Television - Sad life and sparky fiction from the man who made the Mail. By Andrew Billen The Two Loves of Anthony Trollope (BBC1)

Trollope family legend has it that the great novelist died laughing. This, The Two Loves of Anthony Trollope (7pm, 2 May) discreetly pointed out, was an exaggeration. He died a month after suffering a fatal stroke. It was true, however, that the last sound that issued from his beard-infested mouth was a laugh. His niece had been reading to him from a comic novel and, as she reached the end of a passage, there came from her uncle a huge laugh, and then silence.

The documentary, shown to whet the appetite for the third leg of the channel's spirited four-part adaptation of He Knew He Was Right, was infected by the drama's tone, and seemed to agree that Trollope's death, like his life, was a laughing matter. Narrated between ornate inverted commas by Stephen Fry, it seemed wholly unable, despite super-serious contributions of lady scholars from the Trollope Society, to take its subject seriously.

Laughter point number one was that he had held down a real job. Given the current amateurish state of the Royal Mail as revealed in Dispatches: third-class post (29 April, Channel 4), you would have thought a bit of respect might have been due the man who invented the reliable British pillar box. Instead, the programme gave the distinct impression that it was a bit below the salt for a major literary figure to earn a living as a civil servant.

Giggle two was that he treated his writing as a near-industrial process. Believing in "the virtue of the early hours", he began work at 6am and for the next three hours would produce 250 words every 15 minutes. To extend productivity, he designed for himself a portable writing desk, which he would plonk on his knees during his daily commute to town. Joke three was, naturally, his big fuzzy beard, a false version of which was applied to Clive Merrison's chops for his impersonations in the dramatised scenes. This, however, was surpassed by the joke-of-jokes that was Trollope's blameless love life.

When he was 29, he married Rose, a devoted wife in the Victorian mode who cooked, proofread and sublimated herself. The highest praise she received from third parties was for her "honest and hearty appreciation of her husband". Aged 45, however, with two teenaged sons, he fell in love with a vivacious 22-year-old Bostonian named Kate Field. Torn between a wife in whom beauty had faded and Kate, whose feminism challenged him almost as much as did her allure, he did what a good Victorian man should and wrote her slightly overfamiliar letters, while keeping his hands to himself. I fear that if only he had done as modern novelists do, and dumped the missus, the documentary would have taken him a bit more seriously.

A surfeit of people behaving reasonably accounted for the dangerous facetiousness of the early stages of Andrew Davies's adaptation of He Knew He Was Right, the novel Trollope published to general non-acclaim in 1868-69, eight years after first meeting Kate. Naturally, the dramatisation is delightful - perhaps a little too delightful - and boasts enough fine English character acting to win extensions to the BBC charter well into the next century. Just as one exquisite cameo exits left, another enters right. It is hard to know which to look forward to most. Ron Cook as the comic lower-class detective Bozzle confronting the mutton-chopped man of principle Reverend Outhouse, played by John Alderton? Anna Massey as the boggle-eyed old maid Miss Stanbury, tearing away at the dignity of the creepy curate Mr Gibson, played with more oil than vinegar by David Tennant? Or anything starring Bill Nighy, here cast as the unsafe-in-taxis parliamentarian Colonel Osborne?

The main plot concerns the marriage of Louis Trevelyan (the increasingly panda-eyed Oliver Dimsdale) to the semi-wild colonial Emily (Laura Fraser). Colonel Osborne, a man with a carefully cultivated "reputation", is Emily's godfather and calls too often for Louis's liking. In a fit of suspicion and jealousy, he kicks her out of his house and later kidnaps his son from her, convinced of her adultery. He knows he is right. We know he is wrong. Although Osborne is described to his face as "a mischief-maker at best and a blackguard at worst", he is actually the former, behaving not much worse than Trollope did with Kate. By inserting the slightest of stutters into his delivery, Nighy hints at his impotence. Back in the sticks, meanwhile, Miss Stanbury spreads gossip about them and then scolds herself mightily when she realises she has it wrong. And the sanctimonious curate finds that being God's gift to the female population of Wells is more trouble than it is worth.

Lacking out-and-out venality to go at, Andrew Davies edged the production to comedy at every stage of episodes one and two. In the second, he upped the actors' to-camera soliloquies to a dangerous level. Nor could he stop himself using words ("intercourse", as a verb!) and phrases ("duty of care" - cf: the BBC and Andrew Gilligan) that he knew would raise a titter at the back of the class. Fortunately, Davies is too smart to let his overegging spoil the omelette fatally, and in the third episode he allowed the piece's serious themes of truth-telling, propriety and child custody rights to assert themselves. There is, after all, a young marriage in crisis here - and that is no funnier than Trollope managing to keep his own on the rails.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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