Versailles (BBC2) | iPlayer
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (BBC1) | iPlayer
Alan Patridge’s Scissored Isle (Sky Atlantic) | Available on Now TV
Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider (Vice News)
Eleven full minutes into Versailles, and I was cheerfully bonding with the Franco-Canadian mood of it all. Sacre bleu! say my notes. Casse-toi! Quelle fumant paquet de horse-merde… One or other long-haired brother rode through a sea of mud, most of it on the camera lens. A lackey called (I think) Latrine peered into the dark and mumbled something blackly. Eventually, up swelled the titles and theme tune. French ambient popsters M83 with their undeserved hit Outro from Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, an album title that said it all, if not quite rudely enough. Yet then, bizarrely, it picked up pace, the lighting came on and there even emerged the semblance of a plot. Sun King Louis XIV, the most determinedly heterosexual of the brothers, plans a palace in the forest to offer the scheming nobility an alternative court to Paris, the better to honeytrap them under his rule. And this was all rather finely shown, with sweeping landscapes and swooping balconies – of both marble and of womanly flesh – and dastardly schemes and wolves and a splendidly nasty henchperson called Fabien who seems destined, eager even, to spend much of the series facially speckled with prisoners’ blood. I even stopped laughing at the script for whole seconds at a time. This was hard, though, when gifted with such gems as “We must build our own destiny right here. A new France will be born, and this palace will be her mother,” or helpful expositional prompting as “My proud Spanish queen.” (Unaccountably not even hiding behind the slippery veil of mistranslated subtitles: this was all in English.) And there was even a kindly sawbones father with a pretty daughter who, in scenes remarkably reminiscent in their Timotei tweeness of the Papa-Nicole ads of the 90s, was allowed the peerless line: “A woman doctor – now there’s an idea!”
George Blagden as Louis has little to do other than be king, roger the more winsome ladies of the court and make mistakes, chief among these being far too cruel in parts but also far too trusting, particularly of his achingly fey brother Philippe d’Orleans. As far as George’s acting goes… he has nice light grey eyes, which can soften into a light grey or harden into a light grey. Much has of course been made of the frottages and frissons of all the frenzied amour, but we’ve seen it all before, if not always with quite such alabaster arrays of beauty. All in all, the very worst that can be said of this is it’s a good-looking spin through rank betrayals and gilded chateaux, with brocade and breasts. This is also the very best that can be said of it. Among the seemingly unstoppable end-credits that flowed down our screens, way after the acres of decolletage-fluffers and dung-tuggers, was a tiny mention of one – count them, one – “historical consultant”.
Unexpected delight of the week was, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Russell T Davies played fast, loose and brilliant with Shakespeare’s script. Purists balked. Balk away, say I. New Globe director Emma Rice raised horror’d eyebrows when she said recently that some of Shakespeare’s more outdated language left her cold and longing to turn on The Archers. While not willing to venture quite that far, I can only empathise, and in both The Hollow Crown and this it has been screamingly obvious to all but the most blinkered that Bardy-boy benefits from a judicious edit.
But a loving edit. It is as if Shakespeare has been patted down by a most friendly pickpocket and relieved of the great many baubles that still sing to us, while the archaic gewgaws are left rightly to moulder. There are many surprises here. That John Hannah makes such a good villain. That I could actually suffer Matt Lucas, after years of gazing disconsolately at Little Britain as unable to raise a smile as I was to form a valid hatred. That the plot was rendered coherent, in a way my inner teenager finally applauded. That the endgame faerie hey-nonny song-bollocks morphed into an actually joyous celebration of life and of rhythm. This was simply a lovely reminder that, for all that Shakespeare may be perceived, often rightly so, as a testament to the power of language, his legacy is and must always be his wider, ludicrously generous embracement of vital, flawed humanity.
And, oh, that all those stony-faced years of Little Britain could have been replaced by just a few episodes of Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle. Alan set out to make amends for calling someone a chav. He began in Manchester, “spiritual home of the needy”, and so it was always going to get worse. Whether quizzing a freegan with relentless untact on what he would actually eat – “An egg in a sock? A condom full of grapes?” or pondering his recurring anxiety dream – “stuck in a lift with Diane Abbot” – he still represents flawed humanity at one of its most extreme ends, with an exuberant lack of self-awareness.
Talking of which, there was a fascinating little documentary called Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider which launched on Wednesday on the web channel Vice News. It’s in the news now because it achieved unprecedented access, via the sharp and likeable Vice journalist Ben Ferguson and during an awkward little time for Labour, to Corbyn.
Among its insights (denied to more mainstream broadcasters and thus fascinating to them, yet still boring) were the facts that: Corbyn’s wife Laura is pleasant; Jeremy bitterly resents the BBC’s obsession with all things Corbyn. Faced with an extremely friendly face – Ben is an admitted Labour voter, and had burbled in most amiable terms about Corbyn’s “unpolished… approachable” appeal to younger Labourites, Jeremy still chose the path of most resistance. In the middle of the antisemitism storm, Ben had finagled rare access. Jeremy was grumpy, having had to sack Ken – Ben had asked him for the actual reasons, and was rewarded with horse-merde, Mr Corbyn now talking as pantywaist-safe as the non-talk for which he had ever upbraided Blair. “It’s not a lack of leadership. It’s a responsible approach to taking decisions.” Ben’s face was a picture, and one couldn’t help but think of those radicalised young voters who might suddenly realise they were still being talked to by their dad.
Worse was to come. A PMQs in which Mr Corbyn skied it over the bar. We needed Shakespeare. What we got was granite-faced spin doctor Seumas Milne; I’ve seldom seen an Easter Island statue so keen to bury its head in its hands.
