Was du Maurier's sexuality really the most important thing about her?
Daphne, BBC2
Rick Stein in du Maurier Country, BBC2
I am going to have to be stern this week. Daphne (Saturday 12 May, 9pm, BBC2), commissioned for the BBC's celebrations of the centenary of Daphne du Maurier's birth, was a disgrace. Elsewhere, the tributes have been straightforward and mostly pleasing: a new adaptation of My Cousin Rachel on Radio 4, new editions of the novels and a new du Maurier companion from Virago. What does BBC2 give us? A biopic focusing on only one part of the writer's life - her lesbianism - and a programme called Rick Stein in du Maurier Country (also Saturday, 8.10pm).
If I could calm down long enough to stop being outraged, I would find this mighty strange. Du Maurier wrote exactly the kind of dark, gripping novels that are ripe for adaptation. So why didn't the Beeb just send Andrew Davies a few and tell him to get cracking? I'll tell you why. The BBC is obsessed with celebrities, and nothing is deemed to be interesting without one attached.
First of all, the programme-makers found a nice Cornish celeb - Stein - to stand outside the locked gates of Menabilly (the house on which du Maurier based Rebecca's Manderley). Fabulous. Tell us what the atmosphere's like, Rick. Is it very spooky? Job done. Then they turned their attention to Daphne herself. In the scheme of du Maurier's life, it is her books that are the celebrities. Obviously. But sod that. In this skewed world, it's the writer who is the celebrity, even - perhaps especially - if they happen to be dead. She liked girls, didn't she? Perfect.
Crusty, war-traumatised husband; illicit desires; predatory, Martini-sodden women in bright red lipstick. It'll write itself! And the bits that don't write themselves can be left to Amy Jenkins, the creator of This Life. Just make sure she adds the odd typewriter scene.
The pity of it is that Daphne had a peerless cast, all of whom did their best in difficult circumstances (it wasn't hard to tell that the budget was small). Geraldine Somerville as Daphne was exquisitely diffident and mannish; Elizabeth McGovern as Ellen Doubleday, with whom Daphne was in unrequited love, was charming and delicate; and, best of all, Janet McTeer as the actress Gertrude Lawrence, her lover, managed to pull off the great trick of being rapacious and breezy at the same time. Everything else, though, was awful. The direction was so clichéd - is that another crashing wave I see before me? Is that another filterless cigarette about to be lit? - that I wanted to scream. It was boring, too. Two women just went to bed with one another, that's all.
The irony is, of course, that it is only because this film is about a married woman who goes to bed with another woman that it made it to the screen at all. A film about a married man who goes to bed with another woman would not have merited a second glance from commissioning editors. This is profoundly wearying. Prurience and drama are not at all the same thing; in fact, in this instance, they actually seemed to work against each other.
As I waited for Gertrude Lawrence to die - here, we were not even told how, or why - I kept thinking of the real du Maurier. In the few letters we have in which she was able to bring herself to analyse her sexuality, she betrayed a profound unease with it; her coping mechanism was to divide herself in two. Like her father before her, she loathed the word lesbian, preferring to use the family shorthand, "Venetian". What would she have made of this depiction? Intensely private, she would have been horrified. What du Maurier longed for, more than anything, was literary recognition. Too often, she was dismissed as a writer of romantic potboilers. But this film reduced her reputation still further. In 2007, du Maurier's sexuality has become the most important thing about her.
Pick of the week
The Seven Ages of Rock
19 May, 9.10pm, BBC2
A look at the roots of rock, starting with Jimi Hendrix.
Filthy Rich and Homeless
22 May, 9pm, BBC3
Five well-heeled people try to cope on the streets.
Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain
22 May, 9pm, BBC2
Can Marr really bring J M Keynes to life? He'll have a go . . .
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