THE first part of the BBC’s production of War and Peace aired on Sunday, since when the airwaves, newspaper columns and social media outlets have been carrying a whole range of views about the programme, some of which even made sense.

There’s nothing like a costume drama derived from a popular novel to get tongues wagging, and even though many more people claim to have read the novel by Count Leo Tolstoy than have actually done so, it hasn’t stopped opinions about the BBC version cascading in, both for and against Auntie Beeb’s take on the great work.

Predictions that the series will be a huge hit are almost self-fulfilling when a production causes such a furore.

WHY ALL THE FUSS?

TOLSTOY’S masterpiece dates from 1869 and is the marathon of novels – many people have confessed to reading deep into it and then hitting a wall, unable to go any further, usually by about page 700.

What it doesn’t have is the overt sex and incest that appear in the BBC’s version, and one poor dead horse – there’s actually vast numbers of the latter (and a lot of dead humans as well).

SO WHY THE COMPLAINTS?

SEVERAL reasons, most of them due to 79-year-old Andrew Davies, the Welsh screenwriter who is a fellow of Bafta after a 50-year career in which his adaptations of classic works have never ceased to cause comment.

Davies is perhaps best known for the 1995 – and yes, it really was more than 20 years ago – adaptation of Pride and Prejudice which put sexy oomph into Jane Austen’s classic and made Colin Firth a major star, simply because his character, Mr D’Arcy, walked out of a lake in a soaking wet white shirt. Now Davies has done it again, introducing a whole new array of manifest sex into a narrative that never contained such a thing in its 1,300 or so pages.

After all, Count Tolstoy lived in pre-revolutionary Russia, and a noble family like his would never have tolerated writing that was aimed at creating cheap exploitative thrills. His novel is much more clever than that – the writer intended the reader to use his or her imagination and never resorts to basic descriptions of sexual acts when mere suggestion would do.

This is unlike the Davies adaptation, which has already featured soft-focused nudity of the heroine Natasha, AKA Countess Natalya Ilyinichna Rostova, while the nymphomaniac Hélène, or Princess Elena Vasilyevna Kuragin, has shown a comely gluteus maximus, albeit imagined in the fantasy of her boyfriend and later husband, Count Pierre Bezukhov.

All those counts and countesses would probably have been inbred anyway, but Davies actually shows an incestuous affair between Hélène and her brother Prince Anatole Vasilyevich Kuragin, played in the series by Callum Turner. The affair is only hinted at in the book through a rumour heard by Pierre, but if you are going to write bodice-ripping sex, why not keep it in the family?

As for the “dead” white horse called Little Rook that featured so gloriously in the first episode, viewer’s complaints were unfounded – the horse, real name Ziggy, was not hurt in the slightest and is just a great actor, with some people already calling for a Bafta nomination for him.

SO WHAT’S THE REAL STORY ABOUT?

WRITTEN in four volumes and with a two-part epilogue, War and Peace was originally called The Year 1805 but Tolstoy changed it to reflect the epic scale of what he was trying to achieve – nothing less than a comprehensive historical description and critique of Russia in the years 1805 to 1813, the year after Napoleon invaded Russia to disastrous effect.

Through the intermingled lives of five aristocratic families – the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the the Drubetskoy, the Kuragins and the Rostovs – Tolstoy weaves an extraordinary tale of a class and a country that will inevitably suffer the effects of war, albeit one that ultimately ends in victory over the French invaders.

It took years for Tolstoy to research – it is famed for its factual accuracy – and write, and as well as the fiction about the families, in the original he throws in what are nothing less than essays on great themes such as power and war. Many later editions of the novel leave out Tolstoy’s musings which are mostly in the latter part of the book, and you can bet the BBC won’t be wasting much time on his philosophical output.

HASN’T IT ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE?

YES, but not quite so sexily as the BBC’s version. The three best versions start with Hollywood-Rome’s 1956 account directed by King Vidor in which Henry Fonda as Pierre starred alongside Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Anita Ekberg as Hélène – a casting perhaps indicating the female characters’ proclivities – and also featured Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and a young Jeremy Brett as Nicholas Rostov.

Released in four parts over 1966 and 1967, Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic movie in Russian won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and is generally accepted as the best big-screen version.

Many slightly older readers will recall the first BBC television series in 1972 with a brilliant award-winning performance of Pierre by Anthony Hopkins and which also featured the fine Scottish actress Morag Hood as Natasha.

HOW WILL IT ALL END?

WITH five of the six one-hour parts still to go, and perhaps eight million viewers already if iPlayer watching is counted, there’s little doubt the BBC has a huge hit on its hands with Bafta and Emmy awards a certainty, if only for the magnificent costumes and magical settings.

The main actors Paul Dano (Pierre), James Norton (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky), Lily James (Natasha) and Tuppence Middleton (Hélène) are in career-making roles, but of course those excellent actors Stephen Rae (Prince Vassily), Gillian Anderson (Anna Pavlovna Scherer), Jim Broadbent (Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky) and that great Dundonian Brian Cox (General Mikhail Kutuzov) will steal every scene they are in – oh, and look out for Adrian Edmondson as Count Ilya Rostov.

As for how it ends, you’ll have to read the book right the way through from the beginning … see you next year.