UK Edition
Review
Victoria series 1 finale: a right royal yawn, ITV review
It had to happen. Victoria couldn’t be a properly populist portrait of a famously disapproving monarch without including the phrase most often attributed to her. The final episode opened with the young queen (Jenna Coleman) tucked up in bed, heavily pregnant, her husband Prince Albert (Tom Hughes) honking like a goose at a tedious joke involving chickens and “murder most fowl”.
“We are not amused,” she muttered. And, really, who could blame her? Ever since Albert walked into Victoria’s gem-encrusted life, this drama has been bogged down in her battle to convince Parliament and her people that he was the right man for her – and them. The trouble was that I found it hard to view Albert as anything other than an insufferable prig and a control freak.
Last night we saw him insisting he vet all of Victoria’s private correspondence before it reached her. He then gave his brother another high-handed dressing down for being hopelessly in love with a married woman.
I blame Lord Melbourne. Or more accurately Rufus Sewell in that role, and the sizzling screen chemistry he and Coleman generated in the first five episodes of the series. It was what grabbed headlines and got a large section of the TV-watching public talking and tweeting about Victoria from the outset (the ratings have been robust throughout, regularly beating BBC One’s successful Poldark which airs in the same slot). That and a serpent-like performance by Paul Rhys as Sir John Conroy, who also slithered offstage early on.
In a series that depended so heavily on swoonsome high romance and villainy for its dramatic drive, these early departures were a self-inflicted fatal wound. Because Albert, the “torpid Teuton”, simply couldn’t compete with what had gone before.
As a result, Victoria peaked too early and ran out of drama. Attention in the last few episodes switched increasingly from Victoria to other people’s love lives, such as the downstairs dalliance between chef Francatelli and Miss Skerrett, which went nowhere in the end. Our pregnant “queen regnant” became ever more what she railed against: “a vessel to be protected because I’m carrying precious cargo”.
And so the closing scenes were of Victoria delivering that cargo. Happy occasion that this was, it made for rather a flat finish. Instead of cheering loyally, I was yawning royally. The biggest challenge facing a second series of Victoria will be to extract the flesh-and-blood woman from this still too two-dimensional monarch.