They lack the energy and lust and cheek and fear of being a teenager in a coming of age tale. There’s a charming naivety in little Georgie Smith’s performance, but once Lol grows older neither he nor any of the others playing the adolescents feel quite at ease. It means they’re mercifully free of any inherited stage school ticks, but in a drama this length it also highlights their weaknesses. Sadly that’s partly (but far from entirely) because of the inexperience of the young actors, newcomers plucked straight from school and placed in front of the camera. Yet as terrifically unspoiled as the Slad Valley looks, it doesn’t pull you in and make you pine for something you think you remember but which you never had. It’s gorgeously shot, and also knowingly shot frost on windowpanes and blossom on the old apple tree marking the passing of time as well as reinforcing that this is a story dictated as much by the natural world as the people in it. It’s certainly a beautiful adaptation of the novel, just as all of BBC One’s recent Sunday night 20 th Century literary adaptations have been. So does this, the BBC’s second adaptation of Cider with Rosie ( the first was in 1971), put us in that same moment of honeyed remembrance and bucolic idyll as Lol? ‘Remembering is to relive, to be in the same moment all over again,’ groans Timothy Spall in his narration as the elderly Lee, and in doing so sums up several generations of readership’s relationship to the book. It’s nectar for the brain every time you read or remember it. Actually I think I nicked some of that from Dylan Thomas…īut that’s how good Laurie ‘Lol’ Lee’s prose it. You mention it and they get that soft stare in their eyes and start talking in ways that mimic Laurie Lee’s lyrical style, as they recall summers as runny and green as elderflower cordial, and days spent young and easy under the apple boughs.

You can always tell when someone has read Cider with Rosie.

Cider by rosie