Newsnight Review discussed a new TV version of Lucky Jim.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Paul, when the book came out, it was seen as shocking and modern. We now watch it as a period piece, which is quite a switch.

PAUL MORLEY:
Yes, and more suffering actually, probably more suffering watching this than the opera. It's interesting, because I guess if you see that Rosenthal is involved and you are hoping for some kind of modernisation of it. What was deeply depressing to me, there seems to be some attempt by ITV to turn all British novels of the last 50 years into episodes of Heartbeat. There is this appalling need they have to make sure all the period details are right. We get the buses, packets of cigarettes, the cars and tractors, but not a period attitude. So somehow it has a quaintness, an awful emptiness about it, as we see good television actors drift through it, just reciting it off, not really located anywhere. I got a terrible sense of something being really wasted, that it did become like, "This will become a series to replace Heartbeat on Sunday at eight o'clock." Very quiet and pleasant and sweet. No balls, nothing to do with that sense of attitude and spirit there must have been at the time.

BILL BUFORD:
I agree with Paul, it was slick, fast and well done and utterly empty. It returned me to the book, which was a pleasure. The book uses lots of tricks and devices, but it still has a kind of attitude and a chip on its shoulder, and it's got the language. Without that, you just have the devices. I was struck by how clich�d those devices are now. "I am going to the university with idealism, and now I'm jaded." The good girl with the bad guy, the good guy with the bad girl, the impromptu speech. Whether it's a wedding speech or a best man speech, or in this case, the speech at the end of the film that goes badly wrong, until finally they meet at the platform at the rendezvous. I was desperately hoping for the train to leave. The good guy finally gets with the good girl. Go girl, go, get that train! Do something different.

MARK LAWSON:
They have made it much more of a love story, which I think is probably the problem. You get that sense you get in the book of two Englands up against each other. You have Professor Welsh and his madrigals, and his "merrie England", and then this new England. I thought that did come out.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I think that that comes out, but it is done in such a hammy, over-the-top way. The subtlety in the book of someone like Welch is completely destroyed. From the word go, when you have this stupid thing of him driving on the wrong side of the road, and you think it's a kind of clich�. All the way through, it feels like bad clich�s. The '50s were essentially a pretty dull time, and the interesting thing in there was the sense of the angry young men. What Kingsley was doing was he was the first person who wrote a book about a university that wasn't Oxford and Cambridge. He tried to look at the patheticness of class, and the question of being in these universities, and being marooned. Jim is just a joke, really. He's just a rather fatuous figure who struggles through it. I thought he also made Margaret, who is a much more interesting and subtle character� People get it wrong in saying that Kingsley Amis was a misogynist; he was scared of women, but fascinated by them. He's made into this silly caricature, and then she's given this stupid happy ending.

MARK LAWSON:
She's a batty old spinster in the book isn't she?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
In the book, she stays a spinster, whereas Rosenthal has ended her up in bed with someone playing the oboe! It's about as cute as you can get.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought, in fact, it would be quite an easy book to adapt. When I read it again, there's surprisingly little dialogue. We never find out what Jim's set piece speech is at the end. Rosenthal had to do a fantastic amount of writing here.

PAUL MORLEY:
It sent you back to the book. It sent me back to the great Boulting brothers movie, with Ian Carmichael and Terry Thomas, which hasn't got a hope of coming anywhere near. I'm not sure if this is a compliment, but actually it's an insult, because it looks as though it could have been made in the early '50s, which is a terrible thing to say now in the early part of the 21st century, that they have made something that looks so ancient.