219 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
Executable File
219 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
Executable File
culture
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tvandradio
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8150633
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-----
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# Any Human Heart, Channel 4, review
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## Andrew Pettie reviews the first episode of William Boyd's Any Human Heart,
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starring Jim Broadbent, Matthew Macfadyen and Gillian Anderson.
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![Matthew Macfadyen and Hayley Atwell][1]
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Matthew Macfadyen as Logan with Hayley Atwell as Freya, the love of his life
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Photo: Channel 4
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[![][2]][3]
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By [Andrew Pettie][4] 8:35AM GMT 22 Nov 2010
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[Comments][5]
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In his 2002 novel Any Human Heart: the Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart,
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[William Boyd][6] tells the long, absurdly eventful life-story of his
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protagonist across 512 pages. It's a novel so absorbing one of my friends read
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it in a single sitting. For Channel 4's big-budget adaptation, which began
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last night, Boyd has turned scriptwriter to condense Any Human Heart into four
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televised chapters. His challenge: to make Logan's tale light up the screen in
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the same way it leaps off the page.
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Boyd's first conundrum was how many Logans to cast. The novel, told in the
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first person, follows him from his earliest childhood memory - of his
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teacher's circumcised penis while they are swimming together in the country of
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Logan's birth, Uruguay - to his dying breath in a rural village in the south
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of France. One of the book's themes is that each person changes so much over
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the course of a life that they might as well be different people. Or, as Logan
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puts it, "Every human being is a collection of selves." In a different story,
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deciding to cast a trio of actors of various shapes, sizes and ages to play
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the lead might have proved a distraction; here it subtly underlined Boyd's
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central point.
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What's more, all three Logans were perfectly cast. Sam Claflin played him in
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his cocksure student days - dabbling with girls and gin at Oxford, then making
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a name for himself as a writer. Matthew Macfadyen picked up the baton during
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Logan's podgy, slightly pompous middle years, when he foolishly marries the
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bossy (though landed) Lottie (Emerald Fennell), then finds and has an affair
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with his soul-mate Freya (Hayley Atwell). Hovering in the background was Logan
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the Old, played by the magnetic Jim Broadbent, who we saw shuffling around a
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ramshackle house in the south of France like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to
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Come. We didn't hear much from Broadbent's Logan but his cracked and careworn
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features spoke eloquently about what's in store for his younger self.
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As in the novel, some chapters of Logan's life were more convincing than
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others. I still have considerable difficulty believing in Land Fothergill
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(Charity Wakefield), Logan's high-minded first love, who refuses to have
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anything romantic to do with him until he has embarked on a zeitgeist-
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shattering work of fiction. Do women like Land Fothergill exist in the real
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world? Perhaps at Oxford. Then there was Logan's over-hasty marriage to
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Lottie, which comes as a surprise in the book, but was dropped on the viewer
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like a thunderbolt from a cobalt blue sky.
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## Related Articles
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* [Gillian Anderson: 'don't box me in'][7]
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19 Nov 2010
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* [Any Human Heart in pictures][8]
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19 Nov 2010
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* [William Boyd on filming Any Human Heart][9]
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05 Nov 2010
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More convincing were Logan's run-ins with the great and the good - another
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recurring theme - who last night included a hard-drinking Hemingway, a suave
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Ian Fleming and, best of all, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Tom Hollander
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and Gillian Anderson, both excellent), who Logan will be rubbing shoulders
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with in the weeks to come.
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It is famously hard for a film or TV adaptation to measure up to the fictional
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world a reader has already conjured in their imagination. Yet the first
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episode of Any Human Heart scarcely put a foot wrong. Every detail, from the
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casting to the costumes, rang true.
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However, it still wasn't a patch on the book. This wasn't Boyd's fault. It's
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just that what grabs you by the lapels from the opening sentence of his novel
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is Logan's voice - that crisp, funny, slightly self-regarding narrator's voice
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which addresses the reader with an intimacy and directness that television,
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despite all its visual advantages, cannot recreate.
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[X][10] Share & bookmark
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Delicious Facebook Google Messenger Reddit Twitter
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Digg Fark LinkedIn Google Buzz StumbleUpon Y! Buzz
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[What are these?][11]
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* Share: [Share][10] [ ][12] [ ][13]
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[Tweet][14]
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8150633/Any-Human-Heart-
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Channel-4-review.html
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Telegraph
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## [TV and Radio][15]
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* ### [Culture »][16]
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* ### [Books »][17]
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* ### [Andrew Pettie »][18]
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[![TV Guide][19]][20]
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### [TV Guide UK: searchable TV listings][20]
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[![Paul Merton presents the Birth of Hollywood][21] ][22]
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### [Today's TV highlights][22]
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[![][23] ][24]
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### [Britain's Got Talent: where are they now?][24]
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[![][25] ][26]
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### [Doctor Who - the top ten best Doctors][26]
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[X][10] Share & bookmark
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Delicious Facebook Google Messenger Reddit Twitter
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Digg Fark LinkedIn Google Buzz StumbleUpon Y! Buzz
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[What are these?][11]
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Share:
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* [ ][10]
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* [ ][12]
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* [ ][13]
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* [Tweet][14]
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* Advertisement
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![][27]
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telegraphuk
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Please enable JavaScript to view the [comments powered by Disqus.][28] [blog
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comments powered by Disqus][29]
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