News that Dance To The Music Of Time - Anthony Powell's dazzling 12-volume sequence of novels - was being filmed for television prompted the pundits to describe it as Brideshead for the 1990s, but it is a far more complex and interesting series. It is the story of the century seen through the eyes of Nicholas Jenkins who, like his creator, is a product of the English upper classes - Eton and Oxford - who marries an aristocrat (Powell himself married Lady Violet Pakenham, sister of the present Earl of Longford).
Powell (pronounced Pole) moved easily between these two disparate worlds, on the one hand country house privilege, cocktail parties and servants; on the other Fitzrovia, London's between-the-wars literary Bohemia, a place of left-wing politics, basement flats and pubs, with Oxford the bridge between the two. His circle of friends included Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene. He knew George Orwell, William Walton, Constant Lambert, Edward Burra, the Sitwells.
However, the fascination is less in spotting the originals than in Powell's unique depiction of the randomness of life, of fates sealed on whim, on indecision, where no one seems to know where they fit in or what's going on. Yet Dance To The Music Of Time (the title was taken from an allegorical painting by Poussin) is tightly constructed - a danse macabre of death and sex, his themes of snobbery, eccentricity, treachery and betrayal lashed together with irony and wit.
To distil 12 novels of labyrinthine complexity and literary distinction (Clive James calls it "the greatest modern novel since Ulysses") into eight hours of television is asking the impossible. Yet somehow Hugh Whitemore (best known as a playwright: Pack Of Lies, Breaking The Code) has done it - capturing the essence certainly, and enough detail to delight existing devotees and ensure a new generation of readers.
Whitemore, who started reading the books 40 years ago, was not the first to try. Dennis Potter was at one time involved; later Ken Taylor, who adapted The Jewel In The Crown. Powell himself said: "I feel like a woman who has been seduced so many times that she'll never marry. It will be a race to the tomb."
"They don't make them like this anymore" is a staple of TV hype, but in this case it's true. It took nine months to film, spans a period of 60 years, cost around £10 million and it looks stunning. Carl Davis's classy score incorporates great period recordings from Noel Coward to Arthur Askey and Vera Lynn. It is produced by Alvin Rakoff (Voyage Round My Father and Paradise Postponed for TV and a clutch of Hollywood features) who shared the direction with Christopher Morahan (Jewel In The Crown and whose TV career stated way back with the award winning quartet Talking To A Stranger).
Most importantly, the performances are of the highest quality balanced equally between the young and unfamiliar - though with theatre credits as long as your arm - and the old, incredibly familiar. James Purefoy, Paul Rhyf, Emma Fielding, Clare Skinner are among the former; John Gielgud, Richard Pasco, Edward Fox, Alan Bennett, John Standing, Michael Williams, Sarah Badel, Zoe Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson among the latter. It will make stars of both James Purefoy as the young Nicholas Jenkins and Simon Russell Beale as Kenneth Widmerpool.
The story follows the lives of four boys who meet at Eton during the first World War, and takes them right through to the mid-1970s (the last in the series was published in 1975). A Dance To The Music Of Time will inevitably (and wrongly) be compared to Waugh's Brideshead trilogy, but while Waugh has the effect of distancing you - the character of Charles Ryder is the ultimate outsider - Powell brings you as close as possible to the mind-set of the English ruling classes during the pivotal first half of the century.
Inevitably the novels cover a much broader field (300 characters) and the decision in this adaptation to focus on the oddball, Kenneth Widmerpool, could have been risky as Widmerpool is one of the great comic creations of English literature. However, it's a risk that has paid off through the immaculate playing of Simon Russell Beale, an actor who combines talent and bulk in equal proportions but whose impressive theatre career transcends physical typecasting.
Widmerpool is one of life's misfits, a clumsy boy who never gets anything right, never really fits in. At Eton he is the butt of schoolboy jokes (his father is in liquid manure); socially and sexually he's as inept as it's possible to be, described as "more of an adjective than a person". From Mrs Simpson to sex, Stalin and Hitler, his instincts are always wrong.
In the wrong hands Widmerpool could all too easily become a parody. But Russell Beale's performance defies criticism.
Anthony Powell, now 91, says that "somewhat to my surprise" he is happy with the adaptation. "I think they've done as well as the medium possibly can." He's very possibly right.
Dance To The Music Of Time starts next Thursday on Channel 4