Television - A clumsy adaptation mangles a Booker winner's subtle touch, writes Andrew Billen The Line of Beauty (BBC2)

I defer to no heterosexual in my admiration of Henry James nor to any critic of any orientation in my appreciation of the veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies. The idea, however, of Davies getting his mitts on, say, The Portrait of a Lady makes my palms sweat even as I type the words. His method as an adaptor of classic literature is journalistic: first simplify, then exaggerate, usually by turning up the volume on the sex and the humour. It tends to work a treat. But not, please, on the filigree prose of Henry James.

Fortunately, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst is not a Jamesian work; it just thinks that it is. Not much is lost in Davies's three-part adaptation, which errs on the side of crude (Wednesdays, 9pm). It is a twin-plotted story of, on the one side, a rich Tory family's rise through the That cher era and, on the other, a gay virgin's sexual liberation. The young virgin, Nick Guest, lodges in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens, headed by one of Thatcher's ambitious ministers, Gerald Fedden. Nick is soon besotted by the family's lifestyle of unexamined privilege, and even enjoys their politics, in a camp kind of way.

While Nick gets up to all sorts in their private gardens, nothing he does sexually is as bizarre as the obsequies of courtly love that Gerald and his fellow acolytes pay to Thatcher. Sociologically speaking, this is a story of how the freedom she granted the nation to make obscene amounts of money paralleled, to her horror, the freedom to follow one's cock wheresoe'r it might lead (even unto Aids).

Cluttering the novel, however, are aesthetic debates that may give future generations of A-level students something to write about, but which take some following. Gerald likes Richard Strauss; Nick thinks the music vulgar. At what point does baroque decline into rococo? That sort of thing. We also need to get our heads around Hogarth's concept of a line of beauty, which is something to do with a double curve. This is clever stuff, the double curve describing the progress of the two plots, the geometry of the male bottom, and even the trajectory of a Wellington boot that Gerald throws in a welly-chucking contest at a constituency fête. Yet the meta phor is quite easily skipped over, leaving the less erudite reader to laugh at the thought that the "line of beauty" for the younger characters is invariably a line of cocaine.

That less erudite reader's friend is our adaptor, Andrew Davies. He gives the theory of the line of beauty one brief airing in episode two, lets it go, and then goes about exaggerating. The hits of the 1980s replace Strauss on the soundtrack. In the story's moment of social orgasm - when Thatcher attends the Feddens' 25th wedding anniversary - "the lady" disco-dances with Nick, whereas in the novel they foxtrot. Neither does Davies downplay the sex simply because it is homosexual: only the penises are left to the imagination in the buggery scenes, and the director, Saul Dibb, makes a good job (I was going to say a good fist) of pointing the camera lustfully at builders' cleavages. In addition, Dan Stevens as the blubbery-lipped Guest and Oliver Coleman as the golden youth Toby Fedden surely provide all the eye-candy girls and gays could want.

But, as ever, Davies cannot resist upping the sexual voltage when it comes to the straights. In the novel there is a fine scene where Nick notices that Gerald's secretary has her finger in his back trouser pocket and correctly surmises from this intimate gesture that they are having an affair. On TV, Davies has Nick intrude upon Penny giving Gerald a full, Tony-Soprano-style blow job.

Oddly, however, given Davies's reputation for injecting humour into scripts in the reckless manner cosmetic surgeons shoot collagen into lips, the comic scenes are actually better in the book. Nick's awkward meeting with his black lover's evangelical family is practically thrown away and Lady Partridge, a wonderful, ignorant monster in the novel, is a sha-dow of herself in Caroline Blakiston's rendition. Surprisingly, Davies turns out to have a less acute ear for upper-class chatter than did Woody Allen in Match Point.

Throughout, the book's central problem remains visible. Nick falls in love with the Feddens as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited fell for the Flytes, and we are meant to fall in love along with him. But all that the Feddens have going for them is their looks and their heirlooms. The only person who could fall in love with them is Nick, who has aesthetic theory where his heart should be. Thus we have a loveless hero infatuated by an unlovable family, and no one in the story to love.

Dan Stevens does what he can to make Nick human by showing his vulnerability, but he is not helped by the miscasting of Tim McInnerny as Gerald. Looking like Jim Broadbent on a bad hair day, McInnerny lacks the lethal smoothness of a true Thatcherite favourite. Only the Fedden daughter Catherine ("Cat"), played by the alluring Hayley Atwell, looks worth falling for and she is a) a woman and therefore of no sexual interest to Nick and b) clinically crazy. Davies, I fear, has asset-stripped Alan Hollinghurst's novel and not turned much of a profit. Denuded of its sinuous, pseudo-Jamesian prose, The Line of Beauty is shown to be a more minor work than it seemed when it won the 2004 Man Booker.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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