Cider with Rosie

A truly magical production, enjoyed all the more for not being encumbered with an all-star cast (although Samantha Morton was rather wonderful as the author's mother, Annie, and Timothy Spall rolled his 'r's in an authentic Gloucestershire accent, narrating with excerpts taken directly from the book as the author himself).

The film was dotted with cameos, perhaps most notably Annette Crosbie as Granny Trill, and there are lots of recognizable faces, but the whole cast performed their tasks in an understated and businesslike fashion-a large cast, as the film dips in and out of different periods of the author's early life in a seemingly random fashion, reminiscent of the book upon which it was based.

Quite how the production team managed to return Slad (the actual village where Lee grew up) to its pre-war look, I have no idea, but it worked beautifully, and the English countryside never looked more alluring. When Lee published Cider With Rosie in 1959, he acknowledged that this world had already passed us by forever, so to re-create it for a Sunday night TV drama was no mean feat...

The costumes were right, the language was right-even the slang, and there was just the right amount of magic dust sprinkled throughout the whole film...

Cider With Rosie used to be part of every English schoolboy's literary canon, but has recently fallen out of favour. I hope there were enough English Literature teachers watching who remember how good & enjoyable a work this is, and will start setting it again as a required text. I know this was part of a short season of BBC modern literary dramatizations, but I hope that in this case, the BBC might consider commissioning an adaptation of the sequel, 'As I Stepped Out One Midsummer's Morning', which has been woefully neglected over the years...

All in all, a marvellous production, not to be missed-it has, in one stroke, re-established my faith in BBC drama... For those of you yet to see it-I'm jealous!..

Having lived in Cheltenham & explored the Cotswolds a lot, we were looking forward to this, but what a waste of time! If my hadn't been suffering with flu, we would have switched off. (It was all she could concentrate on.)

Glorious filming of the countryside. 1 point. Samantha Morton was very good. 1 pt. Tim Spall's accent & voiceover were very good too. 1 pt. Acting overall - terrible! Story is so inconsequential as to be worthy of no more than a 5 minute film. Avoid!

Cider with Rosie is a text that almost everyone seems to read at school. I never did read the whole book but was always given extracts to work on. I expected this would be some kind of nostalgia filled reminiscence of childhood in Gloucestershire.

I liked young Loll surrounded in a busy household playing sodgers (sic) in the middle of The Great War. However it is a childhood where his father is absent and young Loll does not understand the brutality of the war or the deserter hiding in the woods.

At school he sits between two girls who will have an influence in his childhood and even his adult life.

The older Loll lacks the sweetness of his younger self, being gawky like many adolescents. However he discovers that at times the villagers need to stick together such as when the domineering teacher is placed on top of the cupboard to the delight of the rest of the class or in a more darker turn when a returning ex-pat, now wealthy is killed and robbed.

June Whitfield and Annette Crosbie play the two grannies living on the top and bottom of a house who communicate with each other by banging their broom handles on the floor or the ceiling.

Eventually Loll has that romantic encounter under the cart with Rosie fuelled with cider which acts as a sort of climax to the story.

I have to say this was not a great adaptation even though it was busy in places. We are told that Loll's mother went to see her husband after the war but we got to know little about him or why he abandoned his family. The 1998 television film gave more details about this.

This version of the film had narration by Timothy Spall as the voice of Laurie Lee reading extracts from the book in a very florid dialect which sounded unnatural and over the top to my ears. The 1998 film had narration recorded by Laurie Lee himself just before he died and that sounded more naturalistic.

However director Philippa Lowthorpe has worked hard to bring a different nuance to this version of the film.

...not only for story - nostalgic, seductive, bitter and soft - but for atmosphere. for an England who , for a Eastern European like me, is almost mythological. for Samantha Morton giving a beautiful performance. for the poetry of images . for something who is real personal. memories, crumbs of memories, gentle change of a young man, family, a village life and unique forms of joy. and something more. out of words. but great and usefull and protective.

Too many flashbacks. For a little while they are young kids. Then teens etc. Then go back to young kids & then teens. It was like following a bouncing ball