Rabbits on Viagra couldn’t keep up with this royal rumpy-pumpy

Catherine The Great ★★★★☆ The Met: Policing London ★★★★☆

YOU can’t fault Helen Mirren for chutzpah. She’s 74, and in Catherine The Great

(Sky Atlantic) she plays the Russian monarch in her early 40s as a woman of supreme power who is sexually irresistible to all her courtiers.

And she gets away with it. The last major female film star to attempt such a feat was probably Mae West, who was 85 when she played a silver screen sexbomb embarking on her sixth marriage in the catastrophic 1978 musical Sextette.

Fighting off the attentions of an entire athletics squad, every one besotted with her, Mae declares: ‘I’m the girl who works for Paramount all day and Fox all night!’

Catherine The Great is an attempt to splice the historical grandeur of The Crown with the sex and violence of Game Of Thrones. It achieves that, with sumptuous sets and costumes, and a galloping pace of palace rumpypumpy that would tax a warren full of rabbits on Viagra.

Since few of us know much of this 18th- century megalomaniac, there’s a lot of explaining to be done — and most of it happens while one character is bouncing up and down on another. Gina McKee and Jason Clarke, as the Countess Praskovya and Lieutenant Potemkin, were rolling around so much they must have felt seasick after most of their scenes.

Rory Kinnear is magnificent as a cunning adviser, like no 10 aide Dominic Cummings in a powdered wig, plotting the murder of a pretender to the throne. It’s worth watching for the final scene alone, a mega-budget ball where all the guests are cross-dressing — Mirren in breeches and a false moustache, Kinnear in a big-busted gown with his boobs slipping.

You’ll need a fairly strong stomach for the bloodshed. Kevin Mcnally and Richard Roxburgh, as the beastly brothers Orlov, mete out such a beating to Potemkin with boots and billiard cues that you can feel the bones crunch.

Then they throw him out of a third-floor window, apparently breaking his back. That doesn’t stop Potemkin from dancing like a Cossack at the ball five minutes later. They grew up tough in imperial St Petersburg.

The frustration is that you’ll have to fork out extra if you want to watch. Catherine The Great airs on Sky Atlantic, which will also be available with a nowTV online subscription at £8.99 a month from next week.

And if you want to enjoy the full spectacle, and wallow in the way every shot is composed almost entirely of rich greens, reds and golds, you’ll benefit from a TV the size of a cinema screen.

Watching telly is getting to be such an expensive business that it sometimes feels like the only people who can afford every channel must be armed robbers and drug-dealers.

And they’ve got problems of their own, as The Met: Policing London (BBC1) revealed.

If it’s not 20 shock-troops from the Territorial Support Group in full body armour, smashing down your front door in a dawn raid, it’s the relentless old- school coppers on a stake-out outside your flat for days on end.

Detective Inspector Dan O’Sullivan of Croydon CID was intent on nicking a persistent burglar who had turned violent — waving a gun in the face of former football club owner Simon Jordan as he snatched his £130,000 diamond- studded wristwatch.

The result of the investigation was never in much doubt. Dan got his man and the gun. Jewels and bundles of cash, the loot from numerous robberies, were stashed all over the apartment. It was very satisfying, and very Sweeney.