Catherine isn’t at all bad, but it’s Peter who’s great
TThe Great (Channel 4) is “an occasionally true story”, as it tells us at the beginning, which sounds cute but is par for the course these days. It is the story of Catherine the Great before she acquired Greatness, as a 19-year-old newly married to Peter, emperor of Russia. The writer is Tony Mcnamara, who co-wrote The Favourite (starring Olivia Colman as England’s Queen Anne), and the tone is similar: a bawdy comedy shot through with a streak of cruelty.
Elle Fanning stars as Catherine, a sweet little thing who goes into marriage believing it will be a fairytale. She has a rude awakening when she meets Peter, played with a glorious sense of absurdity by Nicholas Hoult as an overgrown schoolboy whose tantrums can have very dangerous consequences, what with him being the most powerful man in the land.
It’s a great comic turn and the one thing that will keep you watching. Capricious rulers do make great TV – Miranda Richardson in Blackadder remains the performance to beat – and Hoult’s emperor is by turns sly, selfish and thick as a brick. “She gave me a twig – she’s not another in-bred, is she?” he asks his aides in a panic, after Catherine presents him
with a symbolic piece of spruce.
The Great would have worked well in tart, half-hour bites but its hourlong episodes feel a bit much, packed as they are with intrigue, indulgence and sleaze. The tone switches in a second from gleeful farce to unpleasant, as when Peter all but drowns his wife to teach her a lesson, or shoots the bear he gave her as a gift.
Peter, of course, didn’t last long. Fanning shows Catherine developing – or discovering – an inner steeliness and there is plenty of discourse here about gender, and the subservient role that women are required to play. The ladies at court spend their days in pointless games and gossip, and when Catherine tries to establish a school to teach them to read, her husband promptly burns it down. “Take the empress to the other ladies and speak of hats,” Peter says dismissively at the beginning. But you underestimate a great woman at your peril.
Anita Singh
The problem with The Serpent (BBC One) is that it is a whodunit where we already know who did it. As this retelling of the true story of Seventies serial killer Charles Sobhraj meandered through the second of eight episodes, no attempt was made to conceal the French ex-pat’s criminality or to cloak him in a veil of mystery. He was a greedy, grubby sociopath preying on naive backpackers travelling to Thailand in search of a hippy paradise.
The strength of the drama instead flowed from its evocation of the Bangkok of half a century ago – the thrill of the tourist trail was rivetingly recreated. But, while part two of The Serpent came into its own as a snapshot of the past, it was less compelling when the action switched back to the charisma-free Sobhraj, busy drugging and robbing unsuspecting hostelhoppers.
One way in which the series has tried to bring a fresh perspective to the case – which has already inspired three nonfiction books, a Bollywood movie and an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent – is by framing it from the vantage point of Sobhraj’s girlfriend, Marie-andrée Leclerc. Of course this choice may also have something to do with the fact that Leclerc is portrayed by Jenna Coleman, by far the most famous cast member.
As with the first episode, her biggest challenge was Leclerc’s FrenchCanadian accent. She did her best. But you were never not aware that you were watching Jenna Coleman. That may not have been entirely her fault, though. The script by Richard Warlow and Toby Finlay so far failed to put any flesh and bones on either Leclerc or Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim), whose most memorable attribute were his retro Seventies glasses.
It was those travelogue elements that impressed most. Seventies Bangkok was a wonderful playground in which to become lost, and the dissolute world inhabited by Western diplomats was conjured with particular vividness. Here, Tim Mcinnerny shone as gruff Belgian attaché Siemons, and the scenes of Knippenberg negotiating the sweltering underbelly of Thailand were hugely atmospheric. But they couldn’t compensate for a serial killer drama in which the thriller component appeared to have evaporated in Bangkok’s pummelling heat.
Ed Power
The Great ★★★ The Serpent ★★★