Shakespeare retold

Maybe because the BBC reportedly over-pays its senior executives, they sometimes approve hefty funding for great, cute or memorable TV movie productions. Sometimes, those try to be all three, like the Shakespeare Retold 2005 mini-series of four made-for-TV contemporary versions of the bard's plots. One imagined Macbeth set in a Glasgow restaurant's kitchen. The other three were comic efforts, one of which envisaged The Taming of the Shrew as a modern-day rom-com.

Bizarre casting paired short and very shrewish Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, as Kate, a viperous virgin uber-Thatchery MP, and big-framed bumptious Rufus Sewell as Petruchio, a penniless earl wagered into wooing her. Her marriage is required too by party supporters if the spiteful spinster is to get chosen as Leader of the Opposition.

Screen-playwright Sally Wainwright had already been a BAFTA nominee for her work on Yorkshire Television's four-season comedy series At Home with the Braithwaites (200o-2003) and her version of one of Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath, 2003) for the BBC. She'd had what must have seemed an amusing idea for her re-working, which was directed attractively by David (Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper) Richards.

The worthy supporting cast included comedian David Mitchell (as Kate's long-suffering PPS), Jaime (Hustle) Murray as Bianca, a beautiful model sister head over heels for a beautiful Italian teenager, and Twiggy as their mother; Stephen (Drop the Dead Monkey) Tompkinson plays Bianca's manager, harbouring long-unrequited love for her.

The very incredible updated plotline has Petruchio, recently returned from Australia, falling into instant real love for Kate, who agrees within a week to a church wedding, at which her fiancee comes out as a macho transvestite who likes wearing high heels, make-up and a kilt. Not even coolly surreal, and too far from the realities of modern life and politics, the unfunny comedy framework collapses before the pair reach their honeymoon villa and Kate's taming in Italy.

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Peter Bowker, a multiple BAFTA TV award nominee, and winner for Occupation and Eric & Ernie, had the trickier task of placing A Midsummer's Night Dream in a modern setting. His imaginative interpretation works better. The lovers' wooded fairyland, still ruled by Oberon (Lennie Jericho James) and Titania (Sharon Inspector Linley Small), assisted by unreliable Puck (Dean Lennox Shameless Kelly), is found in Dream Park, a lakeside holiday resort where Theo (Bill Paterson) and Polly (Imelda Staunton) are hosting their daughter's engagement party. Its special highlight is to be a revue organised by camp manager Quince (Simon The Fast Show Day) performed by camp staff, including oafish Norman Bottom (Johnny Benidorm Vegas)

The bride-to-be's best friend and secret lover are Shakespeare's second pair of love victims to be served inattentive Puck's mistaken applications of eyedrops of love juice. Director Ed Fraiman has quick-cut fun illustrating the potion's effect, but repeats the device too many times; the production also adds pop song tracks whose lyrics are over-obvious noisy accompaniments to plot developments.

All ends well enough and sweetly, though the comic revue and audience participation were a lot funnier in the original 16th-Century theatrical romp.

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Brian Percival's direction of Much Ado About Nothing won him a BAFTA TV award in 2006. He'd won the BAFTA Short Film award for his 2001 About a Girl, and collected another BAFTA TV award in 2011 for his work on ITV's Downton Abbey.

David Nicholls wrote the snappy TV version of Shakespeare's rom-com, in which Beatrice (Sarah Blackpool Parish) and Benedick (Damian Band of Brothers Lewis) are sparring co-anchors on Wessex TV news programme. Hero (Billie Dr Who Piper), its bubbly bright weather girl and daughter of station manager Leonard (Martin By Jeeves Jarvis), is to be married to sportscaster Claude (Tom Eastenders Ellis), but the jealous former visual effects designer Don (Derek No Angels, Ugly Betty Riddell) plots their falling-out.

The delightfully credible lead pair of actors clearly enjoy their frolic, especially an apropos deconstruction and recital of a Shakespearean poem extolling love and marriage. The play's tittle-tattle tale of hate-love passions has been artfully re-hashed by Nicholls, whose non-TV work includes adaptations of his own novels: Starter for Ten (2006, starring James McAvoy) and One Day (2011, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess). It's clear why the BBC chose to run this story first in the four-week mini-series: this is Shakespeare rendered with comic and televisual flair.

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James McAvoy landed the tile role in the re-working of Macbeth, who's been transformed into the young impassioned sous chef in a top Glasgow restaurant in the noir screenplay devised by Peter (Cambridge Spies) mini-series) Moffat, a multi-award nominee and BAFTA winner for his Criminal Justice mini-series. Joe Macbeth's ambitious wife, Ella (Keeley Spooks Hawes), is the maitre d' for the three-star restaurant, whose absentee owner is a TV celebrity chef, Duncan (Vincent - 300, The Street - Regan). His son, Malcolm, is a long-haired would-be poet and apprentice chef (Toby Dead Man's Shoes, The Street Kebbell.

The Scottish tragic melodrama was given a treatment reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's epic tale of a egocentric chef and his retinue, and director Mark Brozel (award-winning Holy Cross TV movie) followed suit with an artful array of dramatic lighting, raw meat, kitchen knives, gore, garbage and self-consciously well-composed close-ups of Mr and Mrs Macbeth emoting madly.

The one conceit that worked surprisingly well was the transformation of the three witches into a chorus of refuse-disposal bin-men, consoling Macbeth with the thought that his murder of Duncan will only be trouble "when pigs fly", which they do eventually. What didn't work was the concept that the Ghost could be replaced by a macabre Michelin quality inspector.

Another silly idea was corrected before the series was published as a BBC DVD. The original portmanteau title was rightly ditched: ShakespeaRe Told. Will must have groaned in his grave.