Now for something completely familiar
Valerie Grove: Last Night's TV
It would be easy to make us cringe with a live-action Wind in the Willows but, mirabile dictu, the BBC One New Year’s Day film did not. One key to its success was Lee Hall’s script, which didn’t muck about with Kenneth Grahame’s prose and sought no clever meanings in the Piper at the Gates of Dawn stuff. Another was a well-cast Toad, who has to be monstrously egocentric, gloriously reckless, grotesquely rich, bombastically boastful and yet remain loveable: Matt Lucas proved to be all of these. He was terrific, clearly enjoying himself hugely. Mark Gatiss played Ratty as a lovely debonair David Niven toff; Bob Hoskins as Badger was gruff and gravelly and worldly-wise.
And the scenery! Having identified several Thames riverside scenes as being recognisably Marlow, Wargrave etc, I remembered that this production was shot on location in Romania. A sylvan Arcadia, a pastoral paradise of dipping willows and wooded, watery wildness, as English as could be, complete with a stately Toad Hall. Bliss.
