I was hoping for TV magic. . . but got a Harry Potter rip-off

Hurrah! This is what Sunday night telly is about, isn’t it? a tousled-haired hero on a horse, villains in knee-breeches, and s ervants i n nightgowns listening at the keyholes.

Pour yourself a flagon of porter, and pull up a chair to the hearthside. and prepare for a deep, long draught of disappointment because, whatever else it is, Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell (BBC1) is not Poldark.

There were no damsels with heaving bosoms, for a start. In fact, almost the only female under the age of 40 was lying on a couch, coughing herself to death with consumption.

Bodices were not ripped. Derring was not done. For a story that promised to tell of supernatural marvels in the Napoleonic era, this was about as magical as a shareholders’ meeting.

half the scenes comprised rooms full of middle-aged men, sitting around a table, facing each other in debates, making laboured jokes and quoting medieval texts at each other.

If your idea of a racy evening is chitchat in the dons’ common room at an Oxbridge college, then perhaps you found this entertaining. For the rest of us, it was so deathly dry it might as well have been dehydrated.

The 1,000-page book on which the show is based, a debut novel for Susanna Clarke, was a smash bestseller when it appeared in 2004. But that was the height of the harry Potter craze and, more than a decade on, this mishmash of folklore and historical fantasy is revealed for what it really is — a J. K. rowling rip-off.

Bertie Carvel made his f i rst appearance as Jonathan Strange astride a white horse. No sooner had our interest perked up than it slumped down because Carvel rides a horse like he is sitting in a wheelbarrow. You would not want him to gallop across any Cornish clifftops; he would be over the edge before the opening credits were done.

We last saw him playing Nick Clegg in the political drama Coalition: suffice to say the Clegg character had more charisma.

But at least we could hear what Bertie was saying. his rival, Mr Norrell, was played by Eddie Marsan, doing a wobbly Yorkshire accent with every imaginable speech impediment. he lisped, he Elmer Fudded his rs, he got all adenoidal, and half the time he sounded either Italian or russian.

Given the endless complaints about inaudible dialogue in BBC costume dramas, you have to wonder whether Eddie was deliberately having a laugh.

If so, the laugh was on him, because his wasn’t even the worst performance of the night. That accolade went to poor Mark Warren who, through no fault of his own, was made to dress up as an elf in a snow-white quiff, wraparound eyebrows and a jerkin made of leaves. he looked like an elderly Elvis Presley playing robin hood in panto.

Mark didn’t have a decent line to speak but that didn’t matter; no one would have heard him because we were all howling with laughter at his ridiculous get-up.

If this had been a one-off drama, it could have been excused as a piece of failed eccentricity but this adaptation runs for seven weeks. It’s going to be a long slog.

Nicky Campbell was indulging i n his own eccentricities on Perspectives: The Great American Love Song (ITV) — performing favourites by George Gershwin and richard rodgers, on a ukelele, in Central Park. his sheer sincerity helped him to carry it off. For a DJ, he doesn’t have a bad singing voice, limited but pleasantly light. and his passion for the classic show tunes of the Twenties and Thirties shone through.

‘You’d be amazed how many of them you know,’ he enthused. and that’s true; it is hard to think of a time in our lives when we didn’t know The Man I Love, ain’t Misbehaving, and The Way You Look Tonight. The tunes seem to come preprogrammed from birth.

Nicky was in a melancholy mood and it was the lyrics that really affected him but when he asked rapper Baba Brinkman to perform Lorenz hart’s l yrics from Manhattan, without the melody, two things were obvious. First, it’s the music that matters most. Second, that’s why rap is rubbish.