North And South (BBC1): "YOU are bored, Miss Margaret?," someone inquired. "No, I am tired," she replied.

I know how she feels. Another Sunday, another BBC classic drama serial. Still only another week to wait for the new series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and then we can cheerfully abandon North And South.

Duty, rather than enthusiasm, compelled me to watch the first part of the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel exploring the North-South divide in Victorian times. It's nicely enough done with great frocks and even better sideburns, but I longed to give everyone a push as an incentive to get a move on and stop dawdling.

Opening with a wedding celebration, overflowing with women in big dresses and men in smart uniform, was hardly the way to grab the attention because we've seen it all before many times. Many, many times.

As for heroine Margaret (Daniela Danby-Ashe, late of EastEnders and My Family), she's a miserable girl. I bet she's never smiled in her life. She wandered through the opening instalment with one hand on her hat and the other clasped in horror over her gaping mouth as she arrived in the North.

Mrs Gaskell might as well have called her novel It's Grim Oop North or Trouble At T'Mill. For Margaret has good reason to look troubled - her preacher father has fallen out with the church and hauled the family from the beautiful South to the grotty North, namely the mill town of Milton.

So it's goodbye to the flowers, grass and sunshine of Hampshire and hello to the dark, smokey, polluted North where it "snows" bits of cotton all the time. It makes the Black Hole of Calcutta look like paradise.

"Why have we come here? It's going to be awful, isn't it?," wailed Margaret's mum (another miserable cow, so you know where her daughter gets it from).

Margaret assures her that it's not another planet. There may not be little green men but the lads are rough, unwashed and think a woman's place is sitting silently in the corner.

Being a modern sort of young lady, she isn't prepared to take a back seat. There'll be no ee-by-gumming or eckee-thumping for her. She won't be plucking chickens in the street as other Northern women do. What she will be doing - apart from clasping a hankie over her mouth to keep out that nasty Northern pollution - is trying to avoid dishy Mr Thornton, who's glowering away in a dark corner.

The mill owner has come to her father, now teaching for a living, for some lessons but can't decide between Aristotle or Plato. I have the same sort of dilemmas - chips or wedges with my sausages for tea?

Understandably, Mr Thornton's mother has not taken to Margaret and her Southern attitudes. "If you can bear to visit our smokey home, we will be pleased to see you next week," she said. Hardly the most welcoming of invitations.

Meanwhile, there really is trouble at t'mill. The workers are revolting, holding meetings where they complain the bosses make fat profits and they are underpaid. Perhaps things haven't really changed that much, after all.

Margaret has little time for industrial relations, or anybody's relations really. She remains a thoroughly miserable sourpuss who moans that the North is lonely and harsh, with conflict and unkindness everywhere.

"God has forsaken this place, I believe I have seen hell," she said unkindly.

So have I - it's called North And South.

Published: 15/11/2004