It was, perhaps, entirely predictable that in the days before A Very English Scandal began on BBC One, certain people were mad keen to talk about the events that inspired it. A particular kind of newspaper columnist is always waiting for the moment when he can regurgitate chunks of the hefty political biographies he has read, polish to a gleam the hoariest of his tearoom anecdotes. What was far more surprising was the way that the rest of us were seemingly so avid for it, too.
Some 4.6 million people tuned into the first episode of Russell T Davies’s drama about a now half-forgotten Liberal politician whose secret gay life got him into so much trouble. On the same night, by comparison, only 3.8 million viewers watched DCI John Barnaby on ITV investigate the murder of a musician who had been strangled with a violin string. Even as someone who could not loathe Midsomer and its environs more if she tried – such a strangely violent place and yet, metaphorically speaking, so outlandishly safe – this struck me as rather amazing.
At first, I put the collective enthusiasm down to a pretty assiduous publicity campaign on the part of the BBC and to the star power of Hugh Grant, an actor more people adore, especially since Paddington 2, than you might imagine. In trailers for the series, he had looked so charming and wicked: a combination of dash and menace it’s hard to imagine any other actor delivering half so well. Perhaps, I thought, it doesn’t matter a jot if most of us don’t know, or don’t care, who Joe Grimond was, not when you’ve got Grant creeping along landings with a large pot of Vaseline in his hand. In the end, sex is sex and blackmail is blackmail (Jeremy Thorpe, in case you’ve been living on the moon, eventually stood trial in 1979 for conspiracy to murder his former lover, Norman Scott, a man who simply refused to be quiet.) Throw in Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings and Monica Dolan to boot – has ever a series been so well cast? – and perhaps your audience will stick to your script as if to glue. Even a script that touches on the Orpington byelection of 1962.
But there’s more to it than this. Three weeks on and I cannot remember the last time a final episode of a short and distinctly non-grandiose standalone series was so awaited. It has worked where so many historical dramas have failed. Why? Well, perhaps it’s this. Unlike many of them, A Very English Scandal comes with no hint of nostalgia; for all that it relishes, say, excessive moustaches, too-snug flares and cod in parsley sauce (the dish you’ll see Thorpe’s wife, Marion, serve him as they sit down for a Very Serious Talk), it does not long for them and the old certainties they represent. But nor – and this is the more important point – does it set itself up, smugly and patronisingly, in opposition to the past. However glad Davies is that attitudes to homosexuality have changed, he is not interested only in proving how hidebound some, though not all, people used to be (as if we didn’t know already). In other words, he understands that even the relatively recent past was at once both bewilderingly different to our own time and, at least when it comes to the working of the human heart, absolutely and recognisably the same.
This sounds so basic and yet you come across it so rarely on television, in film, even in novels. I’m not only talking about the cliched visual shorthand that has every woman of the 50s with a padlock on her knickers and every man of the 60s with a giggling dolly bird on each arm. Either programme-makers are, in the dread cause of “relevance”, so determined to shrink the gap between then and now that it ceases to exist at all (see ITV’s incontinently emotional Victoria) or they render our forebears so freakishly corseted, you wonder how your grandparents – your parents, in my case – ever managed to get undressed at night, let alone to procreate (see the current film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach).
Davies, though, writes with a flexibility – a better word might be generosity – that you will not find even in dramas set in contemporary times, which aim for grittiness and hyperrealism. Since everyone knows, or can very easily find out, what happened to Thorpe following his trial, it’s probably permitted for me to write a little about the way Davies depicts, in the final episode, the politician’s marriage to Marion Stein, the concert pianist who was his second wife and who nursed him until her death in 2014 (he had Parkinson’s disease). Of course their union was, on his side if not hers, a convenience. When they married in 1973, he was a gay, widowed politician with a small son to bring up and a secret he needed to keep buried. Davies, though, refuses to portray the relationship as a sham – or, at least, not only as a sham.
Marion’s tender pragmatism on discovering the truth of her husband’s sexual life, her shock subsiding softly and quickly into protectiveness, is met on his side with an affection that is no less real for having been born of a certain ruthless expediency. Here is understanding and gratitude: love by any other name, even if it is not the kind of love that would have been available to Thorpe had he been born two decades later. What I mean is: here is an emotional shade of grey in a world (ours, not theirs) where so many things are only ever portrayed in stark black and white.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist