It is a truth universally acknowledged that this new Netflix adaptation is shite. But it’s been quite a week, what with the heat, and the absolute clunches running to be Leader of the Conservative Party, so I was a bit wrung out and wanted to watch something frothy. In a moment of weakness, I plumped for Persuasion, or as it’s also known, ‘Fleabag 1817’. The trailer was DIRE, featuring a heinous use of the word ‘exes’ which made me yelp, and then I’d read a review that suggested it wasn’t funny-bad, just bad-bad. I could have just gone on YouTube and watched Colin Firth erupt out of that lake over and over again, but a trusted friend said ‘I don’t think you’ll hate it as much as you think.’ This ringing endorsement *persuaded* me that Persuasion could work, on a night that was still too hot, a night when Liz Truss had just come a step closer to becoming PM. *Faces camera* Dear reader, I was desperate.

Well, where do we start. I didn’t really mind Anne breaking the fourth wall - her deportment is so distinctly 21st century that having a camera in the room seems fine. In fact, I’m surprised they didn’t go really meta-mental and have a visible film crew following the Elliot family around like they’re in a Regency reality show. In addition to Anne slouching terribly as she drinks her Rioja straight from the bottle, she seems to be dressed in something the costume designer bought when she nipped out to a branch of Toast during her lunchbreak. It’s all a bit random; in one Bath scene (that’s Bath the city, not the tub Anne keeps getting into to denote Bridget-Jones-heartbreak) she’s wearing a beret. Mostly, her clothing suggests she might be moonlighting in a production of Les Miserables, but occasionally she wears a party dress from Monsoon to remind you that she can be a 10 when she wants to.

The script is weird, like it was written by two very different people – one who was stubbornly sticking to the… well, script, and another who kept going off-piste. I can imagine the arguments in the writers' room:

‘Right, we need Anne to overhear this conversation, like she does in the book.’
‘How about she’s taking a shit behind a tree, and that’s how she hears it?’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘Come on, that’s what Phoebe Waller-Bridge would do.’

It’s jarring, again and again, to witness anachronisms and phrases that would never have entered Austen’s head, even if she’d accidentally time-travelled to a Keeping Up With the Kardashians screening. In voiceover, Anne says ‘It’s OK to find love on your terms.’ It’s ‘OK’?! Is it also ‘sick, bruh’ to meet the man of your dreams? Plus, there’s the exes thing, which is unforgiveable, and everyone ranking everyone else for hotness out of ten. But then… there’s a scene where the Elliots are meeting Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret and they endure an awkward silence over tea, before Anne launches into a story about her octopus dream. It was rather glorious, weird and well-delivered, and I laughed out loud. I don’t care if Austen’s Anne would never have said it, it was funny. There should have been more octopuses and fewer OKs.

What else did I like about it? I appreciated the colour-blind casting – and unlike Bridgerton they didn’t go for any bullshit retrospective reasoning, they just did it. Richard E Grant is of course marvellous in the role of Sir Walter. The locations are rather lovely, and Dakota Johnson is extremely watchable, beautiful in a way that isn’t as Route One as I originally assumed. It made me want to go back and watch Fifty Shades, see what she’s like in it. The same, I imagine, but with anal. Cosmo Jarvis plays Captain Wentworth with the air of a rugby player who’s just been hit on the head and is swaying dozily before he falls unconscious. I don’t know if that’s sexy? Maybe it is. I liked that when he friend-zoned Anne she retaliated by wading into the sea like Reggie Perrin. A good cold-water dip always sees me right, though she should really have put on her wetsuit first – I’m sure the costume designer could have picked something up in Lidl. I enjoyed Anne’s emotional support rabbit, a pleasing bit of floof, but he also highlighted something that bothered me about the film as a whole.

Despite being ostensibly heartbroken and bereft, Anne has quite a nice time of it with her bunny. Sure, her family are annoying, but she seems to have several pretty places to stay, even in supposed penury. Lots of friends, lovely dinners, an endless supply of red wine, children to fuss over without having to give birth to them, trips to the seaside. What more does she want? Oh yes, the sexy/shellshocked Captain Wentworth… In the book, Anne is properly miserable but Netflix’s Ms Elliot gives us a cartoonish approximation of despair. It’s the head-buried-in-pillow, slugging-booze, snarking-at-your-sister-in-Italian down-in-the-dumped, with none of the desperate nuance of the original. Ol’ Freddie the naval hero is too lacklustre a romantic figure to really engage our interest, and the whole thing is oddly bloodless, a bit wet. For all the roguish glances to camera, it’s not very radical at all, and I kind of sympathised with Lady Russell, who essentially tells Anne to get over it. In straining to give the show some street cred, the production sacrificed the poignancy and power of the author’s vision.

But, you know, it wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour and a half. Or maybe it was bad, but funny-bad rather than bad-bad. I was feeling fairly neutral until that final scene when the now-happy couple are back on the sea-sprayed cliff, snogging away, and then Anne bloody well WINKS at the camera. Call the Bow Street Runners, I need to report a televisual crime! Good grief, Jane Austen must be side-eyeing in her grave.

So, in conclusion, it was shit, like everyone says, but I guess better than watching Liz Truss’s pork market speech. And when I’ve thought about it since, mainly dwelling on the rabbit, it’s been with a certain fondness. To quote Anne herself (the Austen one, not the Netflix one): ‘When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.’

In other words, it was OK; maybe a 6.

• Persuasion, Netflix