(no subject)

[lavenderhill.livejournal.com]

Hi there – I am also new to this group, but have been an avid reader of AF for over 15 years. I have all the books, and have re-read them frequently.

I have been thinking for a while that the Marlow stories would make a great early Sunday evening family television series. When you think about it, they combine the teenage school highs and lows of The OC (bullies/ school teams/ boyfriends) with the kind of drama reserved for Eastenders (step families/ runways/ child abduction..). It also has some kind of glamour, as the main protagonists are of a class that most people are not.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised that the stories would have to be set in the present day, in order to gain enough interest from viewers, and also the backing from a production firm. This started me thinking about how to update some of the storylines, which are often a product of the time they were written in. The telephone saga in The Attic Term, would be an interesting one, although in my mind, I would have Ann owning the ‘family’ mobile, on which calls home are made. Ginty ends up using the office phone due to the queues and lack of privacy on the payphones near the common room. Some schools are strict about mobiles and insist that the housemistress keeps them until after classes are over, and I could see Kingscote doing this, and Ann obviously obeying.

Another issue would be the make-believe in Peter’s Room, which I cannot see teenagers in 2006 doing. An interesting way round this, would be to have ‘Gondal’ as a new online computer game, which they start playing whilst hold up in Peter’s Shippen, and gradually become addicted to – apart from Nicola, who would much rather be herself out doing something! There was some research done about these kind of online ‘quest’ games, where quite ordinary people in real life, are ‘kings’ of these online worlds. This plot would not only allow the story to develop as it does in Peter’s Room, but also look at the effect of kids spending too much time on computers..

The Thuggery Affair I would love to turn into Chavs, but this is probably rather un-PC!! And the Marlows and the Traitor would have to be drug smuggling as I don’t want to touch 21st century terrorism..

Talking to my sister, another AF fan, about this, we got onto the characters. She says that Nicola is unlike any modern day teenage girl. What 12/13/14 year old is mad about the Navy and into cricket? If there was someone like that at school, they would be really picked on by the ‘trendy gang’ .But I don’t know – I think Nicola as she is in the books would work, and I would still have her dropping her new penknife out of the train (do modern trains have windows that open, though?). She is also safe from the ‘trendies’ in that she a Marlow, and is actually part of the Main Clique with Tim, Miranda and Lawrie. I would, however, have Lawrie and Tim as being quite skinny-jeaned/ Top Shop cool, whereas Miranda would be in Seven jeans and a Chloe top. Nick would be more jeans and tatty converse boots (previously Rowan’s). If any of you live in London, the Top Shop, H&M and Zara on Kensington High Street on a Saturday are full of upper middle class teenage girls in all their glory…. Just to give you an idea of what Kingscote girls would be like in 2006…

Anyways, just wanted to share these thoughts, and wondered what you all think. Would it work? Is it worth me writing a proposition and sending it to the BBC??!

Apols for long post...

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I don't think your idea about Gondal Online will fly. If it was all online, why would Patrick (who undoubtedly has his own PC over at Meriot Chase and doesn't have to share it with anyone) be in the Shippen in the first place?

I have seen that kind of immersive online character interaction leading to real-world emotional torments, but it's generally been in message board or instant messenger-based games where interaction is text-based, rather than the World of Warcraft / Eve massively multiplayer online games where you pilot a little animated character around a world already created by others.

Also, speaking as a roleplayer, I can't say that the idea of having roleplaying portrayed on prime-time television as leading to people very nearly getting shot appeals to me very much!

The idea of Ann as custodian of the family mobile does seem to me like an inspired work-around for updating that particular story, though.

[leapingirbis.livejournal.com]

the hunting might be a bit problematic in this day and age too ....

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I genuinely can't see a television series working, as without the quality of AF's characterisation it would simply be Improbable Adventures of an Insufferably Smug, Comfortably-Off Family. Think of trying to write Nicola for the screen - without the dispassionate, terribly accurate analysis of her fierce loyalties, ethics and shynesses we get in the novels, she'd seem just another fearless, improbably-talented blonde school-story heroine. And Lawrie would just be a dipstick, and Ann a plaster saint, and Rowan the bossy games prefect.

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

The BBC would hate it. White upper middle class family, boarding school, ponies, hawks, hunting, people learning Latin and Greek, the landed-gentry Merricks, and not a single ethnic minority in a significant role, unless you count Miranda being Jewish.
It's impossible to think of anything less fashionable. And I fear that if you were to change all these details to be more "relevant to today's young people", the whole charm of the books would be lost.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Hex was set in a boarding school and did all right (though for Sky, not the BBC). Though I think having Nick et al chased by demons would perhaps be departing a little from the spirit of the books.

[witandwisdome.livejournal.com]

And boarding school stories more popular due to the Harry Potter craze - though I take your point, Ankaret about the demons...

[tootooticky.livejournal.com]

I've wondered for a while if one reason that AF never finished the next book after Run Away Home was that the setting just couldn't be moved forwards one more time.

I mean, in that the differences (society as well as technology) between the late 1970s / very early 1980s and the 1940s / 1950s were really a lot less than between the 1970s and now (or even early 90s).

I can cope with the changing time settings up to Run Away Home, but I can't imagine the characters in a modern day setting, except as '20 years older' IYSWIM. Its really things like the village characters and Mrs Bertie that I can't imagine in 2006 - she'd have to be a Polish au-pair or something.

But then again maybe its just my age - I was primary school age in the 1970s , so I love the references to 'Up Pompeii' and crisps being 2p a packet.

I think if I had to put them al lin one era, I'd set them all in a golden late 60s / early 70s age - a bit like the Follyfoot tv series.

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

Ah but Hogwarts is the socially acceptable face of boarding schools. Hogwarts is needs blind: noone pays any fees, that I can tell; there are kids of all regional accents and shades of the rainbow (except perhaps aboriginal "Red" Indians) and socio-economic status; and there is very definitely no academic streaming. New Labour would probably call it a Specialist Creative Arts College.

Kingscote couldn't really be more different, or less palatable to the sort of people who commission children's drama these days.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

cat_and_loki (who I have been pimping this community to like there's no tomorrow) and I were having this discussion this evening and came to the same conclusion! Though the U-boat crew in The Marlows And The Traitor would probably have to be Communists.

I love the bit where Nicola and Miranda get a packet of crisps and some bus fares out of 20p, and the 'Shall I spend all the 50p? / Oh yes, let's live a little' conversation in Attic Term. :)

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

But so easy to fit in! Just relocate Kingscote to the Hellmouth and literalise the bit in Cricket Term about demons summoned by Tim's costume designs carrying off Val Longstreet. I'm having more trouble imagining a scenario for my other favourite image from CT, though, which is Keith wearing briefer-than-briefs for Lawrie.

[lurkingcat]

And lo, I have joined. Although my entire contribution to the community will probably consist of lurking in the background.

I still think you could sell the 60s/70s-ness to the BBC as a Famous Five inspired nostalgia trip despite the Daks not being the adventuring kind of dog :)

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

This is spot on, tootooticky (can I take it you are a Tove Jansson fan? I'm only just getting over the Finns in Eurovision!). I have long felt that had AF decided to keep the books as 1940s / 50s period pieces, there might have been many more. Updating the setting made the books more intriguing in many ways - the ever-increasing desperation and incongruity (c.f. tonight's Radio 4 documentary on Down Your Way) to make them fit in to a changing world - but it made them much more vulnerable. As Thatcherism put the final nail in the coffin of the world that her original supporters honestly believe she would restore, so it made a follow-up to Run Away Home impossible. The late 70s / early 80s, on the cusp of all things, were the last moment ever that such things were possible in the present tense (c.f. the surprisingly convincing update of the Famous Five for the 1978 Southern TV series - needless to say they never tried that in the 90s).

Follyfoot is one of my favourite TV series, but like the books (and indeed like the same author's World's End books), it's fundamentally opposed to the social order and values expressed in the works of AF (and, on a lower literary level, the Pullein-Thompsons and their ilk). The character of Dora, like Monica Dickens herself (the writer went from being a debutante to going into domestic service), was in fact born into the Marlows' world but felt that she didn't belong there, and reinvented herself as a kind of egalitarian social democrat (remember her expressing her disgust at the foxhunting set?). And that sort of reinvention only really took hold in the middle classes during the mid-late 1960s - Antonia Forest would have loathed the character and her real-life equivalents, would have regarded such people as "class traitors" on a Peel / Westwood scale.

No, by the late 60s / early 70s the setting of the Marlow books in the present day was already looking more and more incongruous. If they have to be in one era, the 1940s / 50s is the one. Removing the pop-cultural references from the later books would hardly interfere with their essence, because you would merely be removing superficialities; trying to make the early books make sense even in a 1970s setting would involve changing far more fundamental elements of the text.

Oh, and welcome by the way (although I've been lurking for some time).

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

I doubt it. That era isn't quite long enough ago to have that heritage appeal that any convincing adaptation of the Marlows would have to play on (updating it to the present would be a terrible, terrible idea, whatever lavenderhill says; the world has changed too much). 60s/70s period pieces play on the social and cultural changes that were already very much happening by then, and putting the Marlows in that time would give the works a kind of tension which I don't think TV producers would be looking for (although I would appreciate it myself).

A TV adaptation of the Marlows could only work as a Heritage Britain PLC 1940s / 50s piece (ditto Monica Edwards or Malcolm Saville, although they too carried on longer). If there was ever going to be an update it would have had to be in the late 1970s, probably from Southern Television (who would have been able to film the Wade Abbas scenes in Wimborne Minster, as they should be, it being in their coverage area) - and that moment passed about a quarter of a century ago.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

And there is another reason why people couldn't take seriously the idea of the Marlow family happening in the present day when they might have been able to even fifteen years ago; the upsurge of huge-selling pop singers from traditionally privileged backgrounds (Coldplay, Keane, James Blunt, Will Young, McFly &c). And then there are people like Tim Westwood (who was around fifteen years ago but was a really obscure figure merely on London radio) ... all these cultural phenomena mean that the idea of an elite immunised from popular culture and living in their own little world - which is essentially what the Marlows are - can no longer be taken seriously in the present tense. If you made the Marlows au fait with popular culture you'd strip away so much of their essence that it would please nobody; us fans would be horrified and the people who like modern-day drama would not be convinced.

I mean, I'm 25. Even fifteen years ago I couldn't imagine boys my age in prep schools listening to MC Hammer. I doubt whether 10-year-olds would think the equivalent now.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Hex? Do you mean the book by Rhiannon Lassiter?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

No, the Sky TV series. It's a bit like a British version of Buffy, set in a boarding school with, as far as I can tell, its own licensed nightclub on the premises. How unlike the home life of our own dear Kingscote.

[theminky.livejournal.com]

It is a pity though, because upper middle class families do exist and surely the children in these families need TV to be relevant to their lives as well. I discovered Antonia Forest when I was at a public school and part of the reason I loved them was because the school bore far more relation to my school than to some - more contemporary stories - set in comprehensives.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Not even the ones who carry off Val Longstreet?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

There's a whole AU in that.

[(Anonymous)]

I love the idea of a tv series, but no no no no no to the idea of an update! I'm rocking at the thought. One of the most emotive images is Nicola's return journey from Port Wade seeing the train go past as she runs through the damp night: the smoking engine replaced by a Virgin pendolino does not counjour up the same feelings!

Please do write to the beeb, but don't change them into identikit fashion victims!