Delicious shakespeare lite; Joan Juliet Buck applauds the BBC's masterly modern reworking of comedy and tragedy.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Modernized Shakespeare is most often an excruciating pageant wherein men and women in vaguely twentieth-century clothes improbably spout rhyme, and we the audience pretend to understand

the absurd richness of their language and to ignore the curiously dowdy costumes. The BBC figured out that it was possible to take Shakespeare's own approach to old material, to use the story and chuck the source. On Sunday nights this month, BBC America airs four "modern" Shakespeare plays, and two of them are triumphs. You can skip A Midsummer Night's Dream set in a therapeutic New Age relationship camp called Dream Parks, and The Taming of the Shrew, where Katherine is a nasty British politician, even if her mother is played by Twiggy.

But Much Ado About Nothing is pure pleasure. Adapted by David Nicholls, it's set in a seaside Britain of clean minicabs, big flats, a TV station, and stately-house hotels, so that the parade and show aspect of Shakespeare's comedies is logical. Of course a regional TV chief would give a fancy-dress party. The clowns essential to Shakespeare's plays are dim-

witted security guards, and love notes are text messages. Beatrice (Sarah Parish) and Benedick (Damian Lewis) are both presenters on an improbably sleek local TV program called Wessex Tonight. He dumped her three years ago, now he's back, and she's not happy. Hero is the sexy weather girl and the boss's daughter; Claudio is Claude, the dumb young sportscaster. The pace set by director Brian Percival makes the reworked, untangled story fly, and for once with Much Ado you care about the characters.

The masterpiece of the group ...