In praise of Hugh Grant

The first episode of A Very English Scandal (BBC1), the story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, was brilliant. So often, dramas about the past suffer from the disbenefit of hindsight. They use the dead as mannequins to wear their contemporary thoughts and attitudes. History, in their hands, is a form of what is now called ‘cultural appropriation’, paying no respect to the reality of the lives depicted. There is a brief moment in A Very English Scandal which teeters on the edge of this, when dear Lord Arran, sitting in his own house and in the presence only of his wife and Leo Abse MP, makes a rather pious speech about how wicked it is that homosexual acts are illegal. One feels one is being preached at, and the preaching is not much improved by the fact that the cause is just. Yet even this moralising is brilliantly undercut by Jeremy Thorpe himself. His attitude to homosexual law reform is striking.