TV preview, A Very English Scandal (BBC1, Sunday): Hugh Grant is brilliantly believable as Jeremy Thorpe
Right, so I’m assuming that you’ve made your minds up long ago about how interested you are in royal weddings and association football, and that you know where to find them on the telly (the wedding is everywhere, the FA Cup Final is on BBC1 from 5pm, just in case).
Good. That leaves the rest of a promising week’s viewing to survey.
The dramatic highlight has to be A Very English Scandal, starring High Grant and Ben Whishaw. Whether you can remember it unfolding before an uncomprehending nation or not, the Thorpe affair in the 1970s remains, as the title of the BBC’s new dramatisation has it, A Very English Scandal. In brief: the wildly promiscuous homosexual leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, is being harassed by a former lover to the extent that he hatches a weird plan to either kill or frighten the man.
The plot is botched, resulting in the killing of a Great Dane (dog) on Exmoor. The dog killer is traced via his car number plate noted down by a nosey housekeeper, the gang end up on trial for conspiracy to murder and… well I don’t want to spoil it for those who don’t remember/haven’t lately read about the denouement. Grant is brilliantly believable as Thorpe, one of the strangest characters ever to inhabit the political landscape, and perhaps the one with, simultaneously, the finest array of gifts and the most grievous of flaws. His nemesis, the former male model Norman Scott was a scarcely more straightforward personality, though obviously without the most destructive aspect of Thorpe’s.
Anyway, it is superbly written, directed and acted, and you will especially cherish Patricia Hodge’s turn as Thorpe’s domineering, possessive and monocle-wearing mother Ursula. As was noted during the legal proceedings, it was a tragedy of Greek or Shakespearean proportions, and overdue for a proper dramatisation. So thanks, too, to writer Russell T Davies, of Doctor Who fame, for seizing the chance.
Apart from that standout drama (the first of three on Sunday nights), you’d be well advised to keep up with The Split, which has lived up to its promise to explore the limits of human and legal fidelity, and The Bridge. In both cases, though, you will need to pay careful attention.
Unfairly, I feel, overshadowed by royal events, and indeed footie events, the national treasure that is John Motson is treated to a full appreciation in “John Motson Night” (BBC2). Even those uninterested in the beautiful game cannot have missed this sheepskin coated hero in the commentary box, and you wonder, with his obvious gifts for language and startlingly accurate memory, what might have been had he decided to devote his life to, say, physics or medical research. Anyway, from Motty Mastermind to the movie The Damned United, it is an excellent way to escape (some) of the royal wedding fever.
Documentary of the week has to be Manchester: The Night Of The Bomb. One year on from the devastation of innocent lives at Manchester Arena, this timely documentary reminds us both of the capacity for evil and its ability to strike, sadly, almost at will; but also, usually, the resilience and strength of the human spirit. The testimony of those involved – victims, families, emergency services – is moving.
Even those unmoved by art are usually appalled, intrigued and surprised by the timeless talents of Hieronymus Bosch. His surreal images of chopped up men and beasts were created long before surrealism was invented, and they look incredibly contemporary, weird, pervy and funny in equal measure – and all some five centuries after his extraordinary imagination took flight. Richly rewarding and endlessly fascinating, Bosch’s work gets a welcome show on ITV’s Great Art which reviews the major exhibition of his paintings in Hertogenbosch, Holland. Hell on Earth, but in a fun way.
I’m not quite sure how ITV will be able to gain the necessary permissions to make A&E Live work, but no doubt they’ll have a found a way. Davina McCall, maybe not the calmest celeb to have around an emergency department, will be at Leeds General Infirmary to check out the dedicated work of our NHS professionals in the 70th year of the best health service in the world. On this occasion, much better to be a viewer than to appear on TV, though.
Last, I can only conditionally recommend Channel 5’s Sex Business series, which runs on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The episodes cover the lives of porn stars, escorts and drug addicted street sex workers, and make for a shocking, poignant, distressing, disturbing but, it has to be said, revealing (in every sense) picture of sexual mores in modern Britain. Not for the faint-hearted, therefore.
A Very English Scandal (BBC1, Sunday 9pm); The Split (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm); The Bridge (BBC2 Friday 9pm); John Motson Night (BBC2, Saturday from 8.30pm); Manchester: The Night Of The Bomb (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm); Great Art (ITV, Thursday 10.45pm); A&E Live (ITV, Tuesday 9pm); The Sex Business (Channel 5, Monday to Wednesday 10pm)
