KEY POINTS:
Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now was published in 1875, so I suppose it matters not a jot that this four-part BBC adaptation seems to have been languishing on a shelf somewhere since it was made in 2001. The Way We Live Now (Sunday, TV One) has
played on UK TV, without, presumably, much of a fanfare. Perhaps the way we live now means that hardly anyone is much interested in Trollope.
This is Trollope - for which read "pretty as a period postcard" - as adapted by screenwriter Andrew Davies who worked the same small magic for the pretty as a period postcard (and that's just the blokes) Pride and Prejudice.
The theme is money and social status; or not having money and desperately needing it to keep up one's social status. Which might mean cultivating the rumoured-to-be-very-rich, but also rumoured-to-be-very-dodgy, Augustus Melmotte, a man who has a shady history and big new ideas in ways of making money.
The mysterious Melmotte, played with caricaturish gusto by David Suchet, who you might recognise as Hercule Poirot, has a history so murky it is unclear about where he came from or what he does. "What is his business?" asks one of the decrepit old geezers at the gentleman's club. "Money," is the answer. "He makes it work for him, makes it sit up and beg like a circus dog."
Decrepit gent number one sniffs and says: "I've heard that the man's a Jew and a swindler and a scoundrel and I shan't know him."
"Can you afford not to know him?" is the reply to that.
Melmotte has a daughter, a strange, fey little creature nobody, not even in a period drama, could call a beauty. But she is rumoured to have a hundred thousand (how that dates the thing), perhaps more. What she looks like doesn't matter. The younger versions of the old boys, the young cads playing at cards, have a conversation about the heiress. "You don't look at the mantelpiece when you're stoking the fire, what."
"That's caddish," said one of the young cads.
Yes, it is, wonderfully caddish, nicely arch and a decent satirical take on the modern manners of the day. It is stacked to the Grosvenor Square townhouse's soaring studs with intrigue, snobbery and social climbing. It is, actually, very modern. It is the way some people still live now, if you can believe the gossip pages. As if in a game of snakes and ladders chasing status and deals and sliding a long way down when, say, Malmotte's new-fangled scam, stock shares, take a dive.
The characters in The Way We Live Now don't seem to have real jobs, they're too busy plotting to make their fame and fortune by hanging out with other richer and more famous people and scheming their way up the social ladder.
The definition of fame, or reputation, has changed, but only barely. We can get a gawk at the way the rich and famous live now, and the way we are presumably supposed to want to live, any day of the week on high rotate on E!
The names come and go but these shows are all the same. We can watch the Lohans, the Kardashians, Denise Richards and Pamela Anderson. All of these so-called fly-on-the-wall glimpses into lives of the famous for being varying degrees of famous, show people who don't seem to have jobs anymore - other than appearing in shows on E! which are about people with too little to do.
They are fascinating, briefly, because the lives they depict are so mind-numbingly boring and the people in them so dull that they make money and that odd social status that comes with fame seem the very opposite of what we're supposed to be riveted by and envious of.
I didn't know Baywatch was still playing but it is, apparently, because a 7-year-old of my acquaintance is hooked on it because she wants to be a surf lifesaver.
The way we live now? Her mother asked her what was the difference between real ladies and the ladies on Baywatch and she said it is that the latter have enormous bosoms. At least she knows they're not real - but that she even knows it says something about the way we live today.