Lost In Austen ITV1, 9pm Who Do You Think You Are? BBC1, 9pm It is a truth, generally acknowledged, that burds go ga-ga for costumed adaptations of old bodice-rippers. Lost In Austen is just such a chick-lit-rom-com concoction: all stately quadrilles in Georgian mansions, brooding heroes in tight breeches and shy young ladies in nice frocks - but with a modish added ingredient: time travel.
A four-parter, Lost In Austen is thus best seen as Bridget Jones wandering through Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - ie, upper-class Britain circa 1813, in the all-knowing manner prescribed by Life On Mars.
Amanda Price, played by the alluringly jubejube-lipped Jemima Rooper, is a 21st-century miss grown thoroughly disillusioned with graceless, stressed-out, thoroughly modern urban living.
Her moment of truth occurs when her beer-swilling boyfriend arrives at her flat late one night to request her hand in marriage, proffering a lager-can ring-pull as a token of his commitment. He then burps eloquently before falling into a stertorous slumber on Amanda's sofa.
How much better life would be if Amanda could live it as if she were a trillsome young husband-seeker on the pages of her favourite novel, JA's P&P. Cue a mysterious door in Amanda's bathroom which led back two centuries to Longbourn, home of the fictional Bennett family.
Amanda stepped through the door, passing her fellow time-traveller, Elizabeth Bennett, coming the other way. Naturally, the pair became trapped in each other's eras, with Amanda at least having the advantage of knowing everyone she meets and how their destinies are meant to pan out.
But whaddayaknow, these plotlines don't go by the book! And it's all due to Amanda, on account of the time/space/fiction/reality continuum being short-circuited by her naughty noughties predilections for drink, tabs, displays of cleavage and first-date snogging.
Amanda ended up discombobulating the innocent nineteenth-century squire, Mr Bingley, who is meant for Jane Bennett. She was likewise taught to dance a quadrille by Elizabeth Bennett's intended, D'Arcy.
In the process of all this, Amanda also learned how to clean her teeth in the approved 1813 manner - with birch twigs, powdered salt and a block of chalk. She resisted the historic offer of a dish of faggots, was forced to borrow a psalter and failed to master needlework.
All these shortcomings established Amanda as "unkempt, indelicate and not at all couth" in the disapproving eyes of Mrs Bennett, the Georgian matriarch whose ringlets are so tightly curled that they have plainly blighted her brains.
Portraying Mrs Bennett, Alex Kingston wails despairingly with engaging brio. As the long-suffering Mr Bennett, Hugh Bonneville is a droll and sardonic joy.
Jemima Rooper is a suitably agonised Amanda, worrying that her exercise in social anthropology will only lead to her subjects being fatally infected with modern ills.
Lost In Austen: rom-com-averse blokes can watch it, too.
In Who Do You Think You Are? Esther Rantzen was confronted by a range of shocking new family truths.
Not the least of these was discovering where her surname came from, Warsaw. She also found that she was related to a Victorian billionaire diamond broker. And that her great-grandfather had accidentally shot a parlour maid to death and been a fraudster.
Through each seismic revelation, Esther was a game telly trouper. Never lost for an apposite reaction, an illuminating response. New life for That's Life now, TV bosses!
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