TV Review: Parade’s End, Waterloo Road, Waterloo Road

Parade’s End BBC2, Friday, 9pmWaterloo Road BBC1, Thursday, 8pmThe Revolution Will Be Televised BBC3, Wednesday, 10pm

THERE’S something called Funny Fortnight on Channel 4 right now. Ignoring the question of whether this absolves the ­network from having to be ­humorous the other 50 weeks of the year, I’ll be very surprised if the season contains anything funnier than the scene halfway through the first episode of the BBC’s new frockbuster Parade’s End where the central characters sat down to breakfast with the vicar.

Round the table were Benedict Cumberbatch, playing a man only slightly less heid-burstingly brainy than Sherlock Holmes; Stephen Graham as his best friend from Cambridge sporting fine whiskers, literary pretensions and a keening Morningside accent; the suffragette who’d earlier put the chaps off their gowff with a prototype Pussy Riot protest; her mad mother, parked behind the table flowers; some other old bat; the tittering curate, prune poised on his fork; the minister’s wife, soon to be glimpsed in post-kedgeree frolics with Graham – and the Rev Rufus Sewell.

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Posho big-hoose dramas would be a whole lot more tolerable, as far as I’m concerned, if they didn’t try to hide their loonies in the cellar. At first the Right Doolally Rev suspected his male guests were doctors, two being needed to certify insanity. Noting Graham’s peely-walliness, he boomed: “I detect the pallor of self-abuse!” He was even ruder in Latin, which only Pussy Riot and Cucumber-patch could understand, and was about to be the most profane a man of the cloth had ever been before morning ministries when his nurse landed a swift kidney punch and hurried him back to the cellar.

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, about an anguished ­Edwardian aristocrat, Chris­topher Tietjens, is what’s called an unread masterpiece and was probably reckoned to be unfilmable. But Tom Stoppard has boiled down the quartet of novels into a tangy kedgeree indeed. It’s a thousand times funnier than Downton Abbey. And sexier. And just generally involving. I already care deeply about ­Tietjens’ son, packed off to wet the bed at an aunt’s when his mother bolted to France with a man called Potty. Heck, I even care deeply about the cedar tree at his family pile, each branch holding a toy or other cherished object.

Tietjens is a corking part, a man in quiet torment over his country going to pot and his wife going to Potty, and Cumberbatch does it proud. “Soft!” he hissed in self-reproach, but Sylvia (Rebecca Hall, equally brilliant) is hard, hard, hard. When she threw the finest ­china at him, she shrieked: “He’s making corrections in the Encyclopaedia Britannica! If I’d killed him no jury would convict.” You wonder how the socialite and the statistician ever got together and you ­desperately want him to run off with the suffragette, for them to consummate in Latin, but, as they say in romcoms, it’s complicated. “There’s something glorious about her,” ­Tietjens said of Sylvia, who in turn and despite her flightiness finds his intellect irresistible.

From the sublime to yet another series of Waterloo Road. This used to be a guilty pleasure, the comic I’d sneak-read under my desk for those moments when the worthier stuff bored me, but recently it’s got too silly and lost too many of its sparkiest characters, so I hardly watched the last run. I had to see this, though: the big flit to Scotland for the reopening as an independent school.

A large chunk of the Beeb moves from London to Greater Manchester; WR, already there, and much concerned with the odd boy, moves to Greenock. Of course it does. For the beak, this was a homecoming, but if he thought he was escaping the knife attacks, a disturbed lad was soon thrusting a cleaver in his face. Thus another crazy WR day ended with a 999 call and the staff hitting the pub to get reeking – standard stuff. Was I expecting more of a Scottish flavour to proceedings? Perhaps. Does the Scottish alcoholic who’s just joined the teaching team not count? No. Is it a bit sad that we give the world a fine education system and get Grantly Budgen in return? Yes. Hopefully, though, the show will adapt to the new surroundings – first days are always tricky – and rediscover its edge.

When a BBC3 continuity wummin says, “We’re so excited to be showing this,” what do you normally do – run a mile? Me too. But the new satirical swipe The Revolution Will Be Televised got off to a fantastic start with Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein – kind of sons of Dennis Pennis – scurrying about with hand-held mics for stunning pops at bankers, MI6 and all the usual suspects. Best was the campaign for Tony Blair’s sainthood: “He performs miracles. He sleeps in a bed with Cherie Blair. He turns an after-dinner speech into £100,000, like that.” «

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