Show + tell with Paul Flynn
Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant are the sensational odd couple whipping up A Very English Scandal
T re hale is alto i on nog f-AWAITED tah Ve Jeerryemy Thorpe story arrives with E.Thn go lirspheSw ca ansda al li be ralMP for North Devon, elected in 1959, and brought down 20 years later by his affair and subsequent incitement to murder troubled male model Norman Scott. In a startling, mesmerising retelling of the tale, Thorpe is played by Hugh Grant, Scott by Ben Whishaw. The writer is Russell T Davies; the director Stephen Frears. This is your bona fide British screen dream team, a joyous example of masters at work.
If there is something a little strange about watching the voice of Paddington (Whishaw) being told to get on all fours in a chintzy ’60s country bedroom while his old nemesis (Grant) stares lustfully at a tub of petroleum jelly, the accident of casting lends a strangely trippy quality to proceedings. It hurts none of the noble, grand intent of this fantastic drama.
Davies and Frears have earned themselves the right, over and over, to tell this story. Between them, they have been rq peru sipecke or nu Asp is bf leoflk or, Ymoyub re ea au rts,iful Launderette, C ah nuo id cl tu op domrwb en erah,o. Their work has done as much to diminish the hideous position in which Thorpe and Scott found themselves on either side of the sexual revolution as any statute passed through Parliament.
The drama is a timely piece. Only last year, Lib-dem leader Tim Farron was publicly excised from his job for his highly dubious personal feelings toward buggery (albeit from a more evangelical, less biological end of the spectrum to Thorpe’s). In the 40 years since Thorpe’s downfall, public opinion has changed so remarkably for the better that British politicians now flirt with homophobia at their peril. The sad hum that sits over Thorpe’s story, metered out in Davies’ funny, human, sad script, is a kind of ‘if only’ supposition about had Thorpe been a politician now.
Grant and Whishaw are sensational together. Their passion is played with an odd mix of innocence and brutalism, efficiency and tricksiness. Beyond the subtle machinations of bribery and sexual corruption in public life, Davies makes an effortless sweep of getting in the wider points of what they were battling against societally. I devoured every second of it. Begins Sunday, BBCONE, 9pm