feeling the way i do, of course i had to go back to gaudy night. i would have just hid under the covers with the book, but arriving in the post this morning was the bbc dramatisation of it, with edward petherbridge, in three 50min episodes. i watched it immediately. i feel savage and miserable, so i deserve it, she says, glaring all around.

i didn't expect, but i did hope, that they'd keep lord st george in it. apollo belvedere in spotless flannels, you know. and i'm quite old enough to ogle incredibly beautiful young men. alas no. other things not in the movie:

no chessmen, no sonnets, yes punting on the river but no beautiful quarrel about daring to write the kind of book that really would hurt like hell but what does it matter if it made a good book, yes high table. also also! i do object. saint-saens can't possibly be peter's sort of music. especially not if the piece in question was the swan. bunter plays it in the movie and says he knows that peter is partial to it. that just can't be right. all heart and not enough brain! and there was a wholly gratuitous bit in a train and a german guard comes into inspect their passports and was very rude to the "english aristocrat." and they gave one of heath's favourite lines about fancy religions having ghastly effects on one's grammar to quite the wrong person. all the subplots - miss hillyard's jealousy, st george in the loggia, (supercilious little beast!) meringues, dog collars, all quite gone, (but bits of peter-harriet romance as flashbacks. peter full of nerves but sometimes radiantly happy. harriet most ungracious and unkempt. they dance far too much.) bunter very impertinent. developments at shrewsbury trimmed to the minimum. oh! the proposal! he didn't say placetne magistra, which was all right, but for her to answer dear idiot and then kiss him! awful! (although he simply said, harriet you know i love you will you marry me and the look on his face - intent, awaiting his fate - made up for the rest of it i hope someone wants me that much one day.)

but mostly it was fun to see caps and gowns and spires.

oh and - i want someone to take me out punting!

of the things not in the book that i had liked, miss de vine (called ms devine throughout the movie) said we can't know what is of overmastering importance, you can only know when they have overmastered us, and that harriet was not to pay the slightest attention to anything other people said.

also, harriet said that bit about how she should scrub floors very badly but she writes detective stories rather well so why should proper feeling should stop her doing her proper job?

i suppose that's what i wanted out of it. actually i should get thrones, dominations out of the library again. i'm sure she says somewhere that her writing isn't real work or not really important and peter argues against that.

but probably i'm just desperate to stare at edward petherbridge. petherbridge doesn't quite behave right, and the voice isn't quite right either, but he looks like my idea of peter. and, on the other hand, that could be because the man who was a peter figure to me in real life happens to look like petherbridge-as-wimsey. so.