Killer tea just wasn’t milked
HUMANS can’t touch Westworld for scale or dramatic ambition, but at least you can follow the story. Though still very watchable, HBO’s series is starting to feel pointlessly convoluted.Let’s hope it’s not another Lost. HAVE ITV bosses been swigging from Dark Angel’s Teapot of Terror?
Arsenic poisoning might explain why their costume dramas are currently crazier than Donald Trump’s hair.
First they turned Victoria and Albert’s relationship into an eight-part will-they, won’t-they? saga – gripping for anyone who’d never heard of The Albert Hall, Albert Dock, the V & A Museum etc etc.
They stretched Howard Carter’s world famous discovery of King Tut’s tomb into four hours of telly tedium.
Would he find it? Could he? Ooh, the suspense.
Yet for some reason they rushed through the little-known story of real-life serial killer Mary Ann Cotton in Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday, 10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN two measly sittings. Evil Mary – played by Joanne Froggatt, inset – topped up to 21 people with arsenic tea, including three husbands, 11 of her own children, two stepkids, one lover and her best mate…mostly for the insurance money. ITV didn’t have to dream up unresolved sexual tension between her and an elderly politician or invent a fictional love interest to pad out Mary’s story. Her drawers were up and down like the Dow Jones Index. Cotton married four times, once bigamously, shagged around, lied and stole. A fraudster and a forger, she was nastier than Nick and about as reliable as a political pollster…easily six episodes’ worth of drama. Yet Dark Angel unfolded at a pace that would’ve knackered Usain Bolt, pelting from couplings to kids to coffins. It was almost farcical. They skipped her trial and the campaign to save her. We didn’t even see her richly deserved death by hanging.
Worse, writer Gwyneth Hughes tried to turn this wicked bitch into some kind of feminist heroine.
Gwyneth had Mary explain she had wanted more from life, “more than coal dust, and childbirth, and men who think saying ‘I love you’ is enough”. Right on, sister.
“Men work hard but for women it never ends,” the black widow moaned.
“Run your own bath, cook your own tea”, she snapped at Joe Nattrass the miner who flattened her mattress (until she put the kettle on).
Cotton killed at will, yet “all men are bastards” was ITV’s message. Loose Women must have loved it.
AT one point Mary grabbed her sister-in-law by the crotch and called her “a dried-up old virgin”, a move that experts now call Trumping. THANDIE Newton, Westworld…Gemma Chan, Humans…Planet Earth II…Poldark finale…The Supervet. CITIZEN Khan – as welcome as foxes on your trampoline, sitcom with a silent “h”…The Last Leg – about as funny as Aleppo…EastEnders – never duller.