One of the dangers of updating a well-loved classic (over-used term, I know) of literature is that, in the process, one can lose the magic that made the original so special. It can apply to films – I dread the proposed, pointless remake of Robocop and JJ Abrams’ liberties place his Star Trek movie firmly outside the canon of the rest of the franchise (preferably in a parallel universe) – but to more august books and plays, shameless pandering to modern audiences more often than not leaches out what once was timeless.


Against my better instinct, swayed by the TV guide’s gushing tribute as ‘one of the highlights of the festive season’, I tuned in to an update of The Borrowers. There was a fine cast, the most prominent being Christopher Eccleston, Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood, all playing their roles expertly and the design and conceptualisation could be sublime, such as Arietta and Spiller hiding in a Nativity scene arrangement or an entire Borrower city in an abandoned Tube station. One might query therefore what made me consider it an hour and a half I shall never get back. My wife held an even stronger negative opinion.

A selected crowd of reviewers on Radio Five (Live) were near universal in their fulsome praise. Near universal? The most senior of these opinion-formers, whilst still confessing to enjoyment, had the caveat that a modern setting means relevant technology of the age with which to expose Borrowers definitively. For myself, it was not just a horrendous plot hole but the decision to ignore it completely was an insult to my intelligence.

In fact, pitfalls in the narrative were myriad as if stumbling around a dungeon composed of oubliettes. Once Pod Clock and his wife were captured, what scientist worth their pay grade does not even take a photograph of his specimens, let alone set up a video camera nearby to maintain constant surveillance of their behaviour (yet a little boy has the ken to record it on his iPhone). And to place them in a large, glass beaker without a lid of some description defies all common sense. Mummified spiders were in frozen attendance in this laboratory and arachnids would have had no difficulty in escaping, though, despite knowing next to nothing of their abilities, the captive Borrowers are plonked here. A secure guinea pig hutch can be (like a video camera) inexpensive. When thwarted with more historic inevitability than a Marxist tract (or Tom and Jerry), the humiliated boffin knows where his quarry in the form of the little boy lives. This is not followed up, however. The list of such deficiencies to the narrative was seemingly endless in the defiance of logic.

Logic is something of which Stephen Fry usually makes great play. Maybe he chose to overlook it in order to relish delivering lines as a biologist. Fine comic actor and raconteur that he is, Fry’s ubiquity is grating, as though one might be worse for wear after overdoing it on the namesake’s confectionery. This, QI, The Bleak Old shop of Stuff, a prominent talking head on Billion Dollar Hippy, other innumerable interviews, hosting radio programmes on the subject of technology, the spoken word and others and regular relays of his tweets by followers – it is no surprise that Private Eye chose to lampoon him as a cross between a Middle Eastern despot and Russian strongman in his dominance and ‘reporting’ that there were “growing international calls for a ‘no-Fry zone’.” Indeed. One can have too much of a good thing.

Of course, he was excellent in his role, as were all the cast but, ironically, that was to the detriment of the story. The characters supposedly the ‘heroes’ of the piece were insufferable and playing it to pitch perfection merely heightened how irritating their personas were – a mixture of arrogant stubbornness and vainglorious bittiness, with a dash of outrageous sneakiness.

The overt emotional manipulation was odious to myself and my beloved, not landing any connection to the point where one rooted for the ‘villains’. The little boy that helps the Borrowers is, by his actions, one step removed from feral youth. So his mother died and his father is out most of the day and night, struggling to make ends meet and his gran is about to be evicted and, and… To quote Wilde, one would need a heart of stone not to laugh but the boy’s obstreperous wilfulness makes it a bitter chuckle. Victoria Wood as the gran, inexplicably, undergoes a total personality reversal from hating the borrowers to expressing gratitude to them. So her sovereign coin is returned and then sold but think of all the grief that need not have happened had it not gone missing in the first place. Hearts of gold but not flesh-and-blood beating ones.

Possibly a child would have been less attuned to these failings, but then why screen it from 7.30 pm, concluding at 9 pm? Lunatic scheduling! Could it be that it was hoped the adults would be so engorged on food and tipsy on alcohol they would be oblivious to the flaws? Or that the nation reflected the luvvies gathered in the Radio Five studio in delighting over the superficiality of it all? Wouldn’t you feel cheated if sparkling wrapping paper turned out to be the gift? The TV guide was almost right. This was of the festive season – the present you didn’t want.