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A Very English Scandal review: A BAFTA for Hugh Grant?

Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd
Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd

From Digital Spy

Given its salacious stir-fry of sex, lies, ambition and attempted murder, it's astonishing that the Jeremy Thorpe scandal has never before been dramatised.

Rewind 39 years and the trial of the former Liberal Party leader was being dubbed "the court case of the century". Newspaper headlines screamed with the shocking details of how Jeremy Thorpe – Member of Parliament for North Devon – arranged, with official party funds, to have his one-time gay sweetheart murdered. "It's no worse than shooting a sick dog," he famously, and somewhat prophetically, said.

Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd
Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd

In adapting John Preston's peppy page-turner of the same name, Russell T Davies has managed to capture both the tragedy and the farce of this most peculiar of political sex scandals. Thorpe was very much a risk junkie, so any romp in the hay (even before the partial legalisation of homosexuality in 1967) was never likely to be a vanilla, drama-free affair.

Norman Josiffe may have looked like "simply heaven" to the ever-lusty Thorpe, but his shaky mental state and crippling sexual insecurity meant he was an ill-advised lover for a success-hungry young MP in the illiberal 1960s.

Davies – and Preston – couldn't have really asked for a more luminous line-up of players here. Some relishable details, like homosexual-law-reform sponsor the Earl of Arran (played here by David Bamber) living in a house overwhelmed by badgers, have the appearance, quite wrongly, of being comic embellishments. Even the Earl's line about his secretary thinking that the human shit sent to him through the post was pâté comes direct from Preston's scrupulously researched book.

Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd
Photo credit: BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd

Then there's Thorpe's partner-in-cover-up, the similarly ambitious and recklessly libidinous Peter Bessell (played with raffish charm by the always-brilliant Alex Jennings), as well as Thorpe's mother, a haughty, monocle-rocking matriarch with a penchant for expensive cigars. All of these characters could be the stars of their own wicked stories.

But it's Jeremy Thorpe himself who remains the most beguiling character here. As Liberal leader he was 13 years younger than his Tory and Labour counterparts and cut a dazzlingly spry and dapper figure on the public stage.

Related: Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw say A Very English Scandal is bleak, absurd and totally riveting

But even young MPs in the 1960s looked old, and despite Hugh Grant taking on this role at the age of 57, he's actually playing someone, in this first episode at least, in their early-to-mid 30s. In fact, in the scenes where he meets Josiffe for the first time, Thorpe was just 31. That's three whole years younger than Hugh Grant was when he did Four Weddings!

Still, it's difficult to think of anyone better in the role. There's always been a bit of the devil in Hugh Grant's best turns, and in Jeremy Thorpe, a man with a fully-realised dark side, he's found his richest part in years. It's amazing how a simple haircut and a couple of ink-black contact lenses are able to transform this one-time pin-up into this cadaverous, impish politico. Let's hope BAFTA remember this one for 2019.

Programme-makers often talk, sometimes unconvincingly, about having secured their first choices for any given part, but it's difficult to imagine any casting directors venturing much further than Ben Whishaw for the role of Norman Josiffe. Though he's hardly a ringer for the real-world Norman, the boyish, bird-like Whishaw proves a flawless fit for the fragile, emotionally troubled stablehand, and if Thorpe remains the drama's most fascinating character, Josiffe is its most sympathetic.

Related: Russell T Davies: 'Love, Simon is extraordinary but we're nowhere near equality for gay people'

There were books about the Thorpe scandal before John Preston's, but all were as fusty and sombre as the political world that Jeremy Thorpe helped sweep away. We should thank the television gods that Russell T Davies got there first. It's hard to imagine another writer having the chutzpah to include the line, "Just hop onto all fours, there's a good chap," on Sunday-evening BBC One.

It would have been entirely possible for a drama of this kind to focus on the murder plot and subsequent trial, to smudge out the sodomy (beg your pardon, 'buggery' in the unforgiving legal parlance of the time), but RTD is alive to the story's essential heartbeat and it's a disquieting reminder at how furtive and canny gay men were forced to be, pre-'67.

All told, the three hours of A Very English Scandal cover 19 years and this first episode closes with Thorpe first floating the idea of snipping the wire on this ticking time bomb. Many of the major players in the story have yet to rear their heads and there are more triumphs and tragedies around the corner for Jeremy Thorpe MP.

The best – and the worst – is yet to come.

A Very English Scandal continues next Sunday (May 27) at 10pm on BBC One.


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