This trend of basing television series (and movies) on booksdoesn’t always work.

More often than not, if I make the mistake of watching the TV/cinema version of the story before I read the book, I won’t bother with the latter. A pity of course, given that most of the interesting detail and descriptions tend to be lost in translation, but there you have it. I’d much rather read a fresh story (I mostly read fiction for fun) instead of an extended version of one that I already know.

Sometimes I make an exception, and I almost always regret it. Take True Blood, the HBO series (yes, another one) that kicked off with a massive bang some five summers ago. I was hooked from the get-go, from the moment I heard Jace Everett’s theme for the opening credits, Bad Things, till the very last episode of the season.

For those of you who have no clue what the series is all about, the keywords here are mainstreaming vampires. And by vampires, Idon’t mean the benign, sparkly Twilight kind. Nor are they the high-school version in The Vampire Diaries. These are the nasty kind, an edgier version of the Buffy style, if you like.

But this is all by the by. By the end of the first season I was so taken by the plot-line that I didn’t feel like waiting for a whole nine months before I could enjoy more trouble from Southern-belle Sookie Stackhouse and her fanged but rather attractive companions.

As soon as I realised that even this series was based on books, I figured I might as well buy the whole lot. After all, since I loved the TV version so well, I could hardly go wrong with the printed original. Right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong, as it happens. The Southern Vampire Mysteries, penned by Charlaine Harris, could not have been more boring and poorly written. The dialogue was forced, there was no well-chosen soundtrack to take your mind off Harris’s uninspired lexicon and the plot didn’t even seem to be following what had happened in Season 1.

I plodded (or rather, skimmed) on with a heavy heart, but quite frankly, after spending a small fortune on the whole set, I had been well and truly suckered.

Fast-forward five years andSeason 5 of True Blood has just roared to a rather wild end last week.

Throughout these seasons, the quality of the script-writing has gone considerably down. The soundtrack remained top-notch for the most part. The visuals and shock-effects made sure that the show retained a massive audience.

However, apart from the actual characters themselves, there is precious little left from the plot-line of the original books. And the script-writers even managed to play fast and loose with the characters, adding a couple of elements that weren’t in the book and drastically changing existing ones.

My question is this: at which point does a TV series or a movie that is supposed to be based on the original become something altogether new? Were Harris to chance upon a screening of this series, I doubt she would recognise any of her handiwork.

That’s the book discussion over. For those who are more interested in whether last week’s finale was worthy of its name, the answer is a definite yes. After about three months of faffing around with a rather dragging story-line that had even the most devoted fans venting steam on online fora, Episode 12 delivered quite a number of plot-twists and shockers, not to mention more than enough skimpily-dressed eye candy.

You can tell when the seasonhas come to an end, because the script-writers actually start making an effort...

Pudsey strikes gold

Hands up those of you who fell in love with the fluffy dancing dog during the past season of Britain’s Got Talent Pudsey and hisowner were announced winners of the season some three months ago, much to the delight of alltalent-show enthusiasts.

Even though the initial furore over the cute duo has now died, sometimes, when I want a quick pick-me-up, I catch myself scuttling onto You Tube to relive his uber-cute dance routine. That’s one pooch that certainly deserved to win the finals.

Life has been rather good toPudsey (and, presumably, to his owner) since they bagged the title. Judging by the constant reports in the media, the public just can’t get enough of him. Now the mutt is set to – ahem – pen his memoirs. Yep, publisher Little Brown has offered the dog a €442,243 deal if it manages to finish its autobiography by Christmas. I guess snapping up J.K. Rowling’s first post-Potter work was not enough for the publisher.

ramonadepares@timesofmalta.com