The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
Is ‘Bridgerton’ the closest thing to X-rated costume drama? Of corset is!
The main thing I noticed about Bridgerton, having slurped down the Netflix series in one gulp, is that it’s got a plot like a porn film.
I don’t mean it has a lot of sex in it, although it has. I never enjoy that on screen unless something actually is a porn film; the pretend humping of well-meaning nude actors in mainstream TV drama is something I just find embarrassing. No, I mean that its actual plot and structure resemble nothing so much as the narrative arc in a blue movie. It all feels invented at short notice to justify set-piece scenes, and nobody’s motivations make any sense at all.
But why would this pretend romance attract other suitors? Why isn’t the father proud of him when it turns out he can speak after all? Why doesn’t he just tell her about the vow, why does it have to be secret? If the family is so poor, where did she get that horse and carriage for going to the printers?
These are all questions you will find yourself asking if you watch Bridgerton, and the answer to all of them is: because nobody was thinking about that when they made the programme. They were thinking about scene-setting, costumes and vibe; a plot was just something they had for form’s sake. It doesn’t bear interrogation, it will buckle under the weight, so stop asking questions and enjoy yourself!
That is very much how porn films are – or used to be, in the days before the internet when one bought them on VHS tape from little Soho shops with streamers in the doorway. Pornographers probably don’t bother with plots now that people can just type “Big German milkmaid punishes cheeky cowhand” into a search engine. Wait, what am I talking about, that is a plot. Perhaps people just type “boobs”.
Anyway, in my porn-viewing days one had to sit through the most tortuous narratives to justify the action. And, like Bridgerton, they always raised more questions than they answered.
But why were the twins allowed into that prison in the first place? Wouldn’t the soldiers get into trouble for taking their trousers off in public? That’s surely not going to fit in there? Is that really what a plumber would do under the circumstances?
So the best way to enjoy Bridgerton – and very enjoyable it is if you can manage this – is just to accept whatever you’re told, immediately and without question.
Accept that this is set in London, though every external scene obviously takes place on the Royal Crescent in Bath.
Accept that the Queen of England is desperate for her royal nephew to marry a lowly viscount’s daughter who doesn’t fancy him.
Accept that a toff called Cowper pronounces his name like “cowpat”, without wondering how on earth the writers arrived at the name of Cowper without knowing the one big thing about it.
And never ask yourself why any character in it does anything.
The main thrust, as it were, of the action, is that our heroine, Daphne Bridgerton, is in love with the Duke of Hastings – who, as revenge against his loathsome father, has secretly vowed never to have children. But he marries Daphne anyway and it’s a very lusty union. And yet the Duke is secretly sticking to his secret vow. You do the maths.
Yes. That is the plot.
What a thing to put in the viewer’s mind as she sips her innocent cocoa before a sumptuous costume drama! It has the traditional will-they-won’tthey of Pride and Prejudice, but it’s not about whether the brooding hero will propose – he does this barely halfway through the series. No, it’s a case of will-he-won’t-he hang on to his… his essential… I mean, this is genuinely what we’re supposed to be thinking about. Is it on the bed? Is it on the floor? Or is it in his wife? This is a RADICAL plot device for mainstream television!
It’s almost identical to a film I once saw on VHS called Splendour in the Ass. In that movie, Lord Ashley Vanderbilk (an elderly English aristocrat played by a 25-year-old Californian porn star; trust me, the combination was quite something) worries that his bachelor son and heir is “failing to continue the Vanderbilk name”.
Terrified that his son might be – and I quote from the original screenplay – “a bit bent”, his lordship contrives to get young Master Westley laid with the help of a local girl called Hortense Harlott. (Small wonder she became a prostitute with a name like that.) The friendly Harlott discovers, over 20 minutes and several complicated pieces of gym equipment, that Westley is very keen on girls but prefers to – and here the script goes a little more delicate – “find love and romance through the back door”.
Westley’s loving parents immediately share this titbit with an eligible single lady. She takes the note, lets the dog see the rabbit, and the last scene is a happy church wedding to the strains of Here Comes the Bride on a Bontempi. Aaahhh.
Now, you may say it is not appropriate to sum up this filthy and literally X-rated plotline for a respectable reader like yourself. But my point is: the plot of Bridgerton, biggest mainstream costume drama of the day, is just the same!
Perhaps both cultural artefacts are operating as a sort of intense satire of what Jane Austen is really about. This is the point of all that Regency matrimony, isn’t it, of alliances and bloodlines? Strip away the light surface of costume and carriage, quadrilles and whist, and in the end it’s all about what you do with your… with your… with your Cowper’s fluid.
How did the writers find the name Cowper without knowing the one big thing about it?
ROLL
Finally, can you identify these literary decapitations?
I still live, but thou, thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will. I can throw it to the dogs and to the birds of the air.
The Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.
The tumbrils begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are robed and ready. Crash! – A head is held up, and the knittingwomen who scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could think and speak, count One.
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S
Þe scharp of þe schalk schyndered þe bones, / And schrank þurč þe schyire grece, and schade hit in twynne.
Dried, sunken, with closed eyelids – a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously.
ANSWERS
O Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
E Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
U A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
H Salomé by Oscar Wilde