meaninglessbark The Line of Beauty looks great and is well acted and that's about it. It's not terrible, but there's nothing engaging about the story either. The Line of Beauty feels a bit like Brideshead Revisited in that the story is about an outsider who becomes an intimate of a wealthy family. But the Line lacks the depth of Brideshead, the story meanders until some dramatic plot points are thrown in. The characters have nothing going on beyond their descriptions, they're more like sketches of characters. And there's nothing appealing about any character. That, along with the meandering story, makes it difficult to stay interested and keep watching.But flaws aside the Line of Beauty is fine for an evening of empty TV viewing, especially if you're doing something else at the same time.

Philby-3 Lovely young Nick Guest (Dan Stevens) from a middle-class home falls into (unrequited) love with his college mate Toby Fedden (Oliver Coleman), comes to live with Toby's wealthy family in their splendid house in Notting Hill and falls in love with them too – "Brideshead Revisited" in London, in fact. Toby's father Gerald (Tim McInnerney) is a Tory MP and craven admirer of "the Lady", Margaret Thatcher, who is in the ascendant, post Falklands, while his mother Rachel (Alice Krige) is from a wealthy Jewish banking family.The action, which unfolds in three Acts, is nicely boxed between Thatcher's two re-elections in 1983 and 1987. Nick discovers that the glittering Feddens, including Toby's sister Cat (Hayley Atwell), are not as noble as they seem, and when he becomes an embarrassment to them he is discarded.The film sticks fairly close to Alan Hollinghurst's novel and retains its Gay sensibility – we see things from Nick's point of view. Somehow the Nick of the film is a more sympathetic character than the Nick of the book – possibly because of Dan Steven's cool performance. Hollinghurst wanted to remind us of what it was like to be Gay in Britain in the 1980s – legalized but subject to widespread homophobia and threatened by the march of AIDS, then a death sentence. The film picks this up very graphically with perhaps greater impact than the book. The wealthy "new money" Thatcherites are given a going over as well (the Lady herself puts in a cameo appearance at the end of Act 2). With supporters like those the Thatcher revolution was always going to be bloody.Nick himself is more interested in art than politics; his "line of beauty" is a curved line (the "Ogee") drawn by Hogarth which happens to coincide with the line of the male buttocks. His relationship with the Feddens is aspirational rather than mercenary (his lover Wani (Alex Wyndham) provides the cash for their "Ogee" magazine). In the end, one can imagine him, like his father, an antique dealer, smacked down by the upper class he sought to join. (Funnily enough, antique dealing in Britain is full of Public School types – "Lovejoy" is a bit of an aberration.) Andrew Davies has produced a typically seamless adaptation, and virtually all the performances are faultless. Some of the minor roles are the most vividly executed, such as Christopher Fairbanks' Barry Groom, homophobia personified, and Barbara Flynn's common as muck Lady Tipper. The class system in Britain was certainly robust enough to survive Mrs Thatcher – she just created a new class of wealthy philistines.

Adrian Cribb 9 years after the Conservatives were in power you might think the BBC would look back fondly at them as they did recently with their documentary 'Tory Tory Tory'. However this miniseries drenches any warmth you might have for those 80s Thatcherites like a freezing bucket of cold water.By far the highlight is watching a succession of British luvvies line up one by one to spit venom at angelic Nick Guest in the last episode because he is gay. You can see they all had fun acting against type in those scenes but for all that it's still a timely reminder that when the chips are down, as they were at the end of the 80s when the horror of AIDS was touching virtually everyone in the LGBT community, they'll kick you when they should be helping you, e.g. Clause 28. For in this series all the Tories conspicuously tell Nick how much they love and value him at regular intervals only to disown him the minute they need a scape goat.So in the plus column we have the keenly observed 80s setting, the sex, the melodrama. The only minuses being the inexplicable schizophrenia displayed by the Conservative characters. But I think maybe that's the point because that's how it really was.

marcelproust Okay, so it may seem unfair to review The Line of Beauty after having only seen Episode One, but the sneaky peek on show last night at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival gave every indication that this adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel is a classic in the making.Everyone who has read the novel will have his or her own impression of the characters and locales. (I lived in Notting Hill for more than a decade, so my mental picture of the story was probably more vivid than most.) But within minutes of the bravura opening sequence (grafted onto the novel by canny adapter Andrew Davies), director Saul Dibb makes Nick Guest's world his own.What I found so extraordinary about this adaptation (or at least the first episode) is how cleverly Davies has mined the novel for humour, social commentary and romance. On- screen representations of the upper-middle-classes tend to show us the wholly implausible world of PG Wodehouse, but without Wodehouse's wit, or stick the knife in with bitter class hatred. The Line of Beauty does neither; showing us the Fedden family warts and all. Gerald Fedden MP (in a stunningly good characterisation by Tim McInnerney) is quite the pompous paterfamilias, but is also generous, funny and kind.As our "eyes and ears" through the story, newcomer Dan Stevens is pitch-perfect; his clear, blue eyes miss nothing as his life becomes more and more entwined with the Feddens and their glittering world. The clips shown of the following two episodes promise no decline in quality, so if The Line of Beauty does not come quite as close to perfection as Brideshead Revisited - which remains the high watermark of British television drama - it is still shaping up to be landmark adaptation, and not to be missed when it premieres on BBC2 later in May.