A radical adventure

Submitted by AWL on 18 January, 2022 - 5:22
Three main characters

Sacha Ismail on Around the World in 80 Days (BBC1, all episodes on iPlayer)


I read it a long time ago, but I remember finding Jules Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days distinctly underwhelming. Did I miss something?

A new television adaptation, co-produced by French, Italian and German public broadcasters and currently showing on BBC1, shares the 1872 novel’s basic premise. A rich Englishman, Phileas Fogg, circumnavigates the world for a bet of £20,000 (over £2m in today’s money). The series is very enjoyable and politically surprising.

As far as I can tell, the series’ creator Ashley Pharoah (Life on Mars) is not known as a left-winger. But he or somebody involved clearly knows quite a bit about the politics, including radical politics, of the 1870s. Both the dramatically revamped plots – with settings including the aftermath of the Paris Commune and post-civil war Reconstruction in the US – and the dialogue are littered with radical references. Even the legalisation of unions in Britain is mentioned.

The context of the period was developments in technology, transport and communications which for the first time made such a journey possible at relative speed and for a rich enthusiast – the same context in which, at exactly this time, Marx and his comrades were helping develop a global working-class politics.

Fogg has something of 21st century capitalists buying their way into space. However 80 Days is far from an uncritical adulation of what he represents.

Fogg’s valet Passepartout is still French, but now of black African background – and a political radical. The detective following them, Fix, has been replaced by a young female journalist of the same name. Race and gender come up throughout. Some in the right-wing media have lost their shit about these changes, with the Daily Mail's tirade seeming to suggest there were no black people in 19th century France.

Both Passepartout and Fix are better characters than Fogg. Both have a good line in mocking and challenging him (at least early on). Leonie Benesch, Ibrahim Koma and David Tennant are all excellent and do well together (by the way, Benesch is German and Koma French).

The other context which would have made a journey like Fogg’s possible was the consolidation of European and in particular British colonialism as a worldwide system. Here imperialism is a repeated target. One example: in the novel Fogg rescues an Indian princess from being burned alive by her relatives (and then marries her - but don't worry, she's light-skinned). In this series the corresponding figure is an Indian soldier threatened with court martial, deportation and hard labour by the British authorities.

As often with leftish TV and films, the conclusion descends into mushy right-on liberalism. Around the World in 80 Days at least has the defence that it is not primarily a political programme. And still, as well as being a lot of fun, it provides entry points to many of the struggles of a fascinating and important time.

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