Russell T Davies and Stephen Frears tell the Jeremy Thorpe affair as a farce with a body count of one, and Hugh Grant is remarkable as a man who never raises his voice. Fast, funny and cold, and a little pleased with itself.
The Jeremy Thorpe affair is the kind of story a script editor would send back for being implausible. The leader of the Liberal Party, a man some expected to end up in Downing Street, spent the better part of two decades trying to make a former lover disappear, and ended up in a courtroom, which is as far as we will go. Russell T Davies has adapted John Preston’s book into three hour-long episodes, Stephen Frears has directed them, and the result is very good. We recommend it, with one reservation about how much fun it is having.
The verdict rests on Hugh Grant, and he can take the weight. His Thorpe stands with his hands clasped behind his back and his chin up, a schoolboy who has never once been told no. The voice is a purr; the teeth do a great deal of the acting. What makes the performance is that Grant never signals the villainy. In the first episode Thorpe suggests to Bessell over lunch that Norman will have to be killed, and he says it in exactly the tone he has just used to order. We laughed, and then we went cold, because Grant does not change his face and the series does not cut away to tell us how to feel.
Ben Whishaw has the harder part and does something we did not expect with it. Norman Scott, as written by Davies, is vain, unreliable, prone to tears and constitutionally unable to keep his mouth shut, and he is also the only person in the story who tells the truth about himself. Whishaw plays him with his shoulders up and his eyes darting, a man permanently braced for the next humiliation. The stretch in which Norman marries Gwen Parry-Jones (Eve Myles) and tries to live quietly in Wales is short, and it moved us more than the rest of the series put together, because for a few scenes Whishaw lets Norman stop performing.
Frears keeps everything moving. Pia Di Ciaula cuts the years like a montage in a caper, a dissolve from one wood-panelled room to another, and Danny Cohen shoots those rooms in brown and gold, all leather chairs and cigarette haze, so that the establishment looks warm from the inside and airless from the outside. Murray Gold’s score is bright, busy strings, the sound of a plot being hatched by people who think they are clever. It works most of the time. It also, once or twice, turns a scene that should hurt into a sketch.
The supporting cast is the deep bench of British television and everyone gets a turn. Alex Jennings’s Bessell is the series’ conscience, or the nearest thing to one, a man who knows exactly what he is doing and does it anyway. Monica Dolan has perhaps four scenes as Marion Thorpe and plays every one of them as steel. Jason Watkins’s Emlyn Hooson, Anthony O’Donnell’s Leo Abse and Jonathan Hyde’s David Napley each get a moment to explain how the country actually ran. Blake Harrison’s Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton is the comic relief, an airline pilot hired for a job he is spectacularly unqualified for, and Harrison plays him as a man who has seen too many films.
The reservation is tone. Davies wants both the farce and the tragedy, and mostly he gets them, but the middle episode sags where it should tighten, and the pace that makes the first hour so enjoyable means that a decade of Norman’s life goes by in a handful of scenes. The series knows that homosexuality was a crime for most of this story and that Thorpe’s fear was real; it says so, plainly, in the Abse scenes. It does not always let that knowledge slow the jokes down.
Frears has been here before. Prick Up Your Ears and Philomena were both about the private cost of English politeness, and this is his most confident go at it since. Davies, for his part, has never written a hero this unsympathetic, or a victim this exasperating, and the series is better for both.
It is a 15 certificate and it runs three hours. Watch it in one sitting if you can. It was built to be swallowed whole, and the taste it leaves is not the one the score keeps promising.
