Television
I am old enough by now to be able to watch a performance and not allow an actor’s alleged offscreen crimes and misdemeanours somehow to deprave and corrupt me.
Yet it is this kind of warped, righteous, moral reasoning that meant Kevin Spacey had to be erased from a film about John Paul Getty, and his role was taken instead by Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp in person. In my opinion, Spacey’s unattractive, baneful personality would have been ideal for the part of the competitive, grasping, miserly billionaire. But now we’ll never know, and the action of the producers and directors put me in mind of those panic-stricken photographic retouchers in the Kremlin, when images were altered and censored after people fell out of favour with the regime.
It is an act of paranoid rectitude – what Oscar Wilde would have called an act of unnatural virtue – and it has happened again with the Agatha Christie adaptation Ordeal by Innocence.
The programme had been finished and was in the can when one of the actors, Ed Westwick, was accused of all sorts by a woman. So, in case we, the viewers, were contaminated or inflamed by having to view his work, his scenes were deleted and his performance duplicated by Christian Cooke, who in fairness is very pretty. No doubt the set was visited by an exorcist and the rest of the cast, who obligingly returned to shoot the show again, sprinkled with holy water.
Honestly, it is getting to be like the Great Terror or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and soon actors will be appearing with placards around their neck. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that Westwick denies the allegations. The Metoo movement has seen off silly notions such as the presumption of innocence.
Complicity and hypocrisy and Marxist gobbledegook are the ruling forces these days. As Robert Conquest once said of the Bolsheviks, so it is now in culture, sport and Oxfam, where ‘terror [is] a normal method of administration, and obedience to any order from above a high virtue’. This will lead to ‘a real dehumanisation’ of the people working in all these fields.
That said, Ordeal by Innocence was pretty good. There was a fine sense of evil lurking under the country-house fixtures, behind the brightly painted walls, and down in the kitchen, where the angry cook, Morven Christie, maintained bubbling vats of jam and chopped the glistening fat off huge hams. The camera pirouetted up the stairwells, and cellos juddered on the soundtrack.
Bill Nighy was a dilettante Egyptologist, so etiolated I fully believed his entrails were under the desk in an alabaster pot. Matthew Goode, a morphine addict in a wheelchair, had perfected a sneering Peter O’toole voice. The big clue was when Luke Treadaway, as an Arctic scientist, flung a paperback of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids on a bedside table.
For here was a family where everyone had come originally from ‘some dismal foundling home’, and resentments had been building up for decades. I wonder if the producers, who’d insisted on replacing Westwick with Cooke, appreciated the irony of a plot that revolved around false accusations?
I became a fan of Philomena Cunk when she described Shakespeare as ‘a bald man who wrote with feathers’. Her new series, Cunk on Britain, is a glorious spoof of the documentary format – the talking heads, the strolling around National Trust locations, the terrible scripts and general phoney