"I'm afraid the patient has died."

'All this emphasis on bonnets and re-doing of period dramas is demeaning and patronising. It's as if the film-makers think all the viewers can cope with is something they've already heard of before."

So says Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, which re-publishes little-known, out-of-print books, mostly by women, and mostly out of copyright - which means (duh!) mostly "costume dramas." (I have long thought Persephone makes lovely volumes, as objects, though I've never read one of them - which is as much about me not reading much fiction these days as it is about anything.)

The Guardian continues:

"...many of [the 75 books published by Persephone] are, in her eyes, prime candidates for adaptation ("except maybe the cookery books"). Hence her bafflement at the BBC's recent production of Sense and Sensibility, which has, of course, been brought to the screen very successfully before. News that there's another version of Brideshead Revisited in production doesn't thrill Beauman either. 'I don't understand how they get away with it,' she fumes."

Now, she is a woman after my own heart. I love this. I've had several conversations lately with several people that sounded just like this quote - about the Dickens glut, the Austen glut (& I love Austen: but did we really need another Sense & Sensibility so soon after Ang Lee's film - and did it really need to be so similar to it??), the stupid heritage-industry feel of it all, the constant low-level boredom...

I know I don't watch much TV anyway. And I know they did Jane Eyre recently, but if I recall correctly it was also horribly bowdlerised. And it seems to have no bearing on anything. I don't think this is just about TV, as such: it's about the loss of a living culture, in which the people who make the decisions for us (yes they do) operate out of fear, rather than from having their fingers on the pulse.

Or is fear itself the pulse? Are we all so uncertain what anything means that all we can cope with is endless Dickens, Harry (not Dennis, of course) Potter and Austen? Whatever happened to things like that wonderful series of Cold Comfort Farm? (We don't want another; they can find something else to film.) I remember when they filmed Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April, with Josie Lawrence in it: lovely. (I do love her books.) Why can't they make Decline and Fall? Why, if they want costumes, can't they film something by Henry Green?

I know. I love the books and don't need the mini-series. But this debate is not about that, it's about the way we think about our culture - as opposed to "society" - and its artefacts, what we want from the past and the future, how we discuss these things among ourselves in the larger group. Here's a question: as Brideshead did sum up the early 80s so scarily well, their pretension and snobbery - and ersatz nostalgia - what would sum up right now? What are our qualities, if you were a cultural critic? Are we not allowed to be cultural critics any more? Why can't they film Brave New World? (Because then our children would understand the meaning of the "inclusion room" at school. And they don't wear frilly dresses in Brave New World.)

But if you want chiffon and some flowers, wouldn't it even be interesting for someone to try to do justice to, say, Mrs Dalloway? (She's younger in the flashbacks.)