Les Misérables, episode 2 review: a dentistry scene worse than your nightmares

We’ve all had bad dreams relating to teeth. The shrinks say they address our fears of powerlessness. In even the grimmest nightmares, surely no one’s front teeth get yanked out by pliers. After the second episode of Les Misérables (BBC One), there’s no need to imagine such a scenario.

The luck of Fantine (Lily Collins, most affecting) spiralled downwards to the point where she had to flog her own incisors to a demon dentist (a silver-tongued Ron Cook). Hands up if you squeezed your eyes shut as the extracted goods plinked into the waiting bowl.

Nowadays Fantine would be selling a kidney but the point stands: Victor Hugo’s novel set in the years after the fall of Napoleon still somehow holds up a mirror to the here and now. Fantine’s chief tormentors are the Thénardiers (Olivia Colman and Adeel Akhtar), a rackety pair of venal innkeepers who extracted money from her as ruthlessly as any payday loan shark. Her desperate plunge into street prostitution was both a tale as old as time, and fresh as this morning’s newsprint.

Sans hair and teeth, Fantine found herself selling in a buyers’ market, and dependent on the unreliable conscience of born-again philanthropist Jean Valjean (Dominic West), who still can’t decide how far his salvation extends. As newly created mayor of Montreuil, he entered the nature-nurture debate about criminality. Are miscreants born bad or do life chances determine their course? His opponent discussing this eternal chestnut was the town’s new police chief Inspector Javert (David Oyelowo), who looked forward “to many interesting discussions on this topic”.

There possibly won’t be a lot of time for these because this Andrew Davies adaptation is having to get through around 200 pages of plot per hour. Of course other versions needed less time, and yet the business of compression means that that some plot lines feel hurried along. In one frame, Madame Victurnien (Kathryn Hunter) was spying on Fantine as she visited the town’s letter writer. In the next she was fact-finding chez Thénardier. The Pontmercy strand craves more breathing room.

West’s blazing performance is currently outgunning Oyelowo’s if only because Javert is a little more than an implacable motive in a coat. Other shades may emerge. Brief glimpses of the two Thénardiers whetted the appetite for further grotesquerie from Colman and Akhtar, though with four episodes still to go I’m already gagging for a comeuppance. To invoke another story of desperate poverty: more please, sir.

What did you think of Sunday night's episode? Tell us in the comment section below.

To join the conversation log in to your Telegraph account or register for free, here.