BBC on blu

[benbess]

One of the very best adaptations of a novel to film in history is, imho, the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice from 1995. It stars Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth, and a whole galaxy of British character actors. I owned the vhs of this back in the day, and watched it several times with my wife. It makes you laugh, and cry, and the length is just perfect, because in 6 nearly hour-long episodes they were able to include virtually all of this sparkling novel, which the movie of a few years ago simply could not. It was adapted by the great Andrew Davies, who I think is considered "king of BBC miniseries," or something like that.

Finally, a couple of years ago we "upgraded" P & P (if you can call it that in this case) to the dvd--which if anything looked worse somehow than the vhs because the colors were washed out and just wrong.

I was looking forward to this on blu-ray, but then I read that it was only filmed in 16mm and my heart sank. How could a 16mm film possibly look good on blu, I wondered. It was just impossible, I thought. But, I read some reviews that said that the pq was actually amazing for Pride and Prejudice, considering it was 16mm. And now that I've almost watched the whole thing again with my family on blu (we're down to the last episode) I can report that it looks fantastic. It almost looks to me like it was filmed in 35mm. It's that good, imho. And it's a bargain right now from amazon--19.95.

Has anyone else seen this? I had no idea it was possible for a 16mm production to look so good in blu. There are details in terms of the facial expressions, the fabric, the interiors, the horses, etc, that we just hadn't seen before.

Anyway, I'm now on a BBC kick in blu, and I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations. I've seen one other title, the excellent Cranford, which is an adaptation of some novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, who is rather obscure, but wrote rather well about the middle of the 19th century. This production was filmed in 1080, and looks great on blu. And it's a wonderful show, starring Judi Dench and a whole cast of British luminaries. It starts kind of slow, but in the end it's quite moving. This is much more of a dramedy than P & P. Anyway, it's highly recommended on blu.


Those are the only two bbc productions I've seen on blu. Are there others that people can recommend?