Lost The Plot

There’s usually good value to be had in a culture clash. We’ve seen it before in Northern Exposure, which later begat Doc Martin. To give it that extra dimension there’s always the A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court approach, employing a shift in time as well as location, although of course the shorthand reference to such a notion is more likely to be Life On Mars nowadays.

Whereas Hank Morgan simply woke to find himself transported back to the reign of Arthur in Mark Twain’s novel, Sam Tyler had to suffer a more violent approach and be bounced off a speeding car before he could awaken to piss his political correctness all over The Sweeney. Now ITV is trying it on with Lost in Austen, although in a suitably far less aggressive manner.

I should say right away that obviously this isn’t a show for me, but I was curious to see how the construct was set up. Disappointingly it was less Life on Mars and more Mr Benn, although without the fez-wearing shopkeeper or the need to put on a Regency-period dress. Instead the unlucky-in-love, Pride and Prejudice-reading heroine, having set the evening aside to tuck into Austen’s book, was interrupted by the discovery of a hitherto unused door to Longbourn in her bathroom.

Apparently the carpenters who provided select furnishings for Professor Digory Kirke’s country house also did a sideline in plumbing on the QT. Except this time sad little Amanda Price also had the added inconvenience of a befuddled Elizabeth Bennet standing in her bath. After the introductions but before the explanations the pair ended up on the wrong side of the door.

At this point I should have turned over to catch God On Trial on BBC2 but it had taken so damn long to get there that I figured Frank Cottrell Boyce’s play would have to wait until I could watch it on iPlayer. With Lost in Austen crawling along at such a leisurely pace I ended up more engrossed in the crossword. While there might have been some reference to the modern girl’s pubic topiary to enliven proccedings, I was so caught up in trying to solve 21 Across that I missed the set up.

Having watched it through two commercial breaks, come the forty-odd-minute mark and still unsure what the point of it all was, I simply switched the television off. Time travel adventures always feature all kinds of wrongs to right, many of which are usually caused in the first place by the protagonists. The best episodes from the various incarnations of Star Trek involved some kind of time displacement, whether it was The City on the Edge of Forever, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Trials And Tribble-ations or the film Star Trek: First Contact.

In Back to the Future Marty McFly had to deal with the unwelcome advances from his mother in her younger guise before finding his way home. Closer in tone to Lost in Austen, without the Oedipal entanglements, with Elizabeth Bennet apparently still in the bathroom her father appeared to be putting one of his other daughters up for marriage to Darcy before I gave up.

“How will she keep the greatest love story of all time on track when Elizabeth Bennet is stuck in the modern world?” the press notes asks. The past couple series of Doctor Who saw the time-travelling twit cross paths with William Shakespeare and Agatha Cristie, stuffing the episodes with all manner of sly references to the authors’ work. Rather than having Amanda Price rub shoulders with Jane Austen herself, Lost in Austen instead transports her into one of Austen’s fictions, which has no real ramifications.

So surely the question to ask is: If you mess up a fictional world, who gives a shit?