War and Peace - BBC1 - 9pm - New

Part I of 6

Thanks but I'll stick with Sergei Bondarchuk's classic Russian version. Nothing can come close to the maestro's epic.

Give it a go

It's a very fast pace. Is this the Russian version?

I'll record it and watch later, NFL on right now and gambling comes first.

how can you know its not as good if you dont watch it?

Very good crisp

You may need a cup  of coffee, Crisp

I always have found it hard to watch remakes of cinema classics.

I wonder if Tuppence Middleton will show us her...


....fine acting skills.

how vulgar, i was hoping to see miss anderson's skills myself

Vivian has made good.

Lily James.....more fragrant than Emma Watson !

I expect a bit of sauce from Chloe Pirrie

first 15 minutes are absolutely shyte

laughably updated BBC-style

Wait till we get first battle scene.

It will be sh1te, like 99% of bbc's output.

Weinstein Company involved in production

BBC have already diluted their audience by putting this on head to head with Legally Blonde.

Anthony Hopkins was great as Pierre Bezukov (guy who just became Count) in 1972 series

Prince Bolkonsky  : Jim Broadbent

(Tough to follow all these Russkie names)

Here we go. Such a long time since we have had cannon and ball on a Sunday night.

Monkhouse ?

Monestry

monastery

Bob, bob bobbing along

started off shyte and got worse

Stuart Jeffries review in Guardian :

Princess Helene is running through a vast palace, casting off an piece of clothing in each room. Given the number of rooms and all those 19th-century layers, it promises to be quite the protracted striptease. She’s pursued by Count Bezukhov, the sexual patsy of a new master, fiddling with his spectacles like a younger, more lubricious Captain Mainwaring.

I loved this scene, with its self-satirising perfume ad aesthetics and Tuppence Middleton performing unwitting homage to Nicole Kidman driven nuts by too much Chanel No 5. Was it faithful to Tolstoy’s novel? Don’t pretend you care.

“Touch me!” the princess commands as, finally, she lies coquettishly in the count’s bed, disclosing her naked bottom. “Touch me!” Pierre awakens. It’s all been a dream. For those of us refusing to go cold turkey after the final Downton on Christmas Day, Andrew Davies’s adaptation of War and Peace (BBC1) helps prolong another lovely dream, the delusive Sunday night fantasy of a past that never existed.

“We need a revolution in this country,” Pierre earlier tells a claque of aristo scum at a St Petersburg soiree in 1805 as Napoleon’s grande armée sweeps eastward. So does British television. We need liberation from the stays and corsets of costume dramas, from mutually assured seduction by Napoleon-era booty calls. But it won’t happen and so, in fairness, the government should give Davies a peerage like the one it awarded Julian Fellowes for his genius in keeping Britain supine during austerity years.

Indeed, this War and Peace has everything we need to get us through the winter without rising up and executing George Osborne for the public good. Bullingdon-meets-Drones-club montage of poshos on the razz with unconvincing prostitutes? Check. A confusion of new characters we can spend the long nights getting to know? Check. Hero (James Norton) with hollow cheeks, well-filled breeches and an interesting death wish? Check. Heroine (Lily James) excitable on the palace steps over departing boys in uniform, like an over-caffeinated younger Bennet girl from Davies’s version of Pride and Prejudice? Check.


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Bosoms heaving? Sabres flashing? Lucrative foreign sales projected? Check, check, check.

For all the compelling silliness, there were two scenes I admired. Stephen Rea and Rebecca Front excelled in the deathbed wrangle over the old count’s secret will. Then there was the shocking violence with which Norton’s Prince Andrei thrust his pleading wife aside before heading off to war – more disturbing because it was a departure from the genteel English parameters of this adaptation.

Indeed, that, for me, was the adaptation’s biggest problem: it was too English. It took the deep-voiced Russian choruses that punctuated some scenes and the shots of CGI sailing ships frozen on the Neva, to remind me War and Peace was set not in Georgian England but tsarist Russia.

No matter, I’m already hooked – if only to find out what Mathieu Kassovitz will be like as Napoleon. I’ll be back next week for more of Davies’s latest sexed-up dossier of the classics.

once watched the hollywood version with Audrey Hepburn - that was torture. not sure that extending the torture is an improvement?

sounds rivetting ...

unfortunately I'm washing my hair next week ... let me know what happens Leopard.

Remember to dry it thoroughly before you put it back on.....you don't want the scabies coming back !