Daily Mail

An oily seducer and a flirty heiress: This is REAL Victorian melodrama!

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

No GooD ever came of being a baronet. It’s the aristocrat­ic equivalent of slumming it, like living in a squat on the French Riviera. The title, a sort of hereditary knighthood, confers no privileges except the right to wear a top hat and twirl your moustachio­s in a caddish manner.

Dougray Scott was playing the role to its grubby hilt in The Woman In White (BBC1), as the oily seducer plotting to wed virginal heiress Laura (olivia Vinall).

Scott does a nice line in lecherous smoothies. You might remember him as the unfaithful boss in the Beeb’s drama of hysterical lady architects, The Replacemen­t.

Here he was greasier than Brylcreem and twice as slick, sliding across the drawing room to gobble Laura up.

Not that she was as helplessly innocent as she liked to pretend — flirting like mad with her watercolou­rs tutor, Mr Hartright, as she threatened to tear off her clothes and dive into the sea, before snogging him in the summerhous­e.

Poor Mr Hartright (Ben Hardy) blushed so red that steam practicall­y whistled out of his ears, and his trousers.

Added to this excitement, her half-sister Marian (Jessie Buckley) seemed terribly friendly, too — though she played billiards and wore culottes, so she might not be the man-kissing kind.

Marian knocked back whisky like a marathon runner chugging water from a plastic bottle. Mr Hartright couldn’t keep up with her, though he happily downed a pint of wine in one when someone else was paying. Perhaps it’s just that instant coffee hadn’t been invented, but those Victorians could certainly put away the booze.

This big-budget adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s 1859 sensation novel promised from the start to recreate the England of the Industrial Revolution with lavish authentici­ty. We followed an urchin running through the filthy streets of London’s ‘rookery’, the cut-throat quarter, with hundreds of people jostling the cameras.

The magnificen­t house in the Lake District where the half-sisters were cooped up did not disappoint either, a maze of passages and staircases, with Charles Dance as a mad uncle in one dusty chamber. It was gorgeously Gothic.

It was also slightly stilted, trying too hard to stick to the structure of the book — in which a series of witnesses tell their version of events leading up to a crime. We kept cutting back awkwardly to Art Malik’s lawyer who looked, as he interviewe­d the characters, like a man who had sat on a blancmange and was trying to conceal it.

A big budget was also in evidence on Little Big Shots ( ITV), where Dawn French played ringmaster to a circus of precocious children.

one stupendous studio set followed another, as a trio of junior tap- dancers followed a four-year- old guardsman in a bearskin, and a girl aged seven pounded the drums while a choir belted out the Phil Collins hit In The Air Tonight.

The climax was three Filipino boys. They scowled and emoted while they bellowed their way through a number with voices to deafen Bette Midler — it was impressive but, by golly, it wasn’t music. That’s the only sort of singing anyone attempts on a talent show these days.

Blame Simon Cowell, who is probably stone deaf anyway, from years of listening to foghorn renditions of Whitney Houston hits.

Thankfully, Cowell has nothing to do with this show. It had all the cute bits of Britain’s Got Talent — the wise- cracking kiddies, the proud parents in the audience — without the annoying judges.

This could catch on.

SUPER-CHALET OF THE WEEKEND: The aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth finally got to sea in the naval documentar­y Britain’s Biggest Warship (BBC2), with a bead doorway curtain from a charity shop in one cabin. It’s the world’s largest caravan.

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