Heed the warnings in fairytales, don’t open that forbidden door!
Warnings in fairytales are given to us for a reason. Take heed, and don’t steal gingerbread from the witch’s cottage or stay out after midnight on a first date.
above all, if a woman strays into the house of a wealthy man, she must never open the door to a forbidden room. in fact, the very existence of that door is the signal to run away.
The legend of Bluebeard, a serial killer who keeps the bodies of his dead wives hanging in a secret annexe, was first recorded in the 17th century by Charles Perrault in his Tales Of Mother goose — though some academics trace it to a Breton nobleman called Cunmar the accursed, who decapitated his pregnant wife Triphine 1,500 years ago.
angela Carter wrote a mesmerising version, The Bloody Chamber, set in pre-war France. The setting for Too Good To Be True (Ch5) is modern, a country house with acres of pristine carpet and a kitchen the size of a tennis court.
But it is still unmistakeably the Bluebeard story. Former East Enders star and strictly winner Kara Tointon plays rachel, who is not the monster’s bride but his cleaner. Downton abbey chauffeur allen Leech is the ominously charming millionaire, Elliott, showering her with gifts and leaving her alone to explore his domain.
rachel opens that door, naturally. she finds no corpses but there is a wardrobe of gowns which just happen to fit her. When she tries them on, she neglects to notice the CCTV camera in the ceiling corner, its blue light flashing.
she also doesn’t discover the spy lens concealed in the widescreen TV that Elliott gives her, so that he can watch her watching netflix. some people have peculiar ways of getting their kicks.
This is a Channel 5 thriller so we’re expected to suspend our incredulity by a few notches. rachel is a single mum whose junkie ex-boyfriend calls round periodically to beat her up and steal her purse, or just to burgle the place.
You might think she would be less trusting with Elliott, who tries so hard to impress her that he buys her 11-year-old son Liam a car — a vintage VW Beetle. That’s the sort of reckless extravagance usually exhibited only by rock stars, shortly before they discover their manager has stolen all their money. But the tale is pacy and well constructed, and Charlie Hodson-Prior as Liam creates a believable motive for rachel to want to escape her life of drudgery and fling herself into the arms of a millionaire.
There’s no denying that lots of women would love to have allen Leech festoon them with jewellery, even if they do know that sooner or later they’ll be hanging on a hook in his man cave.
Every one of the nitwits on The Apprentice (BBC1) dreams of millionairedom and is ready to run the gauntlet in alan sugar’s Bloody Chamber. This week, they cobbled together a pair of video games, using graphics that would have looked primitive 30 years ago. The winning game challenged players to cure a medieval outbreak of plague, which gives you an indication of how dire the losing team’s effort was.
The entire episode would have been better ditched, since its key figure was 35-year-old doctor and wellness entrepreneur asif Munaf. He was fired but, since filming the show, has been spewing hatred on social media.
His posts since the October 7 Hamas massacre have accused israel of promoting ‘fascist ideology’ and called Zionism ‘a satanic cult’. He kept his anti-semitism to himself in the boardroom. no doubt Lord sugar, who is of course Jewish, would have done more than just fire him.