Bad dreams in the night

 I wonder if Cliff Richard had read Wuthering Heights before undertaking the role of Heathcliff. It always looked a bad fit with the early Cliff's slightly curled lip being as menacing as he ever got in his otherwise charming demeanour. Charlotte's Mr. Rochester has his dark side and Anne's tenant of Wildfell Hall is wild but they both make way for Heathcliff in this sisterly game of inventing bad boys because he's a monster.

I realize that nice girls often like something apparently dangerous in a man but Heathcliff's not moody in an 'interesting' way, he's grotesque. It's a horror story. I had assumed he was brooding but somehow magnificent but he's not apparently dangerous, he's seriously so. All the Bronte girls are fine writers but their imaginations are allowed to run away with them in their remote domesticity. None of that will come as any surprise to those who have read Wuthering Heights but it turns out to be more psychological horror than I had expected. Still better than Vanity Fair or Jane Austen and maybe the ghost bit in the second half will be less savage but that will be more pre-Freudian trauma, I dare say.