COMEDIAN and presenter Griff Rhys Jones has been on the hunt around Dorchester to find out about Thomas Hardy's love life.

The performer who wrote and starred in Not The Nine O'Clock News, Smith and Jones and presented BBC Two show Restoration among many other programmes is in the county town filming a new BBC documentary.

It is called the Heart of Thomas Hardy and will be shown on BBC One early next year.

Mr Rhys Jones said: "I've done Thomas Hardy before for the BBC's Bookworm series and last year I made a programme about Rudyard Kipling. We thought it would be fun to do another author and chose Thomas Hardy. I'll be doing a programme on Dickens at Christmas."

While filming in Dorset with a crew from Modern Television in Cardiff, Mr Rhys Jones is staying at Birkin House in Stinsford.

He said: "Dorset County Museum has been fantastically helpful to us in finding out about Thomas Hardy, it's really great.

"Of course we talked with Norrie Woodhall and that's an extraordinary thing to meet someone who has actually met the author.

"Hardy is becoming a high Victorian in people's memories, but he's still a bridge from the Victorian and rural world to the modern world."

Mr Rhys Jones said there was something very moving in Hardy's books which were quite surprising because they were so frank about men and women's feelings and behaviour.

The Heart of Thomas Hardy will focus on the rather tragic story of Hardy's marriage to Emma Gifford, which Mr Rhys Jones describes as miserable' because people thought the marriage had been a terrible mistake.

He said: "They couldn't see what he saw in his wife Emma but when she died he wrote some of the greatest English love poetry about their early relationship which was one in the eye for all her critics, I suppose.

"People sort of think of him as just writing books or novels, which are still read and studied today but I think of him as a very great poet as well. It's very rare to achieve a double and be a great poet and a great novelist and very few can do both.

"It's partly because his books and novels are so full of emotion, suffering and nuances of people's relationships to each other that they are like poems."

He added: "Despite the wet weather this summer we've been in and out of the countryside which is so lovely around here.

"We've had a very good time in Dorchester."