Plastic memory

We have just finished watching the BBC adaptation of 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. I have never been able to get on with Dickens, despite trying from time to time, but the box of BBC Dickens adaptations from which it came (bought from CeX of Epsom, of reference 1, for a fiver. Where else?) said that Dickens was well suited to television adaptation. So it proved to be, and we have had our fiver's worth from the first of the seven box novels.

We started off by thinking that we had not seen this adaptation before, although some of the actors and actresses were familiar enough. Gradually it dawned on us that we had seen it before, but that remarkably little had stuck. Just the odd scene. Maybe we had dozed through most of it.

One of the story lines concerns an insurance scam, whereby a flashy looking operation, well led by the late Pete Postlethwaite, based somewhere smart in central London, extracts life insurance premiums out of people while managing somehow not to pay out on many of the subsequent deaths. With part of the scheme being to attract the participation and money of greedy businessmen who want in on the action. All very entertaining.

But when it started out, I knew that it had been lifted from the television adaptation of Trollope's 'The Way We Live Now', an adaptation we had watched several times in the past, but now retired. I thought it odd that it had been lifted so more or less entire - but I was very clear that the story line really belonged with Trollope, not with Dickens.

Checking this morning I find that the Trollope is another BBC adaptation, actually made a few years after the present one, rather than a few years before. Furthermore, it seems clear that this particular story line is not to be found in the Trollope at all.

Odd how memory plays tricks of this sort.

I suppose, in mitigation, I can argue that both adaptations are lush costume dramas set in 19th century London, involving dodgy manipulations of other peoples' money. Easy enough for the idling brain to get them muddled up.

Reference 1: https://uk.webuy.com/.