While television is obsessed with costume dramas, it has actually been a fair few years since any of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex heroes and heroines came to the small screen (or the big screen for that matter). The BBC’s flagship production tackles Hardy’s most famous novel, Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, a book which was criticised at the time of writing for daring to suggest that a young woman who had borne a child conceived as a result of sexual abuse could still be considered ‘pure’.

Two of the recent big costume dramas from the BBC – the understandably lauded Cranford, and the shamefully under-appreciated Lark Rise To Candleford - relied on a mixture of great casting, warm characters, and witty scripts to produce truly wonderful TV. But Hardy, it has to be said, does not do witty. He barely does warm. Times in his rural Wessex are shown to be hard, and the dangers of being born a woman of low class are spelled out subtly, but clearly. Kudos, I think needs to go to the writer David Nicholls for not trying to add a bit of levity to proceedings to make this grim tale easier to swallow. The first part of the novel should be uncomfortable and ominous, and that was portrayed brilliantly in the writing – and in the performances from Gemma Arterton as Tess, and her loathsome “suitor” Alec Stoke-d’Urberville.

Their relationship is shown to be nothing more than sport for the aristocrat – from feeding the young woman strawberries, to forcing her to squeeze past him in the library, everything he does is for his own entertainment, and his own kicks. These instances could be insignificant on their own, but they are all evidence of the power he has over her due to both gender and social standing, and are precursors to the physical abuse that Alec has clearly had in mind since the moment Tess came to his house and ‘claim kin’.

This opening episode was also very good at showing just how alone Tess is in her struggle to stay honourable. When, late at night, Alec ‘saves’ Tess from a brawl by telling her to join him on his horse, one of the women who had been tormenting her simply laughs and says “Out of the frying pan..!”, and even her own mother sees the rape as an opportunity for Tess to guilt Alec into asking her to marry him. Mrs Durbeyfield has the odd pang of conscience – she wonders whether she should have checked that Alec is a good man, before effectively whoring Tess out to him – but mainly she is utterly selfish, and neither Nicholls nor Ruth Jones who plays her shy away from portraying a mother figure in that light.

Overall, this was a difficult watch, just as it should have been. It is a fault of the medium that the “seduction scene” (as scholars have chastely dubbed it) cannot be left as ambivalent as it is in the book, but overall this is a faithful adaptation, which stays true to Hardy’s assertion that Tess is a pure woman, despite being afforded no protection whatsoever from her social “betters”, her peers, or even her own family.