Wit Rediscovered on Television

I'd nearly forgotten about Lost in Austen, because I'd looked at the advance publicity and I thought it might be terrible. There was, of course, always the offchance that it might be excellent instead, but I wasn't sure how likely that was.

Okay, quickly, in case you don't know - - a couple of hundred years ago there was a writer in England called Jane Austen, who wrote six novels. A lot of people think they're probably mushy romances because they tend to be about young women who tend to get married by the end of the novel.

However, I don't like romantic novels in general, and I don't like mushy ones in particular. I can't give you many examples because I've never read more than a few pages before losing interest. Even the slightly better ones - the Catherine Cooksons for instance - - oh, no no no.

But Jane Austen is different, because her plots are beautifully constructed, and her writing of them is wonderful and has two elements that I particularly like, and they are these:

Good one-liners, and wit: two of my favourite things in the whole world.

In 1995 Jane Austen's most well-known novel, Pride and Prejudice, was dramatised for television in a superb adaptation starring Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth.

Lost in Austen, which had its first instalment last night (and you can watch it on t'interclacker here if you missed it) is about a Pride and Prejudice-obsessed young woman, Amanda Price, who somehow finds Elizabeth, the heroine of the novel, in her bathroom, and then goes through a secret door and ends up in Longbourne, the house where the novel is set, where she meets all the characters from the novel, and has some trouble explaining why she's there and Elizabeth isn't.

So while Elizabeth Bennet is in Hammersmith, Amanda Price is back in the eighteenth century, in the plot of Pride and Prejudice: and finding that her very presence is altering the story in all sorts of worrying ways.

And - - oh, hurrah! - the whole thing is written with the sort of wit of which Jane Austen would be proud. The writer, Guy Andrews, has captured Jane Austen's style of dialogue perfectly. The series manages a neat tribute not only to the novel but also to the 1995 television adaptation.

Profound, world-changing drama? No. Fun? Oh, yes, especially if you know Pride and Prejudice and the television version too. And, like the very entertaining back-to-the-seventies series Life on Mars, it does manage to highlight the idiosyncracies of both our time and Jane Austen's time. I'm looking forward to next week's episode, and that's not something that happens often with television dramas these days.