Mansfield park
ITV1, 9pm

Ah, me: long-suffering and dutiful Fanny Price. She was a steadfast nineteenth-century young woman whose impoverished girlhood was spent being taught to be good. Stap me vittals if she didn't then have to learn how to be grateful, too, when she was beset by further economic hardship.

As poor-yet-noble Fanny, Billie Piper did a marvellous job of seeming long-suffering, noble, steadfast, good, poor, dutiful and - you've guessed it - grateful. Here a repressed sideways glance or a downcast sigh; there a restrained demi-pout of the full, rose-like lips; everywhere else a lightly-masked sense of burgeoning emotional certainty. Doctor Who's erstwhile sidekick delicately underplayed her role to perfection as ITV opened its Jane Austen series with a costume drama that was gripping, rather than being just a run-of-the-mill exercise in bodice-ripping.

Here I'll freely state that, being a flinty 21st-century kinda guy, I'm no fan of nineteenth-century proto-Mills & Boon romantic chick-fiction, by gadfrey - but when Fanny at long last hooked the upstanding young fellow-me-lad of her dreams, the Reverend Edmund Bertram, I echoed the guests at their wedding in sending up a joyous chorus, crying "Huzzah!" more times than was strictly necessary. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah!

But let's get back to the former Mrs Chris Evans, fast emerging as an actress of range, depth and subtlety. In the costume stakes, Billie Piper also coped admirably with the various unflattering dun-coloured Empire-line cotton nighties she was given to wear, while all around her Mansfield Park's other young women were flouncing about looking pretty in colourful silken ball gowns.

Likewise, the show's menfolk had a jolly good time strutting around in riding boots, frock coats, cravats and knee-britches. Reflecting the novel's contemporary worldview, I guess, the male characters in Mansfield Park were given the most scope for physical and facial activity. If they weren't scowling gravely as dastardly iniquities were being strewn in their path, Mansfield Park's chaps were smouldering with duplicitous amatory intent, or losing themselves in dissolute and immoral pastimes such as drinking and betting and performing plays, or dancing a merry sailor's hornpipe, or being twittish cuckolds - each role every actor's dream, i' faith.

Only Fanny's one true love, the aforementioned Edmund the clergyman, had to do much understated stuff - staring into the middle distance all thoughtful and riven, like. You had to doff your stovepipe hat to Blake Ritson as Edmund.

Aye, the boy Ritson's done great and he's gave 110% out on the wing, moping around hither and thither being addled by his love for the wrong woman (before he twigs that Fanny's the one), coming close to resembling a cross-eyed twerp with a hernia, but never succeeding. Mansfield Park's two sophisticated baddies were impressive, too. Ooh, that fluttering flibbertigibbet Mary Crawford with her conniving London society ways and her social climber's philosophy: "Selfishness must be forgiven - there's no hope of a cure" and "I've never yet danced with a clergyman - and I never will." And Mary's devious brother, Henry: what a bounder, cad and rotter! There he was, wearing David Essex's tousled hair, stating: "I fancy having Miss Price fall in love with me," while scheming and plotting "to make a small hole in Fanny Price's heart". Boo, sirrah - boo and thrice boo!

He didn't fool Fanny for a moment. How brave and perceptive of Fanny to spurn heartbreaker, home-wrecker Henry's marital overtures. She rebuffed him when he plighted his troth, and - given that he was a persistently sort - she kicked him into touch when he came back to Mansfield Park again, this time deviously trighting his ploth.

Mansfield Park 3, flinty 21st-century guys like me who reckon they don't like nineteenth-century proto-Mills & Boon romantic chick-fiction 0.