10 Terrible TV Adaptations Of Classic Films (That Everybody Forgot About)

10. Lock, Stock...

Adaptation Of – Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Made on a budget of just £800,000, little was expected of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, a Cockney crime flick that depicted four friends pulling off a heist to pay off a £500,000 debt to a vengeful gangster. It kickstarted the careers of director Guy Ritchie and actor Jason Statham, becoming a cult classic on DVD.

The success of the film led to Channel 4 commissioning a television adaptation in 2000, the same year that Ritchie and Statham cemented their rises further in Snatch. Simply titled Lock, Stock… (with the title of each episode filling in the gap), it featured a different quartet with suspiciously similar character traits to their predecessors and ran for just seven episodes.

Each of these was a thinly-veiled rehash of the film’s formula, depicting the leads getting involved in business ventures of questionable legitimacy and inevitably falling foul of a hardened local crimelord as they bumbled around.

Ritchie co-wrote one episode, but other than that and an executive producer credit he had no hands-on ties to the series, which swiftly lost more than half of its viewership after debuting.

The film is widely regarded today as a great British crime caper and one of the highlights of Ritchie’s career (which has been somewhat tainted by the likes of Revolver and Swept Away), but its television equivalent is an afterthought by comparison.