The Musketeers, seriously?

So, Bozo has always avoided reviewing things.

When you write - and when your work (rubbish though it might be) is criticised - it feels like you are witnessing your children being slaughtered by marauding savages.

 

So - slaughtering the offspring of hard-working writers seems kinda wrong.

And when you write (and Bozo has started writing screenplays as well as novels) and fail to be recognized - when you criticise the work of someone who has been published or produced - it can sound like awful sour grapes.

But - in this instance - I need to ask a question more than criticise.

 

My question is this.

Is it really only possible to tell a story set 400 years ago on modern television by sacrificing all of the language and cultural mores of the time in question to language and cultural mores of the 21st Century?

Seriously?

If the answer is "yes" and The Musketeers  (Sundays BBC1 9pm) seems to suggest it is - I for one am a bit sad.

A few episodes ago someone said "I have been set up!"

Of course we all knew what he meant.

But not a single soul in 1630s paris would have had a clue.

Of course I grew up with Dumas (well not physically - he died 100 years before I was born - even Bozo isnt that old!) - I must have read the Three Musketeers a dozen times. As well as Twenty Years On and the rest of the adventures.. So I love it as it was.

And then in 1973/74 - probably before the Writers of The Musketeers were born Richard Lester directed a masterful screenplay by George Macdonald Fraser to produce the two classic movies which I still enjoy watching.

In those - the Musketeers manage to convince me they are in the 1630s, but remain perfectly understandable.

So, the question remains - can you not persuade anyone to make a period drama in which people act and speak in at least a reasonable facsimile of a period way?

And don't get me started on Mr Darcy leaping in the lake. Sheesh.

Of course you are the TV experts - so if you tell me you cannot have an audience for a period piece unless you use modern street-talk and modern issues (noble though they might be - like women's rights) as cornerstones of story and dialogue - then I have to believe you.

But when I was young -  and I was 15 when Richard Lester's Three Musketeers came out (oops, gave away my ancient-ness) - I found that I learned a lot of history  - and certainly a lot of my interest in history - from the way Lester and Macdonald Fraser told the story.

I hope no one takes the Paris of the Musketeers, or the social life portrayed as anything like a picture of actual 1630s France.

And if you say to me - of course they won't, people aren't that stupid!

Then I will say to you.... Excellent, then stop pandering to them with 21st century dialogue that doesnt stretch their ears.

This is not meant to be an unmitigated slagging off of the series.

I like it actually - it just disappoints me.

The stories are fun (if often historically implausible) and reasonably well told. - Of course it is streets behind dramas such as Justified or The Americans as far as plot, story, character and suspense go - but it's a creditable effort.

But my question still remains - does this actually mean that if my period novel is to be published everyone needs to speak as if they are in 2014 Hoxton?

If my period spy screenplay is to get produced does it really need to sound like Spooks?

Because if it does I may actually prefer to remain unpublished and unproduced.