Ah, the Eighties. It was an age of asymmetrical haircuts, padded shoulders, legwarmers and the Sinclair C5. Or Thatcherite greed- is-good hedonism. Or strikes, riots and Arthur Scargill. In whatever way we experienced this decade, sufficient time has passed for the Eighties to assume the distinct and finite shape of a historical era. Indeed, some of us — well, OK, some of you — are young enough to regard mass unemployment and nuclear chess games as simply motifs, like Ultravox and mullets, in a loose cultural collage.

Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, set among the Tory upper echelons, treats the period more precisely. It reconstructs the years 1983 to 1987 almost like a costume drama through the gestures and artefacts — dinner parties, champagne flutes, cocaine-fuelled excess — of this rarefied social circle. Oh, and sex. The book offers plenty of casual couplings with which Andrew Davies, adapting the book for BBC Two, can again push the sexual envelope for primetime drama (remember the lesbian trysts in Tipping the Velvet?).

Granted entry into this world is the middle-class Nick Guest, a gay Oxford graduate and budding Henry James scholar besotted by beautiful objects and people. He becomes a lodger in the baronial West London home of his college friend, Toby Fedden, whose father Gerald is a rising Tory MP.

The opening episode found Nick happy to be a Fedden household fixture to house-sit, keep a fraternal eye on Catherine, their manic-depressive daughter, and make up the numbers at parties. In this way he enjoyed the seductive climate of money and privilege, while through Leo, a black council worker, he embraced the new freedoms of metropolitan gay life.

After his first date with Leo, Nick took advantage of the Fedden’s keyholder privileges to use the private garden in the square at the back of the house for some alfresco sex. In the book this suggested both Nick’s excited entrance into gay life through a deliriously unprotected coupling and his sudden access into the English ruling class. On screen the scene, though strong stuff for even a modern literary adaptation, lacked any resonance.

Similarly, Toby’s 21st birthday party at the country pile of Gerald’s loaded in-laws — “Not so much a party as a party conference,” Gerald joked — was a decadent whirl on the page. What we saw was a more decorous depiction with big hair and bad dancing to Duran Duran and the Pretenders.

Saul Dibb’s direction also lacked Hollinghurst’s ability to use Nick’s surroundings as an emotional barometer with Nick simply wide-eyed at anything with columns or filigree. The sense of his giddy intoxication of first love and the gilded world around him was curiously muted. This opening episode often simply played out like Brideshead Revisited updated by Eighties Tatler.

Still, with already hinted-at Aids and cocaine looming to blight Nick’s world, and a boom-and-bust economy to dent high politics, the drama should liven up. And let’s hope that Davies can make characters such as Catherine seem more than just a wayward, implicated voice of conscience as Dibb has a fine cast of fresh faces.

Dan Stevens leads the way as Nick, all charm and diplomacy as he drifts inoffensively between cliques and classes to maintain his Jamesian position as an insider-outsider. You also want to see more of Tim McInnerny as Gerald, desperate to cosy up to Mrs T, even if he sports a ginger wig that looks as if it’s done time in Davies’s adaptation of Bleak House.

As a title, The Line of Beauty not only refers to cocaine and the bodily curves of a lover but also Nick’s dangerous susceptibility to all things beautiful. The Girl Who Came Back from the Dead (C4) was more of an attention-grabbing ruse. The film told how, in 1997, ten-day-old Delimar Cuevas was presumed dead after a house fire in the Hispanic inner city of Philadelphia. It was only through her mother’s conviction that her baby was still alive that Delimar was found six years later in New Jersey, having been abducted and raised as her own by a distant relative.

Although most of the participants in this incredible story were interviewed, including a strikingly self-possessed Delimar, this made surprisingly dull viewing. Since we knew the outcome from the start, with the story reiterated interminably after each break, it was inevitably anti-climatic and not helped by pointless blurry reconstructions. Now I can take yet another depiction of a country house party as seen in The Line of Beauty if there’s a point to it. But an out-of-focus family gathering in Philadelphia? I don’t think so.

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