As did Adrian Hodge's adaptation of John McGahern's Amongst Women with a great performance from Tony Doyle as

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As did Adrian Hodge's adaptation of John McGahern's Amongst Women, with a great performance from Tony Doyle as the strict Irish widower. Michael Hastings's adaptation of the Henry James novel, starring O'Sullivan, Diana Rigg and Matthew Modine, transcended its style to involve the viewer with the lives of its characters. Anna Friel looked very pretty in a corseted dress, but not as lovely as Aisling O'Sullivan in the year's best all- round cossie drama, The American. After Christine Edzard's Little Dorritt, this was the most convincing portrayal yet of Dickens's world.

You didn't hear people talking about it at work the next day, though.The best dramasThe other big costume drama of the year, Our Mutual Friend, was another well-designed film, which managed to rise above the cliched use of natural light (the impression of dust-laden everything was particularly well conveyed). Vanity Fair was more interesting, capturing Thackeray's satirical tone with fantastic design work and brave casting. The similarities with that 1979 Bob Hoskins movie were a little too marked perhaps, and this was also over-familiar terrain for Robert Carlysle. They were triumphant Delia Smith, Carol Smillie, Jeremy Clarkson, Caroline Ahearne, Dame Thora Hird. They were notChris Evans, Professor Robert Winston, Ainsley Harriott, Pauline Quirke...Pauline Quirke?The Birds of a Feather sitcom actress, boosted no doubt by critical raves for her role in The Sculptress, tried "doing a David Jason" and crossing over into a BBC1 police drama, Maisie Raine.Not good?Not unless you like people who go round shouting all the time.Other dramas thatdisappointedMarks and Gran's too-linear life of Oswald Mosley, as well as Frank Deasy's look at the explosion of hard drugs in 1980s Edinburgh, Looking after Jo Jo, which marked the return to the small screen of John MacKenzie, the director of The Long Good Friday. So she trainswith weights, she jogs, she runs as if the sky were falling.The Wasting Game by Philip Gross Bloodaxe Books, pounds 6.95..

Not "Amber", though that's the one we'll use, for this:`I'm fat, look fat...'Yes and the moon's made of cheese, that chunk she won't touch in the fridgedried, creviced, sweating in its cold like someone with a killing fever.Half a scrape-of-Marmite sandwich, last night's pushed-asidepotatoes greying like a tramp's teeth, crusts, crumbs are a danger to her,so much orbiting space junk that's weightless for only so long.Burn it up on re-rentry, burn it, burn it. What stopped my breath was when my daughter took a felt pen and signed her piece of damage, with her own name. The mirror, thick plate glass, was cracked from side to side.It makes little difference that we broke two more panes It was an exorcism, not as precise as a poem, maybe, but ... There was the therapy room where our family had been diagnosed from behind the two-way mirror, and there was a leap in my heart when I saw what someone had already done.