Forget Austen! This lusty heroine’s like Darcy with dash of Dick Turpin
Heavens above, Miss Bennet! a lady in a bonnet should scarcely be required to witness such indelicacies, and certainly not on a sunday evening. Whatever will they say at the rectory?
The Beeb’s racy Gentleman Jack (BBC1), based on the secret diaries of the 19th-century’s most unladylike landowner anne Lister, took a lusty delight in defying all the conventions of costume drama.
We were treated to autopsies, vomiting, amputations, festering sores, gangrene and the slaughter of a horse with a pistol . . . and that’s not counting a very noisy lesbian love scene. Jane austen was never like this.
That isn’t to say the story lacked romance — it just wasn’t the sort of romance that involves quadrilles and lost handkerchiefs.
‘I thoroughly intend to live with someone I love,’ sighed anne, though when she said it she was astride a married woman in a fourposter bed. The bedroom scene was apparently choreographed by an ‘intimacy co-ordinator’. You don’t see many of those advertising in the Yellow Pages.
suranne Jones played the heroine as a charismatic mixture of Heathcliff and Mr Darcy, with a dash of Dick Turpin thrown in. she entered the tale driving a
HERO OF THE WEEKEND: What The Durrells Did Next (ITV) told the family’s real-life story after they left Corfu. But the true star of the tale was Jambo the gorilla, seen rescuing a small boy when he fell in an enclosure at Gerry’s Jersey zoo. That’s conservation!
stagecoach at full pelt, and never slowed down.
she was a modern character, a 21st-century woman born 200 years too soon. Writer sally Wainwright tried to signal this at the start by having anne steal Fleabag’s trick of casting a knowing look into the camera and speaking her thoughts aloud to the viewer.
When Phoebe Waller-Bridge did this in her innovative sitcom, it felt revolutionary, but the trick is already starting to look derivative.
Traditional costume drama techniques worked much better: like every corsetted heroine, anne had a truly annoying sister (Gemma Whelan) and an amiably vague father (Timothy West) who was constantly in danger of losing the family fortune down the back of a chaise longue.
The show also fell victim to that infuriating period telly gremlin, the muffled, mumbled dialogue that is drowned by explosions of music.
It almost seems like a deliberate prank: characters whisper without moving their lips and, when you turn the sound up, the soundtrack ruptures your eardrums. They might have had eight kinds of sepsis, back in the era before antibiotics, but muddy Tv sound is one problem that never troubled the 19th century.
You’d need more than antibiotics to fend off the stars of What We Do In The Shadows ( BBC2), which stars Matt Berry, natasia Demetriou and Kayvan novak as a trio of lazy vampires in a dilapidated new York mansion.
This patchy comedy was a mock reality show about creatures of the night, a sort of Keeping Up With the Draculas. But it couldn’t decide if it wanted to parody horror movies or the Kardashians, and ended up missing both targets.
The bone-idle bloodsuckers are shaken out of their coffins by the arrival of a bad-tempered nosferatu type. He expects them to pull out their talons and start subjugating america.
Their vampiric bully is being stored in the attic, where the skylights have been hastily boarded over to keep out the sun’s rays. I think we can all see that punchline coming.
There are plenty of good gags, including the vampires’ manifesto: ‘Free compulsory harpsichord concerts every day of the week, and a ban on turtlenecks.’ But some of the ideas are worked to death, such as the one about boring Colin the energy vampire . . . and few things are worse than an undead joke.