A Very English Scandal is a British three-part television
miniseries based on John Preston's book of the same name.The series premiered
on BBC One on 20 May 2018.
The series is a dramatisation of the 1970s Jeremy Thorpe
scandal in Britain, in which MP Jeremy Thorpe was tried and acquitted of
conspiring to murder his former lover, Norman Scott.
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A Very English Scandal finale review – leaves you reeling, seething and laughing
5 / 5 stars 5 out of 5 stars.
Fabulous performances all round as Jeremy Thorpe finally
comes to trial in a sea of hypocrisy, prejudice, ghastly snobbery, injustice
and a chorus of tittering from the public gallery
Sam Wollaston
@samwollaston
Sun 3 Jun 2018 22.01 BST Last modified on Mon 4 Jun 2018
00.10 BST
Absolutely splendid … Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe.
Photograph: Sophie Mutevelian/BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd
Where were we, then? That’s right, a lonely moorland road,
where Andrew Newton, the airline pilot, has failed to shoot Norman Scott in the
head because his gun jammed after he shot Rinka the great dane. And Norman –
covered in blood, tears and rain and cradling his huge dead dog – is shouting
that it was the leader of the Liberal party who dunnit.
Russell T Davies would have had a lot of fun making this up
if he had needed to. He would probably have been told to ease off a little, in
the name of credibility. We really don’t do political scandal like we used to;
I can’t see anyone making a three-part drama about Jeremy Hunt’s property
interests anytime ever.
Would a great dane really fit into the boot of a Morris
Minor police car though? Possibly, pre rigor mortis, with some folding. Morris
should have done an advertising campaign around it – Room for Rinka, too!
Justice seems to be closing in on Thorpe; he can plug one
leak with a payoff, but another one opens up – there is too much out there.
Letters emerge from him to Scott, with the killer word: “bunnies”.
“Bunnies!” exclaims second wife Marion, looking up from her
morning paper, boiled egg and cigarette. Monica Dolan, who plays Marion, has
made A Very English Scandal even better since appearing on the scene. Monica
Dolan improves anything she is in. Rupert, Thorpe’s son, is dispatched to his
room, to protect him from the contents of the newspaper.
Thorpe resigns from the party leadership and Marion makes
cod in parsley sauce (one of many lovely 70s details), so they can talk. Before
marrying, he dabbled (with men), he tells her. “To relieve myself,” he says,
glancing down towards his dabbling area.
A lot has been said of Hugh Grant’s performance and what a
departure it is from the usual. But is it really so very different? There’s com
there; even rom, as well. He just shaves less often, has a side parting, and
throws a cloak of evil over himself. Romcom Hugh plus bad hair plus shadows
(five o’clock, lying, conspiracy to murder etc). Still absolutely splendid,
though.
The evidence piles up, falls from the ceiling of Peter
Bessell’s old office. Bessell is summoned back from California, Thorpe is
arrested. It doesn’t stop him from standing for election while on bail for
conspiracy to murder – that takes something, doesn’t it? Massive misjudgment
mostly: he loses to the Tory candidate (this is the 1979 election, when Margaret
Thatcher became prime minister). Incidentally, that was the Auberon Waugh
(there was only one, unlike John le Mesurier, of whom there were two),
receiving 79 votes as representative of the Dog Lovers’ party, ensuring that
Rinka is not entirely forgotten. Thorpe was a pet hate of Waugh’s, hence the
dogged hounding ...
So, to the Old Bailey, for the “trial of the century”. This
is where Davies has some fun. Ben Whishaw, too. Was it quite like that, with
Scott looking up, seeing his landlady friend Edna Friendship, suddenly gaining
the courage to be smart and funny and to take on George Carman (Adrian
Scarborough)? It doesn’t matter, he deserves the moment: it is a fabulous
performance of a fabulous performance.
Not that it helps to convict Thorpe. Mr “Justice” Cantley
sees to that in his extraordinary summing up. Wow, just wow, and just as it
really happened, it seems. To sum up the summing up: it’s your decision, of
course, jury, but try to find Thorpe not guilty, because he’s a jolly decent
chap. Also pretty much as it really happened was Peter Cook’s sketch about the
trial, a snippet of which appears in the postscript. More court reporting than
satire.
As well as the outrageous judge, there is so much going on
in that courtroom. Oxbridge chums passing each other notes, doing each other
favours. Hypocrisy, prejudice, ghastly snobbery, injustice and a chorus of
tittering from the public gallery. The 70s, eh? Thank God nothing like it
happens today – men of the establishment abusing their power for their own
personal gratification and getting away with it.
I have heard the odd moan about the tone being wrong.
Nonsense. Just because something involves serious matters doesn’t mean it needs
to be dry. The trial recreation – the whole thing – leaves you reeling,
seething and laughing, all at the same time. It’s both scandalous and very
English.
Then the postscript, with the real Norman Scott, alive and
well outside his cottage. Still no national insurance card, but finally some
good news for dog lovers: he has 11. Woof.
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A Very English Scandal, episode 3 review: Hugh Grant gives a
Bafta-worthy performance as Jeremy Thorpe
Thorpe would have hated this drama, though, in that vain,
sneaky way of his, been secretly highly flattered by Grant’s superlative
capture of his personality
Sean O'Grady
@_seanogrady
Having lived through a dramatised version of the real life
of Norman Scott, the one-time male model who, it was alleged, the leader of the
Liberal Party plotted to murder, it was a pleasant little surprise to see some
contemporary footage of the real Scott at the end of A Very English Scandal,
rather than Ben Whishaw’s rendering of this remarkable man. An enigmatic smile
playing around those full lips – even at pushing 80 you can appreciate the
allure Scott possessed in his youth – and it was confirmed that he is alive and
well, living with 11 dogs (and dogs were quite a big part of this story), and
still hasn’t recovered his national insurance card.
This document, by the way, was the means by which you could
gain legitimate employment and benefits in the years before computers came
along. Scott maintained that Thorpe had retained a replacement card, and would
not release it back to Thorpe. Therefore, Scott was always out of work, short
of money, and always going to be trouble for Thorpe.
The national insurance card fiasco ensured this quite superb
production was maintained right to the end, and the drama and suspense with it.
I especially relished the forensic attention to period detail – the authentic
Hoovers, the Austin Allegro police car, the disco music – Gonzalez (“Haven’t
Stopped Dancing yet”), Amii Stewart (“Knock on Wood”) – people smoking on the
bus, and the BBC Radio 2 jingle. It took me back, I must say.
But what was clearly missing, for the sake of symmetry if
nothing else, was some indication of the health and/or whereabouts of Scott’s
alleged assassin – Andrew “Gino” Newton. This extraordinary figure, played with
a sort of Eric Idle idiocy by Blake Harrison, according to Gwent Police had
been dead for some time. However, subsequent reports indicate that he’s merely
changed his name and lain low. Police have now reopened a probe into the
scandal and the development has become subject to intense speculation. (The new
investigation was prompted by the evidence of Tom Mangold in a previously
unseen Panorama programme from the era.)
However, when all’s said and done, Newton was granted crown
immunity from prosecution in return for giving evidence at the 1979 trial of
the four coconspirators including Thorpe. A run-in between Scott and Newton is
a tantalising though unlikely prospect.
Of course, like all biopics of famous historic
personalities, we know how it all ends, though in the case of Jeremy Thorpe, the
great establishment figure who endured such a painful fall from grace, much of
the detail may have been forgotten, or, indeed, unknown to younger generations.
After all, most of the rest of the people involved are dead, and no one under
the age of 50 can remember the events firsthand. It was, even so, a massive
story.
To borrow the expressions used by Thorpe’s barrister at his
trial (for incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder), George Carman QC
(played with huge, bustling style by Adrian Scarborough), of all the “bastards,
liars, perverts, thieves, blackmailers, inbreds and arsonists” to make their
way into the House of Commons, it was the Right Honourable Jeremy Thorpe who
had the greatest of criminal charges levelled against him – an achievement of
sorts.
Scott made an extremely brave and surprisingly credible
witness. When he told the court that “Jeremy Thorpe lives on a knife-edge of
danger” he summed up the entire scandal. There was much evidence against Thorpe
about both the original homosexual and illicit relationship with Scott, and the
subsequent events that were to end with a great dane, Rinka, being cared for by
Scott, shot dead on the edge of Exmoor, on the dark rainy night of 23 October
1975.
Much of the script was based on documents, memoirs and the
trial transcript, complete with its explicit references to anal penetration,
Vaseline and “biting the pillow”.
Yet I wondered how fanciful some parts were. The
conversation between Thorpe and his second wife, Marion, for example, over a
supper of cod in parsley sauce (all the rage in the late 1970s). So the choice
of dish was believable, but how much did he tell her about his prior sex life
and affair with the man nicknamed “bunny”? Was there some wary chat with Carman
about bisexuality, and how you could get beaten up after picking up random
guys? I’m not sure Thorpe’s possessive and domineering mother Ursula, devoted
to him but sharp-tongued with it, really did say to him after his acquittal:
“Of course, you’re ruined. You know
that, don’t you?”
Clever as Carman was, the reason Thorpe got off was the
disgracefully loaded summing up to the jury delivered by Mr Justice Cantley.
The drama’s producers cleverly included at the end a little clip of the “Biased
Judge Sketch” by Peter Cook (catch it on YouTube), which was inspired by the
case, one of the finest ever examples of British satire: “And now you must
retire to consider your verdict of not guilty”.
Thorpe was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1980s, and
would live until 2014. The drama, however, and his public life, ended in 1979,
fittingly. Thorpe was then still only 50.
Thorpe lived for far longer than the doctors gave him, he
survived his political and judicial crises far more easily than anyone thought
possible, and, as we witnessed in the earlier episodes, he scaled British
politics much more successfully than seemed likely. In 1959 he was elected a
Liberal MP for North Devon; by 1974 he had almost broken the mould of British
politics and made it to the cabinet.
Thorpe would have hated this drama, though, in that vain,
sneaky way of his, been secretly highly flattered by Hugh Grant’s superlative
capture of his personality, with the inevitable Bafta to follow. A Very English
Scandal, then, and despite its sympathy towards Scott, can be counted yet
another, albeit pyrrhic, victory for Jeremy Thorpe.
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'Hugh Grant is uncanny': Liberals glued to A Very English
Scandal
Grant is remarkable as Jeremy Thorpe and the basic thrust is
right, say people linked to the story. Shame about the cars ...
Martin Kettle
@martinkettle
Sat 2 Jun 2018 10.00 BST
Hugh Grant contacted David Steel for advice on the kind of
person Thorpe was.
Watching Hugh Grant’s TV portrayal of Jeremy Thorpe, it is
almost impossible to believe that such an extraordinarily reckless public
figure could really have prospered in 20th-century British politics. But he
did.
The insouciance, the exhibitionism, the darkness and the
utter unreliability that Grant captures so brilliantly in A Very English
Scandal may seem like a grotesque caricature of Thorpe. But it isn’t.
Forty years on, and especially in the social media age, it
seems inconceivable that a major politician could have led a double life as a
promiscuous gay man and a pillar of the parliamentary and social establishment,
without his colleagues cottoning on. Especially when he tried to have his
former lover murdered. But he did – and they didn’t.
Did you know at the time that Thorpe was gay, I asked his
successor as Liberal leader, David Steel, this week. Steel’s response, speaking
from his home in Scotland, was instant, vehement and almost astonished. “No.
Absolutely not. It was a surprise when it all came out.”
On paper, Thorpe was a mid-20th-century Tory politician from
central casting. Male, white, Eton and Oxford, son and grandson of Conservative
MPs, socially well-connected, brought up in Knightsbridge in a house with a
cook, chauffeur, four maids and a nanny. But an admiration for David Lloyd
George, whom Thorpe met several times as a boy, led him early into the Liberal
party.
“He was a very substantial radical,” Steel recalls,
“especially on foreign policy, but also on issues of individual liberty. I
admired him rather than liked him, but he was very charming, always fun to have
around. He was not someone you warmed to. But until the end everyone was very
loyal to him.
As well they might have been, given Thorpe’s early
achievements as Liberal leader. When he succeeded Jo Grimond as leader in 1967,
the party had 12 MPs and had won 2m votes at the previous election. Seven years
later, in February 1974, Thorpe tripled the Liberal vote to more than 6m,
though still with only 14 MPs, coming close to forming a coalition with Edward
Heath’s Tories. But hubris lay just around the corner in the shape of his trial
for conspiracy to murder his former lover Norman Scott.
As one might expect of someone who is portrayed in A Very
English Scandal, Steel has been hooked on the series, the final episode of
which will air on Sunday on BBC One at 9pm. “They have obviously compressed a
lot of the story,” Steel says, “But the basic thrust of it is right. It’s
reasonably accurate in most respects. And Hugh Grant is genuinely remarkable.”
Months ago, Grant got in touch with Steel to ask him for
advice on the kind of person Thorpe was. The two men met at the House of Lords
– exactly the sort of grand setting that recurs so plausibly in the series.
During lunch in a dining room overlooking the Thames, Steel reminisced to Grant
about the events of the 1970s and gave the actor some tips about Thorpe’s
character and quirks, his ways of talking and behaving. Steel is delighted with
the result. “Uncanny,” he says of Grant’s performance.
Steel also has his gripes, though they not political ones.
Mainly they are about the cars that Thorpe drives in the series. “Jeremy drove
a Humber Super Snipe, but they showed him in a Rover 3 litre. And in the second
episode Thorpe is driving a white Triumph Stag when he sees Scott again. That
should have been a white Rover 2000.”
“That scene where I
interview Scott at the House of Commons isn’t right either,” he continued. “Emlyn
Hooson [played by Jason Watkins] wasn’t actually there at all. He had another
commitment and asked me to stand in. It was just me and Scott. I went into the
meeting thinking that Scott was going to complain about Peter Bessell [played
by Alex Jennings]. It was only during the meeting that it became clear he was
talking about Jeremy.”
Steel may have had a ringside seat at some of the political
events as Thorpe fought to save his doomed career, but he is certainly not the
only former Liberal who has been glued to the TV the past two Sundays and will
be again on Sunday. “I’m pretty sure all Liberals are watching it,” says Paddy
Ashdown, who succeeded Steel as leader and who was an aspiring MP during the
Thorpe scandal. “But I think some of them have been dreading it.”
It is true that some of those old enough to remember Thorpe
or who have connections with the real people depicted in the series, have been
worried by the portrayals. Norman Scott, still living in Devon at the age of
78, could be one of them. But, just as Grant talked to Steel, so Ben Whishaw
sought out Scott before the series got under way. Scott was worried that the
series would be “a second trial”, but according to the Radio Times last month
he was “very moved” by the results. “He was very pleased, he laughed and
cried,” reported the director, Stephen Frears.
Alex Carlile, who followed Hooson as the Liberal MP for
Montgomery, is less pleased. “I thought that the portrayal that [Watkins] was
forced to give by the script was rather unfair to Emlyn,” he told the
Shropshire Star. “He was portrayed as devious and conniving whereas in reality
he was extremely frank and never underhand.” Carlile nevertheless joins
enthusiastically in the chorus of praise for Grant’s portrayal of Thorpe.
“We looked on with incredulity,” recalls Tom McNally, now a
Lib Dem peer but from 1974 to 1979 political secretary to Labour’s Jim
Callaghan as foreign secretary and prime minister. “I sat in on meetings he held
with Jim in the 1970s. He was very funny. A great mimic. But I was never
remotely aware in any way of what was happening in his private life, and I’m
not aware that Jim was either.”
Thorpe’s career never recovered from the trial, at which –
spoiler alert – he was acquitted in 1979. He lost his parliamentary seat the
same year. Developing Parkinson’s disease, he died in 2014. For a while, he
haunted party events. Almost to the end, he would attend memorial services for
former colleagues.
“He spent 30 years trying to persuade every successor as
party leader – right up to Nick Clegg – to nominate him for the peerage he
craved,” Steel recalls. But the peerage never came and was never going to come.
In his final years Steel visited Thorpe in his house in Orme
Square, Bayswater. He was physically weak but still focused. “He was difficult
to understand. He spoke through a little microphone thing.” Ashdown also
recalls meeting Thorpe at a memorial service during those bleak later years. “I
put my arm around his shoulders. He was just a bag of bones.”
A Very English Scandal concludes on Sunday at 9pm on BBC One
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Genre Drama
Based on A
Very English Scandal
by John Preston
Written by Russell
T Davies
Directed by Stephen
Frears
Starring
Hugh Grant
Ben Whishaw
Composer(s) Murray
Gold
Country of origin United
Kingdom
Original language(s) English
No. of series 1
No. of episodes 3
Production
Executive producer(s)
Dominic Treadwell-Collins
Graham Broadbent
Pete Czernin
Lucy Richer
Producer(s) Dan
Winch
Running time 56
minutes
Production company(s) Blueprint
Television
Release
Original network BBC
One
Original release 20 May
– 3 June 2018
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