Vanity Fair

****

ITV, 9pm

A SLICE of hot buttered Bodyguard or a hearty swig of the cheeky little number that is Vanity Fair? Viewers had a tough choice to make last night as ITV put its adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian satire up against the BBC’s tale of modern politics and desire.

There could have been televisual civil war in households (other varieties of civil war are available) had not someone invented catch up players; just one of many advantages this century has over the era in which Vanity Fair is set.

Writer Gwyneth Hughes’s take on Thackeray is no dusty bonnets and carriages affair, however, as was clear when All Along the Watchtower rang out over the opening credits. First to rock up was Michael Palin, playing WMT as a twinkly-eyed Santa in a stovepipe hat, to introduce Vanity Fair as “a world where everyone is striving for what is not worth having”.

The striver-in-chief here is Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke), a heroine who belongs as much in these times as the Napoleonic era. The clever young lady from a humble background was the original Material Girl and a chick who made Madonna look like Mary Poppins. If she was around today, Becky would be a contestant on Love Island quicker than you can say, “Get me a mojito, an agent, and a spray tan, in that order”.

Being a woman, skint, and an orphan, Becky’s only chance of improving her lot is to marry money. Standing in her way is the British class system. Becky may have made a friend in rich, naive Amelia, but in her pal’s snooty fiance, George Osborne (yes, really), she recruits an enemy who thinks she should “learn her station” in life.

Cooke makes a wonderful Becky, kittenish one minute, an alley cat the next, sneaking glances at the camera to connect with the audience. ITV have clearly splashed the cash. Though the production values are not quite up to War and Peace standards, there is plenty of uniform action and sideburns for those partial to that sort of thing. Hughes, who wrote The Girl, the tale of Tippi Hedren’s torrid time with Hitchcock on The Birds, is a dab hand at scalpel sharp dialogue.

Bodyguard and Vanity Fair, tales of two women fighting to make it in a man’s world. Sunday nights are set to be the best of times for weeks to come.