Now that bonfires are banned, insecticides have done for migrating swallow-flocks, and “mists and mellow fruitfulness” have been replaced with driving, relentless monsoon from May to November, there is only one way the canny Briton can divine the true start of autumn - telly!

For soon, we will see the unmistakable harbingers: migrating flocks of period- drama bonnets, skeining across the skies. Pungent plumes of next door's Strictly Come Dancing, floating over the fence. And, in churches stacked with sheaves of wheat, the congregation lifting their voices as one, and giving thanks for the return of Harry Hill's TV Burp.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles marks the first of the Africa-bound bonnets - soon to be followed, in majestic V-shapes across the clouds, by Little Dorrit, The Devil's Whore and the Christmas Doctor Who, in which David Morrissey pops up in a stove-pipe hat.

To say this Tess is good is an understatement. In fact, it's Tess-book stuff. Tess-book stuff!!!* In the difficult, dirty days before suffrage, Tess Durbeyfield (Gemma Arterton) is caught between her hen-stupid, sly-smiling mother (Ruth Jones, from Gavin and Stacey), and her stumbling, broke-horse, ale-eyed father. Tess sings in the meadows, and tends her siblings but, when the financial crisis comes, she must wash her hair under the spout, put on her best dress, and go sell herself to the D'Urbervilles - whistling “country airs” to old Mrs D'Urbervilles's songbirds, while her naughty, Buck Rogers-esque cousin, Alec, circles her, like a tight-britch'd stoat.

It doesn't take a particularly astute critic to say that Gemma Arterton is a star. She is already in both the next Richard Curtis film, and the forthcoming Quantum of Solace - and when she takes Alec D'Urberville's proffered, totemic strawberry in her mouth, it's with all the oral magnificence of the next Bond girl.

But it's with Tess's often-tedious “purity” that Arterton really kicks ass. While Justine Waddell and Nastassja Kinski rendered Tess as an uptight virgin milkmaid, repeatedly wailing, “Oim a good girl, oi am!” between violations, Arterton makes her as fierce as a colt. You can see how this Tess eventually takes Angel Clare, and is like “a breeze through his nerves”.

Hardy's aesthetic pleasure in Tess is equalled in the cinematographer's pleasure in Wessex. Given our wet-slime and clay-cold summer, it's surreal to reflect that this world of billowing, bone-dry Downs is in our country. Shot in HD - Thomas HD!!!!!** - the palette is the bleachy-whites of dead oaks, petticoat linens, chalk hills and moonlight. It looks as exotic as Thailand did in 1980s episodes of Wish You Were Here. You can almost imagine a Cuprinol-faced Judith Chalmers wandering through a dairy yard, holding a cocktail, and saying “Cheers!”

Of course, when all the excitement fades a little, one has to admit to oneself: one cannot live on powerhouse BBC adaptations of classic novels alone. These are, at the end of the day, treats. Like cake. Big cake. For day-to-day existence, one needs something far more nourishing and profound. Something like Strictly Come Dancing!

Clearly the most important television show ever made, ever, Strictly returns this week, with a line-up that might actually be the most profound collation of humanity ever recorded. John Sergeant! Phil Daniels! Gillian Taylforth! Amazing! The opportunities for salvation, redemption and revelation are, as always, vast. If Jessie Wallace pulls her cheerful Cockney boots back on, she could go back to being the nation's sweetheart in a mere three weeks. Andrew Castle, the man with the oblong orange head from GMTV, is being given a precious opportunity to appear on television without having to link awkwardly from Kym Marsh to a hurricane. And it feels like a great deal of my life has simply been leading up to watching Gary Rhodes do the tango.

Alas for the beautiful Rachel Stevens, however - universally regarded as the dullest pop star ever. Such is Stevens's disablingly comprehensive media training that, even if some manner of terrible Health and Safety accident occurs, and she ends up being raped, live on air, by tigers, she'll just give a thumbs up to the camera, and say, “I just want to thank my mum and dad, all my fans - and my management, who've been with me all the way since Day One.”

*Sigh

** SIGH

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Sun, BBC One, 9pm; Strictly Come Dancing, Sat, BBC One, 6.30pm

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