The Times Online Review of Desperate Romantics Episode One

July 22, 2009
Desperate Romantics

Last Night's TV
Andrew Billen

Desperate Romantics

BBC Two

Harold Pinter remarked upon seeing Shakespeare in Love that he had no idea that the Bard was such a good runner. Apart from Pinter, however, everyone loved Shakespeare in Love because its cavalier determination to turn Shakespeare into a rom-com action hero was clever in a postmodern way and the resulting film was funny and hugely romantic. Flip accounts of the lives of great artists do not often, however, meet with such approval. I remember some sniffy reviews for Will Shakespeare, a comparable romp written by John Mortimer in 1978. But however you dramatise artists' domestic lives, you are going to run into the related problems that their work is more important than their lives and that their surnames cannot be said aloud without sounding as if you are in a Monty Python sketch.

Peter Bowker, who wrote Occupation, is nevertheless a considerable talent and I would have put my money on him finding a way to making the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood into TV drama. He had said promisingly that, above all, he did not want his six-part Desperate Romantics to be the kind of art biography that has “Monet standing in a field saying, 'I'm going to call this Impressionism, I'm gonna paint the light'” - a reference no doubt to BBC One's unfortunate The Impressionists three years ago. Well, the first episode of DR was no The Impressionists but it wasn't Shakespeare in Love either.

Phil Davis, playing the old grump at the Royal Academy, called the new art “weak, puerile, unintelligent”. Let us just say that I wish DR had been a little stronger, more grown up and more intelligent itself. Rather recklessly, this is a programme about art with no obvious interest in its ostensible subject. The dramatic momentum is all with how John Millais and William Holman Hunt lose their virginity and whether they or their randy mate Dante Gabriel Rossetti will end up with Lizzie Siddal, the ginger-haired model who has been procured for them by their self-appointed publicist, Fred Walters.

Here, Bowker missed a real chance, for if the story were told through her rather than the hanger-on Walters we could hardly fail to become involved. It is Siddal, the shop girl, who puts her respectability at stake by modelling for the brotherhood, Siddal who truly comes from nowhere to become an artist, and Siddal who forms a bond with their patron John Ruskin. It is, too, Siddal who eventually pays the price. Instead, DR is a high-testosterone experiment with a nipple-count higher than at any time since women became BBC channel controllers. Of course Hunt is going to get a blow job in his studio from a whore. It may make you look at a picture such as The Hireling Shepherd more carefully as erotica, but there is something uneasy-making about the script's humiliation of Ruskin on not much stronger grounds than his impotence.

With no sign of Ford Madox Brown, John William Waterhouse or Edward Burne-Jones, I think that we can probably dismiss this show as being any use as history. As television, it has some way to go too. Samuel Barnett as the angelic-looking Millais, Rafe Spall as the troubled Hunt and Aidan Turner as the erratic Latinate Rossetti certainly have chemistry. They look as if they are having fun together, although none of their joshing has so far made me laugh. DR may be a novel take on a movement that can easily be dismissed as fit only for chocolate boxes and Andrew Lloyd Webber's walls but you really just have to take on trust Bowker's self-exculpating opening caption: “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were inspired by the real world about them, yet took imaginative licence in their art. Their story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit.” Has DR caught something truthful about them or would Bowker have been better off dramatising not the PRB but the YBAs?

Original article here.