Pride and Prejudice (1967)

Broadcast weekly on BBC One from 10 September to 15 October 1967, this six-episode serial was directed by Joan Craft and starred Celia Bannerman as Elizabeth Bennet and Lewis Fiander as Mr. Darcy. Its most notable distinction has nothing to do with the performances and everything to do with survival: after three consecutive BBC Pride and Prejudice productions — 1938, 1952, and 1958 — were all either broadcast live with nothing recorded or later wiped from tape, this is the first version of the novel, and the earliest Austen television adaptation of any kind, that exists complete today.

The earliest survivor

That status is worth dwelling on, because it’s easy to take for granted with an author as heavily adapted as Austen. By the time this serial was made, videotape recording was routine BBC practice, and — unlike the 1958 production, whose tapes were wiped after broadcast — this one was kept. It means that everything discussed about earlier Austen television, going back to 1938, has to be discussed at one remove, through scripts and reviews; this 1967 serial is the first point in the format’s history where it’s possible to actually watch the thing itself.

Cast

Alongside Bannerman and Fiander, the serial cast Michael Gough as Mr. Bennet and Vivian Pickles as Mrs. Bennet, with Polly Adams as Jane Bennet, Lucy Fleming as Lydia Bennet, and Sarah Taunton as Kitty Bennet. Georgina Ward played Caroline Bingley, Julian Curry played Mr. Collins, and Sylvia Coleridge played Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Notably, the adaptation omits the middle Bennet sister, Mary, condensing the family from five daughters to four — a compression choice that later adaptations, including the 1995 miniseries, generally avoided.

A transitional production

Coming a decade after the 1958 version and nearly three decades before the 1995 Andrew Davies serial that would come to define the novel on screen for most modern audiences, the 1967 Pride and Prejudice sits in an odd position: made with 1960s BBC studio-drama conventions — multi-camera, largely studio-bound, closer in style to a filmed stage production than to the location-heavy, cinematic approach of later versions — it is nonetheless the oldest tangible link modern viewers have to how the BBC handled the novel before Pride and Prejudice became a fixture of prestige costume drama. For anyone tracing the full screen history of the novel, it’s the first entry on the list that can actually be watched rather than only read about.