Charles Dance

Lord Emsworth (Martin Jarvis) is getting Empress of Blandings, his prize pig, ready for the Shropshire Agricultural Show. He's worried about possible nobbling by rival breeder Sir Gregory Parsloe (Michael Jayston). Meanwhile scandal looms if Emsworth's brother Galahad (Charles Dance) publishes his memoirs so Parsloe hires private detective Percy Pilbeam (Matt Lucas) to nick the manuscript. And love, as ever in a PG Wodehouse comedy, is making life very complicated for the younger set. Dramatised in two star-studded episodes by Archie Scottney, made by glamorous independents Jarvis and Ayres Productions.

Nearly always it's the quiet ones that surprise you with their anger. Terry Pratchett's delightful series of surreal Discworld novels have long bewitched readers. Pratchett novels have always acted as gentle satires of our world, but Going Postal, the latest of his novels to be filmed by Sky was, by Pratchett's standards at least, monumentally angry.

Porcine bankers, the celebration of corporations, the moral vacuity of the concept of victimless crime and, er, the incorrect use of apostrophes, were all fed into the novel that was the source for this Sky adaptation. The anger was mollified for family viewing - but only slightly.

David Suchet, almost unrecognisable as a villain who resembled an ageing, heavy metal star, played Reacher Gilt - the rapacious owner of Clacks, a network of semaphore towers which are Discworld's take on the internet.

This was a man who had taken advantage of a banking crisis to move in and steal Clacks from its inventor. Gilt was enraged when the patrician Lord Vetinari (Charles Dance) pardoned conman Moist von Lipwig (Richard Coyle) on the understanding he revive the Discworld's postal service to provide some competition to Clacks.

Part of the glory of this fabulous chunk of entertainment was that Sky eschewed CGI in favour of lavish sets, constructed with lashings of sparkling invention. Going Postal looked amazing. Luckily, everything else about the production was dazzling too.

Coyle was roguish but sympathetic, and Andrew Sachs, as his assistant, bumbled along like a cross between his Fawlty Towers duffer Manuel and the original grandfather from Only Fools And Horses. Claire Foy, as Adora Dearhart, smouldered convincingly.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, a two-part special from Sky1 which concludes tonight, had a pretty distinguished cast too. Presumably the thesps in question were attracted not just by the money, but also by the always-welcome chance to don some eccentric facial hair and shout a lot. Then again, they could even have been attracted by the script - because the programme is enormous and imaginative fun.

Needless to say, with its origins in a Pratchett novel, the imagination does tend to the bonkers. Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, a con man rescued from hanging by the mysterious Lord Vetinari (Charles Dance, salt-and-pepper beard and moustache). He was then given the job of reviving the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, much to the fury of the man who runs the Discworld equivalent of the internet, Reacher Gilt (David Suchet, Fu-Manchu moustache, beard and eye-patch). Moist's allies include the elderly junior postmaster Mr Groat (Andrew Sachs, huge moustache) and the toothsome Adora Belle Dearheart (Claire Foy, no facial hair but obviously enjoying putting Little Dorrit behind her by smouldering sexily and generally carrying either a cigarette or a riding crop).

With these - and plenty more - elements in place, last night's episode rattled along nicely, easily passing the key test for all programmes that seek to create another world: we gradually stopped noticing how mad that world was. By the end, in fact, it seemed perfectly logical that a seven-foot clay robot should have persuaded Moist to confess that he'd been responsible for the forged cabbage bonds which ruined Adora's family - while back at the Post Office a young man obsessed with pin-manufacture was attacked by a flying monster.

The cosmology of Going Postal is perhaps best described as pre-Newtonian. The Earth is flat and rests on the back of three humungous elephants, which in turn rest on the back of a giant turtle. This, as Terry Pratchett devotees will know, is Discworld, an extensively chronicled alternative universe in which the knowing joke is one of the fundamental physical forces. Those who aren't Pratchett devotees might be pleasantly surprised by Going Postal, which is so nicely done that it makes a proselytising case for the author's distinctive imagination. Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, a con-man and fraudster who is saved from the gallows to bring a bit of healthy competition back to the communications industry in Ankh-Morpork. Charles Dance's Lord Vetinari invites him to revitalise the derelict postal system in order to give consumers an alternative to a kind of steampunk telegraphy system, run with monopolistic greed by the villainous Reacher Gilt.

Moist has no intention of doing any such thing, particularly since he soon learns that all his predecessors have died trying. But as he tries to raise enough funds to flee, he inadvertently invents postage stamps - and begins to be haunted by the consequences of his former frauds. He also has the problem of getting away from his probation officer, a giant golem called Mr Pump, who eventually brings him into contact with the love interest in the piece, a young woman who runs a golem rights consciousness-raising group. It looks terrific and is full of good jokes, including a running gag about Stanley, one of the junior postal clerks, who is an obsessive pin collector. In an attempt to make small talk with him, Moist mentions that he's seen Pins Monthly on the newsstands. "That rag is for hobbyists," hisses Stanley. "True pinheads only read Total Pins." There are appropriately scary villains, some lovely special effects, including a tsunami of undelivered letters that pursues Moist through the corridors of the old Post Office, and just enough real feeling to make you care about what happens next. One of the opening credits read "Mucked about by Terry Pratchett", but neither he, nor they, mucked it up.

Sky may not have the resources to churn out top home-grown drama on a routine basis, but when it does decide to throw its weight behind a production, as it's done for this latest Terry Pratchett Discworld adventure, then it certainly does it in style.

Shot in HD, and with a fabulous British cast that includes David Suchet, Richard Coyle, Charles Dance, Claire Foy, Andrew Sachs, Steve Pemberton and Tamsin Greig, this Bank Holiday two-parter (concluding at the same time tomorrow) is a typically outlandish Pratchett tale about a lifelong con man who's given one last chance to avert the death sentence. The deal? He must take on the seemingly cursed task of trying to rescue Discworld's Post Office, under threat from their equivalent of the internet.

Going Postal: Charles Dance On Lord Vetinari

Charles Dance takes time out from filming Sky 1 HD's new Terry Pratchett adaptation Going Postal, to tell us about what it's like to be the seemingly omniscient Patrician of Ankh Morpork.

I wonder how many viewer complaints ITV2's raunchy new soap Trinity garnered. Personally, my biggest grievance was the total absence of raunchiness. Come on ITV2, you can be ruder than that. Nobody's watching!

The announcer warned us of imminent nudity, but the anticipated feast of flesh turned out to be the same poor actor obliged to show his buttocks twice. And even from behind, the actor involved looked uncomfortable, which is quite an achievement.

Trinity is set in the country's most prestigious seat of learning, the fictional Bridgeford University, where, amid the gleaming spires, intellectual pursuits come a poor second to murder, casual sex, class warfare and bullying.

Charles Dance stars as the sinister Professor Maltravers, who takes instructions from a shadowy figure lurking in a secret hideaway behind the oak-panelled wall. It's early days, but I suspect Maltravers is involved in the sort of illicit experiment that gives science a bad name.

Characterisation is gossamer thin, production values are spartan and the plots risible, but there is a self-satisfied knowingness to it all, as though the producers are more than aware of the show's B-movie sensibilities and inviting viewers to share the joke. Which is all very well, but I'm not altogether sure the joke is that good.

And then just as I was bathed in a warm critical glow that conceivably wasn't even menopausal, I made the mistake of tuning belatedly into Trinity (ITV2), a... um... er... thriller? Comedy? Drama? Sod it, a programme about a bonkers Ivy League-meets-Hogwarts British university full of freaks and sex addicts so charmlessly crass, cynically smutty, joyless, unfunny and badly written and acted (despite starring Charles Dance and Claire Skinner. What. Were. They. Thinking?) that I immediately signed up to the show's Facebook group, where questions such as: "So who looks like the better snog, Theo or Dorian?" (posed by a wicked Wizard of Oz-style ITV employee, presumably), are asked while a horde of 15-year-old girls cyber-shout "Dorian!"

But although buff, beautiful and entirely leech-free, Dorian (Christian Cooke) is a long way from being a pre-watershed hero - no girl would be safe with him alone in a well lit room, much less Afghanistan or a volcano.

Never a martyr to originality, ITV rolled out their latest spooky drama Trinity that is part Lost, part Codename Icarus and part any US college-set comedy-drama that goes straight to DVD, and then straight to the charity shop, and then straight to recycling when the DVD is taking up space that could be used for a DVD that has a better chance of selling, such as Bobby Davro's Rock With Laughter or Fred West Sings Sinatra.

The young characters in Trinity can be summed-up in a few words - Dorian (likes sex, preferably incest, but will settle for virgins; very arrogant); Charlotte (feisty Christian, easily corrupted); Rosalind (loves sex, hates love); Theo (poor but bright, likes sex); Angus (moron, stoned); Raj (stoned, moron). The last two are supposed to offer comic relief through their tripped-out dialogue and drug taking but are perhaps the most egregious screen presences since Scrappy Doo.

There's a temptation to write-off the first episode as an excruciating and clumsy introduction. The first reason is that the truly atrocious scene in which distressed virgin (her father died recently, as never tires of telling anyone) Charlotte (Antonia Bernath) is seduced by the predatory Dorian. After revelling in the joys of sex for the first time, Charlotte suddenly appears as though she's just read the Karma sutra in the 15 seconds it's taken for Dorian to get his end away and is lustful for more. That is until she spots the cross dangling from her neck, and is suddenly tormented by a religious guilt that swamps very pore of her soul prompting her to lambast Dorian for taking advantage of her (and in so doing causing Dorian's face to break out in an emotion that isn't arrogance or scorn for the first time in his life).

The second reason is that away from the debauchery, that is as calculating a sensual device to lure in the casual viewer as a half-naked woman is in a video by the offensively crap All-American Rejects, there is a sinister beguiling plot handled deftly by Charles Dance as the sharp, menacing Dr Edmund Maltravers, the Dean of Trinity, and Claire Skinner as the sympathetic Dr Angela Donne concerning some mysterious experiment or research being conducted at the university.

Of course, we don't know what it is yet, and are unlikely to ever know - as Trinity will probably be hacked to death by the ITV cost-cutting monster that lurks under the bed of every creative thought in independent television - but we can only hope that whatever the devious plan is that it involves the gradual elimination of every single student in Trinity - that by itself would win it a Bafta for Most Satisfying Drama Series.

ITV2's new drama Trinity is set in a fictitious university. The key characters of superficial toffs and bright, working-class teens are all overseen by the principal, Charles Dance, who leads an impressive cast including Claire Skinner as Warder, employed to bring the university into the 21st century by encouraging a new policy of ethnic and social mix. Nudity and sex are in abundance, along with some cringeworthy and potentially offensive dialogue: "Have you ever come on a member of the royal family?" stands out.

But among all this frivolity are secrets involving one of the freshers, who enrols to uncover the truth about her father's death. Trinity is well produced, with some great performances and a mystery that leaves us wanting to know more. I'm already hooked.