A Very English Scandal, episode 1 review: Hugh Grant is both charming and bone-chilling in this brilliant take on the Thorpe affair
Attempted murder is no laughing matter, of course, and yet A Very English Scandal (BBC One) set out to tickle the ribs. As fruitily portrayed by Hugh Grant, Jeremy Thorpe is an outrageous popinjay embodying everything that is perfectly loathsome about some Establishment figures: entitlement and charm masking the ruthless guile of a predator.
The opening scene, featuring symbolically raw and succulent steak tartare, introduced a brace of Liberal MPs slyly at ease with saucy-postcard sexuality. (The other one was Peter Bessell, played with spiffing joie de vivre by Alex Jennings). Theirs was a world in which proud new labels – “gay” – rubbed up against furtive old euphemisms: “musical”, “on the spear side”.
Chaps had to keep quiet about such leanings before Leo Abse (a cartoonishly Welsh Anthony O’Donnell) started soliciting support for his private members’ bill. But Thorpe was soon bombarding the sweet young stable lad Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) with outrageous innuendo.
It’s not a particularly subtle performance from Grant. At one point, as he materialised in Josiffe’s bedroom in a silk dressing gown brandishing a pot of lubricant, he even thrust his tongue priapically into his cheek.
But having broken out of a chrysalis in Stephen Frears’s Florence Foster Jenkins, Grant has here made another deft progression with the same director, lacing his trademark polish with outright unpleasantness. His decision to marry was coldbloodedly plotted as a strategic bid for better poll numbers. The moment that Thorpe determined on murdering Scott having failed “to put the s--ts up him”, chilled the very marrow.
A Very English Scandal: who's playing who in the BBC Jeremy Thorpe drama
The filigree work was supplied by Whishaw as a frightened fawn whose vulnerability is tinged with vanity. Miraculously, the actor not far short of 40 convincingly transformed from a girlish teen into a lithe young lens-loving model.
The script, adapted by Russell T Davies from John Preston’s acclaimed book, has a sprightly structure and half an eye on the here and now. Timely allusions to immigration and the Common Market resound like gongs. But then so too does the whole rambunctious parable of one seedy MP’s lascivious behaviour. Hideously entertaining.
