'Looking at the stars': TV3 adapts Lady Windermere's Fan

As any film student will tell you, in the last years of the 19th century the technical innovations of Etienne-Jules Marey, George Eastman, Thomas Edison and many others produced a scientific curiosity without any definite application, the motion picture. Like all new media, the device was greeted with suspicion by the champions of established forms. Such misgivings were compounded by the innovation's earliest application, projecting novelties and actualites for the lower class audiences of music halls, vaudeville theatres and other venues of ill-repute. Before cinema's narrative potential could be fully realised, the form was already dismissed as disreputable by many. Thus, to achieve greater legitimacy, the newly discovered storytelling medium was aligned with respected forms and canonical texts, with early film-makers adapting heavily from literature. Using cherished texts to trellis the fledgling forms' climb to cultural legitimacy, the literary clout of Shakespeare, Dickens, Zola and others enabled film-makers to attract middle class audiences to its newly constructed nickelodeons. This tactic of gaining cultural capital from adapting agreed 'classics' is not confined to cinema, but is replicated throughout the history of the arts; as Marshall McLuhan remarked, 'the 'content' of any medium is always another medium' (1964: 8). In 2009, the newest and most commercially driven of Ireland's national broadcasters, TV3 made a similar grasp at respectability, adapting Oscar Wilde's 'Lady Windermere's Fan' for its first foray into feature length production. 'Belonging to Laura', a contemporary reworking of the revered playwright's first stage satire, was part of the broadcaster's wider ambitions to rise above the mire of overseas imports and cheaply produced daytime shows for which it is known. In 2009 the changed ambitions of the oft-maligned station could be characterised by the play's most famous line, 'we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars'.