Wordsworth knew how to say it with flowers

Aliens dropping in to see what we were watching on television last weekend must have marvelled at our cultural refinement. Daniel Deronda, Doctor Zhivago, a one-hour programme on the life of George Eliot, to say nothing of BBC2's Great Britons coming to its breathless conclusion. Was there ever a nation more devoted to its own and other literatures? Could there be, anywhere, a people more conscientious in the excavation of its past?

True, had the aliens taken time off from art and history to catch a little of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, they would have seen a lady from Co Antrim struggling to identify those objects which, in a poem by Wordsworth, could be observed, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Were they a) nuclear warheads; b) French ticklers; c) the chorus line from Cats; or d) daffodils.

That the aliens would have known the answer, however remote their galaxy, I have no doubt. If they had bothered to come here at all, taking tens upon tens of years in the effort, Wordsworth must surely have been a major inducement. Maybe not The Prelude or The Excursion, but certainly the Lucy Poems and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and whatever else citizens of the Planet Zog had learnt by heart from Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Time was, on our planet too, when no one had not heard of Wordsworth's daffodils. Now you're struggling to find people who have heard of Wordsworth. Hence his absence from the list of great British achievers. He only taught us how to feel, and what's that worth?

Did George Eliot, who taught us how to feel through thought, or how to think feelingly, make it into the top 100, jostling Cliff Richard, Bono and JK Rowling? Of course not. But BBC1's film about her was intelligent enough, an old-fashioned biography that didn't get so tied up in the author's personality as to forget that the reason we are interested in her in the first place is that she wrote. It wasn't literary criticism exactly, but anyone who had not read George Eliot before would have taken from the programme an idea of the cast of her intelligence, even something of the complexion of her soul.

Daniel Deronda, though, turned out to be a dud. On the page a novel about the interior life, on the screen a costume drama in which no one had an interior. This was not entirely the fault of Andrew Davies, the universal adaptor whose festschrift, in a manner of speaking – for he had adapted Doctor Zhivago as well – this weekend of cross-channel culture-vulturing was.

Blame the glossy and feelingless direction, all saturated light and declamation, as though people in the 19th century blazed with a sort of desperate optimism, announcing their intentions to the century not yet born. The fact that you rarely saw more than one person on the screen at one time didn't further interaction either; but maybe the director could not get his cast together and had to shoot them separately on sunny days.

"Was she beautiful or not beautiful?" is the question with which Daniel Deronda begins. Telly can't be doing with subtleties like that. She was. It all was. Was the effect that of "unrest rather than undisturbed charm", Deronda wonders about Gwendolen. To which there came only one answer. Undisturbed charm. Undisturbed by anything.

Doctor Zhivago did it all better. Especially the unrest. Davies frequently cops it in the neck for sexual anachronism, getting characters to drop their drawers when neither the social nor the literary context justifies it. I have found him superfluous in these areas myself. She is a witchy mistress, sex, and often is more arousing clothed. Words, words are what do the trick every time, which is why good writers are disposed to use them. And even in a pictorial medium, words retain their suggestive power. Mr Darcy's bum might please viewers with a short attention span, but that Elizabeth Bennet was the poorer sexually for not seeing it on the page, I doubt.

Sex was not a problem in Davies's Zhivago anyway, whatever the subsequent complaints have been. Everything he did with Lara and Komarovsky is in the novel, rather more subservient to the history and the politics, it's true, but we have more than enough politics and history on telly already, whereas sex in which shame contends with voluptuousness we see too little of. Yes, our screens are sex-drenched, but it's all cheery, suburban, have-a-go vibrator sex in which the terrible paradoxes of eroticism have no place. "As inexplicable as black magic," is Pasternak's description of Lara's descent into debauch – "sharp pain announced itself by peals of silvery laughter, resistance and refusal meant consent, and grateful kisses covered the hand of the tormentor".

Into which "nightmare of sensuality" Davies's script led us with fearful beauty, though I can't decide whether the overall effect was enhanced or not by the actress playing Lara borrowing her expressions of knowingness and distress from Princess Diana. Was that what Diana was trying to tell us all along, that refusal meant consent, that her peals of silvery laughter concealed pain, and that Charles was Komarovsky?

In which case, in order to do justice all round, Davies should at least have remembered what else Doctor Zhivago says about this seduction. That it flattered Lara to be taken to concerts and to theatres by this older man, and to have him, "as they say, improve her mind". Here, on this orgiastic weekend of televised literature, was a golden opportunity to reinstate not only the mind but the concept of improving it. To slip the antique notion of education in, while no one was expecting it, under cover of sex.

Myself, I'd have had Komarovsky read Wordsworth's "Daffodils" on the ride back from the opera, Lara in ruined-virgin dishabille, her face pressed against the window of the coach, her eyes moist as she pictures them, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.