The series, co-produced by the BBC Drama and WGBH, is the only UK show in the running for best mini-series or film made for TV. The other nominees in the category are John Adams, Recount, Bernard & Doris and A Raisin in the Sun.

Judi Dench is up for best actress, while co-star and Bafta winner Eileen Atkins is nominated as best supporting actress.

The winners of both the TV and film Golden Globes will be announced on 11 January.

The BBC1 costume drama will be up against HBO’s John Adams, Sci-Fi Channel’s Tin Man and A&E’s The Andromeda Strain in the best miniseries category.

Dench, nominated in the best actress in a miniseries or movie category for her role as kindhearted spinster Matty Jenkyns, will compete against Susan Sarandon in HBO’s Bernard and Doris; Laura Linney in John Adams; Catherine Keener in Showtime’s American Crime; and Phylicia Rashad in ABC’s A Raisin in the Sun.

Dame Eileen Atkins, nominated in the best supporting actress in a miniseries or movie category for her role as Cranford’s Miss Deborah, will compete with against fellow Briton Ashley Jensen for her role in the final Extras, screened on HBO in the US; Laura Dern in HBO’s Recount; Alfre Woodard in CBS’s Pictures of Hollis Woods; and Audra McDonald in A Raisin in the Sun.

Airs: Sunday, May 4, 2008; PBS; 9-11 PM EST

Part 2 on Sunday, May 11, 2008

Part 3 on Sunday, May 18, 2008

BBC TV cameras will return to Lacock to film a Christmas special of hit period drama Cranford.

Stars of the original series, including Dame Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton and Francesca Annis, have all joined the follow-up to the autumn series.

The special will pick up life in the small Cheshire market town in September 1844 – a year after the marriage of Sophy (Kimberley Nixon) and Dr Harrison (Simon Woods).

Kate Harwood, the BBC’s head of series and serials, and executive producer of Cranford, said she was pleased the ratings winner would be back.

“Cranford captured the hearts of the nation last year as every week, nearly 8m viewers tuned in to catch up with Miss Matty and her fellow villagers,” she said.

“I am delighted that we are able to bring these much-loved characters back to life for a Christmas special in 2009 and once again uniting an unprecedented pool of talent to thrill and entertain our audiences.”
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The serial is nominated for four BAFTA Television Awards this year including

Now, though, I’m in the middle of a thorough rethink. Two decades later, and along comes the BBC with a “lavish” adaptation of Cranford (Sundays, 9pm) which, in spite of all my misgivings, I end up watching and . . . it’s wonderful. Like every other thirtysomething woman I know, I now refuse to leave the house on Sunday nights, and will not do so until this balm to my soul comes to an end. More to the point, I’m wondering: was I wrong? Is Elizabeth Gaskell’s most popular novel also her best, or is it just that this version is so good that it makes you think it must be so? It’s one of the two, I’m sure – though there is a third possibility, which is that I’m simply getting old. And with age comes not only (ha!) wisdom, but a flinching away from unrelenting grimness.

Whatever. The series is great. People are comparing it to the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but this is unfair; Cranford is better than that. It’s up there with the BBC’s stunning Middlemarch, which was made the year before a soggy Colin Firth got everyone so excited, and was the series that revived costume drama after a long spell in the doldrums.

It’s beautifully written, which is a surprise, given that the script is by Heidi Thomas, who penned Lilies, the cheesiest drama I’ve ever had the misfortune to see (“Liverpool, 1920. Three girls on the edge of womanhood, a world on the brink of change”; it was axed by the BBC after one series). So I’m guessing that she nicked quite a lot of her best lines – “My father was a man; I think I understand the sex” – from Mrs G. But it also looks perfect. It’s not just the cobbles and carriages; the designers have used colour to mirror character. Look at the powdered face of Lady Ludlow (Francesca Annis), and you think of the cold mist rising forbiddingly off her enclosed land.

Is Cranford, an everyday story of Knutsford life circa 1830, still “relevant”? Naturally, the makers of this version have done their public service best to emphasise its more modern themes – Cranford’s inhabitants have an irrational fear of incomers, believing that their arrival will herald a terrifying crime wave – but the truth is that, in its heart, it is not a 21st-century tale at all. Perhaps this is another reason why it is pulling in eight million viewers a week. Not only does it extol the virtues of quiet economy (no status handbags here, girls; you’ll have to make do with an extra ribbon about the hem of your dress), fortitude in the face of loss, and duty; it suggests – and how crazily radical this must seem to the Heat generation – that lasting female friendship may be as consoling as sexual love.

There are not, you see, enough men to go around in Cranford, which means that, unlike almost anything else that has been on television in the past decade, its cast consists mostly of women, and women of a certain age, to boot. So far, much of the critical attention has been spent on Judi Dench, who plays Miss Matty, and it is true that this is one of the best performances she has ever given: quiet and affecting. But in this company, she cannot be said to be a standout.

Julia McKenzie (as cow-loving Mrs Forrester) and Barbara Flynn (as hoity-toity Mrs Jamieson) are both at the top of their game, and even the smaller roles are deftly done (Debra Gillett, who plays Mrs Johnson the haberdasher, reels off her wares to dithering customers with a beady intensity that is quite superb). My favourite performance so far, however, is that of Lisa Dillon, who plays Mary Smith, Miss Matty’s companion, and whose lovely face can swing from wry amusement to heart-clutching empathy in a single beat. These fantastic women own the piece just as Gaskell’s characters possess Cranford – “like Amazons”.

It has taken 150 years for the novelist known as Mrs Gaskell to escape the deathgrip of Victorian sanctimony and ascend into our age as Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Superstar – mother, mistress of manners, model of multi-tasking, and, from tonight, the surest hit on television.

The BBC’s adaptation of Cranford, Mrs Gaskell’s engrossingly soap-operatic story of women’s lives in a Cheshire village in the 1840s, has attracted a dazzling cast including Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton and Francesa Annis.

The lavish five-part series is tipped to become the most watched costume drama since Pride and Prejudice 12 years ago, but while Jane Austen and her 19th-century contemporaries, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, bask in imperishable fame, Mrs Gaskell remains largely unknown to the public.

This hardly seems fair; for while Austen may have penned more polished satires, and it is hard to beat the Brontes for breathless bouts of passion, Elizabeth’s legacy not only transcends both literature and genre, but speaks with deadly effect of the big issues – sex, inequality, social alienation – that trouble us still.

She was no beauty, this serious-minded daughter of a London archivist, and took a dim view of much that went on around her. Yet she appreciated wit, gossip and eccentricity, and beneath her arch eye and quasi-journalistic thirst for answers, Victorian society was reluctantly forced to re-examine much that it took for granted.

She pioneered what might be called the reality novel, wrote one of the greatest of all biographies, and mapped the pathologies of the emerging working class more accurately than Marx or Engels. So why isn’t she more famous?

“She ought to be,” says Joan Leach, secretary of the Gaskell Society. “I’ve complained to the BBC in the past about Jane Austen always being on, and Elizabeth being ignored. At least it’s changing. There’s a big revival going on now. I think we can see her now as a very modern woman – an early multi-tasker, who worked, raised a family, involved herself in the community – and she understood people well and recognised how change affected their lives.”

Elizabeth was born in London in 1810, the daughter of William Stevenson, a former clergyman who served as Keeper of the Records of the Treasury. Her mother died a year after Elizabeth’s birth, and the child was sent to live with an aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire. She barely saw her father again, but seems to have settled well into rural life, and it was from the minutiae of village existence that she later created Cranford.

In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and settled in Manchester, a once upstanding commercial town being transformed before its disbelieving inhabitants’ eyes into “the first and greatest industrial metropolis in the world”.

The conditions of working life were extraordinarily harsh, and from Elizabeth’s pained observation of them flowed her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), which, through the stories of two families, chronicles the miseries of the labouring poor.

Jenny Uglow, the author’s biographer, tells of an occasion when Mrs Gaskell, in her capacity as the minister’s wife, went to caution a poor family against their “suspicion of the rich”. The father took her arm, and clutching it tightly with tears in his eyes, asked her: “Aye, ma’am, but have you ever seen a child starve to death?”

The book caused a sensation – hailed as the first convincing portrayal of life in Britain’s bright new industrial age – and although she had published it anonymously, she was soon outed, acclaimed by literary London, and signed up by Charles Dickens as a contributor to his journal Household Words.

Behind the matronly moniker of “Mrs Gaskell” that she had adopted, now burned a furious social conscience. She went to work on Ruth, the story of a fallen woman, seduced, impregnated and abandoned by the bounderish Henry Bellingham.

In her sympathetic embrace of Ruth and the charting of a young woman’s journey to eventual redemption, Elizabeth effectively tore up some of the most hallowed clauses of the Victorian moral code. This was dangerous territory, and while the book again proved popular, there was a significant backlash against it from those who saw in the image of the fallen women one of the core woes of society. A group of her husband’s congregants burned the book in protest.

“She was frowned on by many people in her own day, who found her ideas rather scandalous,” says Mrs Leach. “The Victorians never appreciated having their faults pointed out.”

Mrs Gaskell defended the book in public, while claiming, poignantly, that the criticism “shocked me and made me physically ill”, but also admitting that she would not allow her daughters to read it.

Yet she was now a prominent figure in the Victorian scheme of things – a friend of Florence Nightingale, a muse to Dickens, who called her “my Sheherazade”, a confidante of the titled, powerful and wealthy, “the fact of her genius” attested to by Henry James. She could afford to take risks.

“When you get into Mrs Gaskell,” says the actress Sinead Cusack, who appeared in an earlier television adaptation of another campaigning Gaskell novel, North and South (1855), “you realise that for all the mannerliness and niceties of the times, she was a tough woman, writing about tough women, and saying things that were hard to say, in ways you weren’t supposed to say them, and I ended up admiring her very much.”

Mrs Gaskell might not have seen it quite like that. Pondering her relationship with Charlotte Bronte, the celebrated biography of whom she completed in 1857, she wrote: “The difference between Miss Bronte and me is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness into mine. My books are so much better than I am that I often feel ashamed of having written them, as if I were a hypocrite.”

It is no secret, and even less of a surprise, that the BBC was initially reluctant to take a crack at Cranford. Outwardly, the story, completed in 1853, is one of breathtaking uneventfulness.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the humdrum daily lives of a group of women villagers – described by Mrs Gaskell as “Amazons”, “widows of respectability” and “spinsters innumerable” – whose myriad social rules effectively prohibit the discussion of anything of consequence.

Yet darker threads lurk behind the soporific veneer. Change is coming to Cranford; the railway is approaching from Manchester and with it the prospect of newcomers whose ways may not be those of the villagers.

“The people know the railway will alter their lives completely,” says Simon Curtis, the programme’s director, “and they fear the destruction of all that they love. It’s like the uncertainty in modern life after 9/11; you want to cling to familiar things.”

Mrs Gaskell, still prolific in her output and staunch in her radicalism, died suddenly of heart failure in 1865. By then, though, she had moved to the more agreeable surroundings of Hampshire. The railway had reached Knutsford, and things, as she feared, weren’t the same any more.