History turned into celebrity soap opera

By GREG DIXON

History, it has been said, repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. But in the 21st century, it seems that it reappears in a different form. These days history repeats as soap.

Even in its title, Charles II: The Power And The Passion (TV One, last night) leaves you in little doubt that this four-part, award-winning BBC mini-series is from the sappy soap school of story-telling, emphasising with the words power and passion that its history would most likely be all sex and violence.

Any doubts it might be something other were assuaged with the viewer warning for the first episode: we were advised that the "sex scenes, hangings, violence and other material" may disturb some of us. And what has followed in the first two weeks has not disappointed on the sex and violence which, I'm sure, disturbs a few.

Perhaps in the age of the uber-celebrity, audiences now demand history to be dramatised through a prism of tabloid sensibility and with Hollywood's tendency to put visual spectacle ahead of story. However, it leaves this particular historical drama feeling like a hollow vessel.

But what a lush and gorgeous hollow vessel. The series reportedly cost in the region of $15 million to make and you can see every buck on screen in the beautiful costuming and handsome design.

But I have rather felt as if I'm looking at people's houses and clothes in one of those up-market celebrity magazines filled with stories and pictures of Europe and America's rich and high-born. If it won the Bafta for best drama serial for anything it had to be for its look.

Certainly the script is nothing special. It is (like all soaps) episodic in nature, though this was perhaps necessarily because of the sweep of years and events it has to cover. But all too often it lurches from one crisis (or love scene) to another, forcing too much of the dialogue into the expositional.

You get the feeling it's simply marking off events: The Great Plague? Tick. The Fire Of London? Tick.

Charles has been called a lazy king, the only one of the Stuarts to have no vision for his country.

But this series seems to cast him as something altogether more feeble: a king bullied by his Catholic mother (played by a nearly unrecognisable Diana Rigg), parliament, his lover (conniving serial slag Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine), his young wife, his ministers ... just about everyone expect the help.

And he's a bit dreamy. Rufus Sewell's Charles is a man who spends a lot of time staring into space. This, I'm sure, is supposed to suggest some sort of inner life. However, the first two episodes have allowed us to see or hear none of the interior man. This Charlie, so far, is little more than a bloke who likes skirt and vacillates more than a bit.

Do I expect more from Sunday Theatre? Well, no. The slot seems to have a weakness for drama that thinks it's better than it is. Charles could have been much more. But even with all the scholarly insight available and all the technological and showbiz whiz-ery on tap, television makers must still decide what kind of story they want to tell.

Unfortunately in Charles II: The Power And The Passion, they have decided to give us a history lesson set on the pages of Hello! magazine.