Wildly inaccurate, yes... but this Catherine’s just Great
The Great is a period romp based on the life of Catherine the Great, but it is not your average period romp as it is lavishly filthy, wonderfully funny, snappily paced, savagely witty and totally modern. The Great is great, in other words. And I put it to you that nowhere else will you have heard the philosopher Descartes described as follows: ‘He smelled of cheese, but what a mind.’ Who knew?
The Great is written by Tony McNamara, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning film The Favourite, which starred Olivia Colman and portrayed Queen Anne as a kind of late-stage Elvis, but holed up with rabbits. And this has that same boisterous, mischievous, galloping energy.
It opens with 19-year-old Catherine (Elle Fanning, obviously enjoying herself) being shipped from Poland to Russia to marry Emperor Peter, played by Nicholas Hoult, who is obviously enjoying himself. It is no matter that the real Catherine was, in fact, 32 and had been married for 16 years and was the mother of two children by the show’s start date in 1761, as this is ‘intentionally anti-historical’, as McNamara has said, and as we’re told at the outset it is ‘an occasionally true story’. So don’t write in to say Catherine wouldn’t have worn cuffs like that. Nobody cares.
Catherine is a romantic and excited about the marriage. She imagines that she and Peter will share a perfect love and, together, they will do wonderful things for Russia. Catherine arrives proffering a spruce branch that is ‘evergreen’, and which she hopes ‘will be a symbol of our feeling for each other, and that we will be constant and caring all our lives’. Peter turns to the camp of obsequious noblemen who follow him everywhere. ‘She gave me a twig. She’s not another inbred, is she?’ he asks. He turns back to her: ‘And you smell funny. Is that usual?’ ‘I have been travelling,’ she says. ‘Let’s hope that’s it,’ he replies. (This all happens within the first few minutes, and I was already delighted.)
Still, she is optimistic about their wedding night. Her mother has told her what’s what: ‘A man caresses you softly, pressing his lips to yours – you float for a time until finally he wraps his arms around you and whispers poetry in your ear.’ At this point Peter marches in, flips her over and does the business while deep in conversation about duck-shooting with his lieutenant. It’s over in seconds. He is keen on an heir. So he finishes not with poetry but with something our old friend, Hot Simon from Bridgerton, would never have said: ‘Let us hope my seed has found purchase!’
The first episode is devoted to Catherine discovering she has married an idiot and a dud, someone who keeps his dead mother in a glass case. This is interspersed with scenes showing Bacchanalian parties at court, female courtiers ordering wigs from Paris and imagining they are the last word in style, even though they wear them like hats. Catherine is being thwarted in her attempt to discuss ideas – she’s the one who had met Descartes, finding him ‘very sweet’ as well as smelling of cheese. She is also thwarted in her attempt to bring literacy to women. As Peter says, and as our old friend Hot Simon from Bridgerton would also never say: ‘Women are for seeding, not reading!’
So much of drama is about tone, getting that right, and so many get it wrong. The BBC’s Black Narcissus, for example, took itself way too seriously, while Netflix’s Bridgerton probably didn’t take i tself seriously enough. And the wonder of The Great? It doesn’t take itself seriously very seriously indeed.
We will now skip quickly past ITV’s South Africa With Gregg Wallace, where Mr Wallace showed us ‘the real Africa’ by going on safari and having a holiday, basically. That said, he had never been camping and did stay overnight in a (luxury) tent, so he was brave in that respect.
Instead, let’s move on to David Attenborough’s latest series, A Perfect Planet, which explores the conditions that made life on Earth possible, and this week it was volcanoes, and it was extraordinary. In normal times I would have said no matter how bad life gets, at least you’re not a fluffy baby flamingo about to be picked off by a marabou stork – oh my heavens. Though now we’re in Lockdown III it does sometimes feel as if we’re all baby flamingos about to be picked off by a marabou stork, but let’s not dwell on that here.
To be honest, there wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before. In fact, there was quite a lot we had, such as flamingoes gathering at Tanzania’s salt flats or hyenas eyeing up a baby wildebeest (run, baby wildebeest, run!), or bears lunging for salmon (swim faster, salmon, swim faster!), but the visuals were breathtakingly awesome. That bear diving for dead fish on the lake bed, for instance. Or the adult wildebeest saving its baby by head-butting the hyenas. We’d seen it all before, but never properly. Amazing.