As I cover a lot of the comedy programming that gets beamed into our living rooms, ITV1 isn't a channel I generally watch a whole lot. I'm not a masochist, after all. So it was quite entertaining to switch over a few minutes ahead of time last week and today to be faced with The Bill - a show which is so utterly old-fashioned looking it is virtually the twin of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Luckily Lost In Austen has a little more class.

The second episode of this gossamer-light (two) period drama started up precisely where things were left last week, with Amanda pursuing Jane Bennett in a raging storm as she headed to see Bingley. Bingley, fans of Pride And Prejudice will know, is meant to fall in love with Jane - and she with him - but at the moment he is utterly besotted with the thoroughly kooky Amanda and her strange turn of phrase. Desperate times call for desperate measures and so Amanda claims to be "drawn to other women" - prompting the rather brilliant line "So it is true that some women steer the punt from the Cambridge end."

The language of Lost In Austen is, overall, its real asset. Despite the interesting concept, there aren't that many interesting things done with the plot, but the dialogue is fantastic. Not only is Amanda's speech wonderfully modern, but her stilted attempts at Austen-esque speech are very funny, and it's especially great to see that the Bennett sisters are picking up a lot of her vocal ticks. Amanda often uses archaic phrases in the wrong context, but the sisters too have problems using their new vocabulary correctly. The writer Guy Andrews also does a excellent job of keeping the 'voice' of the characters believable to those of us who know how they speak in the novel.

Back to the story, and Mr Collins - who is 'meant' to end up with Charlotte Lucas - comes to the Bennett household, and is found by Amanda to be even more repellent than she had imagined. In the absence of Bingley showing any interest in Jane, Collins gets down on one knee to propose to Miss Bennett, only for to Amanda to intervene and end up engaged to him herself. Around this time, Captain Wickham, another of the novel's rather less pleasant characters, also turns up and it's at this point that we realise that Amanda doesn't really know what she's doing. In trying to get Jane and Bingley together (and Darcy and Elizabeth, whenever she gets out of that bathroom) she is attempting to keep the plot on course, but then she goes and warns Wickham off Kitty because she knows it ends badly. But isn't it *meant* to end badly?

In the end, Wickham's nasty rumours that Amanda is the daughter of a fishmonger (of all things!) leads to Collins breaking off the engagement - but he ends up marrying Jane. This is 100% wrong no matter whether Amanda is meant to be sticking to the storyline or giving the Bennett sisters happy endings.

Lost In Austen is light and airy and utterly un-taxing, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The performances are great, and as I say I think that the dialogue is pitched perfectly. The potential for true originality hasn't, so far, been exploited all that well, but now that Jane's marriage to Collins has taken the tale off on a real tangent, it will be genuinely interesting to see how Amanda manages to get things back on track.