The BBC

They seem to have a lot of prerecorded Helen Lewis, god help us.

After Shrivers racist appearance on qt last year there was a lot of stuff about her dwindling to nothing book sales on twitter

2 and a quarter hour coronashow today, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

are they still not sending people to do the radio 4 morning show?

Plotting a graph of Lionel Shriver's useless life, I would imagine the line representing book sales, plummeting downwards, at some point intersecting with the line representing calls from BBC producers, going in the opposite direction.

These people think they're still living in the noughties, when everything's all Monkey Dust and Nighty Night and edgy.

Edgy, the worst kind of y

lionel shriver is just some idiot that used to be on newsnight review all the time!

This was new to me, but interesting.

After the sad news that Lionel Shriver was up to her *antics* again, I decided to take a look at the book sales of my 3rd least favourite contrarian author.

And now I have the stats.

Hold me, I'm going in. There will be graphs... pic.twitter.com/iyxIYu2ndn

— Chris McCrudden (@cmccrudden) March 1, 2019

Bit generous describing her stuff as literary fiction.

lol, them be the brutal graphs of Shriver's shrinking relevance in the publishing world I was referring to Pinefox!

bloody great, tonight we've got the intellectual might of Applebaum and Mason discussing da Rona on R4.

Has he invited Rona to come to Athens?

I'm watching Lucy Worsley so the Beeb is forgiven for now.

LMAO. Stoya come to Athens, the means-tested defence of the status quo is happening. pic.twitter.com/93d5aguyQo

— herd immunity for our time (@misslucyp) April 1, 2020

cursed

How Adonis never made it to the last 16 of the world cup I'll never know

fuckin adonis

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