Television Adaptation
Quiet as a Nun was adapted for television by ITV in 1978, as part of the Armchair Thriller series. The adaptation starred Maria Aitken as Jemima Shore, along with Renée Asherson (Mother Ancilla), Brenda Bruce (Sister Elizabeth) and Sylvia Coleridge (Sister Boniface). Patsy Kensit, then a young child, plays one of the convent schoolgirls, Tessa Justin, who has a significant role in the final two episodes.
The final minutes of the third episode, aired on 18th April 1978, are still regarded as one of the most chilling moments on British television, noteworthy because the series was transmitted before the traditional 9pm 'watershed', the demarcation line in British television scheduling between family-friendly and adults-only viewing. In the scene, Jemima Shore goes into the Tower alone at nighttime. As she climbs into the attic, she encounters the faceless Black Nun sitting in a rocking chair. Jemima screams as the Black Nun advances towards her, bringing the episode to an end. The scene was ranked 63rd in Channel 4's Top 100 Scary Moments list.
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Famous quotes containing the words television and/or adaptation:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)