TV review: The Mystery of Edwin Drood | The Rules of Drinking | My Daughter The Teenage Nudist

By Aidan Smith
Published on Sunday 15 January 2012 07:20

PICTURE the scene: a forward planning meeting to decide what we’re going to watch in the grim early weeks of the new year. Remembering the cold and snowbound start to 2011, a TV trendy pushes his clear-framed specs up his nose and says: “No-one will venture outside until mid-Feb. Give ’em sex, booze and Dickens!”

Instructively, programmes about sex because the birthrate always soars when there’s been a bad winter. Meanly, shows about booze because in January we shouldn’t be touching it (except the latest top medical advice is that a month off is bad for you). And, scoldingly, Dickens dramatisations because if we really think things couldn’t get any worse, we should have been around in 1870.

But guess what? The white hell hasn’t materialised, at least not yet, so everyone’s been able to get out and sign up for improving nightclasses, so missing How Sex Works, Websex: What’s The Harm?, Confessions Of A Sex Addict, etc. I was completing my combined zumba and techy drawing course (intermediate) so you’ll have to locate those on catch-up – you filthy lot – but I did see The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.

Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving Drood unfinished. Gwyneth Hughes picked up the challenge of rounding off the tale: unmasking the murderer, making the “victim” come back to life (he wasn’t the one killed), and having no fewer than three Drood boys briefly get acquainted as brothers (a brood of Droods, verily) before the one we’d come to know as John Jasper climbed the cathedral for what Dickens would never have called – and more fool him – a flyin’ heidie.

This was sex ’n’ booze ’n’ Dickens all by itself. Lust ’n’ drugs ’n’ Dickens, for sure. Choirmaster Jasper (Matthew Rhys – bonkers, brilliant) was addicted to opium and Rosa Bud (Tamzin Merchant), the pretty orphan girl promised to another urchin by their fathers. This was Drood: a bit of a prat. Rosa tolerated Drood (“I can’t kiss you, Eddie, because I have a pear drop in my mouth”) but not Jasper and his infernal leching, which was capable of burning holes in parchment and even stout hats.

With mucky kids, warty crones, Alun Armstrong, a dark and stormy night, Rory Kinnear and the twins no-one knew about (just arrived from Ceylon) at the dramatist’s disposal, you might suppose that any idiot could have completed the yarn, even the idiots who suggested the vajazzling storylines for TOWIE. But the dialogue which I’m guessing Hughes penned – “Oh sweet witch, keep your love. I’ll gladly take this pretty rage instead” – was every bit as rip-snorting as that of the first half, and I applaud her stitchwork. At times Drood could be chaotic – maybe Dickens was on opium, possibly we as viewers should have been – but that added to its charm.

The Rules Of Drinking investigated a century of bevvying and reached the shock conclusion that we’re no more pissed than 100 years ago. During the First World War, the country was only saved from total prohibition by Glasgow’s communists and the fear they’d stage a revolution. Not taking any chances in the Second World War, Winston Churchill declared that every soldier should receive a weekly ration of eight pints before anyone else got a drop.

There was a swift return to Glasgow, and not just for a swift half. A veteran barmaid in the city, also described as a comedienne (aren’t they all?), recalled the hit from mixing Babycham with brandy: “You speak Spanish and forget your life.” We moved, through archive clips, to London and its debutantes (“One ends up speaking the most enormous amount of drivel”), then on to Manchester for the 1,472nd re-run of George Best pouring champagne into a giant pyramid of glasses, before we were back in Glesca Toon for the kickboxing Celtic and Rangers fans who ended forever the right to lug lager by the 24-pack onto the terraces. There was nothing the commies could do about that.

Now, where were we? Ah yes, bare bums. Young exhibitionists are stealing naturists’ clothes. They’re stripping off for body fascism protests on bicycles, but when British Naturism (known as “BN”, a bit too close to BNP) tries to recruit them, they come over all coy.

My Daughter The Teenage Nudist wasn’t so far removed from those early 1960s nudge-nudge wink-wink films showing bad tennis in the buff, and naturists seem fated to always get a bad press. For a racier paper than this one, I persuaded a nudist colony in Pencaitland, East Lothian, to give me weekend membership on condition I wrote up their activities fairly. The headline over the pictures of bad tennis, alas, was “Crinkly Bottom”.

• The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, BBC2, Tuesday and Wednesday, 9pm

• The Rules Of Drinking, BBC4, Wednesday, 9pm

• My Daughter The Teenage Nudist, Channel 4, Thursday, 10pm

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