Elizabeth And Darcy

I've just watched the BBC's Pride and Prejudice- all six hours of it in a single session. I started out of duty (Ailz is studing P & P with the Open University) but I quickly became hooked.

By the end of it Elizabeth and Darcy had become so real to me that I was speculating about their future. I thought, these two will live to see Victoria come to the throne and the railways criss-cross the country and their beloved Derbyshire fill up with factories and maybe they'll still be around for the Great Exhibition in 1851. When they're approaching late middle-age someone will take their photographs. Almost certainly theyll get to read Dickens and Tennyson and....

...And then I made myself quite melancholy thinking about how they've now been dead for something like 150 years.

But, of course, they're not dead at all; they're immortal- reborn every time anyone picks up the book or watches a dramatization.

God Will Be Spared

I understand that the killing of God is going to be worked round or fudged or omitted from the film version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Also the enemy outfit is going to be referred to not as "The Church" but as "The Magisterium".

I always thought the God stuff was the weakest and least convincing thing in the book. Pullman has an agenda and he bangs the drum for it as shamelessly as C.S. Lewis (whom he despises) does for Christian orthodoxy.

Too much theology, not enough art.

Even so, I'm damn sure that this self-censorship isn't being carried out for aesthetic reasons.