UK Edition
Review
Victoria may have a hint of Mills & Boone, but you'll be swept away by it – review
How do you make a Sunday night hit show? For every Downton Abbey or Call the Midwife, there is a Titanic or The Village, dramas crafted with love and attention which somehow fail to capture the public imagination. ITV have ploughed a huge (undivested) sum into Victoria, their new eight-part drama about the life of the young monarch, but will audiences fall for the headstrong royal, and more importantly, will the show win the ratings battle against BBC One’s phenomenally successful Poldark which returns next Sunday? This feature-length episode proved that it certainly has the potential to do so.
I’ve never cared for Poldark, always thought it was camp drivel (Clive James once brilliantly observed that it was an anagram of “old krap”) with pretensions to historical truth. And while Daisy Goodwin’s script for Victoria was ripe with overly knowing winks to epoch-making moments “From now on I want to be called Victoria” – dramatic pause – “Queen Victoria”, and had a fair whiff of Mills & Boon rose-scented romance about it, there was also a terrific pace and fizzing exuberance which that Cornish tin mine saga is sorely lacking.
Much of the energy was due to Jenna Coleman’s performance in the title role. Those who thought the former Doctor Who girl would look a trifle silly holding an orb and sceptre need to exterminate their snobbery. Coleman totally convinced as the pint-sized powerhouse, conveying Victoria’s girlish volubility, vulnerability and iron will all at once. This young queen was not always likeable – she threw strops, she threw ornaments at her subordinates – but she was honourable and Coleman summoned a considerable gravitas in achieving that side of her personality.
In fact, the acting was of a higher calibre than the script entirely deserved; from Paul Rhys’s sinister John Conroy who manipulated Victoria in a Svengali-like fashion before her ascent in 1837, to Rufus Sewell’s charismatic Lord Melbourne, a man who would rather tend to his rooks than to affairs of state. The relationship between Melbourne and Victoria has been sexed up in too contemporary a manner but, thanks to the commitment of Sewell and Coleman’s performances, you were swept along in the candlelit, red-carpeted romance of it all.
Other elements of the first episode proved more problematic. Goodwin’s inclusion of “downstairs” characters seemed to be a misguided attempt to try and replicate the success of Downton Abbey. Yet while Julian Fellowes imbued his servants with emotional honesty, those here (including Eve Myles’s astringent chief dresser and Adrian Schiller’s cynical steward) acted as a sort of chorus to the main action, a bargain basement answer to Macbeth’s Porter or Hamlet’s Gravediggers. “At least you’re English,” carped one to another with the subtlety of concrete. “There’s enough Germans in the Palace.”
Such moments proved an unnecessary diversion from the main event. The life of the young Queen Victoria, her intense relationship with Prince Albert and troubled dealings with the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel (all to come in future episodes) would indicate that this will be a rich, full-blooded Sunday-night cocktail. If there is any justice, Victoria should steal the crown from po-faced Poldark.