Television

in ‘I’m a total buckworm!’ – or drawing as ‘drawring’, or school as ‘skewl’.

I struck off Lewis Goodall when he covered the story of the baby who died because of the ‘mow’d’ on the walls of his home. ‘MOW’D,’ Goodall added loudly.

The Alastair Campbell/ Rory Stewart podcast, The Rest Is Politics, sold out its show at the Albert Hall. As a regular attender at Steve Richards’s politics shows at King’s Place, I can understand this. The Campbell/Stewart podcast has huge appeal.

As the BBC rounds off its centenary year, I can’t imagine what Lord Reith would say about the BBC having a ‘disinformation and social-media reporter’ in Marianna Spring. Her series Disaster Trolls was horrifying. It exposed how easily duped social-media adherents are, and how vile and vicious the Twittersphere is. Bad for the blood pressure.

But I am determined to greet 2023 with optimism. Lord Reith wanted us to be entertained. So hooray for Martin Jarvis (who writes about Twelfth Night on page 26). He’s giving us a Christmas week of Just William. And on New Year’s Eve, he is broadcasting, with his usual repertory cast, an Alan Ayckbourn play, Bedroom Farce, set in three bedrooms – and wonderfully farcical.

Lord Reith wanted us to be informed. It was on the BBC that I heard the energy-saving advice to switch off an electric kettle the nanosecond it bubbles. Don’t wait till it switches itself off. This saves Polly – when she puts the electric kettle on – 27 per cent of the 5p it costs. It will encourage wiser Pollys to put their old whistling kettle on the gas stove (1p).

Alas, we have lost the most sensitive scourge of modern inanities. Andrew Nickolds was the co-writer (with Christopher Douglas, who plays Ed) of Ed Reardon’s Week – for The Oldie, as well as Radio 4.

Remember when Ping, his inane Sloane agent, got Ed a job as writer-inresidence on a train, claiming he was responsible for the infuriating slogan ‘See it, say it, sorted’? Over lunches with Douglas, Nickolds spotted the worst of contemporary idiotspeak.

Andrew also wrote perceptive DVD reviews for The Oldie. RIP.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

There is nothing shocking about the Netflix adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Those viewers who have not read the novel by DH Lawrence will wonder what all the fuss was about. The original story was sold in a bowdlerised version until 1960, when Penguin Books brought out their unexpurgated edition.

It was a sex-education manual, really. Mellors, a world-class crasher, bangs on in a Nottinghamshire dialect about the importance of the words c**t and f**k. He gives the male and female genitals pet names (John Thomas and Lady Jane). He explains that a man’s genius lies in his ‘balls’. And when a woman climaxes, he says, there is a tinkling of little bells, and ‘warm f***ing’ will repair the world’s evils, but only if simultaneous orgasm is achieved.

This version stars Emma Corrin (Princess Diana in seasons three and four of The Crown) as Constance Chatterley and Jack O’Connell as the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.

David Magee, who wrote the screenplay for this revised version, has cleaned up the language, stripped away the soapbox preaching and turned the story inside out. It is now Lady C who plays first fiddle while an essentially mute Mellors keeps up with her demands. The result, while not at all what Lawrence meant, is a great improvement on the book.

The photography is gorgeous, the score, written by Isabella Summers of Florence + The Machine, is superb, the casting is perfect, and the acting is flawless. Mellors, no longer an articulated phallus, becomes a complex and sensitive class-conscious man, while Lady C finds herself in a genuinely tricky situation. The sex scenes – particularly those in which the couple thread bluebells into each other’s public hair and dance naked in the rain – are embarrassing but at least they are not, like most sex scenes on television, extraneous to the plot.

So now that we’ve had the events from the perspective of the frustrated wife, how about giving us Sir Clifford Chatterley’s point of view?

Am I the only person who feels sorry for the cuckolded husband (played by Matthew Duckett) who returns from the Great War paralysed from the waist downwards? Is it not a bit ‘disabling’ to turn the poor man, who is never less than chipper about his situation, into the villain of the piece? One look at his motorised wheelchair and Constance turns pale as her smock. If Wragby Hall, the Chatterley pile, is an open prison for Lady C, it’s a lifetime of solitary confinement for Sir Clifford.

Being a Lawrence obsessive, I was delighted to find that season two of The White Lotus is set in Taormina, the Sicilian town where Lawrence settled after the war. As in season one, the events take place during a week’s vacation in a five-star hotel, where a gay manager is pushed to the edge of sanity by the entitled guests.

If season one was crazily fresh, season two is formula. We kick off, once more, with a dead body and a flashback. The important conversations take place in deep water, and the most morally ambiguous characters pretend to read books on the beach.

This hotel’s guests include, again, the priceless Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), now married to Greg, whom she met in the White Lotus in Hawaii. F Murray Abraham plays Bert Di Grasso, a womanising grandfather, Michael Imperiolo (The Sopranos) his sexaddicted son, and Adam DiMarco the Gen Z grandson, Albie. There are two contrasting couples: Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Cameron (Theo James), who apparently never argue (‘What is there to argue about, anyway?’); and Harper and Ethan (Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe), who are having marital problems.

Season two is largely a homage to Italian cinema. A scene in episode three where Harper, on the steps of Noto Cathedral, is surrounded by horny men is a recreation of the same scene in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, whose star, Monica Vitti, is the figure Tanya now tries to emulate.