Oh là là! Sex, intrigue and great hair in Versailles
Torture, espionage, wetlook camisoles, slavering wolves, adultery, selfflagellation, incest and an epic gardening project –
Versailles (BBC Two) has got the lot. An all-you-can-eat buffet of everything a historical drama will ever need, but it’s lacking one ingredient – alas somewhat important – which is characters worth keeping your eyelids open for.
The recipe is familiar from previous international dramas in wigs and doublets (see also The Tudors). Take a historical era with box-office brand value, remove the tedious bits about canon law and excise duties, and focus on the sex, violence and intrigue, sometimes simultaneously.
There’s plenty in the dynastic creation story of Versailles. Thus we found lusty king Louis XIV (George Blagden) busily covering the court’s supply of young brood mares, including the wife of his brother Philippe (Alexander Vlahos), who was more focused on being the willing play-thing of the Chevalier de Lorraine (Evan Williams) and overspending on footwear. Around them a posse of aristocrats plotted to avoid tax and get the court back to Paris, while the king’s security henchman Fabien Marchal (Tygh Runyan) kept him safe by steaming open everyone’s mail and wielding a variety of implements, some sharp, others blunt, according to need.
This is the Franco-Canadian creation of David Wolstencroft, who gave you Spooks, and Simon Mirren. Its vaguely French signifiers include lustrous hair that makes everyone look identical and no one batting an eyelid at all the frotting in corridors. The cast, which one’s not quite heard of, speak franglais in a mulch of transatlantic accents. Viewers in France were at least given the option of a dubbed version to subdue the hokum.
The intrigue, as we might expect, is probably the most interesting element of Versailles, and the entire attentionseeking soufflé looks suitably splendid, as it should on a budget of £24 million. It just feels as if it could afford to be a little less portentous. Nor is it quite clear what’s in it for British audiences who have not yet been told that Philippe’s wet-look wife Henriette (Noémie Schmidt), also Louis’s mistress, is the daughter of our very own Charles I.
Sometimes in documentaries the camera goes somewhere private and viewers become voyeurs. That sense was inescapable in a tender, painful moment of family intimacy during The Big C & Me (BBC One), a calm and humane new series reporting on the lives of ordinary people living with cancer.
Sally, 48, a sprightly farmer’s wife from North Wales, had been living with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma for a decade, and it showed. “You look at yourself in the mirror,” she said, “and think who the hell is that?”
Before she went in for a last-ditch stem cell transplant, she took the two youngest of her five children to school and said goodbye for at least a month. Tears flowed and the camera gawped. You wanted to look away.
This series doesn’t do that. The first episode followed three people grappling with treatment. Dominic, an overweight pigeon-fancier from Yorkshire, bluffly confessed that he was a diagnosis waiting to happen. “Odds on it were going to happen to me.” He flirted with the nurses while his breast lump was removed under local anaesthetic.
His was the kindest narrative. Yvette’s cancer had been with her for 20 years. A double mastectomy, a holistic lifestyle and the uplifting hobby of belly-dancing did not prevent its latest return. Her face could not help falling when a nice Scottish doctor broke the bad news and offered her a make-or-break drugs trial. “They have to have guinea pigs,” she shrugged.
The Big C & Me looked past cancer clichés to report from the front-line. Sally and Yvette submitted vlogs, while other unnamed cancer patients talked from unidentified hospital wards about being one of the 2.5 million Britons thrust into this other world where the odds could be better.
Aside from Victoria Derbyshire’s voiceover in the first person plural (she has also recently completed treatment for breast cancer), the light editorial touch suggested the best virtues of radio with the added dimension of looking into the eyes of the scared, stoical talkers.
It would have been disingenuous not to include a worst-case outcome, which landed in the solar plexus, before the programme concluded on a hopeful upswing. Valuable, responsible television.
Versailles ★★★
The Big C & Me ★★★★