I WONDER what it is that fascinates so many people about Tom Stoppard’s TV dramatisation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, appearing these Friday nights on BBC2?

I must come clean from the start and admit that I read 30 years ago all Ford’s novels and, as a notorious elitist, I must add that I have read most of Ford’s poetry and literary criticism as well. He was a great man. He formed judgements about the times we live in which we should all take heed of Before I am outlawed for utterly un-plebeian curmudgeonliness, let me say that I am second to none in my admiration for Tom Stoppard and all his works. But this adaptation of Parade’s End – honestly!

Ford was concerned with that most essential thing: the life of the mind which, I might add, is unrecognisable in our debauched times.

As the great Charles Sisson said: “Ford was concerned with the central business in life which is an attempt to try to let you see where we stand...to get to the centre of the mind and stay there.”

In other words, Ford was interested in intelligence and in intelligent apprehension, an attempt – heroic in his case – to present the world as it is: to dispel delusions, the chief of which has always been fashion.

By contrast, what do the devotees of the BBC’s lavish production of Parade’s End delight in? Frocks, aristocracy, nice country scenes, the occasional toff with his trousers down, posh country houses, a bit of naked breast.

And the countless millions who tune in to this pseudo-baroque rubbish do so also because they like to assume a pretended intimacy with the principal actors: “Ooh look, it’s him wot got his trousers down in . . . (insert any unspeakable title you can think of).”

If you are posher than that, you may remember that you “saw him once playing Coriolanus at Shakespeare’s Globe”.

All these supposed judgements are pretentious crap, however you choose to express them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no puritan. There is no harm in this. It is just that it is a travesty to suggest that that Friday night BBC2 glossy has anything to do with the work of Ford Madox Ford. In fact, it is an insult to him.

I don’t mind when people in their countless and unaccountable millions drool over soap operas in the same way that I would never condemn naked babes’ mud wrestling. But don’t let’s pretend it is literature, eh?

There is, I’m afraid, this thing called TV drama. It has lots of money to spend. So it gives us, with the pretence of enlightenment and culture, indiscriminately, cinematographic adaptations of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy, and it tries to pass off these futile caricatures as “literature”, when they are really, all of them, just upmarket versions of Coronation Street or EastEnders.

The plain fact is that there is a great tradition of this culture: Bach, Mozart, Dante, Shakespeare.

And then there is an equally admirable popular culture: Dickens, Glenn Miller, Barbara Taylor Bradford. Just don’t let pretentious snobbery allow us to mix them up.

In allegiance with Noel Coward, I know very well the seductiveness of what he called “cheap music”. I just try not to get it mixed up with the real thing. And I hate the TV production poseurs who traduce great artists by serving them up as so much soap opera.