Review

You might crudely describe the difference between Anne Bronte and Jane Austen along the following lines - one is a writer for whom manners are a deceptive oppression, the other a writer for whom they are an indispensable foundation. So it was hardly surprising that the move from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC1) to Andrew Davies's adaptation of Emma (ITV) had the effect of switching on a three-bar electric fire in an icy room. While the latter radiates the consoling warmth that we cherish in costume drama - the comfort of a world manageable by decorum - the predominant light in the former was blue-grey, a cold unglamorising candour which suited both the book and what had been done with it. This rough distinction does some disservices to Austen's novel - which is brilliantly discriminating about where manners stop and mannerism begins. When Mr Knightley concedes to Emma that "my manners may not have much to recommend me," any attentive member of the audience should by now be on the inside of the joke.

And though it would be easy to represent ITV's Emma as simply a honeyed treat for the audience, it was a little sharper in its approach than the golden light and the jaunty chortle of the music might have suggested. The novel is a story of improvement, of Mr Knightley's husbandry of fertile ground that could easily run wild - so it is important that Emma's charm is not too secure from the beginning. In this respect Kate Beckinsale was excellent, bold enough to risk the audience's dislike with the snobbish cruelty of her early experiments in selective breeding. As Mr Knightley, Mark Strong was less successful, partly because he was too attractive (decidedly unparental in his appearance, even though he has held Emma as a baby) and partly because his first rebuke to her is too unmistakably angry. Part of the book's meaning derives from the fact that Emma initially mistakes Mr Knightley's politeness for lack of gravity. She doesn't really feel the force of his admonitions until he is pressed into a breach of etiquette himself, after her cruel joke on Box Hill - but here, she could hardly miss the point first time round.

Davies's book ended his drama with the poultry thieves who so alarm Mr Woodhouse, a device that might have been intended as a nod to the invisible social pyramid on which this little world rests, but actually had the effect of a decorative sprig of low comedy. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was more implacable. Though both films showed you plates being cleared after one of those set-piece dinners beloved of costume drama, it was Mike Barker who really made you look at the unsavoury wreckage, shoving it under your nose by means of his framing.

The final episode of David Nokes's adaptation didn't entirely resolve the problems raised by the first and second - the forbidding severity of Tara Fitzgerald's performance and the occasionally over-reaching invention of Barker's direction. If you had found yourself wondering what a visual quotation from Kubrick's The Shining was doing in an adaptation of a 19th- century novel, there were yet more moments in which you were distracted by a novelty to which it was difficult to assign emotional purpose. He was fond, for example, of deep-focus composition without the focus, so that characters swam fuzzily towards the object of the scene, crisp in the foreground. It looked great and gave the drama a bite of modernity but I'm still not sure that it signified anything more than "not-fusty".

The series earned the benefit of the doubt though - by its chilly visual beauty (a large credit to Daf Hobhouse's wonderful photography), by its acting (Rupert Graves excellent in particular) and by its seriousness of purpose. It played fast and loose with the plot (adding a cute false ending to tease the audience) but it was true to the spirit - above all, in the unexpected tenderness of Arthur's death. It is Bramwell Bronte who lies dying there - promise thrown away and now irretrievable - and they captured the awful pity of it.