Screen adaptations of books usually become better known than the books themselves, and it's basically true that you're more likely to have seen the film or TV adaptation of most literary works than you are to have read the actual book. This isn't a bad thing. Making an adaptation is a work of democratisation. It allows you to access a story and may in fact introduce you to the books. My dad only heard of MR James because of the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, and I only heard of him after my dad consequently got a book of MR James stories from the library. I first heard of Jorge Luis Borges (my favourite author basically) because I saw Alex Cox's adaptation of Death and the Compass on BBC's Arena strand back in 1996.
In some cases, the adaptation itself becomes so much more familiar than the books that a large chunk of the general public never realise that it was a book in the first place.
Disney has a lot to answer for here. I can guarantee that when you mention Mary Poppins, the proportion of people who think of PL Travers's melancholy, occult-tinged books rather than those heartwarming song and dance numbers performed by Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke (or even Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda) is vanishingly small. The same goes for Dumbo, Bambi, The Rescuers and Lady and the Tramp: there's a good chance that you may not even have known that they were adaptations.
One classic example of this is Worzel Gummidge.
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| (Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs in the 1979-81 ITV series) |
And I'm not going to go further into its merits as an adaptation, other than to say that this version of Worzel Gummidge begins with the source material and then departs from it in a different direction to the older version. But the 1970s version, as fondly recalled as it is, still falls in the “scarred for life” category, with Worzel's interchangeable heads, and the stern, vaguely threatening Crowman, and the uncanny march of the scarecrows to Worzel's trial. I saw one guy on Twitter – one of the few negative statements that came from an actual human and which was worth at least taking seriously – complaining that the new version was “filmed like a horror movie”, to which the obvious response is, sure, I can see that, but have you actually watched the old adaptation at any point in the last forty years? Because let me tell you, Great God Above, it's creepy.
And if that sounds a bit high faluting, this is a children's show, and all of this is coupled with a fund of gentle comedy, and even the mystical stuff is presented with a light touch, marrying wonder and laughter and not at any point failing either. And somehow the half-invisible man who has wandered the land forever, fixing hedges and imbuing scarecrows with life – Mr Woodwose, the farmer calls him, attributing to him the name of the medieval wild spirit-men of the forest – is no less a creature of myth when he's followed by a genuinely hilarious sight gag based around a word painted on a cow.
When we see the Scarecrows of Albion dancing crop formations to unlock the seasons – and there's an explanation for crop circles you didn't consider – it's as breathtakingly beautiful as it is comical (and that helped a great deal by the soundtrack, by contemporary folk band The Unthanks). Worzel is clownish, a bit of a fool, but he is also very old – it is hinted he has been here for centuries – and in his own way wise.
The Tree of Tree, through whose branches every wind blows, and through which one can whisper to every scarecrow in Albion, is a short walk away in a supermarket car park (on Umsdale Road, it turns out, a place where the Detectorists Lance and Andy visit) and its branches are clogged with carrier bags, and the gag about it being a short walk away and in a supermarket carpark only adds to its wonder. Because the magical is nearby. Because it's in the everyday.
Scatterbrook is what a lot of writers these days might call a liminal space, and there's a sense in which Susan and John have to leave behind the outside world to enter it fully, and this is deftly signified by the loss of their phones – no WiFi, no charger, and finally dropped three times by a clumsy, well meaning scarecrow. They do, with aplomb, stepping across the road into the land of folktale, which is as close as a supermarket carpark.
It's impossible to make a rural fable now that doesn't somehow approach ecology, and of course Worzel Gummidge is going to have an environmental slant. How could it not? When the land is caught in an eternal summer, isn't that what anyone with sense is afraid of? To solve it for this year, the Scarecrows of Albion must dance the crop circles, but it's only this year, and there will be other years and it's for the children to be heard.
Mackenzie Crook of course created Detectorists, a gently comic story of people looking for magic in the landscape and finding it, which gave us what was in my opinion one of the most moving final episodes of any television series. In its own way, it was of a piece with Worzel Gummidge, and the marks of Crook's craft – big-hearted comedy, an eye for magic in the mundane – are strongly evident in this new version of Worzel. It's on brand for folk horror fandom, of which I am, I admit, a part, to flip out over something like this, given our obsession with the haunted nostalgia of the 70s and the way that this is recurring, but this particular piece of children's TV, I feel, deserves better. The post-Christmas week is traditionally a time when the BBC go all out and make a piece of BAFTA bait, but this doesn't feel like that. It feels like something honest, and decent. Something that understands magic. It's exquisite. I hope they make more.
