The Casual Vacancy

JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, a grim adult novel which she wrote under pseudonym looks at life in a small market town of Pagford dominated by grotesque characters like they stepped out of an updated Dickens novel. I have heard it said that the book is also inspired by the play, An Inspector Calls, where various characters in the village are in effect the Birling family who have been responsible to the ruin of a young girl's life.

Michael Gambon is the power mad, money grabbing parish councillor who wants to turn a community centre into a wellness spa. Julia McKenzie plays his malicious wife and Keeley Hawes is the flirty but brittle daughter in law. Rory Kinnear is the one who has fought against the closure of the community centre and whose sudden death create the casual vacancy in the parish council and Gambon wants his spineless son to stand and others also wish to contest the seat but a ghost writer on the internet is revealing some home truths.

Yet Pagford is not a place just for the haves. Poverty is rife as well as drugs, drink, teenage sex and domestic violence. This is also the story of teenager Krystal Weedon, living with a drug addicted mother and looking after a baby brother with social workers hot on their trail.

The three part drama series is a world away from Harry Potter. I know my daughter, a Rowling fan attempted to read The Casual Vacancy but gave up, it was not her kind of book. The series has a bittersweet and grim tone. It is political in context between the haves and haves not, the latter who are getting the rug pulled from under their feet.

However the series was not wholly a success, maybe lacking humour, satire and maybe some comeuppance against some horrible people. I believe the ending was changed and softened to make it less tragic from the novel. However I felt that the series would had worked better as a two hours television film and maybe done with being less star studded, Emilia Fox for example was wasted.

What is not in doubt is that Abigail Lawrie was outstanding as Krystal.

Had to write a quick review to counteract the ridiculous first review from whom I can only assume is one of the privileged snooty characters from the programme. I honestly thought it was a joke outside. The programme isn't particularly crude: it shows a realistic depiction of fairly ordinary life, swearing and sexuality included.

Yes, Britain really is like that, and the drama painted a very intimate and affecting portrait of the lives of ordinary people, the hardships they face, and their failings as human beings.

Highly recommended. Apparently IMDb wants me to write more, so I'll say that the scenery is also very nice, so if you fancy a holiday somewhere with nice countryside, I believe it was filmed in the Cotswolds...

Good but not great BBC/HBO series, should appeal to fans of Penguin Classics—there's a bit of Trollope (many pairs of knickers in a twist over a parish council election), Dickens (broad social satire, mostly aimed at the snobbish, hypocritical bourgeoisie), all the way up through Margaret Drabble and Jane Gardam (class conflict and social pathology in a microcosmic village).

The script has the usual problems of a long, populous novel that's been sliced and diced for television. The first two eps were quite involving, the third kind of rushed; prob'ly should have had a fourth to fill out the backstory and tie up some loose ends. I felt sorry for some of the minor characters, like Gaia and Sukhvinder, who had to hang around forever waiting for their one or two tiny scenes.

Good work by the usual suspects—Michael Gambon, Keeley Hawes, Rory Kinnear as the goodhearted lawyer whose death creates the casual vacancy (on the local council—it's complicated…), Julia McKenzie as a real-life Miss Marple (i.e. sneaky Thatcherite grandma). Abigail Lawrie is amazing, in her first professional role, as the series's secret heroine, a tough girl called Krystal. Haven't read the book, but I agree that what another reviewer called the "water downed" ending was not very satisfying.

They did not need to add a "thorough intro" to the mini-series. The introduction that the book provided was perfect. (The book's end was perfect too.) We start with Barry Fairbrother's sudden death and then see how the town starts to deal with it. Barry Fairbrother: What happens when the good man in town, the smart man, the progressive man, the honest man, the open-hearted man, up and dies? You are left with everyone else. This is what JK Rowling explores. The dynamics of a small-minded tight community.

This series made me want to weep - at the senseless waste of acting talent and script material. For this is not a TV dramatization of "The Casual Vacancy" by J. K. Rowling. It's a TV dramatization of the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of The Casual Vacancy. What's more, it appears that slashing it down from a full series to a 3 part synopsis was done after filming already started, probably by the director tearing pages out on the set, rather than by intelligent script writers. How else to explain the presence of all the characters from the book, yet no role - not even dialog - for some of them? How else to explain all the setups in Episode 1 that are just left hanging with no follow-up? What does remain is excellent, completely capturing Rowling's characterizations and the petty snobbery of English village life, but the ruthless editing leaves too much out and too many loose ends. There's no exploration of the interaction between children and parents that is core to the book. There's no hint of who is behind the "ghost", a major plot device. Sukhvinder, who has a life-changing experience in the original, is literally seen but not heard. There's no resolution for the dysfunctional Price family. I don't know why the scriptwriters even bothered telling us Gaia's name, since she's reduced to a walk-on extra.

What's left, basically, is an excellent performance from Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie as the Mollisons. It's worth watching just for that. But that's the tragedy of this series - these are the canonical Morrisons, nobody will ever do it better. And that means the series will never be remade, and the full story will never be told.