And then right at the end, Heathcliff committed suicide – rather than perishing from some unspecified complaint as he does in the book. Back and forth the perspective went, almost as if it was hammering nails into Heathcliff’s grief. First, we saw Cathy through Heathcliff’s eyes – unchanged – and then as she really was – a decaying skeleton. Soon afterwards, Heathcliff frantically dug up Cathy’s grave and tore the lid off her coffin. Rather than tapping discreetly on Heathcliff’s bedroom window at the start, Cathy’s hand shot right through the glass. In this version it was Cathy (Charlotte Riley) as the daughter of the house who was the impulsive and combustible one, while Heathcliff, at least to begin with, followed slavishly in her wake. Although there was plenty of darkness and fury here, Peter Bowker’s script and Hardy’s performance gave Heathcliff a lot else as well: playfulness, humour and, most interesting of all, nervousness. He was clean-shaven for a start and his hair, while understandably a little tousled by all those moorland breezes, was not the usual thicket of mattress-stuffing. But Tom Hardy’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (Sunday and Monday, ITV1) was rather different. The great temptation with Heathcliff is to play him as a complete stranger to the razor, the hairbrush, the trouser press and the deodorant stick – turning him in the process into one of those Bigfoot creatures who appear, always in frustratingly blurry footage, hanging round the refuse bins in American national parks. The Telegraph clearly approves the adaptation: Three quite different reviews of Wuthering Heights 2009 appear today in the press.
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