It's hard for me to judge how this would go down as a drama in its own right to someone who hadn't read the book; as an adaptation it's heavily 'sexed-up' in several senses at once, and I'm afraid thoroughly irritated me by the end.
Filming novels about people growing up is always going to be a problem, and I accept that the timescale is inevitably going to have to be compressed if you want to avoid casting multiple children in each role. It's probably unfair to object to sallow, high-boned Petrova being cast as a dumpy, pallid child; given modern standards of beauty, 'too fat' is probably the equivalent to the 'too thin' given as unattractive in Streatfield's era. If you've decided to cast Emma Watson, it's probably impossible to portray Pauline as making her stage success playing a plausible boy in Shakespeare's Princes in the Tower; the novel's Pauline is short and physically immature at fourteen, while Emma is all too obviously none of the above. And it's perhaps impossible to show the single-minded Posy on screen without making her appear hopelessly unpleasant... although Pauline doesn't come across too well here either, thanks to plot changes and excisions...
But this adaptation for me seemed to miss out on the very atmosphere of the book, while introducing a lot of extraneous sexual plot lines to compensate for all the childhood material they decided to miss out. It ceases to be a story about growing up; it becomes a story about pairing-off, with some heavy modern politics added in. (Poor Mr Simpson loses his wife and comfortable middle-class lifestyle as a planter in Malaya, and becomes a tragic figure born into deepest poverty; the theme of the children's own poverty is excised -- confusing and largely obliterating the Winifred plot line -- and replaced by the device of inflicting Sylvia with tuberculosis as a requirement for earning money; Theo Dane becomes an ageing man-mad flapper; Posy's various nude impersonations (which I wouldn't expect to be kept in) are instead supplanted by the two older girls playing a gratuitous nude scene in a shared bath; the Hollywood director is improbably black; etc.) The production is clumsily 'period' in a way that the original story never is, trying far too hard to establish its setting by shoe-horning in props and references in the manner of a bad historical novel. (Re-reading the book afterwards to judge whether my irritation was justified, I was however amused to note that Noel Streatfield makes a single allusion to Amy Mollison, whom it is now apparently unthinkable to refer to -- as her contemporaries actually did -- by her married name...)
I suppose I just felt resentful that a book I'd liked as a child had seemingly been hijacked by someone with an 'agenda'. An unfair judgement, I expect, but it really did put my back up, and lost most of the story's charm along the way. It's been rewritten as 21st-century girly drama, which the original really wasn't.
Filming novels about people growing up is always going to be a problem, and I accept that the timescale is inevitably going to have to be compressed if you want to avoid casting multiple children in each role. It's probably unfair to object to sallow, high-boned Petrova being cast as a dumpy, pallid child; given modern standards of beauty, 'too fat' is probably the equivalent to the 'too thin' given as unattractive in Streatfield's era. If you've decided to cast Emma Watson, it's probably impossible to portray Pauline as making her stage success playing a plausible boy in Shakespeare's Princes in the Tower; the novel's Pauline is short and physically immature at fourteen, while Emma is all too obviously none of the above. And it's perhaps impossible to show the single-minded Posy on screen without making her appear hopelessly unpleasant... although Pauline doesn't come across too well here either, thanks to plot changes and excisions...
But this adaptation for me seemed to miss out on the very atmosphere of the book, while introducing a lot of extraneous sexual plot lines to compensate for all the childhood material they decided to miss out. It ceases to be a story about growing up; it becomes a story about pairing-off, with some heavy modern politics added in. (Poor Mr Simpson loses his wife and comfortable middle-class lifestyle as a planter in Malaya, and becomes a tragic figure born into deepest poverty; the theme of the children's own poverty is excised -- confusing and largely obliterating the Winifred plot line -- and replaced by the device of inflicting Sylvia with tuberculosis as a requirement for earning money; Theo Dane becomes an ageing man-mad flapper; Posy's various nude impersonations (which I wouldn't expect to be kept in) are instead supplanted by the two older girls playing a gratuitous nude scene in a shared bath; the Hollywood director is improbably black; etc.) The production is clumsily 'period' in a way that the original story never is, trying far too hard to establish its setting by shoe-horning in props and references in the manner of a bad historical novel. (Re-reading the book afterwards to judge whether my irritation was justified, I was however amused to note that Noel Streatfield makes a single allusion to Amy Mollison, whom it is now apparently unthinkable to refer to -- as her contemporaries actually did -- by her married name...)
I suppose I just felt resentful that a book I'd liked as a child had seemingly been hijacked by someone with an 'agenda'. An unfair judgement, I expect, but it really did put my back up, and lost most of the story's charm along the way. It's been rewritten as 21st-century girly drama, which the original really wasn't.