Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little, so you can imagine how sickened I was by the magisterial TV adaptation of John Preston’s A Very English Scandal (BBC1, Sundays).
I’ve known Preston for years. It’s himI have to thank for the compendious collection of CDs rotting in my attic, from the ten years or so I spent working under him (he was the arts editor) as the Sunday Telegraph’s rock critic. But though I’ve hugely enjoyed all his quirky, low-key, sardonically amused novels — loosely on the theme of ‘quiet desperation is the English way’ —I never imagined he’d luck out quite so spectacularly as he has with this truly splendid all-star production.
Script: Russell T. Davies; direction: Stephen Frears; cast: Alex Jennings, Ben Whishaw and, finally maturing into a proper grown-up character actor rather thana handsome chap who always plays himself, Hugh Grant. Three hour-long episodes too, so plenty of time for the period atmosphere and character detail in which this particular saga is so obscenely rich that if it were fiction you’d accuse the author of overegging it.
And the same goes, of course, for the plot. In what bizarro parallel universe would the popular and upstanding leader of the Liberal party — and likely deputy prime minister in a coalition government — hatch a scheme to have his troublesome male ex-lover bumped off by a hitman so incompetent that all he manages to kill is the Great Dane? And in what equally strange world, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — some of it in the hands of both the police and MI5 — would the courts find him not guilty?
To anyone under 40 it might seem almost inconceivable that this is real history.
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