You can’t imagine that wonderfully waspish actress Sarah Parish being intimidated by a dramatist, but she has admitted that the Shakey word has made her go: “I don’t get it, I feel inadequate and thick and stupid and only Dame Judi Dench can do that.” But she also knows that Shakespeare isn’t so much about letting actors show how exquisitely they speak verse, or about “people in tights hooting lines”, as about great characters and stories.

That’s very much the thinking behind the mini-festival the BBC calls ShakespeaRe-Told. The main component is a quartet of updated plays on BBC One, starting this week with a Much Ado About Nothing set in a TV station and starring Parish as a newsreading Beatrice and Damian Lewis as a Benedick who (she says) “puts the w into anchorman”. But the season also includes Troilus and Cressida and the real Much Ado on Radio 3 and revivals of two comedies on BBC 7, as well as Shakespeare readings on Radio 4 and A Waste of Shame, a play about the Bard’s love-life that William Boyd assembled from the sonnets. The authors of Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which follow Much Ado, have made equally free with the originals. Expect medieval Scotland to shrink to a restaurant kitchen, with a power-mad James McAvoy doing things with knives Gordon Ramsay has yet to attempt; Shirley Henderson’s shrewish MP to resist (“in your dreams, mush”) Rufus Sewell’s offer of marriage; and Bill Paterson, Imelda Staunton and Johnny Vegas patrolling a theme-park, not Athenian woods.

Yet David Nicholls’s Much Ado follows Shakespeare’s plot more closely than its setting might suggest. This Benedick may call this Beatrice a “cold-hearted, joyless bitch”, and she reciprocates as colloquially, but they, too, are tricked into discovering the love behind the hatred. And Billie Piper’s sweet Hero, like her prototype, is rejected in church by a bridegroom called Claudius or Claude, provoking a furious Beatrice to utter the original ’s most famous line, “Kill Claude”.

Myself, I enjoyed the new play’s wit and sophistication and was fascinated by the changes Nicholls has been forced to make. Don’t expect his Hero to be a spotless virgin or to respond to public humiliation by consenting a second time to marry Claude. After all, this is 2005, and she has clearly absorbed her Germaine Greer.

Will these plays send people ignorant or fearful of Shakespeare scampering off to discover the originals, as the BBC hopes? That seems as naive as expecting those who enjoyed the Beeb’s similar reworkings of Chaucer to hunt down authentic texts of The Canterbury Tales. But you never know. Late in Much Ado, Parish and Lewis jointly recite one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful sonnets. Hearing that, who wouldn’t wish for more?

• For more on the season, see www.bbc.co.uk/shakespeare

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