Television Reviews : Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ Lights Up A&E; Channel

There are two things wrong with the new 21-part BBC television series “Vanity Fair”--the half-hour segments go by too quickly, and those without access to the Arts & Entertainment cable channel, where the program debuts Sunday at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., will miss this tasty British import.

William Makepeace Thackeray’s satiric masterpiece, beautifully adapted here by Alexander Baron, is a richly astute portrait of frauds and gamblers, pretty manipulators, vulgarians, hangers-on and pious hypocrites, members of Britain’s 19th-Century middle class seeking higher station.

Although the chiding voice of Thackeray himself is missing, passing gentle judgment on his creations, directors Michael Owen Morris and Diarmuid Lawrence and a superb cast have taken great care in bringing that portrait to life.

Myriad plot lines begin as Thackeray’s two heroines, sweet, rich Amelia Sedley (Rebecca Saire) and the avid, pretty orphan Becky Sharp (Eve Matheson), leave Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Girls to take their places in the adult world. Becky Sharp, one of literature’s most endearing schemers, is a perfect fit for Matheson, who potently demonstrates Becky’s talent for self advancement.

None of the bountiful cast disappoints, from Saire’s “dear” Amelia, Sian Phillips’ rich harridan Matilda, James Saxon as Amelia’s foppish brother Joseph and Freddie Jones’ debauched Sir Pitt Crawley, to all the rest.

With dashing King’s Guards, the most elegant society, desperate gamblers, battlefield carnage, drunken butlers and censorious housekeepers, lecherous nobles, births, weddings and deaths, the virtuous wronged and the wicked rewarded--and vice versa--who could ask for anything more?