matrim

Recently, I watched BBC's Bleak House and enjoyed it immensely. But when I checked the related information on IMDB, I found its length is 510 minutes while my dvd version is only 410 minutes. 100 minutes shorter! What have I missed? Could someone who has seen the original version tell me?

Steve Crook

I suspect someone's maths isn't very good (on the IMDb).
They say it's "510 min / 60 min (1 episode) / 30 min (14 episodes)"
But 14 * 30 + 60 = 480, not 510

How many episodes do you have? There should be 13 with the first one being double length.

With that many episodes a timing difference of a minute or two per episode can make quite a big difference.

And where did you get the figure of 410 minutes from? Was it just from the box or have you timed it? DVD producers do sometimes make errors in the run times shown

Steve

matrim

Thanks, Steve!

My dvd version is a Chinese product under the arrangement with BBC, and there are only 8 episodes in 2 d9s, with each episode around 51-52 minutes. And according to your counting, I still missed about 1 hour.

I don't know if it's a marketing ploy or something, for Pride and Prejudice of the same series (the legendary 1995 version) consists of 3 d9s, but it's much shorter than Bleak House.

Perhaps the publisher thought it wouldn't sell well, since it's less famous compared with Pride and Prejudice in China, so they just crammed 400+ minutes feature in 2 discs and made some dirty editing to produce the "special version".

DocRobertPepper

As i remember at the begining of each episode it had a reminder of the last episode so maybe they cut that out which may explain your missing minutes

tomod

i live in new york and still haven't seen it. very frustrating as everyone back home in england says it's incredible..

Hobnail

There are several edits of Bleak House. The original UK tx was the 15 part one; the one shown in Australia was 8 x 60min; and I think there was a 'commercial version' where each ep is docked to 50 min to accomodate adverts.

So you should get the UK or Australian dvd!

The 1980s BBC version is quite good too. Denholm Elliot as Jarndyce, Dianna Rigg as Lady Whassername and Peter Vaughn and Tulkinghorn. The girl who plays Esther is also a lot better looking! It doesn't have the creepy gothic humour of the recent one but it does present a grubbier, more realistic vision. The character of the crossing sweeper boy is really tragic, and it actually shows what a crossing sweeper does (ie: sweeps the horse shit out of the path of passers-by!)