Sex, scheming and salty language – it’s great fun
Mary & George
Sky Atlantic Tuesday and streaming on Sky and NOW TV
Griselda
Netflix, streaming
Big Brother
UTV/Virgin, all week
THE first time I saw Nicholas Galitzine was in 2016, when his south Dublin accent in John Butler’s charming coming-of-age film, Handsome Devil, was so good, I just assumed he was Irish with an exotic surname. Instead, it turns out he is English, albeit with a Greek mother. In Sky’s rollicking new period drama Mary & George, he couldn’t be more English if he tried.
Here, he plays George Villiers, the second son of a noble family and therefore unlikely ever to inherit anything or make a life for himself in the stratified aristocratic world of the early 1600s.
All he has going for him is his handsomeness – as his mother Mary says, ‘If I looked like you, I would rule the f***ing world’ (and, yes, there is lots of salty language throughout, including the word considered the most taboo of all, and frontal male nudity too, for reasons that will become clear).
Mary was born a commoner but presented herself as a woman of noble birth and married Sir John Villiers. When his death left her all but penniless, Mary launched a cunning plan. It was widely known that King James I (who also was James VI in his native Scotland) was at the very least bisexual, and probably gay, surrounding himself with young men.
Mary sent George off to France to learn the manners and skills of a gentleman, where he also learned to fence and to dance.
Then, displaying more cunning and guile than the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, she literally pimped her son after forming an alliance with senior courtiers who sought to dilute the influence of Scots lovers on the king’s decisions.
How much of this is true is anyone’s guess. Historians have argued for centuries over whether James was gay at all and, indeed, he even addressed the rumours himself during his life, dismissing them as gossip.
Nonetheless, Villiers rose to become a duke, one of only three in England at the time, the others being James’s own sons, so the evidence definitely points to something more than friendship. Whatever, the great joy here lies in the political machinations of Mary, in which the great Julianne Moore clearly is taking the greatest of pleasure.
Of a different kind too, as she herself indulges in a lesbian liaison with an Irish brothel-keeper played by the equally talented Niamh Algar. Galitzine is perfectly fine as George, and Scots actor Tony Curran, so extraordinary as a man seeking to die with dignity in BBC’s Mayflies in 2022, brings great earthiness to the role of the king when it so easily could have been played as fey.
If you’re easily offended by language and scenes of a sexual nature, especially same-sex scenes, this probably won’t be your bag, but in truth those are window-dressing of a sort. This is a series about ruthless politicking at any cost and using any weapon in an amoral arsenal to achieve a desired end. It really is great fun. I’m a bit late to Griselda on Netflix, but I was in England at the weekend, and it’s amazing how much of a streaming service you can get through on an iPad as you wait in a departure lounge or kill time on a flight.
Sofia Vergara, best known as the beautiful Colombian Gloria Pritchett on Modern Family, abandons vanity to deliver a gritty turn as Griselda Blanco, the notorious head of a drug cartel based in Miami from the 1970s onwards.
On the run with her three sons after killing her abusive husband, Griselda has smuggled one kilo of cocaine in her suitcase, and manages to get a foot in the door with local small-time distributors. When they double-cross her and refuse to buy the $250,000 worth of coke smuggled into the US by prostitutes from the brothel she once worked in, she faces financial ruin. Instead, far from petty street dealing, she quickly identifies where the real market lies – rich white people – and gives much of it away for free to create the market she needs.
Thus is born a hugely successful – though covert and corrupt, – business.
The period detail, from the clothes to the cars to the music, is so mesmerising, you easily forget that this woman is a ruthless criminal, and that by doing the best for her own family, she is a fount of addiction, misery, death and murder for others.
The morality of the entire show is ambiguous, to say the least, and there are many times you will find yourself rooting for Griselda, when in real life you would be happy to see her caught and banged up for life.
Vergara is so compelling, though, and so far removed from the comedic character she made her own over a decade ago, that you all too easily dispense with distaste. That left me a little bit queasy, to be honest.
So too has what I’ve seen so far of Celebrity Big Brother on UTV and Virgin (one of two, depending on the night). The revamped series with civilians was a bit of a misfire, and I thought the addition of a few stars would set it alight, but it all has been pretty dreary thus far, with the exception of Sharon Osbourne, who has no filter and has slagged off everyone from Adele to Ellen DeGeneres.
And while it was believed the Middleton camp was nervous of the participation by Gary Goldsmith, the wayward uncle of Britain’s Princess of Wales, he has been discreet on that front, and instead launched what might be seen as a proxy attack on Harry and Meghan. Court politics, it seems, are still as internecine and nakedly self-serving as they were four centuries ago.