Television Fiona Rae
Victoria as a “young, effervescent, enthusiastic girl” is the subject of an eight-part period drama.
One minute you’re running away from Daleks, the next you’re riding sidesaddle with Rufus Sewell, discussing how to rule a good bit of the world. Such is the career of Jenna Coleman, who takes the lead in Victoria (TVNZ 1, Sunday, 8.30pm), another sumptuous British period drama, this time based on fact.
The eight-part series was created by TV producer and novelist Daisy Goodwin from Queen Victoria’s diaries, of which there are many. It’s estimated she wrote 62 million words in her lifetime and they reveal a strong young woman who didn’t falter when she took on the mantle of queen at just 18.
The series begins at the moment her uncle, William IV, dies and she becomes queen. She has led a sheltered life at Kensington Palace and her mother’s ambitious adviser, Sir John Conroy (Paul Rhys), is seeking to control her.
“Someone less formidable might not have been able to take on that mantle,” Goodwin wrote in Vogue. “But Victoria’s feistiness springs off every page of her journals.”
She realises that becoming queen is her chance to escape her mother’s overprotectiveness and Conroy’s machinations.
“He means to run me,” she tells Prime Minister Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell, charming in 19th-century garb), “like he runs my mother.” The new queen announces that she wishes to be known as Victoria rather than her first name Alexandrina (Conroy wants “Elizabeth II”) and orders a move from Kensington to Buckingham House, which she decides is really a palace.
But never mind all that running-the-country stuff, the series is really about Victoria’s relationship with Albert (played by Tom Hughes), although it is Melbourne who first takes her fancy. He was her closest adviser, and
debonair and worldly, although his heart had been broken when his wife ran off with Lord Byron.
Goodwin, whose dissertation at Cambridge was about Victoria’s relationship with the media, says there was scandal and rumour at the time. “Diarists said, ‘The Queen is clearly in love with her Prime Minister and her feelings for him are sexual, although she doesn’t know it yet,’” she told the Radio Times.
“Most people think of her as this old, stern widow, but her early life is astonishing. It’s very nice to spend some time with this young, effervescent, enthusiastic girl before she morphs into the Mother of Empire.”