Bullying, bloodlust, brutality inflicted on the weak and the marginalised, toxic masculinity, the corrupting influence of power, civilisational collapse: it's not really a mystery what drew Adolescence writer Jack Thorne to work on a TV adaptation of Lord Of The Flies. William Golding's remarkable debut novel may have been published in 1954, but it has much to say about the times in which we currently live.
Thorne's script was inevitably excellent, straying fruitfully from the source material in offering glimpses of backstories for the central protagonists, making them more complex. But in many ways the BBC series was the vision of director Marc Munden. He was responsible for ensuring that the cinematography had a hallucinogenic and slightly surreal quality (partly a happy accident, he's admitted), and for rendering the frenzied violence so viscerally (aided by a soundtrack composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer that regularly ratcheted up the tension).
As the behind-the-scenes documentary made clear, the circumstances of filming were far from straightforward. For starters, Munden was directing child actors, most of whom were inexperienced and all of whom were subject to restrictions on how many hours a day they could work, and yet he managed to elicit uniformly superb performances. He also had to contend with all of the challenges that the series' stunning location in Malaysia threw at the crew - particularly torrential rain (at one point, an assistant was shown trying to rescue his soggy but vitally important notebook with a hairdryer).
Ultimately, Thorne and Munden's adaptation was a tour de force, powerfully underlining the fragility of civilised society and the fact that the potential for savagery lurks within us all.
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