Television - A tale of 18th-century feminine wiles proves gripping viewing, writes Andrew Billen The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (ITV1)

If Greg Dyke's maths are right, ITV will soon be unable to afford to make a glossy episode of the Miss Marple stories, let alone anything as ambitious as The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. In days of yore, producers might have made Cornwall double for Botany Bay; here Australia, where the four-hour mini-series was filmed, presumably doubled for both Cornwall and Timor, as well as its 18th-century self. Nor can you tell me that the boats were Airfix props tossed in tubs. This Anglo-Aussie co-production looked as good as last year's big drain on licence-fee-payers' pockets, To the Ends of the Earth. Sneer not when ITV attempts to compete with BBC costume epics look a little gaudy - soon we may only dream about the days when the BBC had such competition.

Mary Bryant (16 and 17 April) was ambitious, too, and not just in creating seafaring scenes plausible enough to make you want to heave up your Cadbury's Creme Eggs. This was a true story that carried huge social significance at the time, and yet over the next two centuries was largely forgotten. I was not surprised to learn that the writer, Peter Berry, tried for ten years to get a green light for the project, or that ITV finally gave in only as quid pro quo for him writing the sixth Prime Suspect.

But Bryant's journey was nothing if not incredible. Arrested for stealing a bonnet (and, as Berry's script was honest enough to admit, a small amount of money), the Cornish teenager was sentenced to transportation as one of the first colonisers of New South Wales. The terrible voyage was made worse for Mary by her being, as the script inevitably put it, with child. Yet the voyage halfway round the world was literally only half of it. When the Botany Bay community looked as if it would starve to death, Mary and a party of men stole the governor's schooner and sailed to Timor, the Dutch colony some 3,500 miles away.

The escapees managed to pass themselves off as survivors of a shipwreck for a while, but were finally found out and transported back to Britain for trial. Such was the outcry on their behalf that the survivors were pardoned.

The whiskery judge's declaration that Mary was "free" was an appropriate climax to a piece that tended to labour the obvious point that she was a anything but. Dr Johnson saw a ship as a floating jail, and for transportees it was literally so. Mary was also subject to poverty, starvation, illiteracy and the wrong marriage. Her husband, Will, labouring under an assumed identity in Timor, went a bit metaphysical on her and declared: "If we can't be who we are . . . this is just another prison."

As Mary, Romola Garai gave an extra-ordinarily rich performance. I had not thought her perfectly cast as the society beauty in the BBC's Daniel Deronda a few years ago, but here as a coarser beast, her big facial features and paddling-pool eyes provided more than enough feral beauty and intelligence for the role.

Beside her, as was the intent, her male co-stars paled into vagueness. Her hubby may have been called Will, but as Alex O'Loughlin demonstrated in his second-fiddle approach to the part, he was not man enough to say no when she press-ganged him into marriage in Botany Bay, or to object to her plan to sleep with their jailer, Lieutenant Ralph Clarke.

Ralph (pronounced as in Fiennes) was played by Jack Davenport, who after his runs as Miles in This Life and Steve in Coupling has mastered the art of play- ing losers. Clarke lost big time to Mary, making the mistake of falling in love with her on board the ship and then believing that she had fallen for him in the colony. When he arrested her in Timor, the surprise was that Berry did not have him rape her - saintly restraint indeed.

There was restraint, too, in not turning Mary into a proto-feminist heroine. She was something more worrying than that: a brilliant strategist and natural leader whose morality had been reduced to doing exactly what was necessary for her own preservation and that of her children. Talking of whom: Charlotte and her baby brother Emmanuel were the best-behaved kids ever. Going one better than the Victorian rule that les enfants should be seen and not heard, the pair became entirely invisible, at least to this viewer's eye, for long periods at sea. (I have had less well-behaved children in the back of my car going down to Brighton.)

Admittedly, it is possible that from time to time I had become distracted by their mother's embonpoint, which kept revealing itself not only in the bedroom but under the hellish sun, etc. When I heard early on that the female prisoners' clothes had been left on the quayside, I confess I feared the worst (that is, hoped for the best), and I was not disappointed.

But we all use sex from time to time to keep our audience. I hope that ITV's stayed, because Berry, his director Peter Andrikidis and the cast worked their socks, and in some cases their stockings, off to entertain us with a story I was glad to be informed about. And if I see a more disturbing performance than Garai's this year, I may need to seek professional help.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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