On the telly, the past is not another country where they do things differently — it’s the present, with a dressing-up box, where they do things exaggeratedly, as if giving directions to foreigners from some distant nation without pavements. The aim of most BBC costume drama is to illuminate eternal and contemporary social conundrums without all the confusing clutter of the here and now: no mobiles or computers, no ready meals or Starbucks. The past simplifies and prettifies.
The problem is, it also comes with politically offensive conventions, and as Tristrams see television more and more as a means of liberal nudging, so the past becomes increasingly awkward; particularly the absence of ethnic minorities and, most glaringly, the position of women. Most costume dramas are adaptations of novels: the heroines are often very girly, not the sort of role models BBC producers want for their daughters. So, with The Scandalous Lady W, they chose a contemporary biography of an 18th-century woman whose husband sues her lover for misusing and devaluing his property — she being his chattel. It’s a premise that gets BBC blood boiling, and it all starts with the obligatory phrase printed on the screen: This is a true story.
Well, of course it is, but then so are Peter Rabbit and The War of the Worlds — they are both true stories. A true story is not necessarily the facts, which isn’t a bad thing, except that in this case the facts have been truncated, edited, stretched and repositioned to give a modern Notting Hill sense of righteous indignation and empowerment. I don’t know why they didn’t keep the original title of the book. It was far better: Lady Worsley’s Whim. This was all about her whim, and who she gave it to. Her husband liked to watch while she exercised her whims. The story we were fed was that she was a victim of an uncaring, manipulative, weird spouse, and of censorious times. She was a woman being punished by misogyny and paternalism for having appetites, money and a whim.
First of all, it must be said that it was all beautifully styled and costumed; the look was almost too ravishing. Natalie Dormer, as the Lady, fills the screen admirably — she has a big presence and a face that just can’t say no. She balanced contemporary morality with 18th-century manners. But the men — oh dear. It was sad, really. It was as if she were servicing the cast of the Dutch version of The Office, a stag party from accounts, an unfanciable team of gormless, spineless, testosterone-deficient demi-blokes in wigs. Not entirely their fault: they were underwritten to the point of being characterless.
The whole thing was so constructed as a star vehicle that everyone else was merely a prop, which is a shame, because ultimately it looked not like the struggle of a proto-feminist, but like the spoilt tantrums of the rich, entitled The Kardashians with Corsets. And the facts behind the true story were more interesting, but equivocal.
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Lady Worsley’s family fortune came from slavery, and the end of the 18th century was a moment of general moral turpitude, debauchery, licence and romantic freedom. She became a member of the New Female Coterie, a collection of rich, semi-professional mistresses, and as for being kept from her child, she had at least one more that she probably gave away. She was locked up in Paris during the Terror, and was altogether more interesting and more impressive than this drama allowed her to be. It set out to show her as a bravely unbowed victim, rather than a privileged sexual entrepreneur. But she did look lovely, and she gave good whim.
Show Me a Hero is the best thing on any screen at the moment. This HBO six-parter isn’t everyone’s idea of a box-set weekend, but it tickles my whim. It’s about American politics — also adapted from a book that is both factual and the truth. It explores a federal court’s order to build public housing for black people in a predominantly white area of Yonkers, New York, and this is not during Johnson’s civil-rights era, it’s a few years ago. We follow the mayor, who is elected to stop the building, but finds he can’t.
Now I know that doesn’t sound terribly winning, but it’s written by David Simon, who did The Wire and Treme, and directed by Paul Haggis, who wrote Million Dollar Baby and Crash. And if you like stories and characters that are about big things, and are complicated and messy, then you may well like this. It has a huge cast, some of whom you’ll recognise, most of whom you won’t, and it’s written like long-form journalism, with enough time given to sweat the small stuff and explain the back story. It is yet another example of the muscular confidence dramatic TV is feeling.
It takes a knuckle-cracking hubris to dramatise a subject that five years ago nobody would have financed as a Panorama documentary or a CNN segment, and here it’s told straight and tough. They haven’t made it a gritty take on West Side Story, or given it ersatz human-interest schmaltz or a happy ending. It’s a provocative examination of the limits of local democracy. The white folk aren’t evil and their fears aren’t unfounded. It’s difficult and it’s germane.
Show Me a Hero tackles the contemporary anxiety of incomers, the amount of a working life that is invested in property, the ability of communities to determine their own futures, and the capacity of judges and national governments to make decisions they themselves will never have to live with. In contrast, British television has a less than glorious history of dramatising politics. We really can’t stop giggling at it, or making the subject sentimental, simplistic, personal and patronising.
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Talking of which, there was Anna Richardson with Revenge Porn, a wearingly typical Channel 4 documentary made for nothing about very little. They all want to be the Sunday Sport wrapped up in The Guardian — take a salacious subject and treat it with a social worker’s high dudgeon. Richardson, who specialises in fringes and mildly tasteless, anxiety-inducing programmes about sex and slimming, looked at the apparently endemic catastrophe of naked pictures on the internet, looked at by people not thinking kind thoughts.
Well, last time I looked, everyone on the internet was naked, exercising their whims. But it seems there isn’t enough nudity out there, because Richardson took pictures of herself and posted them with a laughably po-faced self-disgust, as if posting selfies were some sort of Pulitzer-level investigative reporting, as if needing to know what it feels like is actually what reporters do. On Channel 4, empathy and journalism are the same thing. As ever, this fell down the crack between salacious and serious, ending up as boring and coarse, uninformative and unedifying.
I’m normally rather censorious about new-tech social internet bullying, but after an hour of watching Richardson look at pictures of herself and gasp at all the horrible names she was called, I did think: “Oh, really, if you don’t want people to see your bum, then don’t take pictures of it and send it to other people as foreplay.” And I don’t need a Channel 4 presenter to tell me that sex is difficult or dangerous, that it’s a business full of anxiety and fury and irrational appetites and bitterness and shame and buckets of fun. It really isn’t like buying insurance at all.
I think I’ve analysed why I’m so taken with Jeremy Corbyn. It’s costume politics. It reminds me of the 1970s. I’m getting hot-flush nostalgia; I feel 21 again. Maybe I’ll take a picture of myself wearing just Dr Martens and a sneer.
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The Scandalous Lady W BBC2, Mon
Show Me a Hero Sky Atlantic, Mon
Revenge Porn C4, Mon