Hugh Grant’s tour de force as Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC’S new drama

Attempted murder, homosexuality, blackmail, conspiracy – the Jeremy Thorpe trial of 1979 had everything the tabloids could desire, said Jeff Robinson in the I newspaper. And the BBC’S new three-part drama, A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant as the Liberal Party leader, is a tremendously enjoyable re-enactment of the events leading up to it – a “blackly comic dissection” of a repressed world and its ruling class.

Attempted murder is no laughing matter, said Jasper Rees in The Daily Telegraph, but Russell T. Davies’s script makes it “hideously” entertaining. Grant is superb as Thorpe, his charm masking a ruthless predator: the moment when he resolves to have his troublesome erstwhile lover, Norman Scott, murdered, is truly chilling. Ben Whishaw, as Scott, is also excellent – “a frightened fawn” mixing vulnerability with vanity – and Alex Jennings is full of “spiffing joie de vivre” as Peter Bessell, Thorpe’s fellow MP and confidant. At moments the tone was so camp I half expected Dick Emery to pop up saying, “Hello, honky-tonks”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. But Davies’s “effervescent” script – adapted from John Preston’s acclaimed book – brilliantly captures the era’s vicious anti-gay ethos. It’s TV gold.

This is a drama as funny, clever and confident as its protagonist, entwining two decades of political history with a finely drawn portrait of the English establishment, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. And Grant’s tour de force – plus the superlative turns from Jennings and Whishaw – humanises and makes sense of it all. Grant is so wry and roguish you almost envy the woman he marries in order to boost his poll ratings; his politics, too, have a contemporary appeal as his pro-european, pro-immigration speeches help transform a “cranky, faddist” party into a legitimate power player. “Bravo et encore.”