the times | Saturday January 1 2022 saturday review 9
W
hat’s so British
about A Very
British Scandal? I
ask because with
the previous one,
A Very English
Scandal — to
which this is not exactly a sequel, but more
a sort of companion in what is presumably
destined to be an anthology series, albeit
one that is presumably destined to soon
scrape the barrel somewhat in the hunt for
scandals distinctively Welsh — English-
ness was definitely what it was all about.
That, if you’ve forgotten, was about Jer-
emy Thorpe and his affair with Norman
Scott, and it starred Hugh Grant and Ben
Whishaw, and had the unique antago-
nisms between the English upper middle
(Thorpe) and the English lower middle
(Scott) right there at its beating heart.
Whereas this new one is just toffs who
shag and run out of money, and I’m pretty
sure you get them almost everywhere.
Does this story differ, particularly, from
some mildly Italian scandal? The only
thing particularly British about it was that
it happened here.
The title actually deserves a little more
scrutiny. Was it, you wonder, always the
plan? Or was this, in fact, originally intend-
ed to be A Very English Scandal series two
before somebody belatedly pointed out
that the story of a relationship between Ian
Douglas Campbell, Duke of, erm, Argyll,
and a woman who (“Oh God!” you can
almost hear a producer cry, “has nobody
googled this?”) was herself born just out-
side Glasgow might not be technically an
English one. Only they definitely couldn’t
go calling it A Very Scottish Scandal either
because one of those probably wouldn’t
involve people who usually lived in May-
fair and talked like Lord Haw-Haw and
were, in the end, about as Scottish as Rod
Stewart. Nightmare.
Which is not to say it was bad. For one
thing, Claire Foy is never bad, even if her
Margaret, aka the Duchess of Argyll, was
almost indistinguishable from her Queen
Elizabeth II, which I suppose lent every-
thing an extra air of transgression. Paul
Bettany as her husband, meanwhile, was
just fantastic. Cruel, failing, damaged and
arrogant, he was the public schoolboy
nightmare incarnate, coming to hate his
wife as a thin deflection from how much he
so clearly hated himself. On the one hand,
we could have perhaps learnt more about
how brutalised he had been in the war; on
the other, that absence meant we didn’t
have to engage with him as anything other
than a bastard.
So clearly was he drawn, in fact, that it
made Margaret’s complexity a little con-
fusing. Sarah Phelps, who wrote all this, is
wonderful at grain and nuance (you may
recall her Agatha Christie adaptations,
which have a habit of bewildering devotees
who just want to know whobloodydunnit),
but I reckon I could have done with a bit
more of a steer about whether I was sup-
posed to like her or not. Forging letters to
disinherit his kids was pretty bad, right?
Her stammer and head injury hinted at
some damage there too, but the hint was
all we got.
Later, when she accused her stepmother
of being one of the women with whom
Argyll had cheated on her, thereby spur-
ring her beloved father to have a fatal
heart attack, it was never quite clear
whether we were supposed to damn
her for it or indeed even whether we
were supposed to think the accusa-
tion was false, which real history
definitely suggests it was.
More perplexing than any of
that, though, was the coyness about
all the sex, which you might have
assumed was what this would be all
about. It’s not as if I was expecting Nor-
mal People, but if Margaret really was a
liberated sexual adventuress in a time that
just wasn’t ready for it, then why is the
BBC, over half a century later, still just
showing her pirouetting around in restau-
rants? The scene in which the infamous
“headless man” photos were taken wasHugo Rifkind on TV
Why was a sexual adventuress
just pirouetting in restaurants?
chinless sort of cove, good-natured but
racked with a sense of his own boring use-
lessness. Every day he sits in the same
chair in the same gentlemen’s club, eating
the same meal and reading The Daily Tele-
graph, so I guess he has a point. One day,
though, there’s an interesting article in it
that takes him so much by surprise that he
goes briefly insane. You can, it says, now
get around the world in 80 days. Within
moments he has made a wager with some
other bloke that he dashed well will. And
so, pausing only to recruit a manservant
called Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), off
he goes.
So far, so canon. Less canon is the addi-
tion of Leonie Benesch as Abigail “Fix”
Fortescue, who as a young female journal-ist is seeking a way to get noticed in the
sexist, male-dominated world of The Daily
Telegraph, but clearly hasn’t yet twigged
that she could do it by writing shit, passive-
aggressive articles about Meghan Markle.
So having squared things with the proprie-
tor (her father, conveniently), she follows
them both with a plan to write a column
about it. Which is not a terrible idea, but
I’m unclear how she’s going to file.
Keen readers of Jules Verne may recall
that the original Fix was a male Scotland
Yard detective, who follows Fogg under
the somewhat tenuous misapprehension
that he’s a bank robber. Never mind that,
not least because our expectations of Fogg
today probably have more to do with how
David Niven played him in 1956 than they
do with Verne, anyway.
Did you know, for example, that the
actual book has not one single hot-air bal-
loon in it? Tennant’s Fogg ends up in one
by the end of episode one, shortly after
Passepartout has been briefly reunited
with his brother in Paris, and Fogg has
foiled a Day of the Jackal-style assassina-
tion attempt on the president of France,
and shortly before they have to get a train
over a dilapidated bridge to save the life of
a dying boy. All of which is quite a lot more
dramatic than Verne’s version, in which
they basically do bog all between London
and Suez except sit on a boat and a train.
In other words, don’t expect any of
this to be a simple remake of that which
you already know. Although, given that
Verne’s Fogg meets his love interest,
Aouda, by rescuing her, drugged, from
an Indian funeral pyre and that in the
Niven version (eek) she was played by a
browned-up Shirley MacLaine, that’s
probably for the best. I read, also, that they
have already commissioned a second
series, which is frankly confusing.
At his strongest, Tennant channels a
sort of Fawlty Towers-era John Cleese,
minus the malice. It’s decent enough
family fare, but I reckon it will soar or sink
depending on whether his character can
be expanded to something more than “En-
glishman who goes on holiday by mistake”.Paul Bettany was
just fantastic, the
public schoolboy
nightmare incarnate
particularly confusing, seemingly coming
out of nowhere at all. Not least because
neither of the two candidates now deemed
likely to have been him — Douglas Fair-
banks Jr and Duncan Sandys — were even
characters here. Why ever not? Was this
not the story? Why was it all so oblique?
Things were stronger, and clearer, when
it came to the establishment’s embarrass-
ment at being splayed open in the divorce
trial. This was best eked out in some mar-
vellous scenes with Julia Davis’s beauti-
fully poisonous Marchioness, but you still
ultimately needed to believe that Marga-
ret had been terribly hard done by for it
all to work, and her behaviour here was
often so vicious that I’m not quite sure
I did. Look, I liked it. I never have this
much to say about stuff I don’t. It was
evocative, it was beautiful and it got
me thinking and kept me thinking.
Yet after three hours I still didn’t
really know what I was supposed to
be thinking about.It was clearly quite tricky to get Around
the World in 80 Days at the tail end of the
19th century. Here in the 21st, though, I’m
more worried about how hard it is going to
be for David Tennant to do it in only eight
episodes, particularly since by the end of
the second one he was still only in Italy.
Tennant’s Phileas Fogg is a hapless,highland fling Paul
Bettany and Claire Foy
in A Very British
Scandal. Below: David
Tennant in Around the
World in 80 DaysALAN PEEBLES/BLUEPRINT/BBCA Very British Scandal
BBC1
Around the World in
80 Days
BBC1
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