Britannia may be the drama to sate Game of Thrones fans
History geeks should give a wide berth to Britannia (Sky Atlantic). I’ll admit to a trainspotterish fandom from the very first image. The camera swooped down on a stone circle planted on the shore of a lake at the foot of what looked very much like Carmarthen Fan, aka the Black Mountain. It’s a lovely spot, so do pay it a visit.
Two cheers for the location scouts who, imagining Ancient Britain invaded by the Romans, have plumped for Wales. Welsh topography supplies a fabulous if misleading backdrop. The Wales tourist board will enjoy the fact that all of the rainy sequences were shot in the Czech Republic. For Cymrophiles, there’s the rare added pleasure of hearing Welsh dialogue, albeit in a Danish accent, courtesy of Nikolaj Lie Kaas’s weird Druid Divis.
Jez Butterworth (here writing with his brother Tom and James Richardson) has been on sundry magical mystery tours in the theatre. Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man in the credit sequence advised that Britannia is less about known knowns, more about woozy mysticism and ritualistic superstition. It scripted an all-out face-off between fact and fancy. The stomping Romans, led by David Morrissey’s conqueror Aulus Plautius, are all iron, thuggery and Anglo-saxon gerunds. The Britons are a chaos of hallucinogenic belief systems.
The Britons also wore lashings of face paint. The two indistinguishably hairy tribes, whose names I didn’t quite catch, took their make-up tips from the Glastonbury Festival style guide. Someone had fun stencilling runes on to the brow of Zoë Wanamaker’s Titania-like Queen Antedia and daubing early Seventies patterns on Kelly Reilly’s sharpshooting Kerra. Only Mackenzie Crook’s head Druid Veran looked like he’d been to a different make-up truck, one previously attached to Holby City’s burns unit.
Will Britannia’s tick list of sex, violence and brash rock video pomposity sate Game of Thrones devotees? It’s too early to say but what’s fun so far is the way a nonchalant 21st-century sensibility is teleported back to 43AD. Amid a parade of straight faces, Julian Rhind-tutt as Phelan, the obligatory eunuch, is his usual droll self. And the writers have coined some choice threats: “If you ever come here again,” Divis was told by a scary druidess, “I will eat your eyes.” But to seduce waverers, Britannia will need to do more than just talk about such things.
D(Channel 4) feels like an indie antidote to the full-on populism of Mrs Brown’s Boys. It takes commitment to get the gist of Lisa Mcgee’s plotty Northern Irish comedy, which is shot in real locations and has characters who talk at a rate of 19 to the dozen. For anyone under the age of 35, the backdrop – the back end of the Troubles in which British soldiers patrolled the city with two names – must be baffling.
Mobbing the foreground is a gaggle of naughty schoolgirls who get into high-intensity scrapes. Last week, they set fire to the house of their local fish-and-chip owner. This week, their eyes turned towards the Almighty. The girls implored the Virgin Mary – or tried “to butter up the big woman” – ahead of a history exam. The statue seemed to weep, if only because an errant dog leaked through a hole in the ceiling.
When the girls posed for the local rag, their prayerful attitudes were pure girl power. A bit like the Spice Girls, they’ve all got their own branded personality: there’s bossy Erin (Saoirse Jackson), spacey Orla (Louisa Harland), goody-goody Clare (Nicola Coughlan) and alcoholic Michelle (Jamie Lee O’donnell). The fifth member of the band is wet English boy James (Dylan Llewellyn), whose presence is inexplicable, unless you see him as the teen sitcom equivalent of an US star randomly parachuted into an indigenous cast to boost ratings in the States.
The show is also quite caninecentric. The piddling pooch was the second set-piece urine joke of the series so far. “I once saw her punch a Rottweiler!” said one of the girls last week – in a script that blooms with many such colourful images.
Derry Girls’ assault on sectarian pieties may feel a little sepia-tinted, but it’s still a hoot. These teenagers knew nothing of their own divisive history (“I’m stuck on William of Orange!”). Their convent school is run by a wonderfully cynical nun, while the hot young priest who came to investigate the miracle of the weeping effigy was a reincarnation of Narcissus. Game of Thrones isn’t the only show shot in Northern Ireland that punches through.