Wessex Tales

That I saw even part of this series around 1974 seems to me now pure luck-- it ran without fanfare on Georgia's PBS, late on Thursday evenings, and I was able to see four of its six stand-alone episodes. I barely knew Hardy's work then, only his reputation for foredooming his rural characters, and the outcomes for the rustics on view here were mournful indeed. But the individual episodes are remarkably distinct from one another, as befits the very different talents involved: Dennis Potter, David Mercer and William Trevor (!) among the scenarists. The two most memorable: "Two Ambitions", a quiet tale of brothers striving to make lives for themselves and an act of ruinous self-betrayal, and the series closer, the wildly Gothic "Barbara of the House of Grebe".