Word: ravenous
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When The Pallisers was shown on the BBC in 1974, it proved powerfully addictive. On the nights it was aired, dinners were rescheduled and telephones went unanswered. Critics initially complained that Scriptwriter Simon Raven had tweaked Trollope's beard and had taken too many liberties with his novels. One called The Pallisers "a kind of comic historical waxworks." Almost all eventually fell under its spell, however, agreeing that the series was one of the few that could actually tie viewers to the set week after week. The program has also been shown in the U.S. on Home Box Office...
Trollope took six volumes and about 4,400 leisurely pages to tell the story. In dramatizing it, Raven has indeed taken considerable, but for the most part justifiable license with the material. Several subplots and some vivid characters have been eliminated entirely. Some important new scenes have been added-Glencora and Plantagenet are already married, for example, when Trollope begins the Palliser novels-and dialogue has been modernized. "I could seldom transcribe Trollope's text for more than two speeches at a time," says Raven. "I had to invent and deploy my own 'Trollopese...
...Trollope's Glencora says: "They told me he would ill-use me, and desert me-perhaps beat me. I do not believe it; but even though that should have been so, I regret it. It is better to have a false husband than to be a false wife." Raven's Glencora is less long-winded. "I would rather be beaten by Burgo Fitzgerald," she says, "than kissed by any other man." Perhaps Raven's greatest liberty, however, has been his emphasis on the Pallisers, particularly Glencora, among the novels' myriad families and alliances. Explains Raven...
Sweat and Gibber. Raven, 49, is also a writer of mysteries and high-class potboilers (Friends in Low Places) that dwell on sex and intrigue among the upper classes. But he has been a dedicated Trollopian since his undergraduate days at Cambridge. Nevertheless, he spent six months "sweating and gibbering" before he found the right blueprint for the series, which he suggested. He would throw out Trollope's character A as boring and superfluous -only to watch her turn up 700 pages later as someone essential to the denouement. Character B would be discarded, then put quickly back when...
...heroines are me," says Rosemary Rogers. With her big dark eyes, full red lips, mass of raven hair and Las Vegas body, she looks the part - and she has lived some of it. The oldest child of a wealthy educator who owned three posh private schools in Ceylon, Rosemary Jansz was raised in colonial splendor: dozens of servants - never did a lick of work - summers at European spas - impossible to go anywhere without a chaperone. A dreamy child, she wrote her first novel at eight, and all through her teens scribbled madly romantic epics in imitation of her favorite writers...