![]() So about two thirds of the way through the first episode we have to cringe our way through a moving scene in which Passepartout's brother attempts to assassinate the French Prime Minister, misses (he hits – don't ask – Fogg's drinking flask instead), and then dies heroically with arms outstretched a bit like Sergeant Elias in Platoon or maybe like where the horrendous Marius stops one and nearly dies at the barricades in Les Mis. As if embarrassed by the anachronism issues this might raise in the historically attuned viewer, the script team has doubled down by giving Passepartout a lavish backstory in which it turns out he, his brother and his father were all heroes of the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. ![]() Passepartout is now black (Ibrahim Koma) just like Inspector Javert in the BBC's Les Mis adaptation was black. As a reporter for the Daily Telegraph (so sexist in Victorian times it won't even give her a byline, even though her Dad is the editor), she will accompany Fogg on his round-the-world trip, ostensibly to cover the story, but really to correct any foolish, antediluvian notions the viewer might have that actually the original story worked pretty well as a kind of odd-couple, male buddy adventure without the need for an additional female. This one is played (very well as it happens) by the German actress Leonie Benesch, the nanny from Babylon Berlin.īenesch plays an invented (by the screenwriters) character called Abigail 'Fix', her surname being a nod to the detective character who has been written out of Verne's original in order to demonstrate how important strong, feisty, etc women are. But no, that was a different gratuitous, feisty and progressive redhead. You might think she'd been parachuted in from the BBC's rubbish adaptation of War Of The Worlds from a couple of years ago where she worked to similar effect to kill the feel of the period. Happily, help is at hand in the form of a gratuitous, feisty and progressive red headed woman determined not to take no for an answer. The tone is set in the early scenes in a typical stuffy Victorian members' club (The Reform), where, would you believe it, stuffy Victorian gentlemen sit stuffily in their stuffy leather chairs with nary a woman anywhere in sight to point out to them how stuffy and Victorian they are being. ![]() It's as if the whole endeavour has been arranged, not for the purposes of entertainment, but just so a chippy lefty can stand on his soapbox and lecture us on what a terrible sexist, racist and classist enterprise the British Empire was. So unbearably lame is his pallid, put-upon, charisma-free Fogg that you really wouldn't want to spend even one day in his company, let alone 80 of them. Truly if David Tennant had been offered the role of a giant, steaming dog turd, he could hardly have approached it with less enthusiasm than he gives to his sour, bloodless, joyless impersonation of Jules Verne's upper class English adventurer. Potentially, it's a story about an England that should elicit very little sympathy,' says David Tennant, explaining, better than any review ever could, exactly why every fraction of a second's time spent watching him in Around the World In 80 Days (BBC1) is life spent utterly squandered. ![]() 'In many ways, Phileas Fogg represents everything that's alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire. ![]()
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