Mary & George review: The life of greedy and ruthless Mary Villiers gets the bawdy period drama treatment

Sunday teatime on BBC1 in the 1970s and 80s invariably meant a solidly faithful, mostly studio-bound adaptation of Dickens, chopped into 25-minute episodes. Worthy, improving and dependably dull.

Literary period dramas were also big business on Sunday nights ­— perhaps some Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope or one of the Brontës — but bigger of budget and starrier of cast than the early-evening ones.

Still, though: there was never anything so radical as to upset the purists. Something had to change sooner or later, and it did in 1995 when Andrew Davies’s version of Pride and Prejudice gave the world Colin Firth in a wet shirt.

A sex symbol was born (much to the actor’s embarrassment, apparently) and so was the notion that period dramas didn’t always have to be stuffy; they could be racy and raunchy too.

A bloke in a soggy shirt might seem laughably tame these days, but the genie was out of the bottle and there was no putting it back in.

Fast-forward three decades (yikes!) and look where we are. The period drama is on a sex-mad romp. There’s Netflix’s Bridgerton — aka fake Austen, with added T&A.

There’s Sanditon — aka a sliver of real Austen (she never finished the novel) and a lot of Andrew Davies, with added tits and ass.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurdist period black comedy The Favourite, an Oscar-winner in 2018, provided the template for TV series The Great, a bawdy, sweary, satirical alternate history of the rise of Catherine the Great.

Coming so late in a cycle that’s most likely nearing its end anyway, seven-part miniseries Mary & George (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, March 5) can’t help but look stale and derivative.

The spectacle of women in elaborate period costumes effing, beeing and ceeing at one another has lost its novelty value.

The credits say it’s “inspired by” Benjamin Wooley’s non-fiction book The King’s Assassin, about the affair between King James I and the royal favourite, George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, in the 1600s.

This is another way of saying that series creator DC Moore lets his imagination run riot. Mary & George is effectively the story of a pimp and a prostitute.

The pimp is Mary Villiers, a legendarily greedy and ruthless schemer. She’s played by the great Julianne Moore, doing a good English accent. The prostitute is her son George (Nicholas Galatzine).

Mary and George - Official Trailer

In a flashback to George’s birth, Mary looks at him and says: “What do I name you? Should I even bother? Perhaps I should have left you on the floor to rot.”

Maternal Mary is not. George is an immediate disappointment because he’s her second son and, like his sibling, who has an intellectual disability, stands to inherit nothing from their vile father (Simon Russell Beale), who dies in the opening minutes.

George grows up to be a drip, moaning and moping around.

He has two things going for him: he’s usefully bisexual and he’s ridiculously handsome, with cheekbones that could slice cheese

He has two things going for him: he’s usefully bisexual and he’s ridiculously handsome, with cheekbones that could slice cheese at 20 paces.

“If I were a man and I looked like you, I would rule the f***ing planet,” Mary tells him, which is probably the nicest thing a mother could say to a son.

Two weeks after her horrible husband is put in the ground, Mary remarries, to gruff but nice Northerner Sir Thomas Compton (Sean Gilder).

She packs weedy George off to France for some refinement, which means learning the essential skills of a gentleman — fencing, riding and orgying.

George returns a changed man and is ready to face the challenge his social-climbing mother has set him, which is to burrow his way into the affections, and the bed, of King James (Tony Curran), who’s married but likes to surround himself with a coterie of young men nicknamed “the Well-Hung Crew”.

But he’ll have to supplant the current favourite royal toyboy, the Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson).

Mary, meanwhile, is cooking up a few more plots with her latest lover, brothel keeper Sandie (Niamh Algar).

Mary & George would have been fresh a few years ago. Now, it feels like old, if immaculately-made, hat.

All episodes of Mary & George are available to watch on Sky Atlantic from 9pm on Tuesday, March 5