The weekend on television Anna Maxwell Martin steals show in battle of Hastings
Oh Ted. Ted, Ted, Ted! What in the name of all your favourite biblical figures has got into you? As Line of Duty (BBC One, Sunday) gallops to the tape, the nation’s most trusted senior hottie is toying with our affections. Homeless, broke and going full rogue, Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) intensified his mission to reel in H, but succeeded only in reeling in himself. Which may be the same thing.
The final indignity? Facing a frosty triptych of Amazonian interrogators. Quite the irony for an officer with a rep for everyday sexism. His thrusting younger nemesis Deputy Superintendent Patricia Carmichael, brought in from AC-3, was played with furniture-chewing glee by Anna Maxwell Martin, dispensing smug half-smiles and nannyish put-downs. As her ice-blue peepers lasered into him he could barely unhood his left eyelid.
While we’re on eyes, has anyone seen Lisa Mcqueen (Rochenda Sandall) blink yet? She is only the latest woman to join the forces ranged against Hastings. It’s looking awfully like a #Metoo moment for the old fella. He has been thrown off the case
by DCC Andrea Wise (Elizabeth Rider), one half of a pincer movement with PC Tatleen Sohota, played with untiring pluck by Taj Atwal in a largely thankless info-dumping role.
Meanwhile, the ghosts of Lindsay Denton and Jackie Laverty were exhumed to haunt him. Wicked witch Gill Biggeloe (Polly Walker) hissed about “a non-exclusive relationship with the truth” as the camera lurked sinisterly on her shoulder. And then there was DI Fleming (Vicky Mcclure), sporting an array of baffled looks until she could take it no more and went over Hastings’s head. Et tu, Kate?
Dunbar, veering from hollow braggadocio to caged-lion scowls, pulled out all the stops as Hastings tried to wriggle through a maze of his own making (with some help from Heath Robinson). As a blistering workplace drama, Line of Duty keeps delivering. Its flirtation with its main characters’ private lives exhibits less finesse. Kate’s work-life balance issues are a half-glimpsed afterthought, while DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) picked the weirdest moment to resume horizontal relations with his shifty ex DS Sam Railston (Aiysha Hart). Unless, of course, he too was going undercover. Jasper Rees
Is it possible, as Victoria (ITV, Sunday) has been suggesting, that the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert might not have been as perfect a union as history would have us believe? The series has always portrayed Albert (Tom Hughes) as more uptight, self-regarding and uncompromising than the usual romantic portrayals – making Victoria’s famed infatuation with him hard to credit. But now it seems the bloom’s gone off entirely.
That was partly due, as this episode saw it, to the influence of Victoria’s half-sister Feodora (Kate Fleetwood), who here added profiteering from invitations to a royal ball to her long list of sins. That gave us a chance to revel in some sumptuous costumes and smartly choreographed gavottes and quadrilles. It also provided lusty palace footman Joseph (David Burnett) with opportunity for another classdefying rummage in Sophie, Duchess of Monmouth’s (Lily Travers) corsetry.
While that liaison must surely implode fairly soon, other matters dominated for now. Such as the queen being “papped” when intimate royal etchings of her family found their way into the Illustrated London News. And an absence of respect towards her in Albert’s design for a new coin only added to Victoria’s bad mood over his increasingly controlling behaviour regarding the children’s education. The sight of an enraged monarch dishing out a jaw-rattling slap to her husband was genuinely shocking.
Not that he didn’t have it coming. Taking Feodora’s advice and getting a phrenologist to pronounce on troubled heir to the throne, Bertie (Laurie Shepherd), was never going to work in Albert’s favour. Especially when the charlatan deemed the young prince was mentally weak amid not-so-veiled references to the madness of Victoria’s grandfather, George III. When Albert suggested that Victoria’s intellect might be “overdeveloped in the area of self-esteem” he was lucky to get away with just a slap, and not to be despatched to the Tower. By the time the credits rolled, this most idealised of royal marriages was looking very rocky indeed. Gerard O’donovan