The BBC’s latest Sunday night offering is a ridiculously camp adaptation of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. As to be expected, all the usual suspects have been wheeled out for a predictable bout of over acting and stereotypical one liners.
It’s awful, but it got me thinking.
Years ago The Albion Band released a musical version called Lark Rise to Candleford: a Country Tapestry. Dad got into it because folk music was his thing, he’d listen to it over and over in his Vauxhall Cavalier on the way to work– metallic blue, spotlights.
One day, he turned up with the book, not just any book mind, it was the heavy weight hard back version bound in a green spotted fabric. What TV adverts for newspaper commemorative editions would describe as “lavishly illustrated”. He’d sit in bed at the weekends running his hands gently form side to side over the cover before carefully opening it and saying things like, “Look at the lovely pictures” or “It’s beautifully laid out, look at the typography and the weight of the paper”.
He loved that book, and would waste no opportunity to pick it up and admire it happily at arms length.
One day, he came home from work and the dog had chewed it up.