Forget the Versace bling! It’s his sister who dazzles in this drama
Nothing says ‘tacky’ quite like the Versace logo. other Continental fashion designers have elegantly intertwined initials for their brand, but gianni Versace chose a doodle of Medusa, the goddess with snakes for hair.
it looks like the label on a £1.99 bottle of white wine at a rough italian restaurant in Bedford.
Being that flaky takes talent, and money. his combination of wealth and sheer lack of taste was captured brilliantly in The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story ( BBC2), a dramatised retelling of the flamboyant couturier’s murder in 1997.
From the moment he slid from his silk sheets, to stand on the balcony of his Romanesque villa in Florida, Versace (Edgar Ramirez) looked like a Euro-lottery winner in desperate pursuit of class. Even his breakfast of melon slices, served by his butler on a silver platter, looked fake.
this nine-part, big budget docudrama, scripted by London Spy’s tom Rob Smith, revels in the plastic shallowness of Versace’s life. Everything was overdone, from the elaborate gates outside his palace where he was gunned down, to the head wound like a lotus blossom as he lay on the mortuary slab.
there’s no mystery about his killer. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) was a psychopath, a serial killer and a fantasist, who spun implausible stories about his past to everyone he met. the character painted here is very like Patricia highsmith’s charming con merchant and murderer, the talented Mr Ripley.
We saw him ambush and kill Versace, before the story leapt back seven years to their first meeting at a club in California, and a date at the opera — meetings that the Versace family deny ever took place.
Smith was at pains to point out how far from mainstream America the overt gay lifestyle was, just 20 years ago. one of the FBi agents investigating the shooting couldn’t tell the difference between Versace and Liberace.
Another was so eager to hear salacious details from gianni’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) that the poor man had no chance to change out of his bloodstained robe. ( that’s another factual dispute: the real Antonio says he never touched the body, and had no blood on him.)
the real protagonist of this piece is sister Donatella Versace, played by Penelope Cruz — a ruthless businesswoman, who seizes control of the company within hours of her brother’s murder. Psycho Cunanan is too contemptible and sick to hold our attention, but we won’t be able to take our eyes off the appalling Donatella.
For sheer flamboyance, there’s no beating tubby hairdresser Kenneth (tony Maudsley), who flounced into the sea as Benidorm (itV) returned.
he was trying to swim back to the Solana hotel, from an island off the Costa Blanca coast, but only his necklace was washed ashore. of the rest, nothing was found, not even his silver posing briefs. if he doesn’t turn up, it’s a clever way to write his character out of the show — with the possibility of a comeback one day.
nigel havers, as the smarmy dentist taking over Kenneth’s salon, is smoothly amusing, and the wonderful Janine Duvitski as elderly swinger Jacqueline is back.
But most of the best-loved Benidorm regulars have long since departed, and the show has a decrepit air, like a cheap hotel at the tail-end of the season.
Full marks, though, to a hilarious cameo from Spandau Ballet’s tony hadley, sending himself up as a shameless narcissist churning out the band’s hits at a wedding. that was pure gold.