Alert Janeite Cinthia asked us to pass along that the third episode of S&S, to be broadcast tomorrow on BBC One, will start twenty minutes earlier than the first two episodes, at 20:40 GMT rather than 21:00. It also looks like you can catch up with the first two episodes if you missed them or want to see them again.

We suspect that Dominic Cooper will wish this interview back one day. He comes off rather like, well, Marianne Dashwood: sensitive and emotional and unwilling to put on a false public face. This is not necessarily a bad thing, we hasten to add, but we are astonished that someone would bare so much of his inner life in the public press. Also, he’s friends with Colin Firth, which should recommend him in many quarters.

The evening before we meet, Dominic Cooper was having supper with Colin Firth.

The actors recently worked together in Greece on the movie Mamma Mia!, where they struck up a friendship of sorts.

Cooper says Firth is “someone I’d like to be like - a funny, charismatic person…”

He continues to list Firth’s qualities, but I have to confess I don’t quite catch all he says.

Instead, I’m imagining that supper between damp, magnificent Mr Darcy and Byronic Mr Willoughby. The shirts, the trousers, the smouldering silences - oh, to have been a fly in the soup…

“All we share in common is our big, fat, feral hair,” continues Cooper.

Heh.

“Whenever I mentioned it to people, they said: ‘Oh Willoughby - nasty piece of work.’

But but but…we thought everyone LOVED Willoughby because he was sexy! Andrew Davies said so!

“You have to remember the time and how, for girls, if you don’t have money you’re screwed.

“Marianne doesn’t have money, which makes life very difficult for her.

“Willoughby doesn’t have money, so needs his aunt’s inheritance.

Well…actually he has money, but spends it all in anticipation of the inheritance. Slight difference.

That’s why it’s so desperate when he rejects Marianne.

“I do truly believe that he was absolutely in love with her, that he wanted to marry her and is about to ask her to marry him, but gets put in a very difficult position.”

Cooper says this with a palpable empathy that moistens moody brown eyes.

Imagine us rolling ours, but then we’re a cynical old tar-hearted middle-aged spinster. Thanks to Alert Janeite Helen B. for the link.

The Times suggests that we’ve had a little too much prettified Jane Austen and need to go for heartier historical fare.

For decades, TV programmers have been feeding us on the comfort viewing that has come to define our vision of the 19th century. Through the adapter’s skill and the camera’s seductive imagery we’ve come to see our modern lives reflected in the experiences of Ebenezer Scrooge, Lizzie Bennet and Jane Eyre more than Dickens, Austen or Charlotte Brontë surely intended. After some 50 years of intense exposure to the 19th century we no longer view the muddy streets of northern towns or the Bath Assembly Rooms as a Martian terrain. But we should.

Our ancestors were aliens. Aliens in bonnets. Especially the Victorians. The quiet crime of the costume drama has been to slyly convince us that in spite of their indefatigable Christian morality, social crusading zeal, and sense of civic responsibility that the inhabitants of the 19th century shared our modern values more than their predecessors. That somehow, their restrained, conviction-led era was in fact very close to our own.

Society changes, but people don’t. It is a truth uni… oh, you know.

A growing disaffection with period programming stuck in a Dickens-Austen loop has led the rare, brave network executive to opt for something fresher. Over the past two years, BBC Four has stuck its neck out and served up regular doses of the 18th century, culminating in the success of Fanny Hill, which captured 1.1 million viewers on its first night, the channel’s largest ratings share to date. It may go some way towards proving that, in spite of the homeliness of the 19th century, 21st-century audiences are more likely to recognise life in the Georgian era.

Surely they know that Jane Austen was Georgian?

This article in Intelligent Life opines that the latest adaptation misses the point a bit.

In the new “Sense and Sensibility”, the family home that our heroines have to quit when their mean brother inherits, is in fact magnificent Wrotham Park, near London: built, it is true, by untitled Admiral Byng (the one executed in the 1750s pour encourager les autres) but splendid enough for any earl, rather than the equally untitled squires who in fiction owned it. Conversely the Devon cottage to which our heroines retreat—in the book, a fairly new one, half a mile of fertile, plainly docile fields and woods from the mansion of the family friend it belongs to—has been downgraded into a crude, ancient, maybe smuggler’s cottage on the wildest part of the Devon coast.

The issue isn’t one of infidelity to Jane Austen. It is the disconcerting clash between the characters and their properties: they are of one class, their homes of another.

The issue of sex goes deeper. Andrew Davies, the successful script-writer—and, yes, he mostly deserves to be—of more than one such adaptation, thinks it his business to put back the sex that Jane Austen left out. Charlotte Bronte, inaccurately, accused her of knowing little of the female heart. Davies’s concern is femininity well below the belt. Jane Austen indeed knew little of this, and female sexuality is indeed not an invention of the late 20th century. But it was ludicrous to start the Beeb’s new “S-and-S” with a scene better suited to some soft-porn movie, even if it did not morph into the routine gasping-’n'-writhing footage that today’s film-makers presumably can hire by the orgasmful.

The issue again is not fidelity to Austen. It’s the importation of 21st-century sensibility into a society that did not share it. Sure, her age had its sex, its seductions and its licentious side, what age doesn’t? But that wasn’t the side that she was writing about. The result again is discord. I’ve nothing against gasping or writhing, nor against ducal magnificence—in their proper place. But are they really needed, even in 2008, to sell Jane Austen?

Yep.