Cathy go home, or suffering nights

Press, 28 April 1981, Page 15

Cathy go home, or suffering nights

F Review!

Ken Strongman

The latest in a long Ine ofthings that Emily Bronte has to answer for is ruining our Sunday evenings. Replacing “Love in a Cold Climate” with “Blithering Lights” islike being unexpectedly given a cold shower. Even though the 8.8. C. production is good, it is necessarily cast round the same old story and impossible characters. The first half of Sunday’s episode might as well have been in black and white for all the colour it brought into our lives. Poor, visiting, guileless Lockwood is faced with growling dogs and dead farm animals, swinging windows and tapping branches (it is, of course, perpetual, stormy Winter), and explosively shouting people.

He cannot begin to unravel the problematic, cryptic relationships which he walks into — not surprisingly, since neither can those who are enjoying them.

Should he stay, in the “forbidden" room, or go. and risk death in the unknown bog? In the event, unfortunately for us, he stays, and the apparition of Cathy clutches at him in the window.

Slightly downcast at this, he is lifted to his gibbering feet by Heathcliffe, taking a brief respite from tugging and pulling at his rat-tail locks.

Somehow, this Unlikely sequence of events provides the excuse for the start of, the enormous flash-back which is to be our lot.for the next few weeks. All the apalling protagonists are now young and have a long way to go. ' <■ The best that could be said for the second half hour was that at least one appeared to have a colour television again. Perhaps “Hovering Withers" deserves its place in the history of letters as the first fictionalised attempt to portray a mental institution. Certainly, all those who live there are completely mad. Hindley is a psychopath, Cathy a sexually motivated sado-masochist. Heathcliff a screaming, ranting neurotic, Old George a religious maniac, and so it goes on. And they are all vicious and thankless, physicaly. and even , Verbally on the odd occasion when they can muster the.necessary wit. Are the various facets of life portrayed in "Withering Blights" figments of Bronte's relentless imagination, or genuine reflections of the time? Take spitting; they couldn’t have existed without it. They spat to clean things; they spat on the floor to express disapproval; and they spat in one another’s faces when

they could think of nothing to say. They must have been constantly thirsty. i: When they ran out of spittle. they reached for the whip. Conceivably, there are lessons to be learned from "Burgeoning Waists.” It shows what can happen to a nice, middle-class, farming family if its members live in too much neurotic intensity. They should get out more, go to the pub occasionally, and make sandals out of the old whips. It is a pity that the emotional tone of Sunday evening has changed in this direction. If we had to have Bronte’s confounded story, it could have been done in five minutes and much more attractively in the Kate Bush version. Then, perhaps, the far more interesting “Country Calendar” report on the Beethams of Brancepeth (wouldn't poor old Emily have liked that as a possible title?) could have gone on and allowed us a pleasant hour in the Wairarapa.