A dreadful Duchess who shamed herself

I AM not sure what is especially British about A Very British Scandal, so oddly dramatised last week by the BBC. Margaret Whigham, third wife of the Duke of Argyll, grew up in New York City and her life was, mostly, so cushioned by money that it could have been anywhere where there were rich people. Any sympathy I might have had for her vanished when it turned out that she had cruelly forged a letter to try to turn the Duke against his young sons by a previous marriage. The letter claimed the boys had been fathered by someone else. This was surely the work of a monster. The drama ends with an announcement on screen that the divorce case in which the Duchess’s advanced sexual activities were revealed was ‘the first time a woman was publicly shamed by the UK mass media’.

Can this be true? You could make a very good case for saying she had publicly shamed herself. But, apparently, we are supposed to think that this nasty, super-wealthy adventurer was some sort of prototype strong woman, Germaine Greer before her time.

As usual, there was no real attempt to recreate the past. Just old cars, old hats and old frocks. Even the swearing was modern, totally reliant on the F-word as it was not in those days.

To make up for this, everyone smoked all the time everywhere. Please somebody correct me if I am wrong but I do not think that even dukes, let alone reporters, were ever allowed to smoke during divorce cases in court.

Claire Foy, left, more or less repeated her role as the Queen from The Crown. Is it now a rule that all major dramas must star either Ms Foy or Olivia Colman?

A brief appearance by the marvellous, shiningly intelligent Phoebe Nicholls, who long ago played Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited, was a reminder of how much other talent there is and how little it is used.