IT SEEMED such a good idea to persuade Catherine Cookson's fans to play "angel" and back a television adaptation of her novel Katie Mulholland.

There must be 200,000 of them ready to pay £15.99 to bring the printed word to life in a straight-to-video production, their money being, in effect, prepayment for their copy.

To me, 200,000 seems a biggish sale for a video and, sadly for Festival Films and producer Ray Marshall, who conceived the idea when ITV wasn't interested, the plan to raise £3.2m (or £3.198m for those of you with your calculators out) failed to bear fruit. Only £160,000 - about 10,000 fans-worth - was forthcoming. They should have their cheques back this week.

Katie Mulholland is vintage Cookson. Scullery maid, lowest of the low in the hierarchy of domestic service, is impregnated by a rather nasty employer. If you read her gritty North-East novels, it's archetypical: badly-done-by, but strong, women and ne'er-do-well and/or weak males who need to be sorted by aforesaid b-d-b, but strong, women.

At one time, Katie and her type were so popular that we put them all together at one end of our charity bookstalls and waited for the fans to come down, like the wolf on the fold, as soon as the event opened. For the past two or three years, we haven't been able to shift them.

Maybe everyone has read them all, or got a complete set of their own copies, but, when that's happened with other popular authors, we still get asked to look out for particular titles "because I lent it and didn't get it back".

It does puzzle me because her stories are set in family contexts and in the not too distant past and that sort of paperback is our coffee morning stall bread and butter: Harry Bowling, Elvi Rhodes, Jessica Stirling, for example. Any such tale set on the home front in either world war, in Victorian or Edwardian days or even in the Fifties which we must, I'm afraid, accept as history now, sells quickly and is often recommended by one buyer to another.

But, even if Cookson fans are happily reading and re-reading the collections on their shelves, they may still not have felt like shelling out £15.99 for a pig in a poke. Seeing what television has done to some of this country's favourite books, it wouldn't surprise me. They play fast and loose with characters and timescales, never mind picking actors who look nothing like each reader's differing mental picture.

The worst example I can think of, among books I've enjoyed, was The Far Pavilions where events, and those taking part in them, were changed to such an extent that it made nonsense of part of the plot.

I've been watching Marple (not even Miss Marple, who would never have had an affair with a married man) with a Christie fan whose advice is to forget the original story, forget Joan Hickson and watch it as yet another TV whodunnit with too much bright red lipstick.

Stick to reading, or talking books, the pictures are better.