The last episode of The Virgin Queen (Sunday, BBC One), and it all ended so much better than it began. Anne-Marie Duff was noticeably more potent as HM OAP than as a fresh-faced hatchling monarch — somewhat ironically, given that her most famous role has been playing the 18-year-old Fiona in Shameless. Perhaps it was just the rig she was in. It certainly gave her an easy-to-utilise air of other- worldliness. With her ginger wig and gigantic eyes, Duff often looked like a wizened, imperious Garfield.
As with CGI, every year brings advances in make-up technology, making new scenes possible. In The Virgin Queen’s case, this included the small-screen’s first nude scene with a 70-year-old monarch.
The tempestuous Earl of Essex (Hans Matheson) burst in on the Queen making her toilet, and then blenched. After 17 hours in make-up, Queen Elizabeth I looked like ET soaking his feet in a bucket. She tried to cover her bosom with her chemise — the scene recalled someone using a doily to hide a sultana. Essex knelt down in front of her — ignoring that make-up had applied roughly 15 metres of blue string to Duff’s leg in an heroic re-creation of monarchical varicose veins — and murmured: “I should never have gone away from you. Here is where I belong.” This was presumably acknowledging that everyone had been having a lot of fun in make-up, and that, if he’d hung around, he could have spelt out his name in warts on her head.
But the episode was really the Earl of Essex show. Matheson played him like a demented Robbie Williams — a Robbie Williams trying to win over the hearts of the British public not with a series of self-flagellating ballads but by invading Ireland instead.
Essex eventually got his head chopped off — giving the signal for the axe by raising his arms, just like in his video to Angels. His execution was watched by his mother, played by Tara Fitzgerald, who had benefited from so much make-up that she looked like an American bald eagle in a ruff.
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Five minutes later, the Queen died, too — in her boots, standing up, like a cowboy. Rock’n’roll.
It still feels disconcerting when the new The South Bank Show (Sunday, ITV1) features people I’ve ever heard of. As a child, the listing for it in the Radio Times looked like this: “Tonight, on The South Bank Show, Blaaaaah from Gaaaah on his meisterwork, Flaaaaaah.” These days, of course, it’s all Little Britain, Iggy Pop and the Darkness. And, now, Armando Iannucci, the man behind The Day Today, Alan Partridge and The Thick of It, which might just as well be called The Only Programme in Britain with Balls As Big As its Head.
Iannucci is pretty much the epitome of why there can never be enough arch Oxbridge Jews in the media, although one of the first things The South Bank Show does is tell us that he’s actually a Catholic, and not Jewish at all — useful information for my sister, who intends to stalk and then marry him, and has now changed her wedding plans accordingly.
Steve Coogan claimed that what Iannucci does best is “find comedy in the extraneous things”. Personally, I’ve always thought that what Iannucci does best is flashy, verbose, righteous rage. What The Day Today, Alan Partridge and The Thick of It all have is the kind of incandescent, lucid fury with how stupid and venal and ugly the world is, and how unnecessary it all is. Or, in Partridge’s case, how he can’t get back on to television.
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But unlike, say, Sam Kinison, all of Iannucci’s rage is expressed properly, through the proper channels, with correct grammar and the right facial expressions, even though the momentum of the rage warps the eventual output. Hence his trademark and hugely influential creative swearing — for example, “I’ve got to deal with a whole hurricane of piss.”
Later in the show, Iannucci claims that he sends his scripts away and gets all his swears done by a man called Ian Martin in Lancaster. It’s hard to tell if he’s lying or not. It’s certainly true when he claims that the British public are “actually quite interested in picking apart the things that politicians say, rather than just their mannerisms”.
Finally, The Last Tally Ho? (Sunday, BBC One) featured a lot of toffs crying on the day that hunting was made illegal, and then quietly continuing to hunt anyway, possibly mindful of how difficult it is to get a panda car over a ploughed field and then a wood. The usual claims were made for conservation and vermin-control, but it was clear that hunting is more just down to being great fun to cannon around half-cut on a horse.
After all, you never see the upper classes involved in any other conservation or vermin control, like pulling shopping trolleys out of canals, or clubbing rats to death behind the Turkish grocers.