Sense and Sensibility (1981)

Ten years after the BBC’s first attempt, Sense and Sensibility returned to British television in 1981 — this time as a fuller, seven-episode serial with considerably more room to work through Austen’s plot than either its 1971 predecessor or the two-hour films that would follow later.

Production

Directed by Rodney Bennett and adapted by Alexander Baron, working from an earlier dramatization credited to Denis Constanduros (the same writer behind the BBC’s 1971 serial), the production aired weekly on BBC1 from 1 February to 15 March 1981. Its seven-part length let it dramatize more of the novel’s secondary material — the Steele sisters, the Palmers, the social texture of the Dashwoods’ reduced circumstances — than the compressed two-hour treatments Austen adaptations more commonly received on film.

Cast

Irene Richard played Elinor Dashwood and Tracey Childs played Marianne, the central sisterly pairing the whole serial turns on. Bosco Hogan played Edward Ferrars and Robert Swann played Colonel Brandon; Annie Leon played Mrs. Jennings, Donald Douglas played Sir John Middleton, and Marjorie Bland played Lady Middleton.

Reception

Retrospective reviews of the 1981 serial are more mixed than they are for the 1995 film or either of the two BBC productions that bookend it. Childs’s Marianne is fairly consistently praised for capturing the character’s overflowing “sensibility” — her romanticism and unguarded emotion — convincingly across the full seven hours. Richard’s Elinor draws more divided opinions: some viewers and critics have found her deliberately understated performance a fitting match for a character defined by self-control, quietly moving in its restraint, while others have described it as so subdued it drains energy from scenes that need her presence to land. Several retrospective write-ups summarize the production overall as a “solid but flawed” adaptation — well cast in its supporting roles and faithful to the novel’s structure, but not, in most estimations, the definitive screen version of the book. That distinction would go, in most critics’ view, to Ang Lee’s 1995 film and later to the BBC’s own 2008 remake.