I saw Jodhi May in something today and suddenly got an urge to watch her in the TV version  of Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet. I bunged in the DVD and starting watching it from when Florence (played by May) tells Nan (Rachael Stirling) about her relationship with Lilian (Cyril's mother). The next morning, Florence suggests they go out together. Nan takes her to a pub where she has to tell Florence that some of the clientèle of the spacious pub are not, in fact, men. Subsequently, they overhear a conversation which puzzles Florence who has to ask what "tipping the velvet" actually means and Nan explains in words and mime. They then walk home and, in scene of astonishingly awful cheesy CGI, they kiss on a bridge over the frozen Thames while a man skates on the river below them. By this time I'm going "something isn't right" (and I didn't mean the terrible effects) so I rush upstairs to grab the book.

Anyway to cut a long story short, in the book the scene when Flo tells Nan about Lilian is pretty much the same sans the politics but it is Flo who chooses the pub (actually, a small room in a pub), it is Flo who informs Nan that not all the blokes are blokes ("to think...that I might have worn my moleskins, after all"), and much more importantly, it is Flo who tells Nan what "tipping the velvet" means to Nan's great confusion.

What was the thinking of Andrew Davies here? Why did he swap the dialogue around? Maybe if I reacquaint myself with the adaptation I'll understand what he was trying to do but otherwise it removes Nan's essential naivety and places it on the sensible and straightforward and quite frankly wonderful Florence who doesn't deserve that.

Posted via email from F International