Birdsong Strictly For The Birds

Over the past two Sundays I invested three hours of my life watching a camera move in ever so slowly on the face of a man who didn't have a lot of luck. By my reckoning he died at least three times during this show. It felt like I'd died many more times.

The BBC's attempt to bring Sebastian Faulk's Great War novel 'Birdsong' to life left me wishing the idea had been tossed into a muddied trench of its own. Abi Morgan (The Hour arrrrggggghhhhhh) adapted the book and decided on a structure that ran two time streams in parallel; Stephen Wraysford's affair with the married Isabelle and his subsequent time spent in the trenches. She elected to discard the other time-line from the book - wisely - that brought the story into the 1970's.

Two time lines were enough, in fact often too much. Just as you were getting your teeth into one story it skipped back - or forward - to the other. We never spent enough time with either to properly get to know the people or what was at stake.What is the one thing we all know? Structure is everything, get that wrong and everything is thrown out of kilter.

Money had been thrown at this. Mucho grande moolah. Crowd scenes of hundreds featured hundreds of real people, no cgi here. The battle scenes were impressive, as were the trenches, this was a production that screamed attention to detail.

But the pace!

If I never see another slow zoom I will die a happy man.

I enjoyed Eddie Redmayne's performance in My Week With Marilyn and when I saw he was heading this cast I was interested to see what he did with the character of Wraysford. What he did was stand very still - a lot - and show no visible emotion at all - a lot. This shot was repeated over and over again whilst a piano theme evolved very slowly beneath.

Yes, the summer sunlight captured in the pre-war scenes was very pretty, as was Clemence Poesy as Isabelle, the fine lady who gives up everything for a clerk. But even this story wasn't properly developed. One minute they are touching ankles in a punt and the next they're bonking while her old man is in Paris. When they run away together they have a brief moment in in the sun but then she breaks the handle on their last cup and their relationship is doomed. We discover later why she really leaves him. But a bit of nicely lit bonking doesn't really convey the emotions of the pair. Wraysford may say she was the the only women he had ever loved but all he does is gazed in to the middle distance with a stupid look on his face.

Pace is a tricky beggar. But this made that other slowly paced show 'Mad Men' seem like it is cut by The Editor Supreme at MTV. There has to be a reason to take things ultra slow. This just made me frustrated and uncomfortable.

If you hadn't read the book chances are you wouldn't have picked up on many of the themes. The characters aren't really people but representations of a changing world. Hence Isabelle, who represent all things beautiful, is literally scarred by the war and is never the same again. 

I know how she feels.

I need to watch something that rip-roars along at a mighty pace, just to rid myself of the feeling of torpor I was left with .