The Devil’s Whore (Channel 4)

"The revolution will not be televised” sang Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s. If he was referring to the English Revolution, he had a point. The momentous civil wars of the 17th century, culminating in the execution of the King and abolition of the monarchy, rarely feature in big budget TV. I suppose there isn’t much time left for Oliver Cromwell and Charles I once the BBC and ITV have finished fawning over the prospective King Charles III turning 60.

So, after a week of televised toadying, three loud cheers for The Devil’s Whore, historical drama as cutting as the lash that bloodies one agitator’s back. This gripping story not only brings the Civil War era from 1642-60 to life (and gory death). It says “pshaw!” to the Cavaliers and Roundheads clichés and focuses on the political undercurrents brought to the surface as “the world turned” and some fought, John Simm’s character suggests, for one where “no man needs a king to govern him and no woman a husband to govern her”.

The first episode starred leading men of the time, from Charles and Cromwell to Honest John Lilburne, the radical Leveller, but sexed up the history with a fictional female, Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough). Abandoned as a child when her mad mother fled to a French nunnery, the girl foreswore God — at which Satan appeared and unfurled his tongue at her. As a young woman, she drifts from the royal household towards the rebel camp. By the end of episode one the grinning devil appeared again when the King had her husband shot for surrendering their manor house to parliamentary forces.

Around Angelica moved two of the revolution’s principals — Edward Sexby, strikingly played by Simm as an oddball killing machine who stares at her like a stalker between slaughtering people, and sees the souls of slain soldiers depart the battlefield; and Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, the suave Puritan hardman who charms men and women alike, yet bombs an Abbey on Christmas Day.

The cri de coeur throughout was “liberty and justice”. The Devil’s Whore has itself been accused of taking some liberties with history. Still, it looks like doing justice to the cause. Having cast the King and his cavalier nephew Prince Rupert as obvious villains, it skilfully dramatised the conflicts between radical and conservative forces on the other side. When the Earl of Manchester, commander of the parliamentary forces, interrupted Lilburne expounding anti-aristocratic propaganda to the troops and demanded that he bow in submission, Sexby demanded to know where the liberty and justice be if Honest John has to bow “to a hog in armour”.

The upheaval that led to the divinely appointed King being beheaded by commoners ignited a cultural revolution embodied here by Angelica, already evolving from a wife told she was not to think into a free-minded proto-feminist. Some frankly unnecessary bedroom scenes were slipped in, presumably to demonstrate her liberated nature. I suspect there will be more to come as she, like the Levellers, upsets the Puritan elders and lives up to the series’ title.

There was slightly too much reading history backwards here, almost making Angelica look like a modern woman travelled back in time — Life on Marst-on Moor. But at least it gave Simm something to look moody about while he was “waiting for the killing to start”.

Today, as experts debate the constitutional role of a future monarch on television, The Devil’s Whore is a lively reminder of a time when “common” men and women killed a king and made their own history, without any help from the Devil. “The revolution will be live” ends Scott-Heron’s poem-song. In the meantime, catch the last English revolution being televised in fine style on Channel 4.

Wild About Your Garden (BBC One)

A rather more modest revolution was attempted over on BBC Two in the new series Wild About Your Garden, where the team sought to turn a concrete-pathed Crayford riverside garden into a thriving wildlife habitat with rare water voles. Sort of makeover-show-meets-Autumnwatch. The one thing it definitely wasn’t was wild.

All was tamely formulaic, from the frontman Nick Knowles to the blonde wildlife expert wiggling a “vole dance” (geddit?). There was the pointless drama of completing the makeover “against the clock”, and the artificial “crisis” when they could not squeeze a massive tree into the garden — only because of the pagoda they had just built in the space. If it wasn’t for all this nonsense, as Mrs Hume observed, the show would have been like watching grass grow.

By the end the garden’s owner, Betty, predictably welled up at the “absolutely beautiful” results. Before long there were birds and bees and butterflies and frogs and even a few voles, which Betty decided were not as bad as rats after all. But the moral of the makeover was how much man-made effort, technology and money it had taken to create a little “nature” — more of an advert for human ingenuity than the wonders of wildlife.

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