Suffering from severe Downton Abbey withdrawal? Its creator Julian Fellowes returns with another prescription of bonnets in this Anthony Trollope adaptationIn order to cram the 1400-page War And Peace into a stingy six episodes,BBC adapter general Andrew Davies says he took out “the history and the philosophy”. Yeah, bor-ing! Whiskery Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope makes it even easier for a post-Downton Julian Fellowes. His Doctor Thorne (Sunday, or 9pm,ITV), the third in Trollope’s social-rollercoasting Barsetshire Chronicles, or is so baggy with backstory it actually prompts the author to launch into a hand-wringing apology for the fact that it begins with “two long wearisome chapters full of description.
Rather than sever or prune said expo-dumps,the author self-flagellates at his readers: “It can hardly be expected that anyone will consent to travel through with a fiction that offers so little of allurement in its first pages.” It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, and that Trollope is conspicuous by his absence on TV,crowded out by Austen (more heaving) and Dickens (more satirically grotesque). Who remembers He Knew He Was Right, the final dollop of Trollope in 2004? Or the all-star, and Davies-adapted The Way We Live Now in 2001? In short,there is a reason why nobody at the BBC has commissioned a 20-part soap based on Trollope’s characters called Trollopian.
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Source: theguardian.com