It’s been a bit of a mystery why the civil war doesn’t loom larger in the
national consciousness. In all sorts of ways it marks the transition from a
distant Them to an empathetic Us. Before the civil war, history is a story
from another species. After, it’s our story. Perhaps we don’t care for it
because, as Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That, the royalists
were wrong but romantic, and the parliamentarians right but repulsive. There
are no easy heroes. But why on television do we get so many Tudors, with all
their postmedieval posturing and arch posing and simply absurd clothes? How
did men’s fashion ever arrive at doublet and hose worn with velvet Crocs and
a floppy Ascot hat by way of a macho look? The Commonwealth and the civil
war are about the things that directly concern us today. Its poetry and
pamphlets, songs and records all speak a language that is ours. Its
characters are as real and recognisable as any bus queue. And they had
cracking kit.
I have a feeling the civil war attracts the wrong sort of historian: serious
men with a socialist bent and utopian vision, not at all the historical
interior decorators and camp romantics who fawn over Henry and Elizabeth.
The serious and complex business of the civil war is the first moment when
the rabble of Britain step into the light of our story, not as faceless
bowmen or victims or mobs, but as protagonists and heroes. It is the end of
Britain’s story being an aristocrats’ monopoly.
So I was looking forward toThe Devil’s Whore. It is set in the right place and
time and is an original TV script, not an adaptation of some Victorian
royalist romance, and it has a cast that is good and interesting rather than
great and predictable. Andrea Riseborough as Beelzebub’s bitch looked
astonishingly timely; she might have stepped out of a canvas by Lely or
Dobson. I believed every word she said. Peter Capaldi was a rangy, angrily
entitled, Scottish-accented Charles I - all too often this character is
wheeled out as a saintly patrician fool. And the whole production looks
fantastic, with a gutsy, dark atmosphere. You can feel the natural order of
things spinning head over heels. The set dressing is believable and
plot-enhancing without ever becoming preRaphaelite. The script at times was
a little breathless, too much story and character to shoehorn into each
bulging scene, but it was exciting and convincing and the battle scenes were
managed with a skilful camera and too few extras, as is always the way with
television.
The script also assumed we all know our history well enough not to need a lot
of explanatory asides. I like television that assumes I’m smarter than I am.
It’s so much nicer to watch than the alternative. The Devil’s Whore is about
things I am interested in, so I was interested in it and enjoyed it. But I
also liked it for what it wasn’t full of. It wasn’t another bloody costumed
adaptation. It wasn’t a National Trust advertisement. It didn’t have Brian
Blessed, and we were spared David Starkey.
Just how relevant the civil war is can be surprising. One of the main
characters in the drama is John Lilburne - Freeborn John - a northeastern
pamphleteer and Leveller who was locked up and flogged by the Star Chamber
for refusing to plead to a charge he couldn’t understand because it was in
Latin. He was a constant and uncompromising campaigner for equality and our
freeborn rights. In the end, even Cromwell locked him up. But his case was
taken, with all the rest of English common law, to America by the Pilgrims,
and 300 years later Lilburne’s obdurate defence was cited in Miranda v
Arizona in the US Supreme Court and set the precedent for the obligation to
read a defendant his rights. So when the cops on CSI: Wherever say “Miranda
him” to the poor sod in handcuffs, that is in part down to Freeborn John, a
great and memorable English nuisance.
As Herodotus once said: history, it’s a thing of the past and really all a
matter of timing. Someone who must be hugging the fortuitous timing of
history is wee Niall Ferguson, academe’s answer to Jimmy Krankie. Having
struggled with a big plonking series on the reason for money, blow me if the
world doesn’t come over all bankrupt and deflated. And now The Ascent of
Money looks like the smartest move on the airwaves. It’s the early vulture
that gets the banker. So after a little perky topping and tailing and a bit
of an updated voiceover, Ferguson’s programme was right on the money. It’s
an ill wind that doesn’t blow some pundit a per diem.
So, how was this revealing and explanatory exposé of cash? It’s an open secret
that Wee Niall was one of the TV historians who were the collective model
for the relativist teacher in The History Boys, whose advice is always to
say something contrary. He’s obviously taken the implied criticism to heart.
This was a prosaically pedestrian and predictably orthodox stroll through
commerce, taking in cuneiform promissory tablets, Medici money laundering
and the obligatory misunderstanding of Shylock. It was a GCSE class project
cut out of pamphlets and printed off the internet.
Ferguson would pop up in various exotic locations where some money had once
been made or spent or lost, and you really wondered why. He could have told
us this without appearing. He must win the prize for the least imaginative
use of location and air miles. Whenever the social and political
consequences of money were touched on, he’d slip past them with a
common-room quip like a man in a hurry. His story isn’t going to upset any
money changers’ tables or pose any hard questions about the assumptions of
Adam Smith. And despite the times, it was altogether a rather dull show. It
all seemed very 2007. But its smug assumptions should make it saleable in
America, where Ferguson is now feathering his career.
I thought that all the old bluster and truculence and vanity must have been
rinsed off him by Yankee dollars, but then, right at the end, in the
credits, he slid across our screen as “Professor Niall Ferguson”. Ah, who
else would be thin-skinned enough to use their honorific title on the roll
call? Credits on TV are egalitarian and Radio Waves (see left link) is on
democratic places; barely an Anthony goes through without being cut down to
Tony. But, you see, you can take a boy out of Glas-gow, you can transport
him to the giddy Parnassus of Harvard, but you can’t take the Southside chip
off his shrugged shoulders.
Einstein and Eddington was more history, a remarkable story, unknown to me,
about the professor of astronomy at Cambridge and his collaboration with
Einstein in Berlin across the gulf of the great war. It was a moving and
exciting story, in a cream-tea and waiting-for-the-post sort of way. A bit
like Chariots of Fire without shorts, only much faster, much, much faster,
then bent in the middle. Eddington finally proved Einstein’s theory of
relativity at the expense of Newtonian certainty and national pride.
Eddington was a gay Quaker pacifist, not the easiest combination with which
to face England in 1914. Einstein was an unwashed naturalised Swiss
philanderer, not a winning combo in Germany.
David Tennant played Eddington with a marvellous conviction, capturing the
tone of his contrary life perfectly. All the Cambridge side was impeccable;
it was the Germans who rather let the show down. Granted, Einstein is a
difficult cove to make live in pixels, but, all the same, the German side
was rather melodramatic and cartoonish and not as elegantly written or
subtle as the Blighty bits. It was a drama of two contrasting halves, and
even though the Boche technically won, I think we can claim a moral
gentlemen’s draw. They had gravity, but we had much better tailoring.
Special Needs Pets was the best title of the week and turned out to be rather
a good programme. Good in a bad way. Viewers will have been divided about
this examination of the undying love some humans have for animals that would
have been better off dead. Paralysed rabbits, cats in nappies, obsessively
masturbating parrots, collapsible dogs. Some will have seen this as a
collection of heartwarming Daily Mail stories of love across species, while
others will have laughed until they blew their soup down their noses. I was
in the latter camp. By the time we got to the animal chiropractor who had
been treating insemination bulls’ pelvises for repetitive strain injury, I
was a helpless, moist ball, mewing hysterically. I have reached an age where
the only things I find really funny are the humiliating and painful
misadventures of others.
The Devil’s Whore (Channel 4, Wednesday) The Ascent of Money (Channel 4,
Monday) Einstein and Eddington (BBC2, Saturday) Special Needs Pets (Channel
4, Thursday)
