Doctor Thorne review: full crinolines, heaving bosoms and star-crossed lovers

If there's one thing we know very well by now is that writer Julian Fellowes is a dab hand at costume dramas. It's not long since the dust covers were put on Downton Abbey, and here Fellowes is at it again. Doctor Thorne (UTV Ireland, Sunday) is bathed in nostalgia, fabulous costumes, National Trust piles on the fringes of a picture-postcard English village, and plot lines that revolve around money, class, matriarchs scheming marriages for their offspring and a secret child.

But as this is set nearly 100 years before Downton, the clothes aren't quite as covetable. The fabulous frocks are mostly full crinolines (which in shape are like those naff crocheted toilet roll covers), but there's pretty floral head-dresses and heaving bosoms and, in all, it is relentlessly lush-looking – chocolate-box historical drama for pleasant Sunday-night viewing.

Terrific romp
How close Fellowes has stuck to Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne I can't tell, never having read it, but it's a terrific romp, with the first episode scene-setting at a brisk pace: the gloomy first scene takes place at night in the village where a drunken bowsie (Ian McShane) confronts a toff named Thorne for defiling his sister, punches him and he falls down dead.

Switch to 20 years later and we're on the lawn of the fabulous Gresham family house (Downton Abbey looks like a semi-d by comparison) in glorious sunshine where pretty young Augusta's upcoming wedding is being joylessly discussed.

She’s to marry the odious Mr Moffat whose only appeal is his large wallet (a must-have for a Gresham as the family is broke). And who better for some robustly forthright match-making than mama, Lady Arabella (Rebecca Front) whose every second word involves money, aided by her flinty sister Lady De Courcy (Phoebe Nicholls).

The real challenge for these formidable schemers is to find a suitable moneyed match for the just-come-of-age dashing Frank Gresham (Harry Richardson). The problem is that he already has his sights set on the sweet, funny, flirtatious, but poor Mary Thorne (Stephanie Martini).

She has been brought up by local GP, the titular Dr Thorne (Tom Hollander), who in the first episode, after much badgering, tells her her story – she is his brother’s daughter, the Thorne killed by that blow, and she was abandoned by her mother, a poor village woman, who escaped the shame of it all to Australia.

New money rules
And then another vast house looms into view and Dr Thorne is visiting a regular patient, the drink-raddled Roger Stratcherd who – and here's a turn-up for the books - is McShane. It turns out that on release from prison, Stratcherd set about building a fortune through the new-fangled railway. Moreover, being loaded with new money, he has loaned considerable sums to his neighbours the Greshams who are deep in his debt.

Stratcherd tells the doctor that he has made his will, leaving all his money first to his son, and if he dies before age 30, to the first-born child of his far-away sister. The doctor reveals he knows the first born and we now see poor Mary Thorne’s vastly improved prospects in quite a different light.

Inside knowledge
So after a swift paced first episode, the central plot (will star-crossed lovers Frank and Mary get their happy ending?) is set. As viewers, we know about Mary's potential inheritance, but the young couple and the big house-lot don't. (Incidentally, Trollope was terrific at coming up with atmospheric surnames, but Frank and Mary?)

If Hollander over on BBC One in the tense, superb The Night Manager is too scheming and odious for you, then as the gentle, morally upright Doctor Thorne, he's terrific Sunday-night company.