Hugh Grant charms and chills as Jeremy Thorpe MP
Attempted murder is no laughing matter, of course, and yet A Very English Scandal (BBC One) set out to tickle the ribs. As fruitily portrayed by Hugh Grant, Jeremy Thorpe is an outrageous popinjay embodying everything that is perfectly loathsome about some Establishment figures: entitlement and charm masking the ruthless guile of a predator.
The opening scene, featuring symbolically raw and succulent steak tartare, introduced a brace of Liberal MPS slyly at ease with saucy-postcard sexuality. (The other one was Peter Bessell, played with spiffing joie de vivre by Alex Jennings). Theirs was a world in which proud new labels – “gay” – rubbed up against furtive old euphemisms: “musical”, “on the spear side”.
Chaps had to keep quiet about such leanings before Leo Abse (a cartoonishly Welsh Anthony O’donnell) started soliciting support for his private members’ bill. But Thorpe was soon bombarding the sweet young stable lad Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) with outrageous innuendo. It’s not a particularly subtle performance from Grant. At one point, as he materialised in Josiffe’s bedroom in a silk dressing gown brandishing a pot of lubricant, he even thrust his tongue priapically into his cheek.
But having broken out of a chrysalis in Stephen Frears’s Florence Foster Jenkins, Grant has here made another deft progression with the same director, lacing his trademark polish with outright unpleasantness. His decision to marry was coldbloodedly plotted as a strategic bid for better poll numbers. The moment that Thorpe determined on murdering Scott having failed “to put the s--ts up him”, chilled the very marrow.
The filigree work was supplied by Whishaw as a frightened fawn whose vulnerability is tinged with vanity. Miraculously, the actor not far short of 40 convincingly transformed from a girlish teen into a lithe young lens-loving model.
The script, adapted by Russell T Davies from John Preston’s acclaimed book, has a sprightly structure and half an eye on the here and now. Timely allusions to immigration and the Common Market resound like gongs. But then so too does the whole rambunctious parable of one seedy MP’S lascivious behaviour. Hideously entertaining.
After 10 hours of remorseless sadism, the first series of The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4) concluded with a small luminescent uptick of hope. Offred (Elisabeth Moss), the unhappy captive of a fundamentalist regime, seemed to have effected some sort of escape. Fingers were crossed a good minute into the second series until, from within the van ferrying Offred perhaps to liberty, the telltale sound of barking dogs announced a darker destination.
And so she – and we with her – were plunged into an ever deeper pit of the religious inferno. Other petrified handmaids were yanked, gagged, hounded and herded from trucks towards industrial gallows. The imagery rhymed with what we know of real instances of mass mechanised terror, while the soundtrack twisted the knife with Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work. Soon the merciless termagant Aunt Julia (Ann Dowd, magnificent) was at it again, dispensing vengeance and psychological torture with ecstatic righteousness.
This second visit to Gilead’s chamber of horrors parts company from Margaret Atwood’s novel. The first episode was credited to Bruce Miller, the showrunner chiefly responsible for conjuring up fresh hell. While the atmospherics are grimmer than ever, it did fleetingly seem as if, cut off from the source, the writing might be cruder, woollier.
In fact there’s no fear of that. Now that no one knows what’s coming, the story has the freedom to wrong-foot: thus the threat of massed hangings proved a callous ruse. Meanwhile, back in the past when Offred was June Osbourne, she and her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) contemplated a second child just as their first was running a temperature, causing an officious nurse to embark on a disquieting critique of working mothers.
Moss, who must surely regret going back to the unruly, misconceived second run of Top of the Lake last year, must have no qualms about this return. Her face is a mobile canvas onto which she paints bug-eyed fear and pugnacious resolve, even a leering defiance. By the end there was hope after all, even if it came drenched in June’s self-sacrificial blood. It’s the role of a lifetime, and Moss is its powerful equal.
A Very English Scandal ★★★★★
The Handmaid’s Tale ★★★★★