Keeping it in the family

Nancy Banks-Smith
Guardian

Monday March 6, 2000

It occurred to me during the longueurs of Gormenghast that what that place needed was a thorough bottoming, as my grannie would say. Given a halfway decent daily, two elderly ladies should have been discovered starving to death in the west wing sooner rather than later. Of course, good help is hard to keep with cats, owls and actors all over the place. Dorothy Parker's maid, encountering an alligator in the bath, left a stiff note. "I cannot work in a house where there are alligators. I would have told you this before but I didn't suppose the question would ever come up." It came up in spades at Gormenghast.

The mansion to which Charles Fairfield eloped with off-the-shoulder Alice, his virginal bride, in The Wyvern Mystery (BBC 1) was just such a cavernous warren. His father, the wicked squire (Derek Jacobi wearing a sort of thatch) called it "that rundown piece of misery". Just the place to stash a forceful French first wife with a bad skin condition. There was a housekeeper, but very much in the boot-faced Manderley mould, given to veiled hints about family scandals. Georgian gentry evidently had as much elbow room in their lives as in their houses.

There is a great deal of galloping about in all directions, particularly by the thatched squire ("You'll not marry her, if I have to hunt you both down like animals! Aye, run, run!") which gives no-one time to stop and ask, like Arthur Daley, "What is occurring, Terence?". What seems to be occurring is that the forceful French wife is suffering from some disfiguring disease I can't quite put my finger on and, in any case, I'd much rather not. Blind, malign and trailing black bombazine, she haunts Alice's dreams and, in the well-worth-waiting-for last minutes of the first episode, crashes though her bedroom wall, like a secret, black and midnight missile. You cannot but feel that Aisling O'Sullivan, moulting magnificently like a sick eagle, is having a high old time. I don't know Sheridan Le Fanu - not to speak to, that is - which makes the whole thing much jollier and less predictable.

Those, beside snakes, who enjoy the sensation of their skin crawling can indulge themselves in Bloodlines (BBC 2). A chartered surveyor from Bognor - and they don't come much more staid than that - has spent 17 obsessive years investigating his great-great-great-grandfather, the public hangman William Calcroft, and expects to spend 17 more "putting flesh on the skeleton", as he phrased it - for he is not overburdened with humour.

And meanwhile, back in Coronation Street (ITV), Ken Barlow, who is writing a local history ("The truth is out there, Deirdre!"), has dug up, so to speak, the fact that Fred Elliott's grandfather was hung for murder. As Fred is a butcher, this could reflect adversely on the sale of Elliott's prime pork pies ("You won't get better! Ah say, you won't get better!"). People are so... well, they are, aren't they?

It seems to have escaped the locals' attention that Coronation Street is cobbled with the stiffening corpses of the slaughtered. There was, let's think, Emily's husband gunned down in a robbery... Gail's stabbed outside a nightclub... Natalie's killed in a brawl with drug dealers... Deirdre's knifed beside the sour canal... and Rita's flattened by a tram while chasing her across Blackpool Prom with fell intent and a loaded firearm. If Ken called his book The Curse Of Coronation Street, he could make a killing. Run coach trips. Sell black armbands. Lay on a pork pie buffet.

If you can't afford the best barrister to represent you, then at least make sure you get the best actor to play you - for that is how the world will remember you. Justice In Wonderland (BBC2)

was a dramatised version of the Neil Hamilton vs Al Fayed libel trial, punctuated with "whoomphs!" like a racing car as it accelerated past the less gripping bits. All the protagonists should be pleased with their sympathetic portrayal, particularly Charles Dance's Hamilton, emotion played almost entirely with the eyelids, and Kenneth Cranham's Carman QC, more fatal than in the flesh.

It felt as ruthless and relentless as Calcroft's speciality, a public hanging. If the condemned man lingered, Calcroft swung on his boots.

"The guy has a heavy English accent. He could be a fruitcake." - Walter Matthau in The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (BBC 2).