Extras are supposed to include behind the scenes material.

Be sure to pre-order your own copy of this excellent series!

And so we say farewell to Claire Foy’s hugely appealing Little Dorrit as Andrew Davies’s masterful adaptation reaches its climax.

There have been some wonderful characterisations throughout, with Tom Courtenay bravely unloveable as the self-indulgent, vain and brutally snobbish Mr Dorrit, Judy Parfitt as the dragon-like Mrs Clennam, the wonderful Eddie Marsan as snorting pit-bull Pancks, and Matthew Macfadyen as Arthur Clennam, the rock around which all previous storms have dashed themselves.

Macfadyen’s role could easily have been a bore but he somehow managed to convey Arthur’s saintly, solid reliability without ever making it tedious.

Beware: Spoilers ahead

That solidity is shaken in the final episode, when Arthur’s fortune disappears along with Mr Merdle’s bankrupt bank.

Amy, Fanny, above, and Tip are also in dire financial straits as Mr Dorrit’s money goes down the same plughole. But money troubles mean less than nothing to Amy when she learns that Arthur lies gravely ill in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and she leaves her sister and brother to look after him.

source: Daily Record, December 6

Today the corporation apologised to BBC1 viewers who were annoyed at the late move of the drama, as well as factual series The People’s Hospital, to make way for the hour-long current affairs special.

However, the BBC said it believed the Panorama programme - broadcast after Shannon’s mother Karen and co-defendant Michael Donovan were yesterday found guilty of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice - was in the public interest.

Overnight ratings also seemed to back the BBC’s decision. Panorama pulled in 5.6 million viewers and a 24% share in the 8pm hour, compared with just 2.5 million and 10% for Little Dorrit on Wednesday - the drama’s lowest rating of the series so far.

“The conviction of Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan on December 4 was felt to be of huge public interest and we were keen to reflect this by broadcasting this programme,” the BBC said.

“We’re fully aware that making late changes to the schedules can cause disruption and annoyance and we don’t take these decisions lightly.

“BBC1 listings information was updated online and on the electronic listings guides from lunchtime on December 4 as soon as the decision to move the programmes was made.

“There was also an on-air announcement alerting viewers to the change in programme billings.

“We would like to apologise to those people who were expecting to watch Little Dorrit and The People’s Hospital.”

The BBC added that the episode of Little Dorrit could be seen on Sunday at 6.15pm during the show’s weekly omnibus repeat, while The People’s Hospital will return on December 18 at 8.30pm.

This apology is the second of the day for the BBC, with Radio 1 breakfast DJ Chris Moyles also issuing a short statement saying sorry for appearing to link Poles with prostitutes.

source: The Guardian, December 5, by Leigh Holmwood

The lavish adaptation of the Charles Dickens tale was replaced with a Panorama programme titled Shannon: The Mother of All Lies on Thursday night.

It followed the conviction of Shannon’s mother Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan for kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice.

The BBC complaints line received calls from 4,680 viewers, some of whom branded the last minute cancellation “inconsiderate” and “outrageous”.

One viewer, John Everett from Essex, said: “It is a cavalier disregard for viewers. I am very annoyed at the inconsideration of the BBC.

“I had no desire to watch another news programme about Shannon Matthews.

“What has happened to the BBC, pulling highly plugged serials without any notice. It is outrageous. I spent about 3 hours trying to call the complaints line but it was busy from 8pm to midnight”.

A BBC spokeswoman said “Little Dorrit was moved to make way for a Panorama special about the Shannon Matthews trial which concluded yesterday. The episode can instead be seen on Sunday as part of the omnibus at 6.15pm. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to viewers.”

A statement on the BBC complaints website added “The conviction of Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan on 4 December was felt to be of huge public interest and we were keen to reflect this by broadcasting this programme”.

The controversy comes after renewed criticism about BBC scheduling. In October, Little Dorrit lost nearly a quarter of its audience because of changes to its placement in the schedules.

When the series launched on BBC1 in October, it had an hour-long opener on Sunday that drew 6.3 million viewers.

However, viewers who did not stay to watch the end credits missed an announcement informing them that the next instalment of the 14-part series would be a 30-minute episode broadcast on Thursday evening. Ratings for that episode fell by 1.5 million to only 4.8 million.

To confuse things further, viewers were not told that the programme was rescheduled on Wednesday and Thursdays, with Sunday reserved for an omnibus edition.

Viewers voiced their unhappiness on the BBC website.

Little Dorrit is one of Dickens’ least-known works but BBC bosses hoped it would replicate the success of the Bafta-winning Bleak House.

The series stars newcomer Claire Foy as the ‘Little Dorrit’ of the title, alongside veteran Pam Ferris and Tom Courtenay.

source: The Telegraph, December 5, by Urmee Khan

The National Treasure star is in Austria filming the 14th-century supernatural thriller Season of the Witch. He plays a knight charged with exiling a sorceress. “He has come back from the Crusades and has lost his faith in the church and in God,” says producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight).

The witch is played by Claire Foy (British TV’s Little Dorrit). Ron Perlman (Hellboy) co-stars.

“Wherever the witch has gone, the plague has followed,” Roven says. “So they need to transport her to the mountains and perform a ritual that will lift whatever enchantment she has on the land.”

source: USA Today, by Anthony Breznican

452 Little Dorrit (TV, 2008) > Screencaptures > Part 8

Synopsis:

The Devil’s Whore tells the story of the seismic events of 17th-century England, when political disobedience turned to revolution and civil war, and English history changed forever. The story is told through the experiences of a spirited aristocratic woman, Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough), who comes to know the key figures on both sides of this bitter conflict. It is a story not just of political and historical significance, but of love, loss, murder, courage and betrayal.

Angelica is born in 1623, when England is divided both politically and religiously. When Angelica’s deeply religious mother gives up her daughter and flees to France to the sanctuary of a Catholic convent, the child Angelica curses God. Thereafter, at key moments throughout the rest of her life, she is haunted by images of the Devil, seemingly cursed for her moment of rash blasphemy.

As the years pass, Angelica becomes part of the royal court of Charles I (Peter Capaldi), enjoying a life of carefree privilege. She is engaged to her childhood sweetheart, her cousin Harry Fanshawe (Ben Aldridge), and looks forward to their future together at Fanshawe House.

But England is changing. Outside Angelica’s gilt-edged world, the people are poor, sick, hungry and angry; demanding society and government change radically to ensure a better life for all. One such man is John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill), whose campaigning on behalf of the common man puts him at odds with the authorities. On the day of her marriage, Angelica witnesses his brutal public flogging as his wife Elizabeth (Maxine Peake) looks on. That same day, a mercenary and soldier for hire, Edward Sexby (John Simm), visits the palace, where he is captivated by Angelica’s beauty.

Soon after their wedding, Harry and Angelica are visited at home by Elizabeth Lilburne, who has walked, heavily pregnant, from London, to plead with Harry to intercede on her imprisoned husband’s behalf. Loyal Royalist Harry dismisses her immediately, and is appalled when Angelica questions his decision. But for Angelica, the seeds of her political awareness are sewn. She persuades Sexby to take her to prison to visit Lilburne, to hear what he has to say. In the meeting, Lilburne is flanked by two supporters, also paying a visit. They are Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Fassbender) and Oliver Cromwell (Dominic West).

Soon afterwards, amidst mounting public pressure, Lilburne is released from prison. With the authority of the throne under threat, the King marches on parliament to arrest five rebels. They are tipped off, and escape. It is a further humiliation. As the royal authority begins to crumble, so too does Angelica’s marriage, her husband Harry unable to cope with such a spirited and modern woman as his wife.

The royal family are forced to abandon London, and take refuge in Oxford. Finally, the long-threatened war breaks out, with the Royalists and Parliamentarians clashing at the bloody Battle of Edgehill. Those prominent in the Roundhead cause include Rainsborough, Cromwell and Lilburne. During the battle Sexby, previously merely a soldier for hire, becomes troubled by his allegiance to the Royalists, disobeys his superior officer, Harry Fanshawe, and defects to the other side. In the heat of battle, Fanshawe all but kills him, but Sexby’s vision of Angelica helps him to survive.

By now, the lines are drawn, and England has begun one of the bloodiest periods of its history. Sexby has joined the Roundhead cause. King Charles calls upon the massed ranks of his own nobility, including Harry Fanshawe, to support him. But Harry’s wife has different ideas.

It is the start of a road that will change inexorably not only Angelica’s life, but all of those with whom she comes into contact, including the most important figures of this tumultuous time. Ahead of her lies unaccustomed poverty, tragedy and triumph, love and loss on an unimaginable scale, with the Devil of her visions seemingly thwarting her every attempt at happiness.

For England, the future is equally radical. Village will fight against village, brother against brother, as the nation is torn apart. Friendships will be tested and loyalties broken - even among those in command, and on the same side.

The drama has only just begun to play out.

There are moments when The Devil’s Whore, coming soon on Channel 4, seems almost too rich and exotic to be a British drama. Hollywood’s accepted agenda for heroes — whether fighting aliens in Independence Day, Persians in 300, slave-owners in Amistad or the British in pretty much anything starring Mel Gibson — is the struggle for liberty and justice. Our homegrown screen champions, conversely, usually shuffle awkwardly through deeds performed for money, deception, loyalty or petty compromise. So it’s strange to hear epic speeches against tyranny delivered, without irony, by English lips.

“My liberty is his to take — but not to give,” a Leveller cries. “I am freeborn John Lilburne. We will not live like slaves. Nor will we loll in our beds while he bring in an Irish army or a Scotch army to kill us.” Later, Oliver Cromwell pleads for Lilburne in Parliament thus: “Then where is the justice for John Lilburne that rots still in the Fleet by a sentence most illegal, against the liberty of the subject, bloody, wicked, barbarous and tyrannical?”

If the language weren’t ambitious enough, there is the vast scope of Peter Flannery’s script — which some might argue resembles a vastly heightened period version of his previous big hit, Our Friends in the North. To remodel that drama’s catch line, this is a saga of two decades, five friends and their lives that shaped the world. The Devil’s Whore recounts the stories of comrades, enemies and lovers who battle, with varying degrees of idealism and brutality, through the civil war, from the closing days of the Eleven Years’ Tyranny to the post-war manoeuvring between parliament’s factions as the army, the radicals and the conservatives wrestle for the nation.

As in Our Friends, which saw Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, Christopher Eccleston and Mark Strong sharing a screen, the cream of our television acting talent has been assembled for this £7m four-parter. John Simm, from Life on Mars, plays a feral mercenary called Sexby; Dominic West, fresh from The Wire, is Cromwell; and Peter Capaldi transmutes the splenetic aggression of his The Thick of It spin doctor into Charles I’s stutter. At its heart is the Devil’s Whore herself — Angelica Fanshawe, played by Andrea Riseborough, of Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley fame.

Fanshawe is the one truly fictional creation of Flannery and his co-creator, the historian Martine Brant, in a sea of real historical characters. She was conjured by Brant out of a document called The Commons of Newgate — essentially gallows confessions by 17th-century women, gathered by a priest at the infamous prison. “Most of these women broke the mould, didn’t conform and were either pitifully misunderstood or persecuted,” Brant says. Angelica is noble- born, but driven by passion and sensuality. “She is a really open and giving and tactile person,” Riseborough explains during filming in South Africa. “She’s not of her time, because the decorum of court stifles her” — she breaks off to demonstrate the accepted walk for nobles at court, tottering like a tumbling doll. “That’s so wrong for her, because she’s instinctive and sensual and led by her heart.”

As a result, Angelica rejects God when her mother deserts her, but then finds Harry — her cousin, friend and husband — rejecting her for her intellectual and sexual excitability. At the start of the war she is the king’s favourite, but gradually her encounters with Levellers such as Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Fassbender) and Simm’s cynical Edward Sexby radicalise her. She strides through 20 years of chaos, open and hungry for knowledge and experience as the battle for democracy is won around her.

It’s won in impressive style, too. The South African location brought huge cost-savings that meant that great civil-war battles such as 1642’s Edgehill and Cromwell’s attacks on cathedrals and stately homes look like grown-up battles rather than a handful of extras and a smoke bomb. The producers also found an area in the Cape where the countryside looks similar to England, complete with oak trees.

Most of the key moments feature — the forming of the New Model Army in 1645, the execution of Charles in 1649 — but smaller historical details are expanded for dramatic effect. Simm’s Sexby, for instance, is based on a real Leveller who plotted but failed to assassinate Cromwell. He’s a footnote in history books, but a crucial player here.

“I’m not selling this as a way of passing your GCSE in 17th-century history,” Flannery acknowledges. “The Devil’s Whore absolutely takes liberties with historical fact and historical character — I’m trying to write a thrilling story about those times and what the issues were. To do that, I have to make merry with events and characters a little.” All the same, the list of research documents Brant and Flannery consulted stretches from The Commons of Newgate through academic and popular histories of the era, and Pauline Gregg’s biographies of Cromwell, Charles I and Lilburne, to the original pamphlets issued with radical fervour by the Diggers and the Levellers — proto-socialist movements of the time. In a first for primetime drama, however, Flannery’s key source was the Bible.

“The book I returned to again and again was the King James version, since it was written in 1604, with contributions from brilliant poets including — possibly — Shakespeare,” he explains. “I picked it apart to get the language and the tone of the dialogue. It’s full of muscular metaphor and simile — exactly the feel I wanted for the characters.”

The director Marc Mundan, who picked up a Bafta for the Iraq drama The Mark of Cain, matches Flannery’s opulent phrasing by flooding the screen with colour. It’s part Pressburger, part Bollywood hyperdrama, with Simm addressing the camera along the blade of a knife as he prepares for war, and Charles I shot from a vast distance as he peers through a dark window in a white wall to watch an execution. Indeed, with all these ingredients, The Devil’s Whore is easily the greatest civil-war drama we have seen since 1983’s By the Sword Divided. Although, in part, this is because it’s the only civil-war drama we’ve had in prime time since 1983. Astonishingly, since By the Sword Divided, there have been eight Jane Austen adaptations and countless episodes of Sharpe and Hornblower, as well as adaptations of War and Peace and Vanity Fair, recounting aspects of the Napoleonic wars from the domestic to the global. The civil war, the foundation of our democracy, has had a teatime Children of the New Forest.

In part, this is a result of the paucity of civil-war fiction. In September, when the Royal Court Theatre hosted a reading of Caryl Churchill’s civil-war play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, readers of the literary website Ready Steady Book could muster only seven substantial works of fiction about the era, and one of those was Paradise Lost.

“I can’t for the life of me understand why we’re not more proud of the civil war,” Flannery argues. “In our schools, we’re taught that the Cavaliers wore their hair long and had fun, while the Roundheads wore their hair short and banned Christmas. And that’s about it. Regicide, interregnum and restoration, and there you have it. We’ve been invited to feel that England lost its wits for a little while, courtesy of some rather dour men. Actually, it’s the crucible for all the subsequent European revolutions. It radicalised a lot of people and left a legacy of ideas that we’re still battling over. We should, as a nation, be informed about that and take a proud interest in it. Also, for a writer, it’s the most glorious landscape for love and action.”

So persuasive is Flannery’s view that it turned the Irish Catholic head of the actor Dominic West when he put on Cromwell’s helmet. “I came to Cromwell not particularly loving him,” West says with the beginning of a grin. “I knew he ransacked Ireland, I knew he said ‘warts and all’, and that he cancelled Christmas. I suppose you are always in danger, as an actor, of giving a character the benefit of the doubt, and that’s what I’m doing with Cromwell, in that now I really admire him. I think he did everything for an honourable reason. Even the Irish thing was really a 17th-century Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was as horrific as that, but it was done so that, by hitting southern Ireland and Wexford hard, the war would end sooner. He was always in favour of the king, and he didn’t want to get rid of him until he realised the war wasn’t going to end. But he wanted him to be king without the power — which is what we have now, really. This is what he created.”

The Devil’s Whore shows a nation that believes with such intensity, loves with such passion and fights with such fervour, it is almost impossible to recognise. And, although it seems such a long time ago, a glance at the lists of British aristocracy reveals that we are, on average, only 12 generations from the conflict. If you mourn the passing of a country that cared so much and decry the flaccid complacency of modern Britain, you’re far from alone and far from the first. Two centuries after Angelica’s story, Percy Bysshe Shelley, appalled at the horror of the Peterloo massacre, called out in The Masque of Anarchy:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.

The Devil’s Whore is on Channel 4 from Nov 19

source: The Sunday Times, November 9, 2008, by Stephen Armstrong

Roundheads and cavaliers… class warfare… regicide… families at one another’s throats… an explosion of radical ideas… You’d think that the English Civil War would be meat and drink to any half-sentient dramatist.

But think again, for while across our screens flounce no end of Henry VIIIs and Elizabeth Is, the revolution that saw a monarch beheaded and long-oppressed subjects daring to dream of equality has largely been ignored.

But that’s all about to change with Peter Flannery’s four-part civil war drama The Devil’s Whore, which stars John Simm, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Fassbender, and begins on Channel 4 next week. This is a full-blooded epic that’s greedy for the history overlooked by so many others.

“I was astonished when I got into the period how ignorant we are about it,” says Flannery. “Except by Marxist writers, it’s hardly even referred to as a ‘revolution’, but it becomes clear very quickly that it was the first of the revolutions, which paved the way for the French and American revolutions.

“I don’t know why we’re shy about it,” he continues. “There must be something in the English temperament that says revolutions are for Johnny Foreigner. Why did Dickens write a novel about the French Revolution and not the English Revolution? Shakespeare died too early. He would have written a great play about it and taken similar liberties with the facts as I have.”

Flannery wouldn’t compare himself to Shakespeare, but he did give us that landmark British TV drama Our Friends in the North in 1996, which was adapted from his 1982 RSC play. More than eight hours long, it took four friends in 1960s Tyneside, and followed them through the personal and political upheavals of the subsequent decades. It’s a framework that Flannery has recycled in The Devil’s Whore.

“It was a very conscious similarity. In fact, for a long time, we called it Our Friends in the Civil War,” Flannery jokes. “I wanted to create a group of people whom we would follow through the events, following their lives as well as their politics. The main difference is that in Our Friends in the North, the characters were wholly fictional. Here only one of them is fictional.”

That fictional character is the one so charmingly referred to in the title, a spirited aristocratic woman called Angelica Fanshawe, whose dawning political awareness is followed through the first stirrings of discontent, war, regicide and beyond into the sectarian politics of Cromwell’s junta. The name Angelica is misplaced, since she has been prone to visions of a leering Satan ever since she threw her Bible into the mud after being abandoned as a girl by her religious-maniac mother. “She’s a woman not of her time, in the sense that she’s unapologetically brave and sexual and forward-thinking and ballsy and intelligent,” says Riseborough, the actress who plays her. “She’s a real sexually charged, beautifully vivid spirit unable to be chained down.”

It’s the second outspoken, ballsy screen heroine on the trot for Riseborough, last seen as a young Margaret Thatcher in BBC4’s The Long Walk to Finchley. For The Devil’s Whore, Riseborough says she “digested a mountain of stuff. Antonia Fraser and her fantastic book about women in the 17th century. Alison Plowden’s Henrietta Maria. Pauline Gregg’s King Charles I. Tristram Hunt’s very good on the English Civil War, too.”

Simm has also been doing research. “I buriedmyself in books to get a feel of the time,” he says. “There’s a brilliant book called The English Civil War: at First Hand, which is letters written back from the front.” Although, unlike Angelica, his character, Edward Sexby, really existed (he was one of the proto-Marxist reformers known as the Levellers, and went on to try to assassinate Cromwell), Simm’s Sexby is largely a fictional creature. Indeed, he could have stepped out of a Sergio Leone Western with his wide-brimmed black hat and scarred face.

“It’s Indiana Jones with knobs on,” he says. “Sexby’s a kind of anti-hero, which I like best. When you first meet him, he’s a soldier of fortune. And then he falls in love with Angelica and the Parliamentarian philosophy. He changes sides on the battlefield.”

Oliver Cromwell is played by Dominic West. “My mum is Irish and still isn’t speaking to me. My wife-to-be is Irish. He’s not a popular figure over there,” West says.

Fassbender, having just played Bobby Sands in Hunger, and having grown up in the Republic (although his parents are German), also had hostile preconceptions about Cromwell. “I was aware of the destruction, the way he laid waste to Ireland,” says Fassbender, who plays Thomas Rainsborough, the Parliamentarian ally of Cromwell, whose politics gradually become too radical for the Lord Protector. “Rainsborough felt every man should have the vote and everybody should be free, and should have a say in the running of their country. Cromwell thought that was crazy.”

But it’s a royalist character who provides the most gloriously unexpected performance in The Devil’s Whore, and Peter Capaldi as Charles I is a wonder. “What a performance,” says Flannery. “I was bowled over by it.” Capaldi himself says: “There were a couple of days where I thought, ‘This is why I got into acting.’”

One of those days was filming Charles I’s execution scene. “I’d never had my head on a chopping block before,” says Capaldi. “It starts to choke you, the weight of your head pressing against your throat even before the axe comes down. Somebody shot the scene on their mobile phone, and there was this bizarre digital footage of a 17th-century event, and it was powerful, like some terrible thing posted on the internet.”

A potentially just as jarring juxtaposition comes from a fact that has been exercising the media ever since Channel 4 originally announced the project, and that was the location. Civil War Oxfordshire was filmed entirely on location in South Africa, and the press didn’t like it one bit. Flannery says they have his sympathy.

“When they said they were going to recce for locations in South Africa, I was horrified. But they showed me the locations and I was completely won over: entire oak valleys of the kind you wouldn’t find in England any more. And no electricity pylons or planes flying overhead. Mind you, we had to rely on CGI to take out the mountains.”

The shoot lasted three and a half months, but The Devil’s Whore had taken more than 14 years to get to that stage. “Exactly the same amount of time it took Our Friends in the North to finally get filmed,” says Flannery. “My co-writer, the Oxford historian Martine Brant, had the original idea. She was working on a thesis at the time about wicked women of the 17th century, and Tessa Ross, then at the BBC but now at Channel 4, teamed us up, and we spent the whole of 1994 travelling across England in Cromwell’s footsteps.”

Flannery also took the time to read the Bible. “It was my first port of call for the language of the day,” he says. “I annotated the King James Bible for myself. That’s the book they mostly had in common, and those who couldn’t read were having it read to them all the time. All the imagery and their way of expression came from it.

“After I’d researched it for a year, it was commissioned as an eight-part serial, and I wrote the first two episodes, but it was expensive and the BBC lost faith in it. It stayed in limbo for years. I thought about writing it as a trilogy for the RSC, but then Ross found herself at Channel 4 and asked me what I would most like to do, and I said it was still The Devil’s Whore. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You’ll get so many millions of pounds to do it, and it has to be a maximum of four hours.’”

Brant based her thesis on the gallows speeches of 17th-century women hanged at Tyburn. “They were hanged for often petty offences,” she says. “Most of them were pitifully misunderstood and persecuted for not conforming to a patriarchal system. I live in a 16th-century house just outside Oxford where Cromwell stayed during the siege of Oxford and I became fascinated by the idea of a nobly born woman in the Civil War who stepped outside the conventions of her estate and found her own voice amid the chaos of the English revolution.”

Both Brand and Flannery stress the importance of these tumultuous years to our basic civil rights, liberties currently in danger of erosion. Says Brant: “We have a collective amnesia today about these transformational years in which our basic liberties were won: the sovereignty of Parliament, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, religious toleration… in short, freedom from tyranny.”

Flannery continues the theme. “All those ideas from the Civil War survived. In Chartism, in votes for women, all sorts of things… even bringing in decimal coinage, which was suggested at the time. We have been done a disservice by being told that this period was an interregnum, that the world went wrong for 10 years and then was put right again when the King came back. Actually, it was the most exciting political time in our history.”

‘The Devil’s Whore’ begins on Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 4

HOW THE CIVIL WAR HAS BEEN DRAMATISED

Cromwell (1970)
One of the most exciting periods in our history turned into an overlong bore. The counter-intuitive casting didn’t help, with hell-raiser Richard Harris as the Puritan disciplinarian Cromwell and the fastidious Alec Guinness as the flamboyant King Charles I.

To Kill a King (2003)
The casting (Tim Roth as a Tarantinoesque Cromwell and Rupert Everett acting up a storm as a foppish King Charles I) makes more sense here, and there’s a brave stab at the political complexities, but this look at the four years leading up to King Charles’s execution drags long before the axe comes down.

Witchfinder General (1968)
The extraordinary final film of the talented 23-year-old wunderkind Michael Reeves (who died of a drug overdose before its release) was evocatively shot in an autumnal Suffolk. A bleak and brutal cult classic starring Vincent Price as a pious Civil war opportunist finding Catholic witches among the peasantry.

The Moonraker (1958)
This lively British costume drama realised the Civil War’s swashbuckler potential. Long before his Inspector Wexford years, George Baker leapt about the screen as the eponymous royalist fugitive. It also boasts the most unlikely of all screen Cromwells: John le Mesurier.

By the Sword Divided (1983)
Until ‘The Devil’s Whore’, this has been television’s only concerted stab at dramatising the revolution, using that staple of the TV soap opera: families at war with themselves. The royalist Lacey family is split when the eldest daughter marries a Parliamentarian.

Blackadder: the Cavalier Years (1998)
This 1988 Comic Relief Special casts Stephen Fry as a King Charles I whom Van Dyck would have struggled to recognise, but with Warren Clarke rather more persuasive as Cromwell.

source: The Independent, November 14, 2008, by Gerard Gilbert

Channel 4’s new four-part costume drama, The Devil’s Whore, is full of wild storms, furious winds and camera angles so eccentric they make it look like chaos has come to Earth.

The story’s genuinely new: this particular trip back in time isn’t, for once, a literary adaptation. And it’s full of all that crazy weather because its talented director, Marc Munden (The Mark of Cain), is trying to conjure a sense of impending apocalypse.

The Devil’s Whore, which starts on Wednesday, is a tale set in the English Civil War about a fictional woman, Angelica Fanshawe, and how her life intersects with the real events and key figures of the time, including Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

To many who witnessed this period in British history, apocalyptic was just how it felt. In the 1640s fighting engulfed the country and the rule of law collapsed: it was the end of the world as people knew it.

“It’s the crucible for the European revolutions,” says scriptwriter Peter Flannery, who also wrote the BBC’s Bafta-winning Our Friends in the North and has created this new story in collaboration with historian Martine Brant. “It radicalised a lot of people and left a legacy of ideas which we’re still battling out. We might have ended up with a proto-Soviet system.”

For one person, of course, it was a disaster. The king of England is a central figure in Flannery’s drama. “Charles I was a man accumulating the skills of a renaissance prince just when his kingdom was falling into a Balkanisation,” says Peter Capaldi, whose Charles is gaunt and stuttering – viewers will be pushed to recognise this actor as the vituperative Malcolm Tucker from the BBC’s political satire The Thick of It. The part is a gift in dramatic terms, Capaldi says. “Charles was a fascinating character, both tragic and holy.”

advertisementThe Devil’s Whore has the pace – and the occasional fruity scene – of a historical romp. But it’s better written and has a more original, sumptuous look to it than the likes of BBC2’s lamentable take on Henry VIII, The Tudors. “Sometimes you look at a shot and think, ‘Oh, that looks like a painting,’” says Capaldi. “But what do we know about framing and lighting that is greater than Vermeer or Rembrandt?”

Beyond Capaldi, there’s an impressive haul of acting talent in the cast. Angelica Fanshawe is played by newcomer Andrea Riseborough, whose impersonation of Margaret Thatcher in BBC4’s Long Walk to Finchley impressed critics, but whose chalk-white skin, heavily lidded eyes and soaring forehead make her look like she’s walked straight out of a Van Dyck painting. An effervescent 27-year-old, she’s also feisty enough for the fearless Angelica. “Strong women like Angelica were ten-a-penny during that time,” she asserts with a pout, when it’s suggested her character’s ballsy-ness isn’t quite what you’d expect of the period.

Also in the cast are The Wire’s Dominic West as a glowering Oliver Cromwell, Life on Mars’s John Simm as the malevolent mercenary Edward Sexby and Michael Fassbender, who plays Bobby Sands in the new film Hunger, as the mysterious radical Thomas Rainsborough. West voices the sentiment of many of the male actors when he says what fun it was filming the piece – which was done in South Africa, for budgetary reasons. “Sword fights, charging about on horseback – it was brilliant. Exactly what you always wanted to do since the age of six.”

Where The Devil’s Whore was filmed may not have been authentic but pains have been taken in its historical research. Martine Brant, for instance, suggested the seemingly far-fetched incident when, on her wedding day, Angelica strips off her garter and flings it to a gaggle of men from a contemporary tradition at the time (pictured left). “Whoever got the garter got bragging rights,” she explains.

Flannery says he used the Bible for help with the script’s language. “One of the first things I did in my research was read the Bible. That’s the only book they all knew,” he says. It’s responsible for some surprisingly modern-sounding lines, too. “There’s a scene in the first episode where Sexby talks of there being no one left to kill in Germany and says, ‘There’s not one left to piss against the wall.’ That phrase is straight from the Bible.”

Flannery and Brant are also working with an advantage. The Civil War is barely ever dramatised on the small screen. There was By the Sword Divided made by the BBC over 20 years ago, a drama “so ropey”, says Flannery, that “there is only one exterior scene, where a wheel falls off a carriage as it’s going up a hill – and they didn’t even bother to reshoot it. The whole thing must have cost 14 shillings and sixpence.”

Flannery can’t comprehend the period’s neglect. “I can’t for the life of me understand it,” he says. “Also, for a writer, it’s the most glorious landscape for love stories and action.”

The Devil’s Whore will appear fresh, then, at the very least. And, it seems, Channel 4 was lucky to snap it up at all. Flannery says he feels so messianic about his subject matter that, “If this production had fallen through I personally would have written it as a trilogy for the Royal Shakespeare Company.”

The Devil’s Whore is on Channel 4 on Wednesday, 19 November at 9.00pm

source: The Telegraph, November 15, 2008