The Victorian serial killer with the face of a depressed codfish
As Lady Mary’s maid in downton abbey, Joanne Froggatt was never exactly a little ray of sunshine. Her speciality was the watery smile and the damp sigh, drippier than a broken tap.
But she and her stern husband, Mr Bates, were like the Chuckle Brothers on laughing gas, compared to the doleful misery of her tribulations in Dark Angel (ITV).
This whole production was about as much fun as toothache at Christmas. How could it be anything else, when every plot twist involved another dead child? scarlet fever, typhoid, consumption — babies were dying by the barrowload, and that was before Joanne reached for the arsenic bottle.
The drama was based on a true story, the Victorian case of mass murderer Mary ann Cotton. But historical accuracy doesn’t automatically guarantee great entertainment, especially when the subject matter is so hideously bleak.
There’s a strong sense that ITV bosses thought so, too, and weren’t sure what to do.
There was too much factual background and detail to be crammed into two hour-long parts, as originally planned, but apparently it wasn’t worth three — so it ended up as a pair of 90-minute episodes, heavily padded out with adverts and hidden away on a Monday night.
That lack of confidence extended into the storytelling. We never learned why Mary ann had eloped with her first husband, nor what could have happened in her childhood to make her such a coldhearted psychopath.
she simply turned up on her mother’s doorstep, with a baby in her arms and four already in the churchyard, wearing a face like a clinically depressed codfish.
From there, her story travelled in catapult shots. she met a man in one scene, and in the next she was urging him to have one more cup of arsenic tea as he lay dying in bed. she had a baby, and a moment later she was nine months pregnant and burying the previous one.
Through all this, Mary ann never aged a day. she must subscribe to the Victoria Beckham regimen of beauty — if you never smile, you won’t get wrinkles.
all this was made more dour still by writer Gwyneth Hughes’s determination to pile on layers of feminist dogma. Murderess she might be, but Mary ann had an iron backbone, while all the blokes around her were weaklings and liars. Men, honestly — all hopeless.
‘It’s just how life is for women and there’s no amount of mithering will change that,’ her mother consoled her. Mary ann wasn’t to blame for her crimes: her worst sin in Victorian eyes was to be a woman with a healthy sexual appetite. she was a victim of brute sexism.
I ask you, brothers and sisters, what crime is a pinch or two of arsenic in the teapot, compared to the age-old oppressive rule of male chauvinists?
This, then, is what downton might have been like, if its creator Lord Julian Fellowes had been an Islington Leftie. should Jeremy Corbyn take over downing street, you can expect all TV costume drama to be this way.
If that happens, I’m moving to alaska to live like a hermit with the ‘off-gridders’. Chris Tarrant met one in Ice Train To Nowhere (C5), when he stopped off to meet a loner called steve.
steve sleeps with a gun strapped across his back. His cabin is gouged and scarred from where bears have tried to claw their way inside. Why he invited an English TV presenter to pay a visit was not clear, but he wasn’t happy to see him. ‘Close the door,’ he yelled at Chris, ‘this is alaska — not Buckingham Palace!’
In fairness, Chris isn’t posh. He chunters through his railway adventures like a common man’s Michael Portillo, turning his nose up at local delicacies. ‘I can’t eat ptarmigan eggs,’ he complained in the dining car (a ptarmigan is rather like an arctic partridge). ‘Can I have a chicken egg and bacon, with no reindeer?’
Eventually he arrived at his destination, the gold miners’ town of Fairbanks in the far north — and didn’t even bother looking around. some traveller.
If I do emigrate to alaska, I’m not going with Chris Tarrant.