Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10
Cast: Natalie Dormer, Aneurin Barnard, Shaun Evans, David Calder, Craig Parkinson, Oliver Chris, Peter Sullivan, Jessica Gunning, Elizabeth Rider, Richard McCabe, Will Keen, Tom Edden, Alex Beckett, Thomas Coombes.
There are moments in British history that are so worth preserving that to make a film or an epic television programme about them seems the most natural thing in the world to attempt to do; some though should only be attempted if the right cast is put in place to make History real and not just to pull in viewers.
The tantalising case of Lady Seymour Worsley, her husband and her lover is one that set the 18th Century social scene, the courts and Government alight with the whiff of scandal and the fragrant trace of the upper classes being taught about airing their dirty laundry in public. Yet in the deceit of one marriage, the rumours and speculation of such troubles, the gravitas of one of the most important trials of the time was reduced in the eyes of television to look more like a more temperate scene from a Carry On film.
The Scandalous Lady W was perhaps tame by today’s standards, the loves and life of Seymour Worsley, her semi-impotent husband, Sir Richard Worsley and the lover she was willing to reveal all for via the court system, Captain George Bisset, a mere drop in the social ocean compared to the way that some live their lives in the public eye but for its time it was shocking and outrageous behaviour on both the Worsley’s counts.
Yet that shocking behaviour, that sense of Georgian morality was nowhere truly to be seen and in the casting of three main leads, Natalie Dormer, Aneurin Barnard and Shaun Evans, the positions of near reverence they hold in the minds of television viewers was certainly one that arguably held them back to the point of worryingly not caring about the characters they portrayed. It is in such miscasting that television programmes fail and the wicked sense of under-achievement comes hand in hand in unrealistic endeavour.
If not for the sense of the historic and the fine cinematography that adorned the programme, it would have surely sunk without a trace. The Scandalous Lady W, more like a fuss in the suburbs of Georgian England.
Ian D. Hall