Death Comes To Pemberley – TV review

An enormous country pile somewhere in the north of England is preparing for a grand ball. The lady of the house goes downstairs to talk over the final details of the catering with the kitchen staff. There will be soup, wild goose with orange sauce, game pies, fine almond faggots, millefeuille, loads of different kinds of biscuits. It's going to be some party.

Upstair, among the toffs, there's a keen sense of excitement. About the ball, but also just about life and love, and the house, which has been in the family for generations, and is bigger and more important than any of the people who live in it. There's love in the air, too. A beautiful young lady has two men sniffing about ... sorry, courting her. Love rivals, they are polite to each other, while also clearly hating each other's guts. Perhaps they will ask for her hand at the ball …

Hang on though, wasn't Downton yesterday? Ha, but this isn't Downton, though at first glance some of the similarities are almost uncanny. It's about a hundred years earlier for one thing. The big house isn't Downton, but Pemberley. Not Lord and Lady Crawley then, but Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy. Fitzwilliam, better known as Mr Elizabeth nee Bennet … now you know why Pemberley rings so many bells, especially for the ladies. The lady stringing along two fellas is Georgiana Darcy, not Mary.

Nor is it Pride and Prejudice though, but Death Comes To Pemberley (BBC1), Juliette Towhidi's dramatisation of PD James's P&P sequel. PD James's genre-twisting sequel – from novel of manners to murder mystery. Like a modern extension built on to the big house, which recognises and respects the architecture of the original but which is not afraid to stand out and be its own very different thing as well.

So everything's grand and there's a lovely atmosphere in the house. C'mon, of course there is – it's Mr Darcy and Lizzy Bennet's house. But also everyone's dead excited about the big night. Oh, so a couple of the servants saw Mrs Riley's ghost in the woods, but these are ignorant girls from the kitchen, what do they know, they must have imagined it. They are spooky, those woods though, even in the day. And who's this rather odd woman with the crimson bonnet who hisses at people?

Things go downhill with the arrival of ball gatecrashers. Well, not quite arrival, they – Elizabeth's younger sister Lydia and her husband Wickham (remember?) and Captain Denny – are nearly there when Denny and Wickham have a row, and storm off into the woods, at night this time. Shots are heard, a body is later found – Denny's, not shot but with his head staved in from a vicious blow with a large, heavy object.

And then the skeletons start to come out, tumble out, whole armies of them. Georgiana (the sort of Mary Crawley character with the two suitors) has previous with Wickham, Lizzie's got previous with Wickham, he's dodgy that Wickham. And Mrs Riley, whose ghost haunts the woods, only appears when bad stuff is about to happen. She hanged herself after her son was hanged for stealing a deer. The man who sent the boy to the gallows was the father of the man now investigating Denny's death who has just carted Wickham off in a cart, ominously …

Anyway, it's a fabulous mashup. Part sumptuous period drama – with plenty of handsome men in top hats and tight breeches, galloping across parkland on magnificent steaming chestnut horses, for those who like that kind of thing. I'm thinking Tom Ward as the smouldering Colonel Fitzwilliam stands out in that department. Plus pale heaving chests, and all the worries about who's going to ask who to marry them that you get in an Austen dramatisation. But if that's not your thing, then there's a whodunnit thrown in too. It's period drama meets Agatha Christie, Midsomer Murders even, with a hint of CSI Pemberley. It looks beautiful, it's funny too, and even a little bit scary. Great performances: Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin make a perfect Mr and Mrs Darcy, but some of the minor characters also stand out. Such as Trevor Eve, the sinister magistrate, and Jenna Coleman, taking a break from the Tardis, as hysterical Lydia.

Most of all it's so much better than the previous evening's miserable Downton Abbey Christmas "special". Mainly because there is a plot to this, a keen sense of going somewhere. Not just going, but galloping there, almost out of control, like Lydia's carriage. Instead of ambling aimlessly, making it up as it goes along. I suspect a lot of that is because DCTP is adapted from a novel, whereas DA is really just posh soap. I'm already excited about parts two and three.