Senseless sensibility: Just another Jane Austen adaptation?

Television audiences are suckers for anything with Jane Austen in the title. When in doubt, our clever TV schedulers simply up the "bonnet" factor. Because Jane is nothing if not adaptable. We've had a lesbian gothic Mansfield Park (the Patricia Rozema film with Frances O'Connor), a Beverly Hills 90210-style version of Emma (Amy Heckerling's Clueless) and a wonderfully kitsch Bollywood extravaganza (Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice).

Even Jane's own story is up for grabs: 2007 saw two biographical films – Becoming Jane about her early love affair with Tom Lefroy, starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy; and Miss Austen Regrets, where Olivia Williams portrayed Jane as a fortysomething flirt, keen on drinking and parties.

So it comes as little surprise that ITV's next major four-part drama – Lost in Austen – is Life on Mars Austen. Billed as "an ingenious re-invention" of Pride and Prejudice by Drop the Dead Donkey writer Guy Jenkins, it's a time-slip narrative that sees Lizzie Bennet (new Bond star Gemma Arterton) swap lives with modern-day office worker, Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper).

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• Bonnets and bustles: the best Austen adaptations

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.

Going back in time 200 years will mean there's plenty of opportunity for jokes about breeches, porter, body hair and sexual attitudes. Oh, and think of the frocks and the stately homes.

But is anyone else getting a bit exhausted? Clueless was excellent and 2008's female rom-com The Jane Austen Book Club was nowhere near as bad as the critics said it was ("cinematic hemlock" and "icky, brain-dead, ya-ya-sisterhood sludge" were some of the better reviews). But isn't it slightly embarrassing that we keep cutting and pasting the same six books?

Yes, it's great that a whole new generation of teenagers will be seduced by Austen. That the Skins kids will see the surging emotions suppressed beneath scores of Empire-line dresses – and realise that 15-year-olds didn't invent foreplay. Maybe they'll even bother to read the books. Adapting the 1980 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, Fay Weldon boasted: "I always think it's a writer's duty to help people through exams." But actually what is particularly worrying is the future of television itself. Where's the next Skins? Or the next Torchwood? Or a decent British version of Gossip Girl?

It's fascinating really that Austenisation still pulls in the Facebook crowd. But then her novels are total wish-fulfilment fantasies. They're provocative and sexy, yet safe because they are always based on the assumption that the story will start with a single girl and end with at least one marriage.

With our chaotic, multi-tasking lives, it's no wonder that people crave a micro-world of strict rules – from Cranford to Miss Marple's St Mary Mead. In Austen everyone is someone's brother, aunt, sister or cousin (we could be on the set of Friends). And her preoccupations – boy meets girl; girls loses boy; the clash between mothers and daughters – are the classic anxieties of 18- to 25-year-olds everywhere.

Austen novels are about sex. Or at least about how people deal with their sexual desires within a particular social convention. One that prioritises money and caste. It's hard to reject a potential husband when the alternative is spinsterhood, dependence and poverty. It's no wonder that Helen Fielding stole most of the good bits for Bridget Jones. Or that Chadha's new film, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, is teen Austen once removed. From 15 to 50 we never stop worrying about how to balance the needs of the self and the demands of society. Is there any such thing as real love?

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.

And master adaptor Andrew Davies is a modern god for putting the sex and violence back into Austen's novels. The recent rape scene that opened Davies' BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility stopped any of us swooning over Willoughby. It marked the end of the chocolate box, National Trust vision, thank God.

What is worrying is that so many film and television adaptations lack real intelligence. That special authorial voice – part bitch, part psychologist – is so hard to reproduce on screen. Of course, Austen is catnip for actors. It's the Equity get-out-of-jail-free card.

Colin Firth went to Hollywood after playing Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Felicity Jones's career went into overdrive after paying Catherine Moreland in ITV's Northanger Abbey. Gwyneth was surprisingly wonderful in Emma. Mike Leigh regular Hawkins shone in Persuasion. And we all like a bit of post-modern totty in breeches (thank you, Dominic Cooper and Dan Stevens in Sense and Sensibility). Austen's men are real men, after all.

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.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that Austen's strongly plotted novels are a gift to modern film-makers – for a start, they are all out of copyright, so free for anyone who wants to loot the original. But the irony of sexing up Austen's novels with pretty young things is that you lose all the good bits – mature heartache, grey hair, being on the shelf at 27. It's significant that the best Austen films of the last 10 years – Nick Dear's 1995 Persuasion (directed by Roger Michell); Emma Thompson and Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility; Miss Austen Regrets; Shergold's Persuasion – are meditations on grief.

Because great Austen is all about near-failure and last chances. Her understanding of the human heart is forensic. There are betrayals, spurnings, jiltings, elopements, heartbreaks, secrets and adulteries. In many ways, the modern equivalent of Persuasion is a film like Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jane would have understood the moral of that film – the desire to "erase" our memories of a tragic love affair forever. But she would also applaud the great generosity where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet's warring couple – teetering towards failure once again – decide to have one last go. Because love the second time around, as Persuasion proves, might just be worth it.

It's that bold, surreal vision that is lovable about modern films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation or Being John Malkovich (the ultimate modern time-travel story). Why can't there be more original writing like that – shot through with mature sense and sensibility, rather than funked-up bonnet screenplays?

'Lost in Austen' will be on ITV in September

Bonnets and bustles: the best Austen adaptations
By James Rampton

1. Clueless

Austen's universality is underscored by how seamlessly her work can be transposed to other eras. In this dazzling 1995 cinematic re-imagining of Emma, Alicia Silverstone gave her finest performance to date as a supremely shallow matchmaker in a modern-day, Beverly Hills 90210-style high school.

2. Pride and Prejudice

The grandaddy of all Austen adaptations, Andrew Davies' 1995 version of the novel for BBC1 is credited with sparking the current fashion for bonnet and bustle dramas. No matter how many Mamma Mia!s he does, in many minds Colin Firth will always remain Mr Darcy. He made the female half of the nation (including, of course, Bridget Jones) swoon as he emerged from a lake like a 19th-century winner of a wet T-shirt competition in "that scene".

3. Sense and Sensibility

Taiwanese film maker Ang Lee offered an acute outsider's insight into Austen in this compelling 1995 interpretation of the book. Emma Thompson delivered a charming turn as the older, wiser, Dashwood sister, Elinor, but scooped an Oscar not for that performance, but for Best Adapted Screenplay.

4. Persuasion

1995 was a vintage year for screen adaptations of Austen. It also saw this brooding BBC2 reading of the thwarted love affair between the intelligent Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) and the troubled Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds). Roger Michell, who went on to direct Notting Hill and Enduring Love, employed a dark-hued palette to memorable effect.