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Thursday, June 29, 2006

Addendum: BBC Archive Project

Biedroneczka writes in with a little more information on the list she provided of BBC adaptations of Jane Eyre, specifically the two radio adaptations I have not found yet- the ones from 1990 and 2004:

"There's practically no info on the 1990 version. As far as I remember, it's only 30 minutes long. The 1994 programme is indeed the one with Ciaran [Hinds]. And the info on the 2004 one reads as follows: Anne-Marie DUFF reads Charlotte BRONTE bold and passionate story of a woman's search for independence and love on her own terms. Lonely, ignored and ill treated, the orphaned Jane is growing up at Gateshead. Abridged by Sally MARMION. Producer Di SPEIRS. 15 episodes, 15 minutes each. BTW, Here's the link to the site: http://open.bbc.co.uk/cataloguemeta. Sadly, the catalogue is currently unavailable."

The catalogue seems to be in a prototype stage at the moment, according to its blog but is going through a review process. This is how the project is described on the BBC's website:

This experimental catalogue database holds over 900,000 entries. It is a sub-set of the data from the internal BBC database created and maintained by the BBC’s Information and Archives department. This public version is updated daily as new records are added and updated in the main catalogue. This figure is so high because, for example, each TV news story now has an individual entry in the catalogue.

Perhaps more importantly for our purposes is that it clearly excludes productions which no longer exist. It is safe, I think, to suppose then that the 1956 and 1963 Jane Eyre productions are still extant. Once the project is up again, we should be able to see if 1970 Villette, the 1968 Tenant of Wildfell Hall and perhaps others we don't know about are also hidden away there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do hope the Tenant and Villette copies exist, and that they can be reproduced. I have a copy of the Tenant which has a picture of a dramatisation on front, and I often wondered about it.

Lynne

Brontëana said...

to Lynne:

Would you be able to scan or take a photo of the cover and send it to me? The BBC have provided photos for the novels before. I have a copy of Jane Eyre with photos from the 1973 series.

And perhaps you might recognise any of these actors from the 1968 version:

Helen Graham- Janet Munro
Gilbert Markham- Bryan Marshall Arthur Huntingdon- Corin Redgrave (he's on the right).

Anonymous said...

I am not sure what you are asking about the actors but Bryan Marshall played Captain Wentworth in the 1971 BBC production of "Persuasion" with Ann Firbank portraying Anne Elliot. I thought he made a very good captain. Agnes