Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (TV)

Fingersmith

(Synopsis & Reviews)

Synopsis:

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is a story of unrequited love set against the backdrop of the grimy streets and public houses of Thirties London. The drama stars a talented young cast including Bryan Dick (Blackpool) as Bob, Zoe Tapper (Pepys, Stage Beauty) as Jenny and Sally Hawkins (Fingersmith) as Ella. Phil Davis (Vera Drake, Rose And Maloney, Fields of Gold) also features as Mr Eccles.

Revolving around The Midnight Bell, a public house off the Euston Road, it follows the painful pursuit of love from three different perspectives: barman Bob, who yearns for penniless street-walker Jenny; his colleague Ella, torn between the attentions of an older, wealthier man and her secret desire for Bob; and Jenny, forced onto the streets through circumstances and now struggling to keep her head above water.

Critics’ Reviews: (#1)

The nocturnal and alcohol-soaked novels proved to be more of a challenge, one that the BBC has accepted in adapting Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In the three books that were collected under this one name in 1935, Hamilton discovered that to symbolise the whole rootless population of London, he needed to focus on only a few characters and one setting, The Midnight Bell pub, where Bob and Ella work. Bob is young and handsome, but drinks heavily and falls for a prostitute called Jenny, who slowly tears his life to shreds. Ella, secretly in love with Bob, watches helplessly.

Oddly, it is filmed in an impure monochrome, like a colourised film that has been left in a damp cellar: once you get used to it, the relentless greys, greens and browns of 1930s Fitzrovia look all the glummer for it. This is just about the only liberty taken – the screenplay adheres to Hamilton’s dialogue without missing a beat.

Which puts a lot of pressure on the performances. Zoë Tapper’s Jenny is as dizzyingly pretty, blonde and coquettish as she is blank, a combination that is intriguing enough to ensnare Bob. When he proudly points out that Dickens used to live on the same street as her, Jenny giggles: “Dickens! Silly old bugger, ain’t he?”

Ella is clearly warmhearted but, rejected by Bob, can find no outlet for her generosity. The doe-eyed Sally Hawkins of Fingersmith has a melancholy face that betrays Ella’s endless disappointments. Still, her stoicism can’t prepare her for the leech-like attentions of Mr Ernest Eccles (Phil Davis). You can smell his rotten teeth and stale breath. He is fabulously horrid.

The only real flat note is Bryan Dick’s Bob: streetwise and smirking, he seems far too savvy to fall for gauche Jenny’s looks alone – Hamilton’s creation was surely more bookish. While Jenny’s daft comment on Dickens should ruin the learned Bob’s whole evening, here he just rolls his eyes as if it to say: “Women, eh?” We never really understand his intentions; why doesn’t he just slip her a tenner and get it over with?

It’s hard to fault the settings or the score (think Pennies from Heaven), and attention to detail in a BBC period drama is something to be treasured after their Tweenies makeover job on Casanova. The final episode of this three-part adaptation – with Ella fending off Eccles – is particularly claustrophobic, engrained with sooty black humour. This is the first time that anyone has captured the fug and fog of Hamilton’s novels – no small feat.    ~ Bob Stanley, Times Online

Critics’ Reviews: (#2)

BBC4’s adaptation, showing on consecutive nights (and repeated as one piece on Saturday) is the closest anyone has yet come to getting the real Hamilton on screen – but it’s still not that close. It’s well acted: Bryan Dick is a winning Bob; Zoe Tapper does very well with Jenny, especially given that the first film is all about someone else’s idea of who she is ; as Ella, Sally Hawkins is yearning, luckless bravery in a gawky black bob; the ever dependable Phil Davies is an exquisitely excruciating Eccles.

But there’s a curiously airless feel, different from Hamilton’s stale, smoky atmospheres. Much of this might have to do with budget restrictions. Unable to redress London for the 1930s, the director, Simon Curtis, is forced to frame his cleverly chosen exterior shots very carefully – moving the camera an inch either way would probably reveal a mobile phone mast, or McDonalds. This static style carries over into interiors. Composed in very dark tones, the effect is almost abstract.

It’s not Hamilton’s style, but it’s still intriguing – hypnotic almost, especially in the first film, in which scriptwriter Kevin Elyot has cropped the book to reinforce the relentless repetition with which Jenny continually lets the befuddled Bob down. This adaptation wouldn’t have sent him running to the bottle. But he’d have probably opened one, anyway.    ~ Damien Love, Sunday Herald

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