Victoria is all dressed but going nowhere
The frocks and frills have been predictably exquisite in series two of royal romp Victoria (ITV, Sunday). But the finest frippery a rumoured £10 million budget can buy cannot quite obscure a reliance on soapopera-level plotting and dialogue. In this, Daisy Goodwin’s chronicling of the early reign of the century-defining monarch has proved itself alarmingly congruent with costumed predecessor Downton Abbey, another dazzling affair with a weakness for ditzy melodrama.
The glow of young love between Victoria (Jenna Coleman) and nerdy Prince Albert (Tom Hughes) flickered alarmingly in the second of eight episodes. Victoria was still clearly in a flutter over former prime minster Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell). Albert had, meanwhile, fallen under the spell of pioneering mathematician Ada Lovelace (Emerald Fennell). The fascination, the Queen suspected, didn’t end with Lovelace’s brilliant mind.
Victoria’s unhappiness was added to by her ongoing ambivalence towards motherhood. As a princess, she’d passed her childhood in gilded captivity. Now, as a parent, she found herself chained to the nursery once more. Greater confinement would inevitably follow with confirmation she was pregnant again.
Coleman remains irresistibly nuanced as the monarch, her steeliness mixed with vulnerability. She was completely believable as a Queen who could make people tremor in her wake yet be unmoored by the prospect of becoming a mother for the second time.
As the dwindling Melbourne – reduced to tending his rhododendrons and who saw out the episode wrapped in medicinal leeches – Sewell was a charm, too.
He conveyed his feelings for Victoria without coming over as a creep and there was a genuine tenderness between the two when she fled to his country digs to seek advice regarding her marital troubles (“a man who is intent on flirtation does not tend to resort to mathematics,” he opined of Albert’s non-relationship with Lovelace).
There wasn’t much story, with Victoria and Albert huffing past each other for the majority of the episode and then predictably reaching a cuddly detente in time for the credits.
What is ultimately so frustrating about Victoria is that it has reduced the life of Britain’s most historically significant head of state to a series of trivial exchanges in (admittedly very lovely) antechambers. Coleman is fantastic, the costumery sumptuous, but, thus far, season two has been all dressed up and going absolutely nowhere.
The genius of Harry Potter flowed from the magic it sprinkled upon the familiar story of a confused adolescent trying to make his way through the world. So, it was paradoxical that the adaptation of the first of JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective novels (published under the Robert Galbraith pseudonym) has taken precisely the opposite tack. With its slouching anti-hero and slightly limp murder mystery, the concluding episode of Strike: The Cuckoo’s
Calling (BBC One, Sunday) appeared intent on sucking all of the mystique out of the whodunnit format.
This, frankly, is a long and overdue correction. Small-screen detectives have become increasingly ludicrous, whether it’s Scandi noir’s logic-bots or Benedict Cumberbatch’s reimagining of Sherlock Holmes as superhero with poor interpersonal skills. As brought grumpily to life by Tom Burke, Cormoran Strike is the anti-sherlock: a crotchety sod whose special ability is pushing on through a hangover.
He had the perfect foil in Holliday Grainger as personal assistant Robin Ellacott. She was a puppyish Watson to Burke’s huffy Holmes and had turned down a better paying job (and a mortgage with her boring boyfriend) to remain in Strike’s employment.
Their chemistry proved crucial because the actual mystery was a bit of a duffer. Strike’s hunt for the killer of model Lula Landry led in a perfect circle, back to the victim’s adopted brother John (Leo Bill). He’d been greedily eyeing her fortune the entire time, while Martin Shaw’s creepy uncle Tony was revealed to have always suspected that there was something amiss with his nephew.
It all felt a bit Murder She Wrote. More compelling by far was the evocation of London’s shabby underbelly. Especially grim was Strike’s Denmark Street office, a grotty hovel that came over like an extension of his personality. The most striking scene was the opening flashback to the ambush in Afghanistan in which Strike, then a soldier, lost a leg. He woke sweating, threw up in a bin and carried on with his day. Television’s next great detective had arrived.
Victoria ★★★
Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling ★★★★