Around The World In 80 Days – BBC 1

What on earth is this rubbish?   It’s supposed to be a great adventure and a celebration of technological progress, even if it’s rather silly to imagine that Fogg genuinely didn’t realise that he’d gained a day.  Yes, all right, Jules Verne wasn’t very politically correct by 21st century standards, with Fogg rescuing an Indian widow about to commit suttee and then being kidnapped by Sioux and all the rest of it, but he was writing a century and a half ago and, if the BBC didn’t want to deal with that, then they should have chosen a different book to adapt.  This adaptation is just nonsense.  Who remembers Around The World With Willy Fog?  That was 80 million times better than this.  Shame that they didn’t just repeat that instead.

Fogg has been turned into a sort of Blackadder figure, bumbling along uselessly whilst his manservant is the clever one.  I have no objection to the colour blind casting of a black actor as Passepartout, but why on earth have his family been turned into communards?  Half the first episode involved his brother trying to assassinate the president of France.

Where did that come from?  Fix, the man who thought Fogg was a bank robber, has been removed from the story entirely, and been replaced by Abigail Fix, a feisty female journalist.  Yes, I know about Nellie Bly, but this isn’t supposed to be her story: it’s supposed to be an adaptation of Jules Verne’s book.  She and Passepartout are the ones responsible for all the derring-do, whilst the upper class white bloke has been relegated to the status of a total prat.

Seriously, BBC, get over yourself.   If you didn’t approve of Jules Verne’s book, then why did you bother dramatising it at all?   It’s a mid-Victorian book, not a 21st century book.  If you couldn’t accept that, then you should have gone for something else.  Not impressed one little bit.