Monday, 8:30, BBC1

by Kieron Corless, Time Out London, November 2, 2005

The BBC is preparing a mammoth Shakespeare celebration this autumn, right across its services, in a bid to explore the Bard's work in fresh, original ways. The season begins with four modern interpretations of Shakespeare plays along similar lines to the well-received reworkings of "The Canterbury Tales" a year or so ago. Novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls ("I Saw You," "Cold Feet") is first up with a sparky, finely pitched remix of "Much Ado About Nothing," which stars Sarah Parish, Damian Lewis and Billie Piper. Nicholls was an actor in his twenties and reveres Shakespeare plays, so the BBC job was a dream call. "They offered me pretty much a blank slate, but seemed to be leaning towards a comedy," he says. "Three-quarters of the comedies involve cross-dressing, which comes out of a theatrical tradition but is really hard to do on TV. That narrowed it down to 'Love Labour's Lost' and 'Much Ado.'"

Nicholls eventually plumped for the latter -- unsurprising, given his penchant for romantic comedies and sparkling repartee. "It's a social comedy at the beginning of that whole tradition. From there it moves up through Congreve, 'Pride And Prejudice,' Noel Coward and on to the Grant/Hepburn films, and what we recognise as contemporary romantic comedies. If you take the two main characters Benedick (Lewis) and Beatrice (Parish), who are horrified by love and who start off hating each other, then that's 'Pride And Prejudice' and 'The Philadelphia Story.' But Shakespeare was the original exponent of that."

Although the story will strike chords with a contemporary audience, themes and characters still needed an overhaul. The ending has been substantially reworked, with Elizabethan notions of female purity being ditched in favour of infidelity, while the journey undertaken by Hero (Piper) has been beefed up to give new depth to her character.

It makes for a really strong opening to the season, retaining the scale of emotions and events in the play. Structurally, it's fairly similar too: Nicholls' version pulls off the poise and symmetry of the original's plotting, which sees one couple fall out of love as another are falling in. The action has been transposed to a TV newsroom, its technological hardware skillfully woven into the play's themes. At the heart of the play, though, is the electricity between Parish and Lewis, two of our very finest actors, who work well off each other here. "They're both self-contained characters who, when they realise what's happening to them, find themselves becoming vulnerable," says Nicholls. "I hope the audience finds that affecting."

Caption: "Lo, 'tis over to Alan Partridge, who hath the sport."