and its connotations of nostalgia for times past with its elitist ideologies. Secondly, and perhaps as importantly, Bowker provides contemporary audiences with a reason to view dramatic works; identification and involvement with characters. Central to Bowker’s concept for the series was a need to: do something different with art history… something different with what we know about their lives and I hope…a series that still reflects on contemporary Britain today
www.bbc.co.uk/ desperateromantics The characters at the
heart of this vision and perhaps the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood themselves are Lizzie Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As a founding member
of the artists’ group, Rossetti was perhaps most influential in establishing both the artistic aesthetics of the movement as well the bohemian lifestyle of the group. According to screenwriter Peter Bowker, Rossetti and Siddal are a Victorian version of notorious punk icons Sid Vicious and Nancy Spurgeon because of their ultimate punk-like demise.
Representation
and realism Perhaps the most
important departure for the BBC in this classic mini-series is in the unconventionally realistic representations of nineteenth-century Victorian England. Lacking the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ mannerisms of classic adaptation, or the genteel respectability of an Austen text, Desperate Romantics breaks into new territory with its real-life stories of
44 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
sexuality, drugs, death, disease, infidelity and miscarriage. Far from the restrained stoicism of an Emma or even the cheeky optimism with which Bridget Jones plots to change her status from singleton to smug married cow, Lizzie Siddal, model and muse of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, dies a tragic death from a deliberate overdose of laudanum (an over-the- counter-form of opium popular with Victorians). Burned out from years of living a Bohemian lifestyle, suffering from anorexia and two miscarriages, Lizzie is ultimately humiliated by Rossetti’s affairs with his subsequent models, and chooses suicide. Such storylines as used in contemporary television dramas are not necessarily everyday events for most people, but here in recounting the daily
experiences of the Pre- Raphaelites between the years of 1850 through to 1920, Desperate Romantics achieves an authenticity which is not only factually correct, but true. The feminist art historian,
Linda Nochlin defines the nature of Realism in representation as: the ability to give truthful objective impartial representation of the real world based on meticulous observation of contemporary life. The means by which
that truth is achieved varies greatly between genres and forms. Traditions of social realism and drama- documentary production widely responsible for representations of the contemporary in gritty drama serials have previously remained unexplored by producers of the classic mini-series.
Realism as applied to the television mini-series has often relied heavily on a lavish mise-en-scène of horse-drawn carriages, and mannered performances of well-heeled gentlemen and corseted ladies to construct the illusion of the real. Thinking outside the box,
Bowker in his own words uses: art as a jumping off point and being true to the Pre-Raphaelites passions, interests, in terms of their love lives, in terms of their emotional and even their political development.
www.bbc.co.uk/
desperateromantics Using tableaux (scenes
reconstructed as stills from painting) of the artists’ best-known works including Millais’ Ophelia, Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, Bowker achieves
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