ABSTRACT
The Best Things in Life Aren't Free It was a serious adaptation of Hardy's Woodlanders (BBC-2). So much was in its favour. The novel is defined by its experience of the woods, and this had a precise visual equivalent. Harry Green, who dramatised it, understood the essential action, an opposition of life and exchange. There was no pushing back into an idealised rural distance. The primary values of work and love were shown in the process of being exploited. Everything that was lived and made, by the active woodlanders, was seen being taken from them and used, by the merely cultivated. Mrs Charmond takes Marty's hair and Giles's cottage and Grace's husband: a portrait of a lady indeed. Where Henry James showed exploitation at the end of the line, on that consuming journey through Europe, Hardy showed it at its roots, where the means for the journey are accumulated. It was absurd that this bored and predatory woman should have that kind of power over strong and active people, but that is the power of property, literally a lifehold. There is another, more tragic, internal power: the aspiration, in such a world, to become like that which is destroying you. There is the learning of the woods, shared by Giles and Marty, but the woods are not isolated, and there is an awareness of limitation and ignorance. Grace is pushed into a fashionable education by the social ambition of her father, the timber dealer, at a point in his material success. With Grace as its pivot, half belonging in both worlds, the action moves with a dreadful symmetry through Felice and Fitzpiers, Giles and Marty. Hardy shows the destruction in relentless detail and, through Marty, mourns it. Not the destruction of a rural by an urban world, but the taking of life, of working and loving life, by the indifference and greed and confusion of a possessing and alienating system. Annette Robertson as Marty, David Burke as Giles, were memorable. Felicity Kendal, as Grace, had the intractable difficulty of her divided being, but was often convincing. In the last episode, there was a fault of rhythm, traceable to some elements in the novel but deriving also from compression: too much of the consequent action was left to be hurried through.
