TELEVISION / And their cup runneth over: While Mellors finally had his way on BBC1, Sam's regulars had their

IT WAS a Sunday of climaxes. The hype surrounding the clashing Cheers (C4) and Lady Chatterley (BBC1) - a last hoorah and a first orgasm - probably made the nation glad for the invention of the VCR. For at least, oh, about 10 minutes. Until the moment Connie (Joely Richardson) decided she was just mad about Mellors and Mellors (Sean Bean) decided he was just mad about her.

M'lady had snuck away from Mrs Bolton (Shirley Anne Field) and the footloose Sir Clifford (James Wilby) - she was massaging his buttocks on the billiard table as he potted his balls - to count her chickens as they hatched. The local birdlife's symbolic fecundity did the trick. Spring was in the air. Mellors sprung. Rough, masculine hands pawed Connie's heaving brown blouse. Her breasts responded by suddenly doubling in size. (Mellors may be a son of the soil but, come on, just how green can the man's fingers be?)

Was it not only a few scenes before that she had accepted the key to Mellors' hut with the assurance that 'I didn't want to interfere with you'? And he had answered, in his Boddingtons ale advertisment voice ('Eeh, you smell gorgeous tonight, pet'), 'You won't be interfering with me, your Lady' ?

But the demands of crass inevitability ran roughshod over the rules of BBC costume drama. The director Ken Russell had the visuals down pat - elegant, stately, dead - and the soundtrack poured on the classical music to let the doubtful know that what they were witnessing was 'art'. Still, the humping had to provide the highlights. Russell's task, not an easy one, was to revitalise D H Lawrence's 'well thumbed' bits; renew the shock value and lurking class analysis for an era that has, er, outstripped the writer's once Arcadian, now archaic, brand of passion and politics.

What actually happened was perilously close to cartoon. Even the throwaway dialogue wasn't thrown far enough - 'That's wonderful news Clifford] You haven't visited the mines since the war]' - and the billboard-high message that culture is no substitute for the primal is something that needs to be driven past as fast as possible, sirens howling.

Russell spelt out each detail. Shirley Anne Field, obliged to play Mrs Bolton as Mrs Danvers, found every window in the Chatterley country seat and gazed out of it in a manner which suggested either sinister thoughts or new contact lenses: she was pondering and plotting, okay? Yet even her fevered imaginings didn't stretch to M'Lady hitting the potato sack with the hired help. Cut to hut. He was the keeper and she was game. 'You lie down here,' Sean Bean snarled in hopefully masterful manner (a vain hope). Connie demurely kept her kit on, but dutifully let him have his way, maintaining a disinterested demeanour throughout. 'I must go,' she said politely but firmly, the way the insufficently ravished do.

Ding, ding, round three. The famous treetrembler - the coupling that stokes the frustrated Chatterley's banked fires - finally sent the series toppling into parody. What should have been a profound matching of lust became a mere vocal exercise. Which was louder, Joely Richardson's yelps of delight or the orchestra sawing away on the soundtrack?

It would be easy to blame Lawrence. The critical establishment certainly did when Russell rang box office bells with Women in Love. All that purple prose - what was to be done with it? Poor old Ken. However, as the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael points out, 'Lawrence might make a fool himself but he was opening up new terrain . . . he was reaching for clarity.' Russell doesn't reach for clarity. And without clarity - the reasons why these people talk tosh and go at it like their lives depended on the Big O - Lady Chatterley is caricature, a dirty joke badly told.

Cheers' humour, on the other hand, managed the exact opposite of Russell's; one-time parodies were made human again. It's simultaneously the advantage and curse of American sitcoms that they can run next to forever. Longevity means we can spend quality time with our favoured characters even as our darling pets - be it Blanche on The Golden Girls or Norm on the bar stool - flatten out over the course of time to become icons in the worst sense of the word - brittle outlines of their original selves.

The ultimate episode of Cheers drilled deep into that familiarity - Carla managed a convulsive laugh by simply screaming at the returned Diane - and struck untapped reservoirs of fondness. The tics and mannerisms that only 12 months ago had seemed drained from 11 years of exposure yielded dizzy dividends. Cliff's opening sally, 'I'm in no mood to talk' caused hardened regulars to break into grateful applause, just as the newly successful Diane's acceptance speech as Best Cable TV Scriptwriter (she thanked Sylvia Plath, the Amazon rainforest and, one by one, all the Muses) brought back crashing waves of nostalgia for the days when the show casually added intellectual pretension to the list of things that could make a girl desirable.

So what if it was 25 minutes too long? What if the sentimentality of the occasion was ruthlessly milked? Having expertly exploited our laughter for this long, the series could be trusted to exploit our tears with equal care. Cheers always had a capacity for dignified feeling alien to its contemporaries, who preferred to assault the tear ducts directly. The show, after all, was about losers with illusions, about people whose families or jobs or pasts or futures had failed them; the sitcom descendant of that other great saloon sprawl The Iceman Cometh.

Knowing, like O'Neill, that hope springs eternal, the creators allowed all cast members their dream. Father- to-be Woody made the Boston city council. Rebecca married her plumber and got to deliver the perfect Rebecca line: 'I'm a corporate lawyer with the company of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.' Cliff was promoted to the post of assistant supervisor of District A/Grid L. Norm landed a job. Carla saw Diane, her nemesis, chased back to California. Frasier saw Diane, his nemesis, chased back to California.

And Sam? Sam survived booze, pattern baldness and bouts of compulsive sex to learn that he had never truly lost his one true love. That she would be there for him as long as he kept her doors open, her beer cool and her lights burning. As Norm said, heading home to Vera one last, reluctant time, 'Think about it.'

(Photograph omitted)