The Telegraph has an article about why-we-keep-adapting-Jane-yada-yada that contains the somewhat interesting news that Lost in Austen will be broadcast in ITV in September.

Lizzie enters our modern world through a portal in the Bennet wardrobe and ends up in a bedsit in Hammersmith; while Amanda moves into 19th-century Longbourn with the rest of the Bennet family. It’s every teenage girl’s fantasy: sleeping in a bed with Jane, curling Lydia and Mary’s hair. Bingley makes a pass at you, while Darcy smoulders and mentally ravishes you. The plot pretty much writes itself. You just step into the pages of your favourite book.

Why don’t they just name the main character Mary Sue and get it over with?

The audience’s desire for courtly love is fine. It doesn’t even matter if they play loose with the plot. Janeites are horrified by the inappropriate kissing, but the final frames of Adrian Shergold’s extraordinary 2007 film Persuasion, where Sally Hawkins literally ran to claim her love, pounding along the streets of Bath as the camera whirled and swooped, were brilliant.

Hmm.

The audience’s desire for courtly love is fine. It doesn’t even matter if they play loose with the plot. Janeites are horrified by the inappropriate kissing, but the final frames of Adrian Shergold’s extraordinary 2007 film Persuasion, where Sally Hawkins literally ran to claim her love, pounding along the streets of Bath as the camera whirled and swooped, were brilliant really weird.

There, fixed that for you.

And master adaptor Andrew Davies is a modern god for putting the sex and violence back into Austen’s novels.

Put it BACK into Austen’s novels? What?

The recent rape scene that opened Davies’ BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility stopped any of us swooning over Willoughby.

We were too busy trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

But you know casting is not the same as character. Impressionable middle-aged men may fawn over Keira in Pride and Prejudice, but casting Billie Piper (all tits and pout) in Mansfield Park was a grievous mistake. She’s a lovely young actress, but playing moralistic Fanny Price? Someone should be shot. So I’m not losing sleep over the Bond girl in Lost in Austen.

Casting is the least of their problems, really.

It’s late and we’re tired. Dorothy has the Cluebat; feel free to swing away.