Lorna Doone stars have as much chemistry as Tom and Nicole

By FIONA RAE

There's the girl, there's the boy, there's the waterfall ... but is there romance?

Last week's first part of the BBC's Lorna Doone, an adaptation of R.D. Blackmore's 1869 novel, started out like a posh Hercules and didn't really get much better.

Amid the mud and the thatched cottages, the rotten-to-the-core Carver Doone killed John Ridd's dad in cold blood, and so the Ridds' lifetime hatred of the Doone clan began - until John met Lorna at the waterfall and fell in love.

While Amelia Warner as Lorna is pretty and Richard Coyle's John is handsomely yokel, there's about as much chemistry as Tom and Nicole.

Coyle has nothing of the Herculean power of which Blackmore wrote, and besides, I keep remembering Coupling, a really rubbish comedy where he was the sidekick to Miles from This Life.

It is perhaps not all the actors' fault. Screenwriter Adrian Hodges seems to have read Blackmore and found the inner Catherine Cookson.

Or maybe George Lucas, as this exchange suggested:

He: "I love you."

She: "I know."

The script is so leaden I was beginning to think the writers' strike in Hollywood had spread to England without me hearing about it, and duties for Lorna Doone had been farmed out to seventh-formers.

No attempt has been made to capture any spirit of the period, although, perhaps understandably, the broad Exmoor accents of the time have been played down, having since become a comedy cliche.

None of this is helped by the fact that nearly all of the actors are wearing odd-looking and rather distracting hairpieces.

Even the usually wonderful Aiden Gillen, brilliant in Queer as Folk as Stuart, is stuck with a post-punk set of little dreads on the back of his head.

He plays Carver Doone with as much menace as he can muster, but comes across a bit like a 17th-century Johnny Rotten, all sneering mouth and swaggering trousers.

"Where is she, Ridd?" he spat out last week, just before he torched Ridd's family home in his pursuit of Lorna.

I half-expected Ridd to reply, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Surprisingly, the actor who does seem to fit right in is Martin Clunes.

He often seems as if he's just along for the ride (Saving Grace, for example), but here, as the corpulent Jeremy Stickles, he provided the few moments of light relief last week as he negotiated to stay at Ridds' farm long enough to try the roast suckling pig.

Arr, there be plenty of action on Sunday as the story of the star-crossed lovers is intertwined with politics, religion and quite a bit of fighting.

But otherwise there's not much saving Lorna Doone - no weirdness a la Dickens, no chemistry a la Pride and Prejudice, and certainly no glamour a la Hercules.

* Lorna Doone, TV One, Sunday, 8.30 pm