Rule, Britannia
Period drama with an eccentric twist
Say the phrase “British TV costume drama” and an image of restraint pops into the mind. It’s tea and cakes in the drawing room at Downton Abbey and Jeremy Irons in impeccable tweed on the lawn in Brideshead Revisited. But that stereotype may not stick for much longer, because recently the genre has been having a funny turn. It started with Steven Knight’s Birmingham gangster drama Peaky Blinders, which recently finished its fourth series, and continued with Knight and Tom Hardy’s over-the-top Georgian revenge melodrama Taboo on BBC One. And now, this month, comes Sky’s Britannia, a wild drama about Ancient Britain written by playwright Jez Butterworth, whose West End hits include Jerusalem and The Ferryman.
What unites these series? Their brilliant weirdness. Not only do they reach into pockets of the past previously untouched by TV commissioners obsessed with Austen and Dickens, but they do so in unabashedly eccentric style.
Thus, while Peaky Blinders is allegedly based on the real-life gang culture that existed in the Birmingham in the early 20th century, it pays little attention to fact, and employs lots of slo-mo and a modern rock soundtrack to give it a fantastical, anachronistic edge. Meanwhile, the first series of Taboo was a blood-drenched ride that veered into supernatural horror, as it told the story of the fictional, unhinged, 18th-century explorer James Delaney, who may or may not be the actual devil.
A similar trippiness pervades Britannia, which is set in Britain in 43AD during the Roman invasion as the Romans, led by commander Aulus Plautius (David Morrissey), take on the warrior Celts and the magic-loving Druids. Written by Butterworth and his older brother, Tom, it may just be the strangest costume epic yet: a show that starts with Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man as its theme song and only gets odder from there. The first episode includes a hallucinatory fertility ritual, an odd-couple pairing between an outcast Druid and a lost girl that’s more Withnail and I than I, Claudius, and intimations that Morrissey’s Roman commander may be a literal demon. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Crook’s cadaverous Veran rules over a closedoff and apparently permanently high community of druids and appears to be able to summon the dead back to life.
Safe to say, the show is largely unconcerned with actual history. “I’m not interested in the period itself as drama,” says Butterworth, adding with a laugh that he “wants people to complain about the accuracy”. “In terms of saying what actually happened at this time, the History Channel can do that… I was more interested in character than in definable historical events.”
With that in mind, both Britannia and Taboo look back to the kind of “folk horror” that came to the fore in late-sixties and early Seventies films such as Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, both of which examined the sinister, superstitious underbelly of historic and rural English culture and had great spooky fun with our cultural distrust of the unknown.
“I did want Britannia to feel tricksterish and unreliable,” says Butterworth, agreeing that those films were at the back of his mind when he
‘In terms of saying what actually happened at this time, the History Channel can do that’
wrote the show. “Really its central idea is: what happens when one set of gods or beliefs encounters another set? It was fascinating to me that these people could have lived on this island forever believing one thing and then another group of people show up with a completely different [set of gods]. What would that mean? And if there was a god-off, who would win?”
All of which sounds a very long way away from the early progenitors of classic period drama such as The Forsyte Saga, the 1967 BBC adaptation of John Galsworthy’s novels about a family living in Victorian and Edwardian England, and ITV’S Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75) about domestic life in an aristocratic family in the Thirties. Both presented a rigidly literal depiction of a period in English history, an approach that arguably didn’t change until Andrew Davies paved the way for a more creative view of the past with his freer – and steamier – interpretations of classic novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1995) and War & Peace (2016).
Davies’s insistence on embellishing accepted narratives with flights of imaginative fancy (that now infamous scene of Darcy emerging dripping from the lake, for instance) may have been revolutionary at the time, but many of his adaptations now look tame compared to the wackiness of today’s costume dramas. Penny Dreadful, a Victorian period horror show with a cast that includes Dracula, Frankstein and werewolves, and even ITV’S rambunctious, bosom-heaving Harlot, which depicted the sleaze and grime of an 18th century brothel, are two recent examples, while one of the most hotly anticipated new shows is Ridley Scott’s take on Dan Simmons’s bestselling book The Terror, a fictionalised account of Captain John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845 with a trailer that is more American Horror Story than Scott of the Antarctic.
Yet freewheeling period sagas are not without precedent. They owe their biggest debt to cinema, and specifically to the late Ken Russell, whose wild and surreal films made him a true British eccentric. Russell’s best films, from the delirious witchcraft drama The Devils (1971) to his gaudy Byron and Shelley biopic Gothic (1986), operate under their own rules.
These are movies in which no plot is too over the top, no twist too hammy and yet they work, largely because of Russell’s belief in the story he is telling and his commitment to the tone with which he tells it. “He’s not only the most flamboyant interpreter of history but [his work] is far more daring, cinematic and brilliant than most of the stuff filling cinemas today, because he pushed everything to its breaking point,” says film historian Adam Scovell. “All alternative period pieces in some way owe something to him.”
This idea of history on TV as being open to interpretation can in part be explained by a newfound confidence in British Tv-making, which for years languished in the shadow of its artistically bolder and more imaginatively ambitious American counterpart. Britain has culturally had a reverential approach to its own past, yet in today’s TV industry, “history is up for grabs”, as James Richardson, producer of Britannia, puts it.
But perhaps the most pertinent point is that these shows offer a more “authentic” view of what it might have really felt like to live in the historical period they depict. By emphasising atmosphere over factual reverence, the result often feels more emotionally real. All of which suggests that costume drama, for years considered the safe and staid strand of the British schedules, is in danger of becoming the most exciting and experimental genre on television.