Television - Andrew Billen finds that classic serials are what BBC1 does best

The final moments of the second part of Andrew Davies's adaptation for BBC1 of The Way We Live Now - the halfway point - brought us to the title. Roger, the scrupulous, not to say sanctimonious, head of the Carbury family, has unexpectedly met Paul, his friend and rival in love, at an out-of-season seaside resort. Compromisingly, Paul is in the company of another woman. "Has she no regard for her character?" Roger asks, perplexed.

"Have you? Perhaps these things don't matter any more. What do I know about the way people live now?"

Anthony Trollope's satire tells us that the way we lived in 1875 was in a state of deep compromise. Nothing new in that, Adam and Eve might say, and Jane Austen was writing about the detours true love made at money's beck 70 years before Trollope. He, however, saw particular opportunities for corruption in the railway share boom of the decade. The landed aristocracy were finally being supplanted by cash. A baronet might once have been as good as his family tree; now he might be only as good as his bank balance.

As for the new money, it would be bad business to investigate its provenance too carefully. There are plenty of rumours, all of them true, about the financier Augustus Melmotte's. "The man's a Jew, a swindler and a scoundrel, and I shan't know him," says Mr Longestaffe, played by that wonderfully fussy old actor Oliver Ford Davies, in episode one. Ah, but can he, or his family, afford not to know him?

Melmotte's oppressive influence lours over the dimly lit Victorian interiors of The Way We Live Now. As he thunders through boardrooms and drawing rooms, the camera wobbles. David Suchet, who is not a particularly big man, makes a lumbering, rumbling monster of him - although, if it is an impersonation of Robert Maxwell he is after, he misses that monster's sense of humour and his charm. In this production, he is associated with sticky food, and the goo spreads. Lady Carbury, the story's Baroness Hardup (played by Cheryl Campbell), wipes her glove after Melmotte, a jam tart in his other hand, kisses it; but all the perfumes of Arabia will not now sweeten her little hand.

Melmotte is no victim, or not yet, but it is just possible to feel pity for his brutish, Caliban-like coarseness, and for the snobbery and anti-Semitism with which others treat him. We must feel rather more sympathy for his daughter, Marie. Played by Shirley Henderson, this "strange little monkey face of a woman" has a voice reminiscent of Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. No man will like her best, she correctly surmises, but she is easily persuaded otherwise by Sir Felix Carbury, Baroness Hardup's penniless son and heir, who is, naturally, after monkeyface's inheritance.

Felix is a less appealing character than Melmotte, because he lacks the charisma that even corruptly procured power bestows. Played exuberantly by Matthew MacFadyen, he has not a clue who he is any more than he understands the fiduciary duties of a company director. "I'm a baronet, all right," he tells Melmotte unconvincingly, and for their next meeting we see him auditioning in front of a mirror, rearranging his face and trying on clothes. He is always adjusting his dress, whether crab-fishing in his breeches after sex with his country- bumpkin mistress, Ruby, or fidgeting in a drawing room, or extracting his boots from a pile of ordure. (In all period drama, I have never before seen a character step in horse shit: congratulations to all concerned.) His moral counterweight is Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy), a young man who is so dead straight in his business dealings that he really wants to build the Central American railway that Melmotte sees only as an investment scam. Cleverly, however, Trollope has this financially pure man tainted by sexual corruption. Although he is in love with the classic serial's typical honourable virgin, the "pure innocent girl" Hetta Carbury, he cannot extract himself from the vice-like grip of his American mistress, Mrs Hurtle. It is she whom the virtuous Roger Carbury sees walking with his friend on the beach.

In the most brilliant moment so far, however, we are allowed to see how Roger, in pressing his pursuit of his cousin Hetta, has been corrupted, too - in his case, by love itself. "You think of her and speak of her as a child, Roger," Paul says. "All your intercourse with her has been as a grown man to a child and now you offer yourself as a lover. How can you regard your own advances to her with anything other than embarrassment and disgust?"

No one (not even those who have read it) regards The Way We Live Now as a great novel. Its love-affair subplots are trashy. The names of the walk-ons would make Dickens wince (Marquis of Auld Reekie, Lady Julia Monogram). Yet it is thrilling the way Davies has extracted its molten core. I love the bravado of the dialogue; didn't you love the incestuous implication of the word "intercourse" in Paul's rant? Not to mention the nervy, hand-held camera-work, under the direction of David Yates. Lorraine Heggessey, the controller of BBC1, says she is not looking for more classic serials. She must be mad. They are the thing her station does best.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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