Bored of the dance

TV REVIEW: Strictly Come DancingBBC1, Sat, Tess of the D'UrbervillesBBC1, Sun, Lost in AustenUTV, Wed, Who Do You Think You Are?RTÉ1, Mon

MILLIONS OF VIEWERS can't be wrong - or can they? The most pedestrian of trawls through statistics for prime-time Saturday-night viewing reveal that astonishing numbers of people (we're talking about more than twice our entire mildewed population here) regularly tune in to watch Strictly Come Dancing. For those of you who have managed to avoid contamination: respect. Here, however, are the pass notes. Between now and Christmas (shiver the thought), Bruce Forsyth (who is now 181 - the BBC have him cryogenically frozen between series) and a tubular blonde called Tess Daly play host to no less than 16 competing dancing couples. Each rumba-hungry pairing comprises a professional ballroom dancer (who variously pulls, twists and leads his or her stiffening protégé through the process) and one lukewarm celebrity, usually from the world of sport, EastEnders or GMTV.

This year, the stumbling wannabes also include chef Gary Rhodes (and his hair gel) and a flaxen-haired gal called Jodie Kidd, who is apparently famous for playing polo with the princes Hazza and Willz and for being around the same height as her horse; oh, and in the dumpy-dancing intellectual corner, political correspondent John Sergeant. The couples, competing to win a glitter ball, the admiration of their peers and enough TV exposure to bag them a contract on Holby City (I jest, but you get the picture), are judged by a high-camp quartet: choreographers and dancers Bruno Tonioli, Craig Revel Horwood (try saying that with a mouthful of polo pony), Arlene Phillips and chivalrous Len Goodman.

I suppose when you've chiselled off the pan-stick, ripped out the falsies, gone to work on the fake tan with a blow-torch, and beaten the perspiring celebs out of their Lycra, the attraction of Strictly Come Dancing (aside from its vaguely dominatrix overtones, its tasteless spandanglery, frilly cuffs and hissy fits) is that the show is live. If squashy Sergeant is waltzed into the scenery by his muscular-calved Russian partner Kristina ("I luff the glitter ballz"), in her silver boob-tube and slingbacks, the camera is going to be there quicker than the medics.

"More drama than the Queen Vic at closing time," said Brucie on launch night, his fishy-blue peepers seeking out the camera under the pile of discarded tights and cement knickers. And old twinkletoes is right: seems like we have developed an insatiable appetite for real-life drama, and actors behind scripts are just not as much fun as actors in tooth-wateringly tight dancing pants, being pilloried for their under-rehearsed plie.

Soon enough, boring old TV drama will merely be a conduit to the reality contract.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, I dunno, but I think must be my age. Time was when a BBC costume drama saw me sniggering behind the sofa with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a gut full of riotous disdain. Ye olde girlies in mud-splattered crinoline dresses being chased across the Fens by libidinous rakes in frock-coats, while their deranged, invalid mothers cranked up the consumption over their porcelain chamberpots, was never my particular poison. And then, last winter, Cranford came along; love and death in sepia, fantastic, memorable performances, and my resistance to the genre crumbled like a mildewed bed-sock.

I suppose what I'm trying to admit here (and this is not an easy thing to write) is that I wept after the first episode of the Beeb's new classic serialisation, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. All right, it was the end of a long weekend and, let's face it, a solid hour of Bruce Forsyth would usually be enough to make a python suppurate, but I found the dramatisation of Thomas Hardy's desperately sad, fatalistic tale surprisingly moving. The magnificent, spirited Gemma Arterton plays Tess, a naive country girl, emotionally manipulated by feckless, self-interested parents, who leaves home to work for the perfidious D'Urbervilles and is raped by her employer's son, Alec (a dark, complex performance from Hans Matheson).

It is all, as you would expect, visually seductive and expertly dramatised, and yes, I know, I know, I know, this is exactly what you would expect to hear from a fortysomething female who has spent her Sunday stuffing the ubiquitous chicken and now, after a couple of smudgy glasses of unchilled Tesco plonk, finds herself with her dated kohl pencil running down her wrinkling cheeks. Well, bull's-eye, there you go. I figure I am the target audience for the classic serial, and as such I can vouch for its potency.

What is it, though, with women and literary heroes/heroines? Jane Austen's Mr Darcy and Emily Bronte's Mr Heathcliff have been invading dreams since they tramped out of their progenitors' imaginations, and somehow, despite our pocket-sized promiscuity, our e-dating, our nervy metrosexuality and our notional equality, these archaic fictional heart-throbs still linger in our psyches.

A MODERN SEXUAL/CULTURAL sensibility transplanted to the past is hardly a new TV idea (look at Life on Mars, for one), but the relocation of a lippy, leather-jacketed brunette, with decidedly Noughties responses to love, desire and sexual oppression, into the playground of Jane Austen's imagination is a pretty inventive and potentially humorous premise for a series. Lost in Austen is a game, warm-hearted drama, which sees twentysumfin' Londoner Amanda Price step through the space-time continuum via a door in her loo (as you do) and arrive, attitude intact, in the living, breathing home of her fictional heroine, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice.

Amanda (Jemima Rooper), disillusioned by her life in the present, embraces the past a little fiercely and, at this point in the drama, has managed to admit her passion for and to Mr Darcy. For a while, it looked as though her literary fantasy was to be made flesh, but alas, while tugging at the neckline of her empire-line frock, Amanda hastily illuminated Darcy on aspects of her sexual history.

"I cannot marry you," sighed Darcy (Elliot Cowen), who looks like a woollier and cleverer Hugh Grant and managed to get through a whole TV hour without flicking the hairspray out of his forelocks.

I have written before that I could imagine Jane Austen having a whale of a time hanging out at pass-the-Chardonnay script conferences in modern-day Soho wine bars, and this frothy dramatised marriage of Austen's past and our imperfect present works well. It is worth catching, although, with just one episode to go before its denouement, you'll probably be looking for repeats.

GENEALOGY IS THE NEW black, folks. RTÉ, rushing to close the stable door before the trend bolts, has hijacked, bought or spirited away (under cover of gloomy Celtic mists) the format as well as the name of the popular trace-your-family-tree series, Who Do You Think You Are?, an identikit of the BBC version, which can occasionally be quite riveting. Our home-grown variety is apparently to be populated with a bunch of "popular Irish personalities" (Joe Duffy fits the bill, but my "popularity" radar bleep gets a little faint around Dana Rosemary Scallon). Anyway, each week a PIP (work out the acronym yourselves) blows the dust off his or her antecedents, and attempts to provide a bit of entertainment while also avoiding the pitfall of assuming that everyone is going to find their bearded, polygamous Auntie Ethel as fascinating a character as they do.

The series kicked off with the journey of RTÉ's chief news correspondent, Charlie Bird, a brave start given the rather taciturn nature of the individual.

It turned out that Bird's family closet was a receptacle for some serious skeletons: his Bermuda-born grandfather, who took a wrong turn on the way to Bandon (where he was heading to do a spot of electrification), ended up in Macroom, where he met and married Charlie's well-heeled grandmother. Unfortunately, though, despite his conversion to Catholicism in downtown Macroom, he omitted to divulge the fact that he already had a wife back in Blighty.

Later, courtesy of some well-educated digging on the part of confident and enthusiastic archivists (set to supersede TV celebrity chefs?), Bird found a great-great-great-great-grandfather who served under Admiral Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, and discovered that he came from a distinguished line of seamen that your average admiral would shiver his timbers for. Bird's nest to crow's nest . . .

Okay, it's Saturday again - get ready to rumba.

tvreview@irish-times.ie