Daily Mail, 11 November 1994, by Marcus Berkmann
"Such a trial for us all - The Trial of Lord Lucan (ITV)"
-----------------------------------------------------------

SOMEONE has to do something about drama-documentaries before 
we are overrun with the things. Perhaps a brief moratorium 
could be declared. Would 10,000 years be enough? 

Lord Lucan is lying in his cell. Enter lovable cockney 
prison guard. 'You could 'ave some readin' matter if you 
like, Lord Lucan. We 'ave books, papers . . .' Short pause, 
for his Lordship to look weary and urbane. 'Do you have a 
pack of cards?' 

Of course, none of this happened, and even if it had, I 
doubt that God the Great Scriptwriter would have lumbered 
his players with lines as awful as these. 

*The Trial Of Lord Lucan* was a grand exercise in 'what if?' 
speculation. What if Lord L had sat in his car overnight at 
Newhaven and not vanished to a life of splendid isolation 
deep in southern Africa, as current theories have it? What 
if he had been magically transported to an amazingly wooden 
drama-documentary? What if he claimed innocence? What if he 
actually was innocent? Unfortunately, we run into a small 
credibility problem here, as besides Ludovic Kennedy, no one 
thinks for a moment that he didn't do it. If he didn't do 
it, why did he run away? So, to change the ground rules in 
this way, to speculate on what might have happened if he 
hadn't run away, is not to mess with the facts to some 
trivial degree; it is to create a fiction. 

But then that, of course, is the fundamental problem with 
drama-documentaries. They claim to reconstruct the truth, 
but what they actually do is reinterpret the truth in their 
own tendentious way. It's all a massive con job, hiding 
under a patina of self-importance that seeks to fool the 
unwary into believing that such productions are somehow more 
significant, more real, than ordinary fiction. 

*The Trial Of Lord Lucan* had this self-importance in 
spades. Doomy music played as a series of not terribly 
convincing lookalike actors impersonated the principal 
players. Lord Lucan was played by Julian Wadham, who had 
clearly been instructed to make him a sympathetic, even 
sensitive, character. Open, sympathetic, sensitive 
characters rarely win large amounts of money at poker. How 
could such a man have tried to kill his wife? But then, of 
course, such a man didn't. Lord Lucan did. 

Lynsey Baxter did rather better as Lady L, giving her a 
mental toughness that added unexpected shade to the 
character. But the rest of a surprisingly distinguished cast 
were ill-served by a woeful script and direction that could 
most kindly be described as 'stately'. 

Pity poor old Anthony Head, who, as Lucan's chum Dominic 
Elwes, had to say: 'He's a blue chip fanatic, not a black 
lace fetishist.' This was cruelty to actors, as indeed was 
his viciously coiffed hairstyle. 

The film was on safer ground in the courtroom, but 
considering the raw material it was all surprisingly 
ungripping. No, that's it for me and drama-documentaries - 
at least until Open Fire on Saturday night. 



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.