I obtained this four DVD series from a local library. I saw it advertised in a catalog and recognized some of the performers so I thought it might be interesting. My impression was that the first three decades were almost totally divorced from the final decade. We liked the performance and narration by James Purefoy of the lead character Nick Jenkins but I felt the series would have ended satisfactorily when he returned from WWII to his wife and child. I stared in disbelief at the final episode when the main characters of Nick Jenkins, his wife Isobel and his former lover Jean were now all portrayed by different performers? I suspect the original actors might have read the script and wisely decided that sordid episode was not for them? Few of the characters in the final decade have any redeeming qualities whatsoever especially poor Pamela. You didn't care any longer about the fate of most of them. When you thought you have seen enough decadent characters, a new one shows up. Simon Russell Beale as Widmerpool managed to be be alternately amusing, pompous, entertaining, ambitious and comical during the first three episodes. In the final decade he became too pathetic to watch. I also felt there were far too many characters to try to keep track of with many popping in and out of the saga at different times with no apparent rhyme or reason.We really liked the first three decades, especially the music which represented accurately the mood of the times. When Jenkins entered the Ritz Hotal to meet with the ex-husband of his former mistress, the pianist was playing two Vera Lynn chestnuts- "Room 504" and "That Lovely Weekend" which I haven't heard since my WWII days. Perhaps, I enjoyed the music of the initial decades because so much of it was American and familiar. The final decade was totally devoid of any music which made it too ponderous and ugly to bear. My suggestion would be to enjoy the bravura performances and music of the first three episodes and terminate your viewing when Nick Jenkins returns home to his family to another Vera Lynn melody- "It's A Lovely Day Tomorrow." Spare yourself the discomfort of watching the tawdry final episode. Finally, much of the nudity was jarring and unnecessary and probably as embarrassing to the audience as it appeared to be to many of the characters.

No, I haven't read the books, but I have read Proust, and you can bet Mr. Powell read him too. Powell's first volume appeared thirty years after Proust's death, and a greater valentine can't be imagined.Both "Dance" and "In Search of Lost Time" are panoramic multi-generational quasi-autobiographical narratives of the gentry they knew. Lower class types pop in from time to time, but they never take center stage for long. Both genteel epics run more than 3000 pages. Major characters are rarely single portraits, but are usually drawn from composites of two or three prototypes. Both works chronicle the human cycles of birth, education, coupling, re-coupling, decay and death.In addition to writing earlier, Proust had the structural advantage of writing the beginning and end of his novel first, spending the rest of his life filling in the middle. It was a meditation on the nature of memory, and underlying all the gossip and melodrama is an awareness that there is a coherent thesis and philosophy tying the whole journey together.At least as presented here, no such unifying ideas are discernible in Powell. We meet characters of greater or lesser interest, they do the things that people do (and sometimes don't do, and occasionally never have done in the history of the world). They learn, age, crack-up and die, but the whole thing just kind of trails off and rumbles to a stop rather than ends. We may have a good time getting there, but I wind up wondering why we made the trip.In response to criticisms of the abridgment, we should note that Powell, as a former screenwriter, was not upset at the reshaping of his work for TV. Nicholas Coleridge reports: "Powell, himself, says that 'Somewhat to my surprise' he is happy with the adaptation. 'It seems quite alright to me,' he told me with faltering voice, on the telephone. 'I think they've done it as well as this medium possibly can.'"Across the board, the actors are almost uniformly pleasing. Simon Russell Beale has been rightly cheered for his remarkable and daring Widmerpool, but Michael Williams (Judi Dench's late husband) is outstanding as Ted Jeavons, and Edward Fox steals every scene he's in, no surprise there. James Purefoy as Nick has to do a lot of listening, and occasionally he does it wonderfully well.I was not upset at the recasting of half a dozen characters in the fourth film. Some of the young actors looked quite silly in extreme age makeup as practiced 10 years ago. I'd have been happier if it had been more widespread. It took me about 8 seconds to register that Nick and Isabel and Jean were played by different actors, and then I plunged right back into the story. I'm sorry for the viewers that were derailed by the substitutions, but I wasn't.I am perplexed by the character of Pamela Flitton as played here in her unique patented performance by Miranda Richardson. She is a vicious, irritable, impatient, destructive, sexually voracious, uncontrolled and uncontrollable woman, everything that panics an English writer from Charles Dickens to Bram Stoker and onward.Pamela is a crimson-lipped vampire straight out of Hammer Horror, and not one thing she does or says has a motivation. I hope the books are more coherent in explaining why, why anything.BTW, the film "A Business Affair," from novels by Barbara Skelton, gives Pamela's prototype's side of the story, and I look forward to seeing it by way of further illumination. There's precious little to comprehend on view here. She just is.Anyway, this is all professionally done and makes for entertaining viewing. It may not be the absolute best of its genre, but it's a long way from the worst. It is highly recommended to people who like British miniseries based on long novels.OTOH, no one has ever made a good movie out of Proust, they're all terrible. There's a wonderful published screenplay Harold Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey, but it was never produced. If you want to spend a year reading 3000 pages, please start first with Proust, then take on Powell for dessert.

Once again BBC show us the pride of British drama, giving us a full account of this incredible Anthony Powell saga. Not only does it contain a rich historical scenery, but also something of a philosophical clue of how life actually works. Starting off in Uni environment, we get to know young Nick Jenkins - a man in the middle in a circle of friends. Moving on in life is inevitably also a break up from this social network. As the inter war periods goes on, Nick meets his old friends (and friends of friends) in the most unexpected ways. Ever so slowly a pattern emerge, that is somehow life itself - we move around, get married, divorced, change political opinions in a series of shorter and longer encounters. As Poussin's painting has it - A Dance to the Music of Time. A true masterpiece.

This was an adaptation that was almost bound to fail. Squeezing 12 novels into eight hours of television allows just 40 minutes per novel. 'The Valley of Bones' was condensed into just 17 minutes. If this had been done well it would truly have been a miracle of compression. However, it was achieved by eliminating about two-thirds of the book. So it is really rather surprising that the adaptors should have created scenes which were only hinted at rather than described in the book. I counted four, all of which added unnecessary violence and gore. I think if Powell had wanted to make these scenes explicit he would have done so - but he preferred for them to happen offstage. What is also hard to forgive was the decision to play fast and loose with the chronology towards the end of the series. For example, the launch of 'Fission' should have been immediately after the end of the war rather than somewhere in the mid 50s, while the award of the Magnus Donners prize took place in 1968 or 9 rather than 1963. Anyone who has any feel at all for the period would know that the difference is immense.But there are good things about this too. The casting is excellent with no-one out of place; the atmosphere for the most part convincing and compelling. A pity that the cast did not have the chance to work through a real adaptation, rather than this drastic and unsatisfactory abridgement.