KEY POINTS:
Only a master story-teller could take a legal case so slow and crushing as to put the largest glacier to shame, and infuse it with the kind of mystery and intrigue, horror and humour, that has the punters crying out for more.
Charles Dickens' Bleak House (TV One,
Sundays, 10.25) leaves modern legal dramas in the shade, with its labyrinthine plot and vast cast of innocents, villains and eccentrics, all centred on a wrangle over an inheritance so interminable that generations have died, ground down with disappointment. The case of "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" doesn't even escape the great novelist's talent for telling names - as has been pointed out, try saying it without yawning.
This BBC version of the novel is the work of Britain's king of the literary adaptation, Andrew Davies, who's pruned the 1000-page novel into a TV-friendly serial, showing here in eight hour-long parts.
Some have seen its "soap opera" format (it screened in Britain as half-hour episodes) as disrespectful of a classic, but as Dickens himself was a master of the "leave 'em begging for more" serial (Bleak House was originally published in 20 instalments), it seems churlish to object.
The story is partly a satire on the legal system of the day but is soon whisked off in a complex plot swirling with false hopes and disastrous choices. It wouldn't be Dickens without a bevy of orphans, those here range from sassy Jo the street urchin, to Ada and Richard, two delicately shining lights you can't help but fear for in the draughty Victorian gloom.
Davies got straight to the action in last night's first episode with the story's heroine, Esther (played by Anna Maxwell Martin), a woman of dubious origin and sterling moral character, being rushed by carriage through the stormy night to meet her fate. Between the likeable Esther and the other key character, the icy Lady Dedlock, there is enough subplot and back-story to make any writer of 21st-century "enigma" dramas weep with envy. Every scene is packed with import. What's more, you can always count on Dickens to satisfactorily wrap things up.
Of course, the chief delight is in the acting, with a tantalisingly diverse cast (including the brazen choice of American star Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock) and no player, however small the part, failing to shine.
Even Krook the landlord's evil cat throws everything into its hissing cameos.
Charles Dance plays arch villain, the lawyer Tulkinghorn, as so hood-eyed and cold-blooded you expect at any moment to see a tongue flick out to snap up flies. And Anderson takes Lady Dedlock to a level of frigidity that is positively cryogenic.
One hour down, seven left to savour. Shame that TV One considers this great, sprawling feast too rich a diet for prime time and is screening it - nearly two years late - at the unobliging time of 10.25pm.
Get the recorders busy for there is much sex, drugs, murder and scandal still to come before Judgment Day.
