Meet the wickedly funny female assassin who’s bang on target
SOMETHING strange happened on saturday night, all over the country, people found themselves falling a little bit in love with a murdering psychopath.
Villanelle was the cold-blooded assassin in Killing Eve (BBC1) — a clinical, ruthless one- woman murder machine with a wicked sense of humour and a taste for the finer things in life.
When we first saw her, she was in a Viennese ice cream parlour, relaxing after slaughtering a Russian politician. As she left the parlour, she maliciously flicked a bowl of ice cream into a little girl’s lap. And that was her being nice.
Villanelle had barely been back at her home in Paris for five minutes before her handler called with details of her next hit. Dressed in hot pants and astride a motorbike, she travelled to a grand villa in Tuscany to murder a mafia businessman. Before stabbing him with a poison dart, she schmoozed him and asked where he bought his exquisite soft furnishings.
But Villanelle was cocky and sloppy. Although she had murdered the Russian, his Polish girlfriend Kasia got away and was taken to a London hospital for her own safety. Villanelle was duly sent to London to murder Kasia and make it look like suicide. she disobeyed the order. As well as butchering Kasia in her hospital bed, she killed the nursing staff and police protection officers.
As news of the original Russian’s murder reached Mi5 in London, secret service officer Eve Polastri suspected instantly that the assassin was a woman, though her male colleagues doubted her. After launching her own illegal and bodged investigation, Eve was fired, but the head of the Russian Desk (Fiona shaw) secretly sought her out for an undercover mission.
As the assassin whose tongue is every bit as sharp as her poison darts, Jodie Comer was sensational in the lead role, while sandra Oh was brilliant as Eve, the woman who wants to bring her down.
it’s written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Anybody who watched her comedy, Fleabag, about a woman trying to cope with life in London, will know dark humour is very much her style. slick, gory, funny and highly original, Killing Eve felt like ground-breaking television with Villanelle set to become the most charming fictional psychopath since hannibal Lecter.
she may not be a psychopath, but Becky sharp is certainly as scheming and manipulative.
in Vanity Fair (ITV, sunday), she had travelled to Belgium with husband Rawdon as the officers prepared for battle.
While there, Becky flirted wildly with every man in order that they might play Rawdon at cards and he could rinse them of their cash. As she dressed in revealing clothes and threw herself at married men, Rawdon became alarmed that Becky was enjoying her role a little too much.
‘having to be charming all day and flirt half the night is wearing,’ she protested, even though her actions led George Osborne, husband of her best friend Amelia, to declare his undying love to her. As the episode ended, news arrived that Napoleon was marching on Brussels.
The women wept as their menfolk went to war — apart from Becky, who was left wondering who she’d sponge off next.
ITV has done a clever job of putting a modern twist on an old, familiar story and getting Michael Palin, as William Thackeray, to do the catch-up at the beginning of each episode was a stroke of genius.
indeed, his ‘A world where everyone is striving for what is not worth having,’ has become a catchphrase to rival: ‘Previously on homeland.’
CHA-CHA-CHARMER OF THE WEEKEND: You’ve got to love Ann Widdecombe. On Strictly The Best, former contestants spoke about their nerves and how crushed they were by low scores. Except Ann who said: ‘I didn’t care tuppence.’