This young Victoria could reign supreme over Downton
Was the real Queen Victoria ever as daintily beautiful as the lovely Jenna Coleman? At the very least, I’m pretty sure eyebrows weren’t quite so perfectly sculpted in the 19th century. In the second episode of Victoria, ITV’s latest attempt to replicate the success of Downton Abbey, our young queen was being undermined all over the shop – and not just by grumpy TV critics moaning about her very modern facial features.
“She’s got an unstable temperament,” said her fiendish uncle, the Duke of Cumberland (a lip-smackingly devilish Peter Firth). “Her wits are fragile.” Boo!
The second episode focused on Victoria’s job of selecting a new prime minister to rule alongside her. She favoured Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell) and why wouldn’t she? She’s a teenager, and teenagers are motivated by good-looking men. Lord Melbourne knew he was irresistible – but he couldn’t really be bothered with the whole running the country thing, instead urging his rivals, “she would be yours if you would just flirt a little”.
But Victoria had a core of steel. When potential candidate Robert Peel (Nigel Lindsay) suggested she reshuffled her ladies-in-waiting to incorporate more political diversity, she wasn’t having any of it. Her ladies were pretty much the only people the poor lamb could trust, since the rest of her retinue of hangers-on, including her own mother, were up to all sorts of nasty manipulations. Fortunately, because Victoria had her wits very much about her, she was wise to it. “I am not a piece of clay to be moulded by any hand,” she declared.
One of the most entertaining scenes came when Victoria cast a critical eye over prototypes of a coin bearing her face. “I have no chin in this one and two chins in the next!” she wailed. “I look like a goose wearing a crown!” Teenagers, eh? If only she’d had Instagram filters at her disposal.
Elsewhere – namely, downstairs – there were murky goings-on. I have a very bad feeling about palace chef Francatelli (Ferdinand Kingsley), who, in the space of a few scenes, went from light flirtation with maid Skerrett (Nell Hudson) to some very dark threats which can only end badly.
Not an awful lot of note really happened in this latest episode, but some developments are looming which could turn this series from cosy Sunday night fare to something far more exciting. “The Queen must marry soon, and then she will look to her husband and not to me,” said Melbourne, setting up the fact that she’s about to be match-made with Albert. A love triangle? Tell us more.
Asitcom about three kids screwed up by adoption might not sound like the stuff of lighthearted laughs, but The Coopers vs The Rest (BBC Two) did inspire several titters.
Domestic sitcoms are old hat (they seem like poor imitations of
My Family – which wasn’t even that good in the first place) but bringing adoptees into the mix did make things more interesting at first.
“Why did we adopt children?” asked mum Tess (Tanya Franks). “We could’ve adopted a panda. They send photos and a newsletter”. Anyone who admires Franks as an actress knows that she does abrasive and deranged very convincingly (most notably in Sharon Horgan’s brilliant Noughties sitcom Pulling), and that was the case here.
The husband in question was Toby, played by the very charming Paterson Joseph ( Peep Show). He was good cop to Frank’s bad cop, and the pair had three adopted children – teenaged tearaway Frankie (Erin Kellyman), her far more innocent sister Alisha (India Brown) and little brother Charlie (Joseph West).
All of the brood, of course, had issues. Franke was a rebel, Alisha had found God and poor Charlie was a mummy’s boy who was never invited to his classmates’ birthday parties.
Writer Andy Wolton is an adoptee himself and the script certainly was grounded in an emotional truth. The Coopers vs The Rest is one of a series of BBC comedy pilots and, from what I have seen, the premise has promise. However, there is a problem with scary Tess. We learnt early on that the Coopers went down the adoption route on account of her “hostile cervix”. But this seemed to be affecting her whole personality – after a while, all that severity was grating. A little maternal warmth would improve this show no end.
Victoria ★★★★ The Coopers vs The Rest ★★★