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The thirteenth tale review5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() All the ingredients of the potboiler plot bubbled away nicely for 90 minutes and served up a richly, deliciously satisfying stew. ![]() Not that it mattered in the end of course, because of – well, the thing and the thing, which led to the unravelling of the big thing but … anyway, we'll leave it. You had to trust more than you were able to verify that She Who Was Performing The Switching felt that She Who Was To Be Switched Upon was sufficiently maddened not to notice the substitution. The only scene that didn't work quite as well as it needed to – and I'm going to try to avoid spoilers here as it's Christmas and fewer people than ever are likely to watch things in real time – was the switcheroo at the end. Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (BBC2) was as faithfully yet thoughtfully reproduced for the screen as you would expect by Christopher Hampton, who among many other things wrote the scripts for Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement. There's not a lot that can go wrong with that and nothing did. A bestselling book comprising a dying writer, an untold tale, a curious biographer, incestuous ancient couplings, fey-slash-homicidal children flitting about crumbling mansions on the moors, close-mouthed housekeepers, handsome gardening lads, skeletons emerging from loamy soil, high staircases and blood-spattered marble floors, made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman and shown on a cold December evening. ![]()
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