First things first, Any Human Heart is my favourite book ever. Through the  journals of fictional writer Logan Mountstuart, the reader is given a review of the whole of the twentieth century and shown that, no matter whether we experience extraordinary events in our lives or not, what matters most is the relationships we develop with others. So on hearing several months ago that it was being made into a television drama my heart dropped. I didn’t want the emotional connection that I have with it to be weakened in the future by memories of a lacklustre film representation. And a on a more snobbish level I didn’t want people to end up watching the TV series before they had read the book. Then I heard that Jim Broadbent and Matthew Mcfadden would be two of the three actors to play the protagonist Logan Mountstuart at different stages of his life and my hopes raised a little. And when I heard that William Boyd, the author, was writing the screenplay himself, my hopes raised a lot.

Obviously, as the novel is my favourite book it will be highly unlikely that I will enjoy the dramatisation as much but it’s not fair to judge the two by the same criteria, as I have written about recently (here). Film exists in a much narrower space than the novel and therefore cannot tell stories in the same way or with the same freedom. So I look forward to watching Any Human Heart as a drama and it will be interesting to see what Boyd has decided to focus on, and what he has decided to leave out.

Any Human Heart starts on Thursday at 9pm on Channel 4