TV review: Room at the Top | Campus | The Crimson Petal and the White

Published on Friday 8 April 2011 19:20

ROOM AT THE TOP BBC4 Thursday, 9pm CAMPUS Channel 4 Tuesday, 10pm THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE BBC2 Wednesday, 9pm

SOCIAL mobility and further education are both hot hot hot right now, so with stunningly good timing we have a new university-set comedy and one of the great angry-young-man novels transferred to the goggle-box.

Already Room At The Top and Campus are locked in an almighty struggle over who can claim the title of being TV's Most Sex-Crazed Man.

If you've read John Braine's book or seen the movie with Lawrence Harvey as Joe Lampton you'll remember that it all ends messily for the anti-hero of Room At The Top. But in the first of this two-parter he was eyeing up everything in a skirt, including a landlady old enough to be his mum. Joe had left behind blue-collar Dufton ("Dirty, dead") and was making his way in white-collar Warnley where everything was better, especially in the middle-class bit known as "T'top" where he'd taken a room.

I loved those kitchen-sinkers, the books and the films - Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Billy Liar etc, and it still bothers me that Tom Courtenay didn't jump on that train and follow Julie Christie to the ends of the earth or at least the ends of her stockings. I was hoping for a whole season of oop-north classics on BBC4, but it seems we'll have to make do with the story, set just after the war, of the relentlessly randy, chippy, striving, reinventing Lampton, a man who grades women from 12 up to 1 based on the income they expect their husbands to earn.

Harvey was Lithuanian-born and looked the part of an outsider. Here Lampton ("Grade 7: 600 a year, deputy and assistant, head group") is played by Matthew McNulty, who isn't outside anything; rather he's very much inside the club where TV gets all its actors these days: dark good looks, square-jawed, rather pretty and often seeming a good few years younger than the men they portray, though this could be down to advances in skincare. Still, his performance is better than grade 7; I'd give it 3.

Warnley's pretensions – the folly on the hill, Chekhov being namechecked in civil service pep-talks, the am-dram – are deftly evoked. In his first read-through with the weekend thesps, Joe mispronounced "brazier" as "brassiere". Then again, maybe brassiere was what he meant. His older woman was soon shedding hers, quickly followed by his younger one. Maxine Peake is a sensuous Alice, who chastises Lampton for being so "bloody provincial" and uses the c-word. I don't think that was in the book and similarly Jenna-Louise Coleman makes for a much less innocent Susan, though I'm not complaining.

I could complain that Joseph Millson as the libidinous lecturer in Campus has a standard-issue look. Specifically, this would be a complaint about him not being mad-eyed and Zapata-moustached like the original libidinous lecturer, Anthony Sher in The History Man. But what's the point? Better just to enjoy this six-parter from the team behind Green Wing, although I've yet to find anyone else who likes it.

What does that say about almost everyone I know? That they all went to uni whereas I didn't. Maybe I'm too quick to laugh at portrayals of varsity life where the head of the English department sunbathes on the R of Kirke (the uni's name) spelled out in big concrete letters and declares: "It's like the best vending-machine imaginable. Every September another crop of gorgeous, impressionable girls drops into the drawer at the bottom. I don't even have to press D6 or reach into the perspex flap to grab them." But the truth is I envy my friends their debauchness and, just occasionally, their degrees. Like Joe Lampton, I can be right chippy.

Not that Campus is perfect. It's terribly pleased with its own daring in that very Channel 4 way. I mean, is "vagina" still funny, the eighth time you hear it? Wouldn't it have been wise to save up some of the vaginas to counteract a possible mid-series audience drift? Because isn't there a very real danger the show has over-vagina-ed itself after just one week? I can't help wondering if the late, great Johnny Speight was watching, up there in Comedy Heaven. The Sex And The Sitcom doc the previous week dug up old footage of the Till Death Us Do Part writer bargaining with "four 'bloodys' for two 'tits'" to get his scripts past the TV beaks.

The appallingly racist vice-chancellor in Campus is encouraging his lecturers to write books, to help attract "the foreigns". The Crimson Petal And The White is much concerned with writing, too, and in a suppurating Victorian London gives us a disinherited perfume heir who has the barnet ("It's supposed to look like Matthew Arnold's") but not yet the book, a prostitute called Sugar keeping a diary of her clients to "wreak revenge on every pompous, trembling worm", and a mad wife who can barely manage the spidery scribble "Must get out more".

Chris O'Dowd, Romola Garai and Amanda Hale are all terrific but I fear I'm laughing at this dramatisation of the Michel Faber bestseller at moments when I shouldn't. Oh, and there's far more sex than writing but, like Speight must have done all the time, I fear I've used up my permitted quota and so can't describe it in detail.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on April 10, 2011