All societies are censorious in various degrees and on various topics. Two years ago, Sarah Phelps adapted Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for TV. It’s the third title the thriller had: when it first came out in 1939 it was Ten Little (supply your own N-word). It was the US that objected and had it retitled as Ten Little Indians. That, too, with the passing of time (call it progress), brought a sour taste to the American mouth. Hence And Then There Were None.
Phelps’s adaptation of Ordeal By Innocence, just concluded, required no title change. But, nonetheless, a Twitter storm has whipped up against its foul-mouthedness.
For the loyal Christie reader, it runs against the grain of her fiction. Can one imagine Miss Marple saying: “It’s the effing vicar whodunnit”?
There is a belief that censorship – whether self-, state- or community-imposed – can raise art. Kingsley Amis once asked whether Pride and Prejudice would have been a better novel if Elizabeth Bennett had been able to tell Darcy to eff off – as Crystal Clarke’s Tina Argyll did to a group of men in the Christie adaptation.
Perhaps it would. Men, when “unbuttoned” among themselves, have always talked like that. When, around the same time as Pride and Prejudice, one of Byron’s lovers wrote a revenge novel about him, he dismissed it, in his lordly way, as so much “fuck and tell”.
If Phelps’s uncorking of the swear bottle frees up some looser flights of language on TV, it would be most welcome. IMDB’s Parents’ Guide to Downton Abbey, for example, notes that the programme “contains very infrequent use of mild coarse language (ie ‘bitch’), in reference to contemptuous women”. Do, of course, protect the children but, dramatically speaking, the series would be a touch more realistic with bad language both above and below stairs.
And why – despite producer Kate Oates pulling the programme into 9pm territory – are the characters in Coronation Street limited to the gor-blimey lexicon of bad language? Free the street with the language of the street, say I.
