Women Love… The BBC

Who here sat down to watch Great Expectations over Christmas on BBC1 and thought… contemporary adaptations of the classic Victorian bildungsroman just do not get any better than this?

Yeah Gillian Anderson played a highly commendable and wickedly seductive portrayal of the heart-broken and sequestered Mrs Havisham. And yeah the BBC’s inspired formation of Satis House; with its plethora of antiquated rooms suffocatingly packed with ornaments, trinkets and keep-sakes preserved in Mrs Havisham’s bitter, wrought emotions and dust accumulated from years passed in solitude was so persuasive it’s almost as if Dickens’s very sentences were being spoken through our very own, heroic, British Broadcasting Corporation’s film set. No one’s arguing with that.

But what I’m saying is, even if you happened to miss the fantastic three-part adaptation and even if you aren’t that much of a Dickens fan, just take a moment out of your day for me and for all of the women out there who I know were fixed to that screen over the holidays, watching, recording and (like myself) pausing the already wonderful BBC adaptation to admire, on arrival, exhibit A(mazing), the best part of the show, the dream of all dreams: Douglas Booth - who not only beautifully acted out the role of Dickens' striving protagonist Pip, but also, well, was just bloody beautiful. Yes, ladies, it's still available on iPlayer...