andrew emerson

At 9.00pm yesterday evening, more serious-minded television viewers will presumably have opted for BBC1 over ITV1. After all, Joe's Palace (BBC1) was the latest work from Stephen Poliakoff, generally revered as the last of the great practitioners of proper old-school challenging TV drama. A Room with a View (ITV1), meanwhile, was just yet another literary adaptation by Andrew Davies � and of a book that's already been a hugely successful Merchant Ivory film.

Even so, and at the risk of sounding shamefully middlebrow, I do wonder if such serious-minded types chose rightly. Joe's Palace certainly didn't skimp on the familiar Poliakoff themes: a big symbolic house, very rich people, the haunting influence of history on individual lives, exquisite objects, family archives, outdoor dancing, and a central character determined to "get to grips with how I've ended up who I am". This time around, though, those themes felt rather thrown together � so that, for all the beauty of the direction, the result remained something of a narrative mess.

The weirdly stilted dialogue didn't help much either. Only briefly did it seem like a deliberate attempt to create an otherworldly atmosphere. After that, it just seemed like weirdly stilted dialogue.

The Joe of the title was a teenager who suddenly found himself appointed the doorkeeper at a splendid but vacant London house, belonging to billionaire Elliot Graham (Michael Gambon). As far as I could make out, Joe (Danny Lee Wynter) was a fairly monosyllabic lad. Nonetheless, Elliot decided he was brilliantly wise and clever, and so did everybody else who happened to be passing through.

In the meantime, Elliot also embarked on that quest to find out how he'd ended up who he was � or, in specific terms, to discover how his father made such vast amounts of cash. When the revelation came, in by far the programme's most powerful scene, we received a glimpse of the much leaner and more compelling drama that Joe's Palace might have been, given a bit more discipline. (Which, of course, would have had to be imposed by Poliakoff himself � seeing as his towering status evidently means nobody at the BBC is willing to tell him to tighten things up a bit.) For the rest of the time, it merely hovered, in its undeniably lovely-looking way, somewhere between the mildly intriguing and the slightly annoying.

At first sight � and every subsequent one � A Room with a View, based on EM Forster's 1908 novel, was a far breezier piece of work. Yet, precisely because Andrew Davies churns out these adaptations so fluently (and so often), it's easy to underestimate just how well he does them. Here, once again, we got not only an impressively deft dramatisation of a classic book, but also a neat commentary on it.

Forster purists mightn't have liked some of the liberties Davies took last night � but all were added with his usual thoughtfulness, mixed with his usual touches of well-aimed mischief.

The decision, for example, to spell out what the novel might have meant by calling Cecil Vyse "an ideal bachelor" certainly can't be regarded as a betrayal of everything Forster stood for. Davies also added a framing story in which he showed us that, after winning the hand of Lucy Honeychurch (Elaine Cassidy), George Emerson (Rafe Spall) died in the First World War. This duly served as a jolting reminder of where the post-Victorian world we see struggling so hard to be born in the book would soon end up.

And yet, there was nothing flashy or self-important about A Room with a View � something which really can't be said of Joe's Palace. Only later, in fact, did the realisation dawn that Davies might have said more about the power and nature of history than Poliakoff managed with such obvious effort.