Great Expectations BBC One 9pm Sunday

[CrossPurposes]

Yet another version begins tonight: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/articles/2023/great-expectations-steven-knight

True you can get a sunny Christmas Day but not whilst it's snowing too! 🤣

Despite my reservations, I enjoyed this. Will be watching again next week.

The best adaptation was obviously David Lean's though.

I thought the actor playing Pip was really good 🤷‍♀️

I read the book for my A level years ago and am trying to remember how it all pieces together.

The opening scene of a man hanging him self should have come with a warning though 😳 I don't remember that in the book!!

This Pip is too much of a modern broody teenager for me. I like Olivia Coleman’s Miss Haversham.

I think it’s a shame they didn’t use more of the opening from the book, to establish the characters a bit more - it was hard to have the great sympathy for both Pip and Magwitch which Dickens so effortlessly evokes, and therefore to care as deeply about what happens to them. I felt rather as though the viewer is intended just to observe rather than immerse in this version so far - it looks great and so that’s not a great hardship. But it is interesting, and I liked the portrayal of Pip’s sister and thought the actor played her deep sadness at the unfair hand she’s been dealt, and the hardness that engendered in her.

Looking forward to seeing how things develop.

Well, I have a photo taken on 22nd March last year of the snow scene of Pips first visit to Miss Havishams house, so not winter at all😉

I have never seen any adaptation of Great Expectations and did enjoy it. It made me feel sick the possibility of Pip getting into trouble for stealing the pork pie his sister made. We have now looked into the story a bit more so have a bit more of an idea what is going on.

I watched it for 5 minutes. It was dire. Maybe I should have persevered a bit longer.

One little mistake annoyed me. Towards the end Biddy calls him Pip Gargery. He's not - he's Philip Pirrip but could only say Pip as a young child and the name stuck. Joe Gargery is his brother-in-law.

Great Expectations without the 'Dickens'. Why?

Yes, and they’ve decided his sister, who is referred to by everyone in the novel, including Pip and Joe, as ‘Mrs Joe Gargery’, is called ‘Sarah’. AND have tried to humanise her, where she’s a husband-beating monster 20 years older than Pip who gets a nasty comeuppance in the novel. (Though who knows how, as this adaptation seems to have disinvented Orlick?)

I thought it looked lovely, but had lost Dickens’ humour. Pip was way more ‘modern moody teenager’ than terrified little boy (I assume they decided not to have him be seven in the opening scenes so they could keep the same actor for longer?), and Pumblechook was nowhere near ridiculous enough, and Joe wasn’t warm-hearted and silly enough. And everyone from Pip to Joe to Magwich kept talking about ‘the blacksmith’s shop‘, rather than smithy or forge. The one thing an early 19thc blacksmith’s forge wasn’t was a shop! Too much Compeyson too.

Pip should be younger IMO. He’s supposed to be young, innocent and rather sensitive - which is precisely what makes him susceptible to Miss Haversham’s scheme regarding Estella.
The thing with the names is not important I guess but it is irritating. Pip is Philip Pirip (not Gargery) and his sister’s actual name was Georgiana not Sarah.

Great Expectations is one of my favourite books, so I'm very particular about tv and film adaptions.

I disliked this. I disliked the way they've mangled the flow and time of the story. I was offended by the way they portrayed Mrs Gargery as irritable and weak, as opposed to being harsh and absolutely awful but the person who is held in some reverence because she keeps the household running. I was disappointed by the way the humour has been stripped out. Dickens, when you get past the bleakness, is hilarious.

It's a dismay because I thought Tim Key and Matt Berry were ingenious casting. I'm confident I would have liked Olivia Coleman as Miss Havisham too, but I didn't last that long.

I liked it but was irritated by the opening scene. The book opens with the cemetery scene and in my opinion this is one of the great opening pages to be read anywhere. Opening with the sister giving Pip a hard time makes him look like a victim of a cruel adult which wasn't a dimension created by Dickens. Joe and Vic viewed her as comical rather than sadistic.
The best version is still the John Mills one.

I think his sister was very cruel @SammyScrounge She is ridiculous but the violence towards Pip made him miserable. He asks Joe why he puts up with it and Joe explains it’s because his own mother was the victim of violence perpetrated by his father. I found that quite bleak in all honesty. The violence completely colours his feelings towards his sister.

It seems a massive missed opportunity to cast Matt Berry as Mr Pumblechook and not have him dial it up to 11.

Pip isn't a Shakespeare reciting moody adolescent, but a small boy, terrified in a graveyard.
I understand that there are different interpretations, but that does skew the dramatic opening scene. Olivia Colman is far too old for Miss Havisham. She's not elderly, she's locked in a decaying past.

Plenty of adaptions have played Miss Haversham quite elderly even though she is only in her thirties in the book.

Fine, but that’s not Dickens’ cartoonishly awful character, though. He doesn’t write her as an adult passing on her own trauma, he writes her as a monster viewed by a terrified seven year old and by an almost equally frightened husband (whom she also beats, and who tries to protect Pip). Pip is too big and too unafraid of her in this adaptation. And humanising her dismisses both the comedy of the early scenes and the high stakes in Pip having stolen the pork pie and being about to be found out — Magwich threatening him is just the norm for how many adults behave in Pip’s world. And means that Magwich’s generous gesture in claiming responsibility for the theft is genuinely unexpected. This brutalised convict has grasped something about how life is for what the novel has as a routinely-whipped, orphaned seven year old.

I liked Olivia Coleman’s Miss Havisham.

Good points, @DivineAffliction . Also, little Pip wouldn't have told Joe that he couldn't become a blacksmith. He wouldn't have understood that there was a choice. That was his future. He didn't begin to despise that until much later.
However good Colman is, she's too old to be Miss Havisham, which actually does skew the story.

The whole point is that Pip only questions his background after he comes into his expectations.

'Fine, but that’s not Dickens’ cartoonishly awful character, though. He doesn’t write her as an adult passing on her own trauma, he writes her as a monster viewed by a terrified seven year old and by an almost equally frightened husband (whom she also beats, and who tries to protect Pip). Pip is too big and too unafraid of her in this adaptation. '
This. And this is where I turned off.

i was upset by the sister and her treatment of Pip

It's even more upsetting when you realise that Pip is a small boy. He's taller than her in this adaptation.

i think you’ve misunderstood my point @DivineAffliction I was responding to a post which suggested Mrs. Joe was a figure of fun to Pip and Joe. I was disagreeing with that.

Yes, in this adaptation, Pip has expectations and ideas ‘above his station’ long before his mysterious bequest. From what I remember in the novel, he’s actually looking forward to being apprenticed to Joe at the beginning of the novel, and he’s certainly not clever — he goes to a dame school in the evenings and tries to puzzle things out, and the only one who’s impressed by his learning is Joe, who is illiterate, can’t even spell his own surname and doesn’t notice that he and Pip are holding their prayer book upside down in church. Pip only gets some understanding of social class when Estella calls him a common labouring boy and complains about his boots and hands.