ITV GOES POSH:Mansfield Park

For those who don't read, here's the plot of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.

Fanny Price, a poor girl with rich relations, is sent to live with the rich relations at Mansfield Park. This happened a lot in Olden Days. The relations never fail to remind her of her place, except the boring middle son, who is nice to her, and gets her to read good books (always important in Jane Austen World). Along come the Crawfords, a slightly twisted brother and sister seduction team who set about seducing Elder Daughter Maria (played by Teen Slater) away from her rich-but-stupid husband; and Boring Middle Son away from the priesthood. Henry Crawford also tries it on with Fanny, but is rebuffed and runs off with Married Maria instead. This brings SHAME upon the lofty Bertram household and everybody realises that Fanny is actually quite a good egg, and more deserving of Mansfield Park than anybody else. Middle Son bins off the Crawford hussy and marries his cousin instead.

So it's a kind of Cinderella story, with added commentary on the patriarchy, sexual politics, the morality of building one's family fortune on human misery, and loads of other stuff about families, rivalry etc. Fab book.

But this is ITV1, and all ITV1 wants is nice frocks, pretty houses and men in britches jumping in ponds. Thankfully the pond-jumping is avoided, but there are plenty of nice frocks about. One of the prettier touches is the change in Billie/Fanny's clothing as she rises in status. She starts off wearing something in brown cotton, and ends up strolling through the lavender hedges in a gorgeous pale blue satin confection that looks good enough to eat.

Somebody has also decided that, as a poor relation, Billie would not have the usual Regency rules of ladylike decorum forced upon her, and therefore she has to express her free-spiritedness by tearing about the house like her life depends upon it. There she goes up the stairs...and there she goes down the stairs. Good thing it's a big house. Billie isn't as insufferable a little prig as the other Fannies I have seen, but I did wish she'd stop running like a hoyden and do something with her hair. The action was mostly shot on hand held cameras that made you feel slightly seasick, but I think it was to make the point that the bulk of MP is about YOUNG PEOPLE HAVING FUN! and not nice frocks and britches. Look! there goes Billie again...she must have forgotten her hat...

Billie's arch nemesis in MP is not a giant Slitheen or even a Dalek, it's her Aunt Norris, played with twitching evil relish by Maggie O'Neill (aka Her from Shameless). Auntie blames Billie for everything, and is eventually banished for blaming Billie for not marrying Henry Crawford and driving him into Teen's married arms.

Edmund the boring middle son was suitably po-faced and intense. Actually, I thought Roistering Eldest Brother Tom was more interesting, and so did Billie by the look of things. Teen didn't have much to do other than look beautiful (check) and rather calculating (check check). Nothing was made of Fanny Price's bluestocking tendencies (except for a timid question over dinner about slavery), and she wasn't banished to Portsmouth to experience Middle Class Hell after refusing the advances of Henry Crawford.

ITV1 crammed one of Austen's denser novels into two hours by concentrating almost wholly on the central romance, which kind of works if you haven't read the book. It galloped through the more meditative aspects - and believe me, there are a few. I kept wishing they'd slow down a bit, and give Billie a hairbrush.

NEXT WEEK: Northanger Abbey, starring That Hussy Emma Grundy!

The Pope Dunnit

I fancied a bit of detective tosh last night, to chase off the hangover wrought by champagne cocktails and several glasses of wine at lunch, so settled down to watch Waking The Dead because it's got She Queen, the best thing about Brookie, and Shoestring Trevor Eve in it as a police psychologist and a super Met Chief Inspector type who open up unsolved murder cases, wear white coats, frown at dusty corpses and write on plate glass windows with magic markers. They have a team of youthful underlings who provide something pretty to look at and do all the running around. They also have Tara Fitzgerald as the slightly weird but sexy pathologist. Tara wears a white coat all the time and isn't mean to a winsome Victorian child once; neither does she get her cornet out and treat everybody to a soulful rendition of the Concerto de Aranjuez while shutting down a pit and giving Pete Postlethwaite a heart attack. Which is nice.

So, the plot goes something like this. We get a flashback - last night's was to the 1990s, when hair was big and bankers had secret lovenests behind the filing cabinets. Somebody shoots a shagging couple. Fully clothed. You didn't get naked sex on TV until at least 1997. Fifteen years later, builders in the process of turning the bank into a trendy wine bar hit a ceiling and out drop two skeletons, still at it by the look of things. Cut to Shoestring and She Queen swapping witticisms over coffee while the underlings smirk at each other. Tara pokes the shagging skeletons with a biro and deduces that they were up to No Good. Shoestring links it all to Black Wednesday, and the underlings laugh as She Queen cries: "Norman Lamont! Young 'uns these days ..." Peter Capaldi appears from nowhere as a reformed fraudster who now lectures bankers on what to do with their shit, which is a Freudian analogy for money. Anyway, Peter twinkles at She Queen and uses lots of psychobabble to bamboozle her, but she's a proper psychologist so she only pretends to be bamboozled. At least, I hope so.

A blonde pops up from nowhere, says she's a journalist writing about a missing lady banker who was married to a cocaine dealer from Dublin. DNA shows that yes, it is the lady banker and her lover, and Tara proves, using the young ones as giggling props, that they were killed in flagrante with one bullet. Wow. The youngsters stop giggling and look meaningfully at each other until She Queen turns the hose on them. Not really.

There are a couple of men in suits who look worried, and then after one goes off, the other, slightly more important one picks up his mobile phone and starts speaking in Latin. Something like: "Gettus riddus of that blokeus wot sold us the gearus". Shoestring waves pictures of Roberto Calvi and starts muttering about Opus Dei-led conspiracy theories. I begin to suspect the hand of Ian Paisley in the writing of this script, and the young 'uns smirk. The Gards say they've got better things to do than go around arresting shifty chaps just because some English bastard says they should, so Shoestring has to shifty coke dealer chappie around the disused warehouse himself. Coke dealer falls off a high place despite Shoestring's frantic attempts to save him. Is there any point in watching the conclusion? Or should I just tune in to see Shoestring and She Queen try to arrest the Pope, and fail. So they go for Ruth Kelly instead...

XMAS TEEVEE SPECTACULAR

SCD FINAL!! Our sporting heroes had to do five dances each thanks to Tarbuck’s dodgy ticker. Wowsa. Mark came up trumps with a couple of excellent booty shaking latin numbers, a couple of OK ballrooms and a barnstorming freestyle with some great lifts. Whatever the haytas on the Guardian message board say, he was a much better dancer than Matt, always gave a better performance and had much better chemistry with Karen, so I’m glad he won. Karen had a breakdown as expected and Mrs Ramps made some barbed comments about how she supports her husband and loves him WHATEVER HE DOES, so there, tabloid scum!!

THE RUBY IN THE SMOKE!! (AKA: BILLY VS MRS OVERALL) This is based on a Phillip Pullman novel that I haven’t read and is a spiffed up costume drama that manages to include every cliché and narrative device known to Victorian fiction. Billy is a spirited young lady who is orphaned when her dad dies in a dodgy shipping disaster, so she hooks up with a Scooby gang of assorted nice people (including a dishy photographer that I am sure I have seen in something else, but I couldn’t quite place him). Julie Walters is excellent as her nemesis, a murderous granny who wants to get hold of a legendary ruby because some posh lady called her a slag ages ago. There are triads, opium dens, coded messages, confused parentage, reference to the Indian Mutiny and dastardly maharajas and lots of scenes where people run around Limehouse and hit each with bits of wood. It was all very sketchy and rather incoherent, but I still enjoyed it. The next instalment is due to screen this year and is called “The Shadow in the North” – possibly about the rise of Manchester United?

DR WHO XMAS SPECIAL: Catherine Tate mysteriously appears on board the tardis and makes fun of the doctor a lot. Good. It all turns out to be part of some dastardly stroke overcomplicated stroke implausible plan by a giant spider lady to hatch loads of baby spiders so they can take over the earth or something. One of Julie Walter’s villainous minions from Ruby in the Smoke also appears in this as Catherine’s dastardly fiancé, who was feeding her magic space juice as part of the plot. He croaks it in this one as well. The giant spider thing looks impressive at first glance until you realise that it can’t actually move and the actress is forced to wave her arms around and overact in order to convey her galactic eviltude. I thought Catherine Tate was quite good and the plot is OK but not great. Entertaining enough for xmas day and not bad compared to some of the rubbish plots they had in the last series. At the end there is some preview stuff for next series which will give all the dr who nerds plenty to wank about on the internets until it finally airs.

DRACULA: This is like a reimagining or something, which means that they totally mess the plot up. Jonathan Harker snuffs it pretty quickly, without even getting to partay with the three hot vampire chicks. What a swizz. Instead, the main character is Lucy’s husband who has got the clap and wants Dracula to cure him so he can get some loving off Lucy. This works about as well as can be expected. He is played by the blue eyed bloke off “Line of Beauty” and ends up getting his head ripped off. That’s what you get for standing around smirking for four hours in a ponderous drama about the 80s. The actress who plays Mina is intensely irritating and I am annoyed that the plot is not reimagined so that she dies horribly as well. Dracula is played by Shifty Marc Warren. He spends half the time going “grrrr” and waving his head around in slow motion and the other half poncing around in a Robert Smith wig and licking ladies necks lasciviously. I am asleep by the time Lucy turns into a satanic blood sucking hussy, which was probably the best bit. Oh well.