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Here are our top picks from tonight s TV (Monday, 28 December).
From a new Sir David Attenborough special to a 90s throwback, here s a selection of what s on TV this evening.
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Black Narcissus - 9PM, BBC One
After its premiere on Sunday, Amanda Coe s adaptation of Rumer Godden s Black Narcissus continues with episode two tonight.
Sister Ruth’s health worsens as winter sets in, and the ghost of Princess Srimati plagues her as Angu Ayah tells her more of the princess’ tragic fate. Dilip Rai’s arrival in search of education presents Clodagh with a dilemma, and she is forced to turn to Mr Dean for help.
British nuns stuck in the Himalayas, living in a crumbling palace where the former local ruler had kept his harem and going slowly mad with pent-up passion over a handsome Englishman.
What’s not to love? This new retelling of Black Narcissus, the 1939 Rumer Godden novel that was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Deborah Kerr in 1947, is utterly compelling, from the scenery to the simmering sexual tension.
The movie was banned in Ireland, censored in America and described by Martin Scorsese as ‘one of the first truly erotic films’.
We aren’t as easily shocked now, but the new BBC1 three-part series retains plenty of its allure (it’s been produced by Andrew Macdonald, grandson of the 1947 film’s co-director Emeric Pressburger), while adding modern touches such as filming in the Himalayas and using Nepalese actors instead of English ones pretending to be Nepalese.
Gemma Arterton as the ambitious and troubled Sister Clodagh
Credit: Miya Mizuno
Black Narcissus, Rumer Godden’s 1939 bestseller, has the atmosphere and self-sufficiency of a dream. This story of a group of Anglican nuns who set out to establish the Convent of St Faith in northern India during the 1930s is compressed, sublimely visual and psychologically astute. Like a dream, its surface of compelling singularity flows over darker universal currents, and as with a dream, any attempt to explain it is bound to break its spell. From the moment we enter the narrative, along with ambitious alpha female Sister Clodagh – “the youngest Sister Superior in the Order” – we are dispatched up a mountain to discover an impossibly vivid, beautiful and troublesome place, which has many names: Mopu Palace, the House of Women, and now the Convent of St Faith. Most recently some German Jesuits attempted to rebrand the former seraglio as St Saviour’s School, before abandoning their missio
The troubled sisters of Black Narcissus
Credit: Miya Mizuno
Of all the great masterpieces of British film – and there really aren’t that many – surely the most wondrously strange is Black Narcissus. Released in 1947 in Technicolor, it’s the story of a pre-war community of Anglican nuns who try to establish a school and convent high in the Himalayas in a mysterious palace that once housed the harem of an Indian prince.
There the nuns encounter isolation, suspicion and an eruption of sexual desire, which descends into madness. The film’s director, Michael Powell, once said that “eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end”.