This article was originally published in The Courier on 5th April 2014.
New
Worlds: Tuesday, Channel 4
Alexander
Armstrong's Real Ripping Yarns: Thursday,
BBC Four
Paul
Whitelaw
Six
years ago, Channel 4 aired a semi-fictionalised drama about the
English Civil War called The Devil's Whore. Despite boasting a
cast including Michael Fassbender, John Simm, Dominic West, Peter
Capaldi and Andrea Riseborough, it was a distinctly average affair.
Perhaps
it's the circle of one I move in, but I don't recall much clamour for
a sequel. And yet here it is, in the guise of New Worlds,
galloping over the horizon on a wave of public apathy. Television is
often accused of being a doggedly predictable medium, but it doesn't
half surprise and confound sometimes.
Set
20 years after the unmemorable events of The Devil's Whore,
it flits between an unstable 17th
century England and settler-dominated Massachusetts. Writer Peter
Flannery, best known for Our
Friends in the North,
seems to be groping towards a valid point about the hypocrisy of
Britons railing against royal oppression at home while subjugating an
entire race of people abroad. He's aided in this regard by shots of
Native Americans being slaughtered in meaningful slow-motion. Subtle,
it is not.
Back
in rural Oxfordshire, former Cromwell acolyte Angela Fanshawe – now
played by Eve Best, rather than Andrea Riseborough – presides over
an idyllic retreat of twee, gown-clad maidens. This safe refuge for
ethereal Timotei models was inevitably invaded by the bloodied chaos
of the outside world. As in The
Devil's Whore,
Flannery revels in presenting a lurid, violent world rife with heavy
symbolism.
Although
speckled with ostensibly dramatic incident – Angela's daughter
being kidnapped at gunpoint; James Cosmo falling to his death against
an unconvincing CG backdrop – it suffers from the same problem as
its forebear: it's hard to invest in these thinly drawn characters,
as they feel more like pieces being moved around on a flame-engulfed
chessboard. It's handsomely shot, but pretty pictures count for
nothing when used to mask such turgid storytelling. New Worlds isn't
so much a drama as a lavish historical pop-up book; a bewigged chore
in search of meaning.
Accompanied
by a welcome repeat run of Michael Palin and Terry Jones' post-Python
classic, Alexander Armstrong's Real Ripping Yarns
delved into the square-jawed world of Boy's
Own adventures. Much
like the series itself, it was mired in a sort of appalled affection
for this archaic terrain of absurd Victorian values.
Armstrong,
our genial guide, could barely disguise his admiration for an era
when boys were trusted with dangerous poisons and explosives,
although his excruciating dip into an ice-cold bath – once thought
of as a catch-all cure for male ailments – left one in no doubt
about the madness of the era's teachings.
Palin
and a curiously marginalised Jones were on hand to discuss their
love/hate relationship with the literature of their youth. Palin is
often lazily categorised as a frightfully nice and placid chap, but
it was clear that a spur of righteous anger underpinned his satirical
recollections of a childhood spent in the public school system. It's
hard to be truly fond of an epoch steeped in racism and bullying
conformity.
Nevertheless,
I had to marvel at the deranged metal contraptions used to stave off
adolescent sexual urges; “self-pollution” was the wonderfully
chaste description. And the letters pages of the day were a font of
inadvertent comedy. Full of blunt editorial answers shorn from the
context of the letters themselves, they were a master-class in straight-faced
surrealism. No wonder Palin and Jones were taking notes.
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