The Forsyte Saga (ITV1)

The Royal (ITV1)

FROM the moment you see her, there's no doubt that Fleur Forsyte is going to be trouble. "I'm not your daughter for nothing - if I want something I generally get it," the forward little hussy told besotted father Soames Forsyte as a four-part adaptation of John Galsworthy's third book To Let got under way.

There are characters on TV you instantly like and hope all their dreams come true. Others, you feel like giving a good slap and wishing them the worst of times. Fleur falls into the latter category. "She needs someone to say no to her," an observer notes, echoing my thoughts exactly.

Fleur is set to cause chaos within the feuding Forsytes now that she's fallen for her cousin Jon. He, in case you need reminding, is the son of Soames' former wife Irene. She's now with Jolyon, who's not long for this serial, one feels, after the doctor tells him: "I'm afraid you're in a bad way, old chap".

Soames is the same cold fish he was in the first series, but with more wrinkles. It's the 1920s and he moans that the war has changed everything, apart from the Forsyte clan. Thankfully, for dramatic purposes, "most of the Forsytes were spared - too old or too young" and sat out the Great War. Besides, Granada didn't have the budget for big war scenes.

Stick-in-the-mud Soames doesn't hold with women riding astride a horse in public, or girls with short skirts and common airs. He rates giving women the vote as highly as people did the British entry in this year's Eurovision Song Contest. The only chink in his armour is spoilt daddy's girl Fleur.

It's instant attraction when she meets Jon, a young man with appalling taste in headwear who's spending time down on the farm. "I think they really like each other," says a witness to their romantic collision, with masterful understatement.

This is classy stuff, with much attention to recreating the period and a cast list stuffed with respectable British thespians. I still can't say I warm to Gina McKee's Irene, but Damian Lewis's Soames is a wonderfully odious creation.

The Royal offers period costumes too. As well as boxes of Omo and cans of HP baked beans placed strategically about the set to remind us this is set in the 1960s. The opener in the second series of this Heartbeat hospital spin-off also allowed itself a little in-joke. The canopy of the local cinema informed us the current attraction was Carry On Doctor.

The format offers the usual medical condition of the week coupled with a heartwarming story and a crisis on the wards accompanied by a soundtrack of wall-to-wall hits from the period.

I love Wendy Craig's suitably starchy matron uttering such immortal lines as, "This hospital can't function without clean laundry", in the days when medical staff looked after patients and not budgets and paperwork.

Better still is Denis Lill's pipe-smoking surgeon, bellowing - as chief surgeons in those days never spoke quietly - "Why am I still waiting for my haemorrhoids?" Probably because the comic relief porters are busy peeling potatoes and storing fish on behalf of the local chippy is the answer.

At least St Aidan's Royal Free Hospital bid farewell to one difficult patient, Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard), whose long-lost daughter turned up to collect him. He preferred his comfy hospital bed to the thought of going home, insisting he was still ill. "It's very pernicious, this anaemia," he said.

Published: ??/??/2003