Cider With Rosie review: ‘it captures the poetry and the spirit of Laurie Lee’

Another Sunday, another adaptation of a classic of 20th century literature. They’ve been fabulous though, and Cider With Rosie (BBC1, Sunday), the last, is no exception. There’ll be moans and grouches of course, as there have been with the previous ones – they changed this and left out that, the murder, the uncles. It’s about mathematics, though, and different media: a 300 page book doesn’t always fit neatly into 90 mins of TV. And what works in one doesn’t always work in the other. A certain amount of trimming and alteration is required.

Which Ben Vanstone, the tailor/mathematician/adapter, has done expertly. The uncles are lost (the grannies – Trill and Wallon – survive, happily … well, until they sadly die). It doesn’t entirely follow Laurie Lee’s thematic approach, though it does yo-yo backwards and forwards in time. Crucially, though, it captures the poetry and the spirit of Lee, and a kind of village life that even towards the ends of the first world war was dying and now no longer exists, except maybe in Outer Mongolia. And a time in a person’s life when so much is going on and changing, in their heads, and in their pants. I don’t believe many people watching won’t have been taken back to their own childhoods, adolescences and early loves, wherever and whenever they were.

The kiss, the pastoral one Loll and Rosie have been heading towards throughout, even if he doesn’t know it, is lovely. “So dry, and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air,” an older Laurie Lee remembers (perhaps a bit too old Hovis-ad rural-nostalgic from Timothy Spall, narrating – ’twas a grand ride back though!).

Young Archie Cox is the teenage Lee, encapsulating awkwardness and embarrassment, mischief and discovery. The even younger Georgie Smith is adorable as the even younger Lee; child actors seem to get better and better. Ruby Ashbourne Serkis’s Rosie grows ever more beguiling throughout to the viewer, as she does to Laurie. Jessica Hynes frumps up surprising well as Mrs Crabby the schoolmistress (the classroom scenes are hilarious). Samantha Morton’s Annie – mum – radiates humanity and warmth. And the Slad valley (it was actually filmed around there, in Gloucestershire) looks as beautiful as it did on the midsummer morning when Laurie Lee walked out, feeling “doomed, and of all things, wonderful”.

There was a rare hint of bucolic English beauty in last week’s This Is England ’90 (Channel 4, Sunday) – sunrise in a field, even if it was tinged with post ecstasy come-down blues and guilt. The sunshine is now all gone, and the (small l) lols of the first episode are a distant memory. Now we’re plunging into proper Shane Meadows depths and darknesses.

Is this the worst ever gathering for a meal (“dinner party” doesn’t sound right for TIE, too middle class) in the history of television? Not because of the brussels sprouts, but because of what Lol has to say. Oh, by the way Kelly, it was me who killed Dad. I did it because he was raping me. And Milky, that racist Combo is about to come out of prison, to live with us in the house where (y)our non-white daughter lives, sorry.

It’s an extraordinary episode, that stays ringing in the ears after the credits have rolled and leaves you feeling numb and drained. But – and this is the beauty of This Is England – even among all those tears and that misery, there is some tenderness and hope. Gadget’s kindness to Kelly is genuine friendship when it’s most needed. And Lol and Woody’s love for each other: I love Woody and Lol, almost like I love real people in my actual life. That’s quite an achievement by Meadows.

It’s a shame that many more people were probably watching Downton Abbey (ITV, Sunday) in real-time. After the other two, Downton looks even sillier than it normally does – and further demonstrates that bonnet drama is better when it comes from books than when it makes itself up as it goes along.

This hospital business is one of the most tedious storylines ever. A kidnapping is over all too quickly. Anna’s fertility treatment is potentially interesting and might actually resonate with some. If it works though, poor kid (potentially alive today, in the real world): imagine having the miserable worm Bates for a father; I think I’d prefer not to be born at all.

The best thing about this episode is a return to Downton of the pigs. Lovely spotty ones. I wonder if the prime minister is watching.