Joan Smith: Bleedin' Ada, what the Dickens was that all about?

The BBC 'Bleak House' is half soap opera, half horror movie

The past they offer is almost always dark, noisy, with terrible weather, and peopled either by virtuous heroines or gurning villains. One reason I have a sneaking liking for Kate Bush is that her sung version of Wuthering Heights is full of immediately recognisable teenage angst, unlike most of the ponderous film adaptations.

The BBC's starry and expensive adaptation of Bleak House began predictably last week with dreadful weather, lashing rain, which is a little odd since Charles Dickens makes a point of telling us on page one that torrential rain has just stopped in London, to be replaced by thick fog. I suppose a pea-souper isn't as telegenic, although in the novel it's an important metaphor for the state in which the characters have been plunged by the interminably slow process of the law.

Bleak House is about Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a court case involving contested wills that has dragged on until some of the principals are dead and their descendants resigned and confused. The BBC seems to have decided to treat it as a cross between a soap opera and a horror movie. In this Andrew Davies adaptation, the past certainly is a foreign country, in the sense that most of the characters seem to inhabit a coal hole, except for occasional forays into soggy Hertfordshire.

As if that doesn't make it hard enough to follow, it has been shot in brief, fast-changing scenes, with nightmarish flashbacks and blaring sound effects. Whenever I encounter this particular style - all busy, busy, busy - I am suspicious; the message it sends is one of nervousness about the original material. After the first episode of Bleak House, which lasted an hour, I felt dazed and wondered if my eyesight was going. After the second, which was in the 30-minute format of the remaining 13 episodes, I was irritated by the way in which the surface grotesquery obliterated Dickens' profound humanity.

Victorian England (Bleak House was published in 1853) was certainly unlike the 21st century in dress, manners and the rigidity of its class system. The BBC's version of the novel makes a great deal of those superficial differences but can't make up its mind whether the characters, are human like us or almost a different species.

Esther Summerson (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Ada Clare (Carey Mulligan) are too modern, while many of the others are Victorian stereotypes, streetwise urchins or roguish landlords. You wouldn't guess from this adaptation that John Jarndyce's work-shy friend Harold Skimpole (Nathaniel Parker) was based on a real person, the radical author Leigh Hunt, one of many Dickens' gibes against selfish people who wear their principles on their sleeves.

I'm not against adaptations, having grown up on TV versions of Dickens as well as the novels. But I'm not sure that viewers unfamiliar with his work will be encouraged by this series to read Bleak House, surely one of the points of making a popular version. There's no getting away from the fact that this is a very long novel, almost 1,000 pages in the Penguin edition. Davies and the BBC have turned it into a drama series for people with chronically short attention spans; not so much Dickens for our time as for the MTV generation.