One Sunday afternoon a year or so ago I found myself listening to a Radio 4 adaptation of Jules Verne’s story, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’.  It’s a good yarn I remembered reading as a teenager, although I did recall getting a bit confused at the time since I had assumed that 20,000 leagues referred to the depth, not the distance travelled. (A league is about 3 miles, so 20,000 of them would have gone right through the earth and out the other side). 

Anyway, the main characters in the story are Professor Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, the harpoonist Ned Land, and of course Captain Nemo.  I can’t recall there being any women in the cast. 

But there was a prominent female character in the radio adaptation, which initially puzzled me until the penny dropped: they’d substituted Conseil with Pierre’s daughter, ‘Miss Connie Aronnax’, thus, it seems, bringing the story into the 21^st Century.  

This is silly I thought.  As I understand it, no self-respecting 21^st Century girl would ever allow herself to be titled as ‘Miss’.  But more importantly, despite M. Verne’s story being a best seller for over 150 years, somebody in the BBC had decided that it needed updating.  The fact that Ned Land, a superstitious fisherman in the 19^th century, would NEVER have sailed with a woman on deck, was conveniently over looked.

I listened to it for a while, but it didn’t work.  It’s a man’s story, and I’m sorry ladies, that’s really all there is to it. It’s as silly as trying to re-write ‘Little Women’ with a male lead.  Of course there’s no reason why a woman could not have done everything Conseil did, but the point is, M. Verne didn’t write it that way. 

So, fast forward a year or so, and the Beeb is at it again, this time with a TV adaptation of Around the Wold in 80 Days, and though it appears to be done rather well, there are massive changes to the original story.  It stars David Tennant, as Phileas Fogg.  But he’s not the Fogg of Jules Verne’s creation, who was a calm, calculating man. For some reason he’s become a fastidious, clumsy and awkward person, haunted, it seems, by accusations of being a coward. 

So let’s see how the BBC version differs from the original:

1. Fogg and his party don’t get caught up and robbed in a violent demo in Paris, Passepartout has no revolutionary connections, they are not taken prisoner by anybody, Fogg is not shot, and they don’t leave Paris in a balloon.
2. There is no female companion, Abigail Fortescue, who is portrayed as more-or-less Foggs equal, having written the newspaper article that piques Fogg’s interest in the journey in the first place. 
3. A major part of the Verne plot is that, owing to a case of mistaken identity a policeman, called ‘Fix’, is trying to stop Fogg completing the journey.  Fix is written out of the BBC version completely, so the ‘bad guy’ role seems to be taken up by a fellow Reform Club member.
4. There is no broken viaduct or injured boy in the Italian train journey.
5. Fogg and Passepartout do not get lost in the desert and are not rescued by Abigail and the English aristocrat, Jane Digby.
6. In India, the British Army do not attempt to shoot an Indian soldier for desertion.  Instead Fogg et al rescue an Indian woman from Suttee (being burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre), a practice the British had actually attempted to ban many years earlier.
7. Fogg is not called a coward by anybody.
8. The Telegraph editor is not accused of dishonourable behaviour towards women by Jane Digby.

So why all the changes?  It seems that ‘adapted for TV’, really means, ‘completely re-written so as to address modern day issues’.  I’m not suggesting issues such as racism and sexism aren’t important – of course they are.  But is it really appropriate to modify a well-loved story in order to address them – why not simply write a new story?  And can’t we simply have entertainment for its own sake, rather than using it for educational purposes?

If there were a shortage of women who were able to overcome the social limitations placed upon them by society in the nineteenth century I could understand it, but there’s plenty of inspirational figures to base a new story on.  For example:

• 1889 the American journalist, writer and inventor, Nellie Bly managed to do the same journey as Fogg, but completed it in 72 days; 
• Yorkshire born Isabella Bird, who, starting out in the 1870s, made remarkable journeys to the Americas, China, Morocco and all over Asia, and wrote extensively about her travels.
• English aristocrat Jane Digby, whose colourful life scandalised Victorian Brittan.
• Swiss Olympian Ella Maillart made and wrote extensively about her solo journeys through Asia during the 1930s.
• Annie Edson Taylor, an American schoolteacher who, on her 63rd birthday, October 24, 1901, became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara falls in a barrel.

So please BBC, stop re-writing old, well-loved stories to reflect modern values, and employ talented modern writers to write some new stories.  You never know, they might end up being still read in 150 years time!