beaten up his sister and broke her nose but I don't accept it in the service of this particular story and I find the fact that so many people find the story romantic to be worrying.

Again broadly agree.

It may well be that much more is going in the novel, or that it's a great novel. But the TV version has to be judged on its own terms.

In the TV version not enough is going on, not enough is at stake (as Jed says), and whatever problems characters have are not properly explained, despite 6 hours to do it.

It's attractive and appealing in a way but the longer it goes on, the less it stands up. By the last few episodes I couldn't help thinking it was pretty dire.