The Crimson Petal and the White 1

I have absolutely no acquaintance with Michel Faber's book, but the BBC co-produced adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White looks very promising. I didn't pick up at all on the parallel between Sugar and Agnes, that both are writing - one a quasi-autobiographical novel, the other a fragmented and self-denying memoir - until I visited the BBC's programme website (which shows evidence of cutbacks by being more anaemic than sites for series of this profile used to be); but there are several character details being held back for later episodes, Lucinda Coxon's script concentrating for the moment on William Rackham's trajectory and how his acquaintance with Sugar and belief that he can be effectually sexually dominant over her make him into a confident part of his father's business machine and potentially (at Sugar's instigation) its regulator. It's a mark, perhaps, of the cynicism of the turn of the twenty-first century that William's socialism is dismissed as the pose of an ineffective coward. The production paints a picture of Victorian sexual conduct which is now the received one, but if so it's a stylised hyperconventionality, the characters all inhabiting different corners of a shared Hell. Strong performances from the cast, especially Chris O'Dowd, Romola Garai and Amanda Hale; Gillian Anderson seemed a little too music hall at times but perhaps that's appropriate for a madam of a crumbling brothel with high class pretensions. Richard E Grant's predatory doctor, a specialist in hysteria, sublimated sinister; arch affectation has its place and Grant deployed his well-exploited line carefully. More Mark Gatiss and Shirley Henderson next week, perhaps.