This I ask you: what, and perhaps why, is a moor?
Is it a bunch of Berber, Black African and Arab blokes and sheilas who conquered the Iberian Peninsula?
Is it, perhaps, a type of habitat with temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrub-lands in upland areas with low-growing vegetation on acidic soils and heavy fog?
Or ... orrrrrrr ... is it a place of winds so foul and hail and cloud so bleak that young men's hearts quiver and sicken as their owners, lonely and crazed with subterranean emotion, fix upon a love they know is their only chance to find comfort when the rain does spit and lash upon their naked souls?
Oh, the moors.
Where gnarled roots of skeletal plants, already half shattered in the gale, are kicked from the ground by the boots of madmen escaped from Bedlam, screaming with the pain of centuries as they stumble across the frozen tundra drooling, insane, hunting for their next victim.
Yes.
This, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, is the moors.
The moors: where the doomed love at Wuthering Heights between Catherine Earnshaw and the cruel but vulnerable Heathcliff eventually destroys them both.
"Heathcliff - it's me, Cathy, I've come home.
"I'm so cold. Let me in your window."
It's something like that, anyway.
I don't know, I've never been to the moors.
But next Wednesday at 8.35pm on Prime, Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley and Andrew Lincoln get all emotionally constipated as Heathcliff, Cathy and Edgar Linton.
They stride across the moors in knee-high boots and get all lovesick and mental.
You know the drill.
Of course, Andrew Lincoln has been around.
You may remember his real name was Andrew James Clutterbuck. He started out in This Life and Teachers, then donned an American accent (if an accent can be donned) in Moon Shot, and kept it in The Walking Dead, that zombie series on recently.
Tom and Charlotte met on the set of Wuthering Heights in 2009, which is quite romantic.
But enough!
Wuthering Heights - this version at least - tries to be just a wee bit modern. Check out the fonts on the opening credits.
And there is something just a little wrong with Tom Hardy as Heathcliff.
He just does not look embittered enough to pull off the sort of emotional brutality the role requires. His lips are too pink and full.
But let us not dwell on the negatives.
It's the moors - it's Emily Bronte, it's Cathy and Heathcliff, it's Andrew Lincoln back from outer space, and not killing zombies.
It's Wuthering Heights.
Just get into it.
- Charles Loughrey
