Can a TV series touch your heart and change your life? Nooo? You can only say that if you haven't seen this one. I would have answered "no" myself before watching it by chance a few years ago. Unbelievable but true, this is what this miniseries did to thousands of viewers all over the world. If I had only suspected what a turning point BBC NORTH AND SOUTH, would be in my life... I would have watched it earlier! Instead, I discovered it only in the summer 2008 and it , incredibly, actually changed my life.
Exaggerating? Not a bit. I know the same happened to so many! Which other costume series had such an extraordinary response? Pride and Prejudice 1995, of course. But not many others.
Enthusiastic fans, hundreds of them, overwhelmed the BBC Drama message boards with messages about the series and, in particular, its hero. Soon the BBC had to set up a separate message board for the discussions. The phenomenon of so many women taking to an Internet message board for the first time because of their love for this programme became the subject of an article by Anne Ashworth in The Times. She wrote:
The BBC Drama website contains the outpourings of hundreds of thirty and fortysomething women for this year’s romantic hero. He is John Thornton, the northern millowner in Mrs Gaskell’s North & South, recently serialised on BBC One. Thornton was played smoulderingly by the previously little-known Richard Armitage as a blue-eyed, dark-haired stunner, the Darcy de nos jours. On the messageboard, character and actor merge into one object of desire: RA/JT (from http://www.richardarmitageonline.com/)
