I’ve
never made any bones about hating Julie Burchill’s
Sugar Rush.
It’s a master class on how not to write a novel: characters
that struggle to be even two-dimensional, an unoriginal and
ultimately depressing plot, and prose that manages to be both
shallow and tortured at the same time.
But
when I heard Britain's Channel 4 was creating a 10-episode series
based on the book, I was optimistic; a television adaptation
might salvage something from the wreckage. So now that it's
finally here and a few episodes along (the first episode aired
June 7), how does the dramatization shape up in comparison to
the book?
Initially,
I wondered how on earth were they going to make ten 40-minute
episodes out of such a slight book, especially when you consider
that the BBC squeezed the densely plotted, 500-plus page Fingersmith
into only three hours. The answer appears to lie in the “based
on the novel by Julie Burchill” caption that pops up in
the title credits--that’s “based on” in the
same way Little House on the Prairie was “based
on the novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Take the characters,
setting and basic premise and then do something else with it
entirely.
In
the case of Sugar Rush, that wasn’t a bad idea.
In fact, it was a very good idea indeed.
The
setting remains the same: Brighton, an English seaside
town long associated with amusement arcades, dirty weekends
and homosexuality. The characters and basic premise remain more
or less the same: middle-class Kim (Olivia Hallinan) is madly
in lust, bordering on love, with her new best friend, boy-crazy
Maria “Sugar” Sweet (Lenora Crichlow).
Channel
4 is upfront about the show's lesbian content in its official
description:
