When Thomas Hardy was 84 he invited for tea in Dorset the actress who was to play Tess in a silent movie of his most famous novel. And what did the great master of prose write in his journal of their encounter, during which they surely discussed the problems of adaptation and the portrayal of a pure but sexual woman? Two words: “Yum, yum.”

I have to say BBC One's Tess never looked yum-yummier than last night. Dressed in finery bought for her by the wicked Alec, her hair up where usually it lay over her shoulders, her fingernails for once burnished, Tess looked every inch the femme fatale, which indeed she was, having murdered Alec with the boarding house bread knife. Pure no more, she and Angel, her estranged but now won-back husband, had exceptional sex in one of the rather fine mansions the citizens of Wessex left unattended in those days.

The lovenest was decorated with a large tapestry of what looked like the Garden of Eden. Expulsion was inevitable. Soon the doormat-crossed lovers were sharing a less comfortable bed at Stonehenge, whose slabs were also left unattended in those trusting days. The police stole up while Tess slept and took her off for questioning and execution. Angel looked on sadly from a hill above the jail, accompanied by Tess's younger sister, the over-named Liza-Lu, whom - in what has always struck me as a deeply sinister arrangement - he will marry in Tess's stead.

There was nothing much wrong with this Tess. It was, by some way, an improvement on Ted Whitehouse's two-part adaptation for ITV a decade ago. For one thing, the BBC's adapter, David Nicholls, put a rightly high emphasis on the story's atheism. One of the best scenes last week had Angel, shaken to bits by Tess's confession about her illegitimate baby, whispering what the hollowly-named Mercy was surely hoping would be the traditional three little words but were actually: “It's all a lie. There is no God.” There were no voice-overs in this production, so we missed Hardy's famous pay-off about “the President of the Immortals” having “ended his sport with Tess” - but better nothing than doing what ITV did last time to appease its church-going audience: rewriting the line to say “Mankind in its honoured way had finished its sport with Tess.”

Nevertheless, the pace lagged frequently, and, once Anna Massey's Mrs D'Urberville was dead, there was little Sunday-night character-acting to relish. Although Eddie Redmayne as Angel and Hans Matheson as Alec had youth on their side, neither carried much charisma. (I make no complaint about Gemma Arterton's Tess, a spirited lass and of more appropriately comely and hormonal proportions than Nastassja Kinski in the Polanski movie.) And the directors, David Blair here included, still missed the visual clues, many of them phallic, that the book is full of (I refer them to Tony Tanner's essay Colour and Movement in Tess). A final star-depriving reservation: Rob Lane's music was often as unsubtle as that of the piano player who no doubt accompanied the original silent movie.

For musical uplift we had to wait until after the news for The Story of the Guitar. Presented for some reason by Alan Yentob, who admitted he barely knew how to pick one up, this extremely entertaining part one of three contained stunning performances by Segovia, John Williams and Xuefei Yang, the first person to be allowed to study that instrument of Western decadence at the Beijing Conservatoire.

Yentob's theme was that the guitar was both a means of seduction and its object. Everyone agreed with that: from Apollo who, having failed to rape Daphne, made into a lyre the laurel tree into which she had been turned; to Yang, who said that playing was like “making music with your partner”. Next week we get the guitar as deadly weapon. Cue Pete Townshend who, teased at school, yesterday recalled his complex motives for learning to play: “When I come out with this guitar you'll f***ing wish you didn't f*** with me.”

The new American sci-fi series Fringe began last night with a mega episode crammed with ideas, mostly other people's. Co-created by J. J. Abrams, who invented Lost, the show, fair enough, ripped off Lost's aircraft opening, but then went on to rip off The X-Files, Silence of the Lambs and Minority Report, too.

The main interest was working out who was going to be Mulder to FBI Agent Olivia Duham's Scully - the shaven- chested John Scott or Charlie Francis who never spoke in less than a shout. It turned out to be neither but the sarcy, unfunny Peter Bishop, son of the mad yet brilliant scientist who has worked out how to make dead people telepathic and loves Sponge Bob SquarePants. The show is saved by some borderline genius-rubbish dialogue. Villainess with prosthetic arm: “How long has he been dead?” Henchman: “Five hours”. Villainess: “Question him.”

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