Classics Revisited: 'Pride and Prejudice' 1980
For many Jane Austen enthusiasts, the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice was their introduction to televised adaptations of Austen’s work. Like any adaptation of a beloved and brilliant novel there are additions, changes, and inexplicably left out scenes. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but this five-part series (currently available to stream on BritBox) has a good try.
The BBC has, over the decades, loved Pride and Prejudice, with the first version aired live as a one-hour show in 1938, two years before the wacko Olivier/Garson Hollywood treatment. No recording was made. As far as I can tell (because footage has been lost or destroyed and accounts vary), the novel was serialized in 1948, 1952, and 1958, and the first color series was made in 1967, the 150th anniversary of Austen’s death. The British Film Institute has footage from this 1967 version, and you can find snippets online. (A big shoutout to Mistress of Pemberley for her Pride and Prejudice excerpts where scenes from available productions are grouped together for comparison.) This five-episode version of Pride and Prejudice, which aired in the UK in 1979 and made its PBS debut in 1980, was directed by Cyril Coke, with a script by renowned feminist writer Fay Weldon, and remained the prototype for Austen adaptations for the next fifteen years, until Andrew Davies arrived to shake things up.
Let’s acknowledge the bad stuff first. This series is over forty years old and filmed mostly on video indoors, so the color is faded. The background sound has no ambiance, it's just one of those things that you notice only when it isn’t there. Other than technical issues, the acting is frequently one-note, with stage-trained actors barking their lines, the occasional dreadful wig (yes, you, Wickham), and unexciting costumes. It is a fact universally acknowledged that costume designers design for their contemporary audience as much as for historical accuracy, hence for instance, the crazy padded shoulders in the 1940 version. And what did we all love in Britain in the 1970s? Designer Laura Ashley and her retro, block-printed cotton dresses. And what did we not like? Bras, so the line of the dresses reflects exactly that modern aesthetic, not the authentic Regency profile.
