It’s funny, all the British TV we watch.

Tonight we start watching a recent adaptation of Mansfield Park, being shown on PBS Masterpiece during their Jane Austin marathon. (The things we do for our loved ones, I tell you.) What’s funny is recognizing actors from other British TV stuff. This time it’s Douglas Hodge. As soon as I see him I say, “Hey, it’s Tertius.” Yes, he played Tertius in the version of Middlemarch that we saw, the one with the lovely Juliet Aubrey. We also saw him in The Way We Live Now, playing Roger Carbury, cousin to the odious Sir Felix Carbury, faithless suitor to Marie Melmotte, played by the dazzling Shirley Henderson. In Mansfield Park he’s Sir Thomas Bertram, Douglas Hodge is.

It takes me longer to figure out the guy playing older brother Tom Bertram, heir to Mansfield Park. Finally. “Hey, he was Tom Pullings in Master and Commander.” I remember the cool scar he had on his cheek in that. Must have been the lack of that what made me take so long to recognize him.

In general, everyone is way too good-looking, in a Georgian England’s Next Top Model kind of way. Except for Billie Piper’s eyebrows. What’s the deal with those? Whoever’s playing Maria Bertram looks vaguely familiar. IMBD tells me she’s the new Bionic Woman on NBC. And, whoa, she was in four-hundred and thirty-two episodes of Eastenders.

Alistair Cooke being long gone, we have Gillian Anderson as our host. She reminds me of my all-time favorite stripper, Christina L. I suppose it’s not just that she looks like her, with her hair longer now, the same dyed red color. But also that I had made a deal with Christina that I’d try watching X Files if she would go out one night and look at the Comet Hale-Bopp that was big in the sky at the time. I watched like four episodes of X Files. Not really my thing, although I do really like David Duchovny in general. And Gillian Anderson, although at the time she didn’t remind me of Christina. And she never did check out Hale-Bopp, as far as I remember. Not really her thing, I guess.

(And I learn from IMDB that Alistair Cooke died fairly recently, in 2004. Almost made it to a hundred. He only hosted Masterpiece Theatre until 1993, apparently retiring after twenty-two years at it. Would’ve been cool to see him introducing Upstairs Downstairs every week back in the day, instead of sans intros on DVD like we had.)

(We only make it through about half of Mansfield Park. Dawn will mercifully declare it unfit to watch tomorrow night. We’ll abandon it in favor of the old Amanda Root version of Persuasion. You remember Amanda Root, right? She was Winifred in the newer Forsyte Saga, with Gina McKee and Rupert Graves and Ioan Gruffud. And Ciarán Hinds plays Wentworth. You remember him in The Mayor of Casterbridge? With Juliet Aubrey, Jodhi May, Polly Walker, and Jean Marsh? He’s also apparently in a version of Jane Eyre with Samantha Morton, but we haven’t seen that one.)