sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

White Teeth: last night, Channel 4
It's not often I worship at the square godess in the corner of the living room, but I - gah. Bugger. Argh. Other cartoon statements. I have a shit memory: I can't remember what I wrote five minutes ago. It goes straight from my head to my fingers and it's gone. It's the complete opposite of filling up a car with petrol. But it was great and I liked it and it's gone. I know we live in a throwaway society, but I didn't want to throw it away yet. I'm so angry I might use exclamation marks soon and that's a serious no-no.

I read somewhere that Channel 4 had spent £3.5 million on the adaptation (but that could mostly be on tube ads and bound-in inserts in Sunday supplements), and it showed. High production values, I think they call it. Although I can't help thinking that Clara and Irie look like sisters in the promotional material, rather than mother and daughter, but that's messing around with the space-time-continuum for you.

Inevitably with an adaptation where you've read the book- and who in the country hasn't? - your vision doesn't always quite match up with the producers': I thought the curry house would be tackier (more like a real one on Cricklewood Broadway) and Clara was uglier/more gauche in the book. But these are little niggles. I loved it. The book's biblical proportions had me desperate for the next bit of plot action, but the TV adaptation - inevitably, in squeezing a mammoth book into four one-hour episodes - has a pace and urgency that was missing in the original, and I loved it. Perfectly cast, wittily observed of the nuances of 70s life (my parents' sheets, for example), it covered all the issues of multiculturalism, racism, ethnicity (the contrast of the two weddings was magical) and, er, teeth.

Maybe a little heavy on the orthodontic metaphors for my liking. But I know what I'm doing next Tuesday night, so don't call me. And I love the soundtrack. I want.