The Making of a Lady, ITV1: costume drama meets the macabre Like the book, the film will begin as a Victorian fairytale, duping us into a false sense of familiarity. Emily Fox Seton, who will be played by Lydia Wilson, is a "nice overgrown girl... whose life was a continuous struggle with the narrowest of mean fortunes" who provides companionship to grand Lady Maria Bayne (Lumley). She takes the fancy of the stiffly unglamorous widow Lord Walderhurst (Linus Roache), and soon becomes the unlikely lady of his country mansion. Until this point, our full attention rests on the demure petty concerns of social rivalry, but things become more complicated when Emily befriends Walderhurst's wildly handsome young relative Alec Osborne (James d'Arcy) and his exotic wife (Casualty's Hasina Haque), who turn out to be very dark characters. When Walderhust joins his regiment in India, Emily is left alone, unaware of the bitter dangers and social implications that came with defending a huge fortune. Ultimately, Burnett asks, must fame and fortune come at the expense of the purity and kindness that our heroine embodies? The drama is being filmed on a modest budget of £1.2 million in just four weeks. Filming has taken the production to three stately homes including Jacobean Cheshire mansion Dorfold Hall, which is to be Walderhurst's country pile. It comes as no surprise when d'Arcy - fresh from filming lavish Hollywood blockbuster Cloud Atlas with Tom Hanks, and a Hitchcock biopic with Antony Hopkins - tells me at lunch that there has been something of a "Dunkirk spirit" on the set. According to Curson Smith, though, managing the tight budget has been nothing compared to the challenge of blending costume drama and psychological horror. He calls his hybrid "a cross between Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, and Rosemary's Baby." How has he done it? With careful manipulation of the camera so that, as in the novel, we only see the world through Emily's eyes and "never quite know what's real and what she's imagining. It is about a girl being immersed in a world she doesn't understand, and we go on that journey with her. The fact that two plot threads, one a romance, the other a thriller, are woven together through the film, has resulted in the creation of a strange dichotomy on set. D'Arcy is channelling childhood trauma to get inside the head of villainous Alec, whom he describes as "a sick puppy... but quite good at badminton." In the other camp, Roache says playing the part of Victorian gentleman Walderhurst has been "delicate, like fine lace work." "I accepted this job because I loved the romance," says Roache - admitting that it's been a bonus to be able to stay down the road with his father, aka Coronation Street's Ken Barlowe. For me, it's about two people who are getting married for different pragmatic reasons. It's so unusual, so human, and so delicately written. He's just finished filming the "awkward" first lovemaking scene with Wilson, which both actors think is a pivotal moment for their characters. "Women have changed their relationship to their bodies since then," says Wilson, who has spoken to a movement coach to help her create Emily. She encouraged me to think about Emily's sexuality as this absolute mystery to her. All her movement flows out of her guardedness. When she does have sex with her new husband, it's this huge game-changing thing. Both Wilson and Curson Smith agree that Emily, Burnett's rather pale heroine, may be the reason the story dropped out of fashion. Jane Austen's heroines are witty and concerned with image. Emily doesn't have any of the commodities that make someone successful in the modern world. She's not exactly a little sex bomb [in the book]. She's more like a lovely kind cow with big eyes. The 28-year-old Wilson, whose film credits include parts in Never Let Me Go and Channel 4"s Any Human Heart is a Cambridge English graduate and says she "wolfed down" Burnett's novel before taking the role. She wants to be as faithful as possible to Burnett's Emily, though the script has admittedly taken some licence with her character. But the production has been faithful to Burnett's writing in at least one vital arena: the wardrobe. The author, said to have been disappointed with her first husband, once complained to her friend, "he does not know the vital importance of the difference between white satin and tulle, and cream-coloured brocade." In the books, her descriptions of clothes, sometimes pages long, are bordering on the fetishistic. So it seems only right that Wilson should have had a staggering 42 costume changes for 100 minutes of drama. She talks extensively about her "top 10 outfits" including "a cream suit that has a gorgeous little cravat around her neck, a huge hat, and a garnet-coloured rope that does it up at the front..." So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself for a new entry in a distinctive genre, the obsessively detailed costume horror. "The Making of a Lady" is on ITV1 at 8.00pm on Sunday 16 December