YTV's 1974 adaptation of 'South Riding', scripted by Stan Barstow, is a triumph of literary adaptation – faithful and vivid – which shows up the atrocious 1938 film and the botched potential of the over-abridged 2011 BBC serialisation. The 13 50-minute episodes develop characters and subplots, building a full portrait of community life in the eastern East Riding (Winifred Holtby's fictional 'South Riding') in the 1930s. She subtitled it 'An English Landscape', and this is what we get: a landscape inhabited by people we get to know and love. It's a familiar landscape: I grew up in 'Kingsport' (Hull) and discovered the book as a teenager there in 1980; the setting was the era of my mother's childhood. The real Holderness locations are lovely: Withernsea lighthouse, Spurn Point, flat fields, huge skies, eroding clay cliffs. Never mind the occasional squire, whole towns have fallen off the edge of the world here.
Politics – local, national, international – shape the story, which begins, like the novel, in the press gallery of the County Council in Flintonbridge (Beverley) as two rival councillors – a feudal, reactionary country squire and a consumptive Clydeside Red – compete to be elected alderman. Three years later, one will be dead, and the other sacrificing his health to build a better future. Everything between – births and deaths, breakdowns, blackmail, corruption, poverty, school life, love affairs, marriages and their destruction – is framed in the context of local government. The personal is political, the political personal.
We see how political decisions affect people's lives: the Public Assistance Committee in Yarrold (Hedon) and the implosion of the Mitchells' marriage because of unemployment are especially chilling, given current (2011) UK politics. Lydia – the gifted teenager forced to leave school when her mother dies – still strikes a chord in debates about child carers, poverty and educational opportunity. We see, too, how politicians' characters and personal histories influence their actions. Hermione Baddeley is the definitive Emma Beddows: the first female alderman in the county (based on Alice Holtby), who has made herself indispensable to her community in compensation for an embittered marriage, and is infatuated with a man young enough to be her son. John Cater is also superb as Anthony Snaith, whose manipulations just manage to stay within the law, but who has a genuine desire to improve his community. He is a lonely man (in the book, traumatised by being abducted and abused by paedophiles in childhood), whose only emotional outlet is his love for his adorable cats.
The cast includes many familiar faces: Lesley Dunlop and Judi Bowker as Lydia and Midge; Clive Swift as Huggins, the lay preacher who takes 'lay' rather too literally; Ray Mort as the feckless but amiable Barney Holly; June Brown as Lily Sawdon; Joan Hickson as Agnes Sigglesthwaite. I enjoyed Dorothy Tutin and Nigel Davenport as Sarah, the modernising new headmistress, and Robert, the debt-ridden squire, haunted by guilt over his wife's post-partum psychosis. However, both are rather too good-looking: Anna Maxwell-Martin and David Morrissey (2011 version) are more as I imagine, if a little young. I can't *quite* envisage Tutin's Sarah leaving a trail of unsuitable lovers – she seems too ladylike, too wise – while Davenport's Robert is too genial and does not resemble Mussolini-with-hair. In contrast, Norman Jones is too plain as Joe, the tubercular Scots socialist, who, in the novel, has a "pretty face" and "curling ruddy hair" (Winifred's 'beau idéal' – ditto David in 'Anderby Wold'). I suspect he's been cast less handsome to skew viewers' affections towards Robert as 'romantic hero', but Joe's *moral* beauty still wins my heart. His social awkwardness and earnestness are touching: his chat-up line about Sarah's resemblance to Ellen Wilkinson; a painfully clumsy conversation about concert tickets when you *know* he really wants her to say she'd like his company; the harrowing Public Assistance meeting at Yarrold (Hedon)
This is the only adaptation to discuss his background, organising Black South African miners (like Winifred's friend William Ballinger) until his health broke. He is a *real hero*. Unfortunately, Sarah takes this courageous, selfless man for granted as her ever-dependable, platonic best friend, as if his physical fragility desexualises him, and means he's not a 'real man'.
This highlights the most infuriating plot-thread: Sarah's sexual passion for Robert, the antithesis of all she values (and, ironically, secretly even more ill than Joe!). It's a self-betrayal fuelled by a dysfunctional childhood: she's a driven over-achiever, a violent alcoholic's child, needing approval from dominant men with whom she then quarrels *because* of their dominance. She's quite right to call him a "bucolic dictator"! When, at dinner in Manchester, he is flippant about her fears for her German friends, I wanted her to tip her dinner-plate over his head, *not* seduce him! (In her shoes, I'd take the first train home to seduce a delicate Glaswegian in Mrs Corner's garden-shed instead
) I certainly don't mourn Robert's winning the Alexander III Memorial Driving Award (a pity about Black Hussar, though!). Mind, I don't share book-Emma's belief that "it's not politics nor opinions" but the fundamental "things of the spirit" that count: politics and opinions *express* our essential values; one can't truly love someone with inimical values. (But then, Emma, too, is besotted with Robert!) And Sarah herself recognises that a meaningful relationship with him was always impossible.
The ending offers some hope: on the King's Jubilee, after a plane crash and the laying of the foundation stone for her new school, Sarah re-reads Joe's letter, which (uncharacteristically) she has been carrying in her handbag for 3 days. She is smiling – surprisingly, given his worrying news, unless she has come to her senses and has plans
The camera then scans the South Riding landscape, and the final shot is of Winifred Holtby's grave in Rudston: a fitting tribute to the inspiring young woman who created this engaging fictional universe and its inhabitants.
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