I probably made a mistake in coming to this most recent remake of "The Lady Vanishes" just days after watching Hitchcock's definitive 1939 version. There's just no comparison. Hitch's version was fast moving, exciting, suspenseful, funny and sexy while this version was by contrast, turgid, dull, predictable, humourless and staid.

The central character of Iris garners no interest from the viewer right from the start and quite why she's made to fall down a steep hill after witnessing a scene between the illicit lovers "Mr & Mrs Todmorton" is anyone's guess. Anyway, back at the hotel she throws a strop and decides to let her so called friends return to England before her, although within a day she's hey-presto on the next train herself, free spirit that she is. There she bumps into a friendly middle-aged woman who befriends her in the face of foreign frostiness, before the latter makes like the title and precipitates her attempts to find her and save her from a dastardly fate.

Only thing is you get no sense of connection between Iris and Miss Froy, in fact the latter witters on so much that if she sat next to me on a train I'd welcome any chance I got to escape her attentions. Moreover there's no mystery at all, the Hitchcock reveal of Miss Froy's writing her name in the condensation of the train window substituted for an English newspaper discarded in her compartment. There's no mysterious nun to alert suspicion, the romance between Iris and the professor's young assistant appears out of thin air while the rescue conclusion is wholly devoid of thrills.

I didn't feel the cast did much to lift an already stodgy production either, but the starriest players ever couldn't have made this dead duck fly. In trying, I presume to distance itself from being a slavish copy of the famous original it seemed to completely forget it was meant to be a romantic comedy-thriller.

Now excuse me while I try to forget I ever saw this whole dreary programme...

By calling this PBS program "The Lady Vanishes," one believes he or she will see a remake of the Hitchcock film of the same name.

However, that's not the case. Alfred Hitchcock was notorious for purchasing a book to make a film and then using a section or even a paragraph from it and building the story around it.

Hitchcock's source material was a novel called "The Wheel Spins" by Ethel Linna White, and this is an adaptation of that, which only bears a passing resemblance to "The Lady Vanishes." An elderly British woman who befriends a younger woman seems to disappear from a train, but no one can remember seeing her in the first place.

The young woman in this case has the same name as the early film, Iris Carr, and here she's played by Tuppence Middleton. She's a playgirl, with plenty of money and drunken friends, and they've all made a spectacle of themselves at the hotel where they stayed in Croatia. Iris becomes ill, supposedly of sunstroke, and nearly misses her train.

When she boards the train, she finds that not many people speak English, and it seems like an awful lot of the people from the hotel are on it. Still not feeling well, she is befriended by a Miss Froy who takes tea with her. Iris falls asleep, and when she wakes up, Miss Froy is gone. She seems to have disappeared off of a moving train. A handsome young man, Max Hare (Tom Hughes) befriends her and tries to help. But it starts to seem to him and to others that Ms. Carr is off her nut.

The film started slowly, and for this, I blame the leading woman and the direction she received. She comes off as extremely unpleasant and bratty, and by the time she's plowed into the twelfth person without saying 'excuse me,' your interest is just about lost. Once other characters enter into the story, it picks up.

It was great to see MI-5's Keeley Hawes, almost unrecognizable in a black wig, as a woman having a liaison with, of all people, Julian Rhind-Tutt playing a proper Englishman. In his younger days, with his unusual face he always played wild men, sporting long red hair and using his comic timing to perfection. Here, his hair is short and he is quite distinguished as a somewhat frosty Englishman.

I was a little disappointed. I wanted it to be better.

THE LADY VANISHES is the third adaptation of an old-time mystery novel. It was first made - to great success - by Hitchcock in the 1930s, and then a remake with Cybil Shepherd and Elliott Gould followed in the 1970s. This new version is a TV movie made by the BBC, and - somewhat inevitably - it's the weakest version yet.

The problem with this adaptation is a mixture of both the script and the budget. It's obviously made to cash in on the success of DOWNTON ABBEY, but there's far too much of the socialising and not enough of the thriller. The first half hour is excruciatingly slow and even once the action shifts to the train it doesn't get much better. The scenes on the train feel claustrophobic and not in a good way; Hitch's version ended with a rousing action scene, but the drawn-out mystery here just fizzles out with a lack of inspiration and budget constraints.

The cast is no better. Tuppence Middleton (TORMENTED) is the detestable heroine, and required to undergo a character arc from snobby and rude to warm and caring, but Middleton is too inexperienced to convince in the part. The likes of Keeley Hawes and Julian Rhind-Tutt are merely window dressing, their performances weak imitations of their roles in UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THE HOUR respectively. As for Gemma Jones and Stephanie Cole, the actresses are game but their comedy value is virtually nil. Jesper Christensen must be thinking that his days of starring in James Bond movies are long in the past with this pitiful, by-the-numbers TV drama.