The importance of not being earnest
Although comedy may provide the spoonful of sugar that relieves life’s bitterness, it can also be used to emphasise its cold, relentless injustice. Shakespeare knew Juliet’s bawdy nurse or Hamlet’s gravediggers or Lear’s fool might provoke a laugh – but he also realised the odd wry aside or truth-in-jest would strike home as surely as a vial of poison or venom-smeared blade.
So it is with the three-part comedic drama A Very English Scandal, which tells the true story of UK MP Jeremy Thorpe’s gay relationship with Norman Scott in the early 1960s – a time when male homosexuality was still illegal in England – and his subsequent 1979 trial for trying to arrange Scott’s murder.
Hugh Grant (as haughty public school thoroughbred Thorpe) and Ben Whishaw (as a fey, unstable Scott) are magnificent, and have already won nominations and awards for their performances. Grant – in the role of his career – teeters brilliantly between the likeable, proficient country MP who rose to be leader of the Liberal party, and the predatory schemer who could seduce his young ‘‘bunny’’ and then callously arrange to have him shot when the troubled ex-lover threatens to go public.
Grant and Whishaw last played movie nemeses in Paddington 2 and there’s an element of hyperbolic surrealism to their roles here – especially in the way that classobsessed 60s and 70s Britain is played for laughs. Toffs called Boofy with stately homes overrun by badgers, Grant’s monocled mother thumping away at the piano, closeted MPs swapping euphemisms in the Commons, and a stream of caricatured Welsh, Irish and West Country locals make for a light-hearted setting.
Even the murder plot and subsequent court case have a Carry On slapstick quality – at one point, two cream cakes find their inevitable landing pads during a brawl at a topless beauty pageant, and the judge’s summing up runs like a working men’s club stand-up routine.
But all this banter is more than entertainment: it’s a clever device that highlights the worst of those times. This is the England that smiled while it groomed Jimmy Savile’s ego, that cheered while gay men chose suicide over being outed, that let power buy peerages, that mocked mental illness as weakness, and that guffawed as a cartoonish Benny Hill clutched after his scantily clad prey.
Thorpe’s trial was a sensation at the time, marked his downfall as a politician and continued to raise debate until his death in 2014 after a long battle with Parkinson’s. This masterful drama certainly resurrects the seedier, more headlinegrabbing elements of the case and retells them with stunning panache and beautiful comic timing – but the effect now is not to re-sentence those involved, but to put that version of England on trial.
There’s certainly no comic relief in Counterpart, which returns for its second season this week.
The darkly compelling drama’s first season rivalled Westworld for mind-warping complexity, with its premise of a gateway to a mirror dimension hidden under the streets of Berlin – especially when that mirror dimension meant duplicated characters and settings.
The central idea is that the gateway between worlds has closed, marooning characters in the wrong dimension. Some are bent on destroying their new home.
It might make sense for all but the hardest core fans to revisit the first season before embarking on the next, as the initial catchup sequence and occasional explanatory dialogue do little to delve into the mental minefield.
That said, the moodiness, paranoia and intrigue is back with a vengeance. The acting – especially that of JK Simmons’ two versions of Howard Silk – is once again outstanding. And he tension between two hyper-realistic worlds makes for an ideal vehicle to explore today’s themes of alienation, witch-hunts and
terrorism.
A Very English Scandal screens Wednesdays on Soho from February 13 at 8.30 and the new series of Counterpart starts on Soho on February 14, also at 8.30pm.