Sculpting a classic into a small-screen work of art

Dominic West, Lily Collins and David Oyelowo in Les Misérables (BBC One)

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Les Misérables: BBC One

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‘Next to a battle lost, nothing is so sad as a battle won,” the Duke of Wellington is said to have remarked while surveying the mangled mass of casualties strewn across the countryside after his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. And it is to this battlefield shambles, the myriad tangled dead and dying in their once gorgeous but now gore-befouled uniforms, that Andrew Davies turns as the curtain raiser for his adaptation of Victor Hugo’sLes Misérables(BBC One).