BBC Television is making a film about Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Twenty or thirty years ago the idea would have caused barely a
ripple. It was the kind of thing that the BBC was expected to do.
But not anymore: and in a world where television has less and less
time for high culture, the news could scarcely fail to be welcome.

Or could it? Some programs, however worthwhile their themes, are
worse than no program at all, and such details as have so far
emerged suggest this might well be one of them. Wordsworth, it
appears, is going to be portrayed in it as a cold-hearted
exploiter, Coleridge—the junkie of genius—
as his tragic victim. We
are going to be asked to accept that he deliberately encouraged
Coleridge in his drug habit so that he could take advantage of his
gifts (since he was plainly the lesser poet); that he drove him to
the very edge of destruction; and then, when his services were no
longer needed, that he calmly abandoned him. And in case we still
have any doubts where our sympathies are supposed to lie, Coleridge
is going to be played by one of the most sought-after stars of the
moment—Robert Carlyle, who made his name in the celebrated movie
about male strippers, The Full Monty. It’s prime time material.

There is an old joke, probably going
back to Victorian times, about
the magazine Punch. “I’m afraid it’s not what it was—but then