Britain's love affair with braces and bonnets

Who was your favourite Willoughby? If you don't find the actor Dominic Cooper to your taste tonight in the present BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, you can always flick back metaphorically through a compendium of historical television listings to pick out a Willoughby that suits you better: perhaps it was Peter Woodward in the 1981 adaptation, or did Greg Wise really nail the part in Ang Lee's film?

Each decade washes up a slew of lavish costume dramas based on classic literature, chiefly the works of Austen and Dickens, and fans are able to wallow nostalgically not only in the frilly, mannered and ordered worlds they portray, but in endless comparisons of the merits of various productions.

They are a reliable hit with viewers in this country and across the world. Americans adore this steady, high-quality transatlantic output and have recently featured Bleak House and Jane Eyre to great acclaim in the prestigious Masterpiece Theater slot on PBS. They are soon to do same with Cranford, Sense and Sensibility and an Andrew Davies version of EM Forster's A Room With A View. At the same time, a small sub-set of classic serial enthusiasts is developing a fresh internet art form on YouTube. They have started to set favourite scenes from these dramas to their own choice of music, creating a new kind of pop video in which lace handkerchiefs and horse-drawn carriages play a big part. Such a novel response to the many period dramas on our screens is probably meant to celebrate the form, rather than subvert it, but at least it embraces modern technology. The fear of some of our best contemporary writers is that the British love of classic adaptations reflects an unhealthy obsession with the past.

Novelist JG Ballard is blunt about it. 'I can't stand these costume dramas. They drive me insane. It is all so phoney,' he complained. 'Why does the BBC spend so much time in the past? It seems the only thing we have to look forward to in this country is our nostalgia.'

The nation, he believes, has 'always been in love with pageantry and uniforms', but it is not something the BBC should repeatedly encourage.

'There are too many hats. Everybody is over-dressed. We should have more drama set in the present day. These costume dramas feed our desperate need for a more deferential class system and a sense of order in society.'

Beryl Bainbridge, the award-winning author, has similar reservations. 'I just feel it is too rose-tinted a vision of the past and I don't understand why they want to do it,' she said. 'Who is deciding that we all want to switch off from real life and watch this kind of thing, even if it is well-acted?'

It might be a good idea for Ballard and Bainbridge to steer clear of their television sets for the rest of the year, because there is plenty more on the way. Davies, the acclaimed adaptor of Sense and Sensibility, Bleak House and Northanger Abbey, has already embarked upon a new serialised version of Dickens's Little Dorrit. Meanwhile, next weekend, the BBC will be unveiling a new secret weapon in the ratings war and, once again, it is wearing a bonnet. Building on the high audience numbers expected for tonight's second episode of Sense and Sensibility and on the popularity of recent adaptations of period classics such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, the corporation is to launch a hybrid genre - part costume drama and part soap opera.

On Sunday night, just before the final episode of Sense and Sensibility, a starry production of Lark Rise to Candleford, adapted from Flora Thompson's rural Victorian tales, will try to combine the cultured appeal of a dramatised literary classic with the draw of a regular drama series.

'Thompson's books are teeming with character and incident,' said executive producer Sue Hogg, 'so we hope to go back again for further series.'

To underline her intention the two Oxfordshire communities around which Thompson's drama revolves have been built especially for the production. A collection of dilapidated farm buildings just outside Bristol has been transformed into the streets and houses of both the backward-looking and bucolic Lark Rise and its neighbouring, thrusting market town, Candleford Green. The unusual decision to construct an extensive and expensive open air set for the series came at an early meeting to discuss locations. 'It means not only can we maintain the same high quality, it is also very good value because we can go back and re-use them.'

The series is to star Dawn French as the lusty, eccentric Caroline Arless, and Julia Sawalha, most recently seen in Cranford, as Dorcas Lane, the independent and flirtatious character often thought to represent the adult Flora Thompson herself.

Davies is attempting to tell the story of Sense and Sensibility in just three episodes, but the first series of Lark Rise, which has been adapted by Bill Gallagher, will run for 10 hour-long episodes. Going out for the first time next Sunday at 8pm on BBC1, it will mark the corporation's boldest attempt yet to keep a grip on the millions of mainly middle-aged viewers who tune in religiously, but only for a classic serial.

Last year some of the most revered matrons in the British acting profession, all dressed up in lace and crinolines for Cranford, surprised pundits by appealing to more viewers than the ITV1 rival youth show, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. And, while a recent audience survey confirmed that more than two-thirds of Cranford's viewers were over 55 years old, such a niche market cannot be ignored when there are eight million people in it. On New Year's Day the BBC's first episode of Sense and Sensibility also drew in a creditable five million viewers, and it might well have done better still if it had not been pitted against a new series of Midsomer Murders on ITV1.

But the BBC drama department's compulsion to produce more and more 18th and 19th century costume drama is not just driven by ratings, or even by the lucrative sales to foreign broadcasters. According to Sue Hogg, the high standard of these productions has become an invaluable part of the BBC brand.

'Production standards get higher and higher. There is always someone raising the bar, which is wonderful really, but it means audience expectations are also very high. Nobody in the world does this like the BBC,' said Hogg, who also argues they represent good value for licence payers. 'We have made Lark Rise for a tariff that matches any other show going out at 8pm and that is amazing, really. It is much less than Dr Who costs.'

The publishing industry also often enjoys a happy knock-on effect from the successful television dramatisation of a classic novel. This Christmas sales of Gaskell's Cranford helped to further boost the coffers of Bloomsbury, publishers of Harry Potter. 'It was one of our strongest selling titles,' confirmed editor-in-chief, Alexandra Pringle. 'These books don't always do very well. It depends, we find, on how long the television series goes on. The more programmes, the more the effect builds.'

The enduring appeal of the costume drama for its millions of viewers is harder to pin down. Hogg suggests audiences feel at home with the plots and yet are excited by the lavishness of the productions. Gallagher suspects these series are popular because they portray a simpler world. 'Flora Thompson writes that the people she grew up with "had never lost the secret of being happy on little",' he said. 'In our age of frenetic appetite, that seemed to me to be something worth dramatising.'

Ballard would disagree, of course. His most recent novel, Kingdom Come, was set in a shopping mall outside west London and asks whether consumerism in our society could ever turn into fascism. 'We seem to have our heads in the sand,' he said. 'It is almost as if the present is too frightening to face.'