A few days ago, whilst looking at the list of TV programmes to be broadcast, I noticed on a little watched channel the series "The little drummer girl" which is, of course, based on the book by John Le Carré. This is one of my favourite JlC books, and part of our itinerary last year in Greece was not completely by chance.
Unfortunately, I had missed the first four parts of this six part series, but I managed to catch the last two parts. Maybe they'll show this again after a while - one of our satellite channels rebroadcasts series after six months or a year after the initial screening. I've set the series to be recorded, so if it does return, it will be recorded automatically.
There was a film made of this book which was a complete travesty. It starred Diane Keaton of all people as the eponymous girl, which is wrong on so many levels. I have a video of this somewhere but as it was such a poor rendition of the book, I haven't seen it for a long time. I don't know how someone who had not read the book would take the film.
The tv series was much more on the ball. The fifth episode was very close to the book, but the sixth and final episode took several liberties with the source material. It didn't ruin the story but took it in a slightly different direction.
As is common with dramatisations of favourite books, the characters didn't look very much as I imagined them, although Charlie, the heroine, was a much better match for her character than most of the other actors. At least there weren't unexplicable name changes although there were location changes: the final scenes play out in London and Britain instead of Germany.
I thought that the two episodes that I saw were of high standard and I hope that some day I'll be able to see the previous episodes.
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