Northanger Abbey, Sunday, ITV1

The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom, Sunday, BBC Two

“Dammit this is Bath, you know. Everything is more free and easy in Bath.” In his doomed attempt to seduce our heroine through innuendo, this gargoyle from last night’s Northanger Abbey might have added that things are also freer and easier in baths. They certainly are in Andrew Davies’s adaptations. Davies, who made Colin Firth famous by wetting his blouse to translucence in Pride and Prejudice , abides strictly by his own rule when making TV out of the classics, namely: up the sex and jokes. Thus it was that the virginal Catherine Morland, playedby Felicity Jones ( The Archers ’ Emma Grundy), was one moment daydreaming in her bathtub and the next arising from it naked in a forest to be greeted by her clerically attired suitor.

Reports of her full backward nudity were exaggerated. So was her face, its full lips almost permanently parted in a toothsome expression somewhere between astonishment and rapture. Some say that Jane Austen cannot be trusted in Davies’s hands, that her two inches of ivory (as she described her canvas) get crushed in his ape-like mitts. This underestimates the robustness of masterpieces and misjudges Austen, who wielded a pen so sharp that it could hit Davies where it hurt.

In any case, if Davies is a sensationaliser, of all her books, Northanger is the one that speaks to his talents. It is the story of a respectable teenager who has filled her head with gothic horror novels. In Bath, where Catherine is first introduced into society, everyone is reading them — well the girls anyway; the boys are busy trying to read the girls — but only Catherine mind-melds with them. As she soaks, the floral wallpaper in the bathroom sprouts extra fronds until she is trapped in a forest of fantasies.

Davies was not wrong to source her wanton imagination in a wannabe libido. He overegged it, of course, because he is Andrew Davies. While we never exactly see her reading one-handed, there is no doubting why she is so annoyed when her sisters interrupt her alone with a book in the long grass. The director Jon Jones kept up the background heat by aiming his camera firmly at his actresses’ cleavages. Isabella and Eleanor became Catherine’s bosom friends in every sense.

His horror sequences were flat, however, and Northanger Abbey, which should be up there with the Addams Family mansion, looked no more sordid than some Holiday Inns that I’ve visited. The spookiness was left to Liam Cunningham’s grunting General Tilney and he welcomed Catherine to Northanger with all the sunny charm of Dracula’s butler in the Hammer movies.

Davies, meanwhile, failed to get over Austen’s real point, that the complications and pitfalls of the class structure in Bath were far more horrifying and unknowable than potboiler gothic. Austen’s first novel was a horror story, you see. But dammit, this was a free and easy adaptation. On a cold spring weekend, it made you believe the sap might yet again rise. Jones is a radio actress of whom we shall doubtless see more (and even more if Davies is writing the script).

For perverts who, instead, get their rocks off on ideas, BBC Two played against Northanger Abbey the last part of Adam Curtis’s weirdly brilliant documentary trilogy, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom . Curtis’s favourite phrase was “as this series has shown”. I was not sure if it had.

He intones his theories against bizarre archive footage that induce a delightful suspension of disbelief, so that Tony Blair intones as tumbrels from a silent movie of the French Revolution roll past his podium. Upon leaving this dream state, it can be hard to summarise Curtis’s arguments sensibly. And there is sleight of hand. The “pragmatic” Bill Clinton was shown raising his eyes to heaven just after we had watched Tony Blair ranting about world liberation. Different country. Different date.

Isaiah Berlin, inventor of “negative freedom”, began as hero of the episode and ended as its villain. A clip from a 1950s BBC show called Conversations for Tomorrow , apparently set in the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club, had him objecting to paternalist anything. In the hands of Blair and the neocons, Curtis argued, negative had turned positive. The result was Baghdad. Nothing good comes out of smoke-filled rooms. As this series has shown.

In search of Big Gordon

Had Adam Curtis negotiated the rights, he might have used Apple’s famous “1984” commercial in The Trap. It’s the ad that portrayed IBM as Big Brother. But you don’t fret about copyrightif you make internet shorts. “Hillary1984”, aclip that transforms Mrs Clinton into Big Sister, has made headlines in the US. It was made bya geekcalledPhil rather than the obvious suspects at Barack Obama’s HQ. So, a bottle of champagne for the first reader to spot a viral video depicting Gordon Brown as Stalin. Obviously, if we have to wait for the next Tory party political broadcast, the offer is void.

Your thoughts please . . .

I’ll be on this page three days per week and Ian Johns on Thursdays and Fridays. But TV’s frontier is too vast to be monitored by us alone. Our only hope is if you join us on the lookout — and, preferably, can work Real Player, SkyPlus and Four on Demand (took me three weeks, that last one). In other words: Read. Watch. Email. Please.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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