television review

With the Jane Austen seams nearing exhaustion (both Emma and Sense and Sensibility have been completed and are ready to roll), a new source is required to fuel the growing public demand for drama with costumes. So step forward Thomas Hardy, reckoned by television executives to have significant reserves of both to exploit. Although in his case it is more melodrama, and frankly he wasn't that much of a frock man.

Hardy occupies ground somewhere between the coy irony of Austen and the sexual psychobabble of DH Lawrence. His is a world charged with passion, romance, disappointment, idealism and fatalism; his characters learn that the laws of nature are there to keep any human ambition in check; his books do not have happy endings. It is worth reminding yourself of Hardy's intensity as a writer, because you would never have guessed it from the adaptation of his Return of the Native (Sun BBC2).

In order to condense his vision into 100 minutes, all the scale of Hardy's creation had been stripped, leaving a frail skeleton of a plot which frequently veered towards the farcical. It was like a Stella Gibbons parody out there, all childish misunderstandings and intimations of dark deeds, letters going astray and doors not being answered, Celia Imrie and Joan Plowright rolling their eyes around as if auditioning for the Hammer House of Horror. Laughable scene followed laughable scene: the first meeting of the lovers, through the clearing mist with a heavenly chorus syruping away in the background; the participants in the rural love pentangle all arriving beside a raging torrent at the same moment; the hooded heroine braving the final storm looking like a participant in a Scottish Widows television commercial.

The real crime of this production, though, was the way the tragic collision between the compulsive idealism of Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye (she casts him as her ticket out of the choking claustrophobia of her surroundings; he sees her as the reason to stay) were reduced to the pat incompatibility of Curly and Raquel. Actually, that's not fair: Curly and Raquel's relationship is realised with considerably more subtlety.

It wasn't helped by the acting. A smudge of Goth-style mauve lipstick and a geographically uncertain accent were not sufficient to transform Catherine Zeta Jones into the woman of appetite and zest that is Eustacia. Instead, she played her as the pricktease of Egdon Heath. "I have this great fear that the excitement will not last," she said, early on. We should have trusted her judgment on that one.

And Ray Stevenson was such a weak-jawed wimp of a Clym that you felt like reaching into the screen and slapping him about the face with a damp Marigold glove. He wasn't just visually impaired; Stevenson played him as a version of Pete Townshend's Tommy: deaf, dumb and blind. But most particularly dumb. Not that everything was miscast, however. Exmoor should receive a Bafta for the brilliance of its portrayal of Hardy's real hero: Egdon Heath.

Also looking sumptuous was "Louis Malle's India" in Fine Cut (Sun BBC2). Re-cut as a tribute to the director who died in 1995, it was, apparently, the work of which Malle was most proud. You could see why.

In essence it's a grand video diary: on his seven-month journey through the sub- continent, Malle managed to turn up image after image which made those Indi-ahh adverts look positively frugal: the funeral procession led by a band tunelessly playing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow"; the camel that was going round in endless circles, mixing cement; the ascetic wandering the streets of Delhi wearing, for no apparent reason, 100 skewers embedded in his person.

The Indian government went apo- plectic when the film was first screened, throwing the BBC out of the country. Twenty-five years on, it is hard to see why, unless they simply got bored of long sequences involving folk-dancing and fishing. Or perhaps, as the Exmoor tourist board may feel when it catches sight of Return of the Native, they just didn't want the rest of the world to get the impression that everyone who lives there is barking.