...and who wrote it? An angry Corbyn disciple
GUNPOWDER featured the most violent and visceral scenes of execution ever screened on primetime television. This starstudded BBC1 drama about the November 5 plot was not so much brutal as psychotic in its quest for historical accuracy.
Sian Webber, best known as Phil Mitchell’s lawyer in EastEnders, was stripped naked and crushed to death under iron weights on a public scaffold – a 17th century punishment known as ‘pressing’. Her only crime was her religion, Catholicism.
Then a young priest was hanged, drawn and quartered: We saw him strung up and cut down, copiously disembowelled and butchered with an axe, before his head was dipped in tar and displayed on a spike. The camera never flinched, though plenty of viewers must have done.
It might seem hard to understand the need for this exceptionally graphic, nineminute sequence... until you realise that the writer, Northern Irish novelist Ronan Bennett, is a Left-winger from a Catholic family, once wrongly jailed for the murder of a policeman during an IRA bank robbery.
(You might not be completely amazed, by the way, to learn that Bennett is a dedicated disciple of Jeremy Corbyn and worked for him as a researcher in the Eighties.)
Describing Bennett’s politics, respected US radio giant NPR says that in his work: ‘Ireland’s centuries of struggle against British rule are always there as a subtext.’ Now the ultra-violent executions take on their real context. The king’s Protestant thugs are the oppressive English state, while the Gunpowder plotters led by archCatholic Robert Catesby (Kit Harington from Game Of Thrones) are the Republican freedom fighters.
IRA parallels aside, the drama does boast quite a cast. Mark Gatiss, chewing his vowels like an evil Winston Churchill, is the spymaster Robert Cecil. History records that Cecil was hunchbacked and almost a dwarf: Gatiss conveys that by hooking his head at an impossible angle, as if his neck were broken. It gave me a crick just to look at him.
Peter Mullan, playing against type (he’s usually a gangster), is a saintly priest, while Derek Riddell is the camp King James I and VI of Scotland, simpering at his favourites and waddling like a flat-footed duck – more attention to historical detail.
Other heavyweight names include Liv Tyler, Daniel West, Shaun Dooley, Kevin Eldon and Robert Emms. You could assemble a Royal Shakespeare Company out of that lot and hear no complaints.
In the final seconds, a plug-ugly ruffian stepped from the shadows and introduced himself as Guy Fawkes (Tom Cullen). With this three-part serial due to reach its climax on the eve of November 5, we’ll be seeing more of him. His first act was to plunge a knife between a spy’s ribs.
Violence is a necessary part of any costume drama set in Tudor or Stuart times – and has been since Shakespeare’s day, with blood-drenched tragedies such as Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. BBC executives criticised for showing the Gunpowder executions might pretend their drama is in this gory tradition. But on TV, violence has to leave something to the imagination – otherwise, it descends to the level of porn.
Wolf Hall, the BBC’s highly acclaimed 2015 adaptation of the Booker-winning novels set in Henry VIII’s court, climaxed with a moment of real horror, the beheading of Anne Boleyn. We heard the axe fall: We did not need to see the blood.
Gunpowder’s extreme violence was all the more incongruous because it came after a scene of chilling and controlled tension. The king’s troops burst into a country house where Mass was being celebrated, and searched the rooms until they discovered a priest hiding in a chest.
Two more priests trembled silently behind a secret wall panel. It was good enough to have viewers holding their breath. How stupid to follow it with a scene grim enough to make them cover their eyes.