Reception
Overnight viewing figures estimated that the programme was seen by 7.3 million viewers (28% audience share) on 28 December 2008, against a Top Gear: Vietnam Special on BBC Two. It was the most watched programme of the day.
The adaptation received mostly negative reviews from the press, believing it did not match up to Hitchcock's 1935 film version (as predicted by Mickery). Sam Wollaston of The Guardian felt that the romance scene between Hannay and Victoria (when they stay overnight in an inn) was "one of the silliest ever" and felt that after the final scene at the loch and the concluding scene: "It's all very silly .... It doesn't have the pace, the moodiness or the wit." Damien Love of Sunday Herald felt the "tepid pace" was set by the casting of Penry-Jones, and that he "has a style reminiscent of the young Roger Moore, but without the vital, animating spark of self-deprecation. As Hannay, Penry-Jones is not at his best, and more reminiscent of a well-stuffed armchair on wheels." Mick Hume of The Times said "The overall effect was to turn Buchan's blood and thunder tale into a pallid politically correct Enid Blyton story", and The Independent's Robert Hanks concluded his review by saying that "By the end, my impression was that several pages of the plot must have been eaten by a dog, or a bored actor, and the director had decided, sod it, nobody's going to keep watching this long. Which I wouldn't have if I wasn't being paid."
The adaptation did receive some positive comments however. In The Sunday Times, A. A. Gill praised Penry-Jones and said that it was "racily paced" and was "the closest to the original and by far and away the most convincing". Roz Laws of the Sunday Mercury also commented on Penry-Jones, saying that he "proved to be just as good a spy in 1914 as he was in Spooks, only more dashing" and Alison Graham of the Radio Times, in her 'pick of the day' piece, said that Penry-Jones is "just perfect as John Buchan's hero" and commented that Victoria (Leonard) was "a splendid suffragette". Alasdair McKay of The Herald said "it was all rather spiffing and well-mannered".
Articles in the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph reported on the inaccuracies in the drama, including the 1916 biplane and the submarine rising in a freshwater loch, and 24 viewers complained to the corporation.
Read more about this topic: The 39 Steps (2008 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)