Sex and swearing in "Witness for the Prosecution" and "To Walk Invisible" - a study in contrasts

There's a terrible fug up in here

Someone at the BBC has obviously decided that diminutive actor Toby Jones is box-office magic, because he has starred in two of the corporation's "prestige" drama series this year - he's probably been pencilled in to play Mr. Darcy in the next, inevitable BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I have nothing against Toby Jones, but both productions sucked like hoovers. The Secret Agent was dismal and depressing, and this week's two-part adaptation of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution was even worse, despite receiving inexplicably glowing reviews in the press.

First, the whole thing was evidently shot in  a pea-souper, both exteriors and interiors: I kept having to quell the urge to give the screen a wipe. Second, everything was grim and sordid and seedy and depressing: to quote Peter Cook, I can get all that at home, without the BBC adding its two-penn'orth. Third, what exactly is the point of shoe-horning the word "fuck" and several unpleasant sex scenes into an Agatha Christie drama? The old girl managed to become the world's biggest-selling writer - 2000,000,000 books and counting - without recourse to effing and blinding or graphic depictions of rumpy-pumpy.

Does the BBC seriously imagine we're fidgeting at home, thinking, "Well, if nobody has sex or says 'fuck' in the next five minutes, I'm switching over"? If (as I suspect) it doesn't think this at all, why does it insist on including bad language and scenes of simulated fornication when adapting written works which included neither. (Before I'm accused of missing the point, I understand perfectly well that the two sex scenes in the first part  had a dramatic purpose - one showed the ghastly joylessness of Toby Jones's marriage, and the other hinted at Leonard Vole's true character : but both points could have been just as easily made in other ways.) As for the bad language: nobody watches an Agatha Christie adaptation in the hope of hearing any of the characters say "fuck". So just leave it out, okay?

Having been depressed and repelled by the first, achingly slow-moving part of Witness for the Prosecution, I decided to give the concluding part a body-swerve.

Emily, Anne and Charlotte - BAFTAs all round!

Two nights ago, we watched To Walk Invisible, a two-hour BBC drama about the lives of the Brontë sisters, their dipsomaniacal brother, Bramwell, and their nice but weak clergyman father. It was absolutely brilliant - possibly the best thing the BBC has done in 2016. The writing, acting, direction - everything - was simply first class. Finn Atkins as the thin-lipped, almost dementedly determined Charlotte,  Chloe Pirrie as an elementally furious Emily (the very embodiment of her thrilling poem, "No coward soul is mine", and all the rage and passion of Wuthering Heights), and Adam Naigitis as the appalling self-pitying mess of a human being that the drink and drug-guzzling Bramwell Bronte appears to have been (I can't have been the only viewer shouting "Die, you useless bastard!" by the end) all deserve every acting award going. It was thrilling.

Here's the thing - it also contained bad language: a lot of it in fact, with Bramwell effing and blinding away. And there was sex (a particularly unpleasant example of the sex act in a dream sequence near the end allowed us a glimpse of the demons haunting poor, pathetic Bramwell). But it was all perfectly justified - it helped explain how three provincial clergyman's daughters came to write such heavingly torrid fiction: Bramwell had unwittingly dragged the real world, with all its sordidness and wickedness, violence and yearning, right into the family home. Sally Wainwright's script and her direction were both masterly - especiallyas the whole thing could so easily have ended up as a sort of French and Saunders parody.

I'm not against onscreen sex or swearing: it's just that there should be an effing point to the effing - and to the effing and blinding.