Greetings and cheers for the initiative and vision in having made Affairs Of The Heart available. The series is a particularly fine example of why much literary or period adapted drama was so often brilliant in the 1970s.
With each episode taking the name of its leading character and all adapted from stories of Henry James, including novels, it's remarkable how fluid and satisfying the treatment is within the forty five minute or so framework. The viewer is fixed upon the compelling and focused human drama at hand, usually containing a surprise twist of ambiguity in James' exploration. In these years audiences understood that television was intimate and concentrated whereas film was expansive and visual and rarely without musical scores. With television viewers could sit and watch two people talk to one another for several minutes and be held in thrall. It were as if the subject was an extension of their lives which of course, it very well could be. This was an art of the relevant as opposed to an art of escape.
As a young adolescent, Affairs of The Heart effectively
introduced me to Henry James and I was certainly among those who watched inthralled and relished the rich flow of language, thought and consequence. The series also provides the opportunity of equally relishing a collective cast who were among the finest actors of their generation hitting their marks and treating us to a feast of dialogue. Sometimes playful, ironic, unexpected or tragic, Affairs Of The Heart hasn't aged a day, and puts to shame the dumbed down and diluted product that all too often is served to us now together with a commercial formula more the subject in itself than the subject it purports to serve.

Roger Little
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