Television - Full of vulgar touches, this adaptation is truly Dickensian, writes Andrew Billen Bleak House (BBC1)

The law, it is observed in Andrew Davies's adaptation of Bleak House, grinds very slow and very fine. So also, sometimes, do television "classic" serials. At 15 episodes and eight hours, Bleak House (Thursdays 8pm, and Fridays 8.30pm) might threaten to be a case in point but for two things. The first, as has been much remarked upon, is that, apart from the opening double episode (27 October), it has been chopped into half-hour chunks and is being run in the post-EastEnders slot.

This gives the double illusion that it is a soap opera (although the arty, fidgety camera work is nothing like a soap's) and that it honours the book's origins as a monthly part-work (although why twice-weekly instalments are more faithful to this than weekly ones puzzles me).

The second reason why no one is likely to complain that this Bleak House is too much of a good thing is Andrew Davies, who takes a realistic view of Victorian novels, namely that they are too slow, too wordy and too complicated for television's needs. The most striking aspect of the opening hour is that Davies has abolished the wonderful, finite-verbless prose poem with which Dickens starts the novel. Davies not only does away with a narrator's voice but with the weather it describes. Instead of "fog everywhere", the meteorological conditions have worsened to a mini Katrina. There is rain everywhere, slashing, lashing, bouncing off the top hats, steaming off the horses, reflecting off the streets. Instead of being wreathed in smog, the blue-black landscape is illuminated by lightning flashes.

Bad weather is a cliche of the gothic and fits the book's title but, as importantly, the TV opening honours the television convention that stories should begin with either an explosion or a car chase. So here, mutatis mutandis, we get claps of thunder and horses galloping like mad pulling a carriage through the rain. The carriage is taking our heroine Esther to the High Court of Chancery and she is late for a very important date. Davies is taking a liberty here. There is no suggestion in the novel that the stagecoach is late. Indeed, Esther's perfectly gentle ride in the book is not to court but to Miss Donny's boarding school. Even if it were to Chancery, it would be against the spirit of the novel to suggest the law courts ever required anyone to rush anywhere. But Davies wishes to establish the pace of his reworking.

Bleak House is a complicated novel, but judging by the first 90 minutes, Davies has hacked a clearway through the thickets of its plot. We need not expect Dickens, who adapted his own works for the stage, to have minded. When a girl on a train admitted she skipped past his longer boring bits (not, she added politely, the shorter boring bits), he laughed. What he would have thought of how Davies has revised the book's other major drawback is less easy to say. Even by Dickens's standards, Esther is an extraordinarily wimpish heroine: "I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that," she writes. But Anna Maxwell Martin's Esther is anything but stupid. She is alert, questioning, pragmatic and dismissive of fools, such as her suitor Guppy.

Maxwell Martin's winning performance does very well to stand out amid a crowd of older A-list character actors. Gillian Anderson haughtily suffers as Lady Dedlock, locked into a marriage with Timothy West's beautifully understated Sir Leicester, a man who can be firm when needed with everyone but his wife. Charles Dance turns the lawyer Tulkinghorn into a darker, sterner figure than I recall from the book. Denis Lawson embodies troubled decency as John Jarndyce. While Nathaniel Parker is not physically my idea of the phoney simpleton Skimpole (one of my favourite Dickens characters), his interpretation will more than do. Richard Griffiths does a great turn as the uxorious Bayham Badger, more proud of his wife's former husbands than he is even of her.

Even the more gimmicky casting decisions seem to have paid off: Alistair McGowan as Kenge, Liza Tarbuck as Mrs Jellyby and Johnny Vegas, at last giving the acting performance we fans hoped he was capable of, as the rasping, cynical and, finally, explosive Krook (how Davies must have been tempted to start with his spontaneous combustion and work back). With such rich parts for everyone else, I almost pitied Richard Harrington as Woodcourt for having to play someone sane. I didn't mind Polanski's new Oliver Twist but he had nowhere near this access to charactor acting.

Nemo, the opium addict, played with agonising desperation by John Lynch, is buried in the second episode. His coffin is given a helping kick into the burial plot. It seemed a slightly gratuitous touch and I had a mind to check it in the original text. In the same way, I thought of drawing attention to Guppy's riposte when Esther rejects his hand: "And that is your final answer?", which sounded more like a lift from Tarrant than Dickens. But, on reflection, I realise it matters little whether the cruder touches are Dickens's or Davies's: in both cases the vulgarity is part of their talent. Whatever you may say of other Victorian novels, nothing Dickens wrote was ever fragile or discreet or in good taste. The great mystery is why Davies has never been asked to dramatise a Dickens before. They are made for each other.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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