Wuthering Heights has been so over-filmed down the years that it might as well be called Withering Lows at this stage. Aside from the numerous big-screen versions, Emily Bronte's novel of doomed romance had already been adapted for television six times before this latest one came along.

The first one in 1948, when television was a burbling infant, was followed by ones in '62, '67, '78, '98 and 2003.

That last one, by the way, was produced by MTV and relocated the action to contemporary California, where Heathcliff, renamed Heath, became a floppy-haired, would-be rock star. Dude.

So what do you do with a story that's been done so many times before? It's obvious, really: you twist it around, turn it upside down and inside out, and basically try to pass off something very old as something very new.

It's called "reimagining" and it's usually a pain in the classics. Last year the BBC tried to reimagine Oliver Twist and ended up with EastEnders in fancy dress. Scriptwriter Peter Bowker's new two-part adaptation of Wuthering Heights doesn't wreck the original to that degree, although it does pointlessly mess around with the chronology.

Admittedly, it's more than 30 years since I read Bronte's book, but I'm pretty sure it didn't begin with Cathy's ghostly grey hand crashing through the window of Heathcliff's tormented dreams and then take an age to reel back to the beginning. Ironically, it was only when Bowker stopped reimagining, about 30 minutes in, and let Emily Bronte's imagination take over, that Wuthering Heights began to work.

A lot of it has to do with great casting. Tom Hardy makes a striking Heathcliff. His transformation from brooding, feral young romantic to bitter, twisted middle-aged man is wholly convincing.

Elfin-faced Charlotte Riley's Cathy -- so often wan and watery in previous adaptations -- is sexy and feisty enough to make you believe why Heathcliff would yearn for her to "come back" from beyond the grave.

It still looks too Sunday-night-pretty, though. Wuthering Heights concludes tonight.

Like Heathcliff, Paddy O'Gorman and his trademark hat are constants in an ever-changing world. So, unfortunately, is poverty. It's poverty that concerns Paddy in the current series of O'Gorman.

This week he was on the streets of inner-city Dublin and Cork, talking to people forced to resort to cash-converter shops, the less patient, less forgiving successors to the near-vanished pawnshops of old.

Among many affecting encounters, Paddy met a young, recently unemployed electrician who'd had to hock his beloved electric guitar, worth €1,500, for a mere €50.

Paddy told him they'd exchange numbers, so that if he got the guitar out of hock before the programme went to air, he could play him some blues. He did and he did, and it was a small but wonderful moment. In his own gently enquiring way, O'Gorman is TV's best chronicler of the times we live in.

- Pat Stacey