A bestselling book comprising a dying writer, an untold tale, a curious biographer, incestuous ancient couplings, fey-slash-homicidal children flitting about crumbling mansions on the moors, close-mouthed housekeepers, handsome gardening lads, skeletons emerging from loamy soil, high staircases and blood-spattered marble floors, made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman and shown on a cold December evening.
There's not a lot that can go wrong with that and nothing did. Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (BBC2) was as faithfully yet thoughtfully reproduced for the screen as you would expect by Christopher Hampton, who among many other things wrote the scripts for Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement. The only scene that didn't work quite as well as it needed to – and I'm going to try to avoid spoilers here as it's Christmas and fewer people than ever are likely to watch things in real time – was the switcheroo at the end. You had to trust more than you were able to verify that She Who Was Performing The Switching felt that She Who Was To Be Switched Upon was sufficiently maddened not to notice the substitution. Not that it mattered in the end of course, because of – well, the thing and the thing, which led to the unravelling of the big thing but … anyway, we'll leave it. All the ingredients of the potboiler plot bubbled away nicely for 90 minutes and served up a richly, deliciously satisfying stew.
Redgrave and Colman. What do you say? Any fear that proceedings might devolve into an act-off disappeared within the first frames, and after that it was pure pleasure, watching two perfectly pitched performances fill the screen and the story with just the right amount of … oh, well, everything. Just the right amount of Gothic grandeur from Redgrave as the dying author and narrator of the tale, overlying a realistic pulse of fear and the frailty of an old lady struggling to shed a lifetime's burden. Just the right amount of guilt, misery and restlessness from Colman as bereaved and sorrowing biographer Margaret Lea, who was as appalled and compelled as the viewer by the narrative and otherworldly forces closing in around her. Add a supporting cast including Steven Mackintosh and Robert Pugh and, after it was all over, you realised that the most unsettling and disorientating aspect of the whole thing had been not the pseudo-ghosts, falling bodies or abandoned babies. It was the unusual experience of watching a production suffused with genuine talent instead of something in which some over-leveraged reality TV star is being desperately stretched this way and that to fill another hour-shaped hole in the schedules. Thank you to everyone involved for a smashing late Christmas present. It unleashed great tidings of comfort-watching and spooky joy.
So too did the first episode of new three part series Sacred Wonders of Britain (BBC2), in which archaeologist and historian Neil Oliver (the Scottish one who requires those of us who have an inner headmaster to repress the urge to shout "Gettahaircutboy!" at the screen long enough to let him impart some of the knowledge locked up in that overly hirsute head) examined how the British Isles has been shaped by its inhabitants' changing beliefs over the past 13,000 years. The opener looked at the ice and Neolithic ages. First came the imbuing of natural phenomena such as the Creswell Crags with mystical significance. Its caves were etched with pictures of animals, perhaps in the service of persuading nature to yield to them the real-life equivalents. Then, as farming began to replace hunting and gathering and people assumed more command over the land, tombs and monuments start to occur. Henges, stone circles, long barrows thousands upon thousands of years old are still visible – or at least discernible by the lie of the land and the tutored eye.
Just as the patient teams of archaeologists gently removed layers upon layers of accrued detritus from the ancient sites underneath, so Oliver and the experts swept away the modern assumptions that obscure our vision of the past. They unearthed a part of history when labour was not something to be avoided or saved but embraced as an offering to ancestors and spirits, or a show of strength and devotion. Creating a stone circle was not the unfathomable waste of time and effort it appears to us but a way of drawing communities together peaceably to forge bonds that could aid the population's survival in a pitiless landscape.
The programme was equally unafraid to be informative and meditative, which made it rather wonderful. Happy new year.