I was delighted when I heard that CJ Skuse’s Sweetpea (the first in a series of five books) was being adapted for television. The entire series is wonderful, but the first is the one to beat. The story of Rhiannon, a serial killer of (mostly) bad (mostly) men, Sweetpea hits the ground running and never lets up, blackly comic, as brutal in its social commentary as our girl is with a knife, and with a wit just as lovingly whetted. Rhiannon is that rarest of creatures: an unapologetic female protagonist written just as unapologetically by her female creator.
Her backstory is such that you can’t be sure whether nature or nurture has made her a psychopath, but psychopath she surely is. At least 82% anyway, according to a BuzzFeed quiz she takes. Rhiannon’s voice sings from the page, the plot delivers twist after turn, with the suspense mounting along with the body count, and there isn’t a wasted scene or word. Please do read them – they will do your heart (especially if it is female and full of suppressed rage) good.
Read them before, and indeed instead of, Sky’s screen version, which has been stripped of everything that makes the books great. It’s a flat, insipid six episodes that seem to go on for ever. Every possible punch is pulled, every sting drawn, every joke cut. This Sweetpea (played by Fallout and Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell, making the most of what she, had she read the book, could never have dreamed would be such a dreary part) is mostly driven by a desire for revenge on a mean girl at school. Instead of Skuse’s warrior woman, we have a petulant child. Skuse’s Sweetpea gathers friends (or rather Picso – “People I can’t shake off”) around her to make her seem normal. She uses them and her ordinary job as camouflage so she can go about her vigilante killings unsuspected. The television Sweetpea is driven by circumstance to her first murder, instead of actively seeking it like the original. She is the opposite of a psychopath. She is a drip. And drips are very boring.
Instead of murders, we have catfights and a pallid love triangle that only in its final moments carries even a modicum of the original’s charge. Instead of a funny, fierce narrator we have a script devoid of humour, drive or depth. Instead of a perpetrator glorying in her murderous gifts we have a victim mewling and puking her way to semi-catharsis very, very slowly.
The series reeks of cowardly decision-making at every turn. The book is a story of female rage and male violence and it seems that no one involved wanted to deal with that uncomfortable fact in the slightest. It is also about the resilience and the warping of children, the power of parents, the question of whether we are born as we ever more shall be or made into what we become. And it is about the possibility or otherwise of redemption – and whether being 18% normal means you can or should care about it.
Sky’s Sweetpea is about – nothing. It’s about a mousey woman who wants to be more visible and more confident and becomes so, indirectly, after killing and kidnapping some people. But the journey is never credible, not least because it is so hampered by the pathetic desire to keep the heroine likable and – I just know this word was sprayed around every meeting more liberally than a Sweetpea victim’s arterial blood – relatable. The main effect in fact is to make us root more and more for mean girl Julia (Nicôle Lecky) simply because she is less boring.
In a world of unnecessary voiceovers, it is a particularly bitter blow to find that the one drama crying out for one – Skuse’s series lives and dies by Sweetpea’s voice and the unfettered access we have to her unique thoughts – did not see fit to supply it. Again, the lack of it, the lack of translation to the screen of any salient part of Sweetpea, the refusal to admit any difficult parts of the book into the story stinks of fear.
And if you haven’t read the books and don’t know what you’re missing? I suspect it would still feel underbaked and unconvincing – no more than serviceable. The story is thin, the motivations thinner and the stakes low. You don’t need to have met Sweetpea in her original, glorious form to find drips dull. They take care of that by themselves.
But as a wasted opportunity to put something fresh, funny and truly idiosyncratic up on screen, it is galling. It would make Rhiannon murderous. I wonder if Skuse feels the same way?
• Sweetpea is on Sky Atlantic and Now.
