Do you get the feeling that there are too many costume dramas on television? In the run-up to Christmas, we had Oliver Twist on BBC1 (repeated just after Christmas) and this week saw the same channel starting a three-part dramatisation of Sense and Sensibility. Last year ITV gave us adaptations of three other Jane Austen books, so there is a danger of viewers feeling thoroughly Janed out.

One need hardly say that this dramatisation was the work of arch-adapter Andrew Davies. The BBC's Commissioning Controller preposterously called the book "Sex and the City set in the country" and Davies's version began with a typical example of sexing-up, as a man slowly undressed a woman in front of a warming fire. Other aspects of the adaptation seemed to be Davies inventions rather than Austen originals, as when he borrowed the words of a popular song to make Marianne say: "When I fall in love, it will be forever."

Nevertheless, the first episode aroused one's curiosity to see how the tale would develop, and the acting was first-class - especially from Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield (pictured with Dominic Cooper) as sisters Elinor and Marianne. Part of their appeal was that their faces were comparatively unfamiliar, and you could therefore readily believe in their characters. I found it harder to accept Mark Williams as Sir John Middleton, as I kept thinking "That's the bloke from The Fast Show."

The Shadow in the North (BBC1) is another adaptation of a book - the second novel in Philip Pullman's quartet about Victorian sleuth Sally Lockhart. Billie Piper resumes the role she took in last year's The Ruby in the Smoke, gutsily negotiating a world full of villains and mysteries. In fact, the mysteries were so mysterious that I gave up trying to fathom what was going on, even though I watched the whole tedious 95 minutes. The original book may have made sense but this adaptation was a bundle of inconsistencies and unexplained puzzles. How, for example, did the heroine manage to walk into the villain's armaments factory unhindered?

The implausibility was deepened by the strange mixture of Victorian and modern manners and language. The script was full of anachronisms like 'stage-door Johnny', 'awfully big of him', 'I'm a pacifist', 'you smug Scotch git' and 'put the wind up' - all of which the OED dates as 20th-century. Even the sphynx cat which appeared in one scene seemed unlikely. Why choose to adapt a novel set in past times if you can't get the period details right? Or, as a correspondent suggests in the Radio Times, can't we have real dramas from the likes of Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde and Chekhov instead of these constant adaptations?

Author J.K.Rowling came across affably in J.K.Rowling: A Year in the Life (ITV1) but perhaps you can be affable if, by your own admission, you have "lots of millions of pounds". She does give some of it to charity, having set up a trust to channel money to such causes as research into multiple sclerosis - the disease that killed her mother. J.K.Rowling had a fairly dour upbringing, being frightened of her father and being told by her parents that she should have been a boy. Despite her wealth, she can't stop writing: admitting to working on "a political fairy tale" for children younger than the audience for Harry Potter.

Talking of women who are richer than possibly they deserve, Spice Girls: Giving You Everything (BBC1) traced the careers of the five girls who achieved their goal of becoming 'household names' and recently re-formed to supplement their incomes. The documentary showed that the main fly in their ointment was probably the bossy Geri Halliwell (alias Ginger Spice), whose distinctively tasteless choice of clothes set her apart from the four others. Geri virtually split up the group by walking out abruptly in 1998 but they now all claim to be the best of friends.

Money is a great healer.