“Read the Book, See the TV Series” Netflix #StreamTeam
Have you ever had a film lead you to a book? Or a film? And what books have lead you to watch a TV series?
It’s a tricky one – I always prefer to go from TV or film to the book; usually the book has the depth and subtleties that the big screen can miss. If a book I love gets made into a film, I usually end up disgruntled at the bits they necessarily cut (don’t get me started on the Hunger Games, or the huge disappointment of the second Deathly Hallow’s treatment of Voldemort and Harry’s epic battle. HOW could they lose the absolute crucial point of the entire story? I’ve just deleted three lines on this – I’ll stop here before I get carried away again).
Rarely, reading the book is actually a disappointment – I adored the film of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel so very much I immediately downloaded the kindle version to relive it. But without the stunning colour and imagery of the film, and the changed storyline, it lost a lot of the wonder and magic for me.
My sister (now a qualified midwife herself) knew all about Call the Midwife LONG before it hit the screens, but the TV show has definitely spurred me on to read the books to fill in the gaps.
For my children? My then-9yr-old wasn’t allowed to see the next Harry Potter film until he’d read the book (I think it was Goblet of Fire). So he read it in a week – and suddenly woke his brain to the joy of immersing yourself in a huge book, a love that has never left him. He would never even have looked at the Hobbit without having seen the film – but once he was hooked by the first film, he demanded the book so that he could immediately find out what happened next!
I want my daughter to enjoy the beauty of J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan – but the reading in itself is probably a little dry for her 7yr old brain. Watching the Disney film version though? She was hooked; and she and I have recently been revelling every bedtime in the rich beauty of the original.
“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
Next on the agenda? Heidi. We’re going to settle down at the weekend and watch the 1937 Shirley temple version – I’m absolutely confident that she’ll fall in love, and that’ll mean I can go shopping on Abebooks for a lovely 1960’s copy of Heidi, just the same as the one I remember.
How about you? What films or TV shows made you pick up a book? And what TV adaptations do you love from book classics?
