A Very English Scandal, episode 3, review: Hugh Grant completes transformation from romantic lead to hypocritical rotter in finale of the Jeremy Thorpe affair

A Very English Scandal (BBC One) began as a knockabout farce and, even after unlucky pet dog Rinka was executed, it never quite stopped being one. The circumstances of the case certainly helped. What joy that one suspect shared a name with the actor who played Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army. And that Norman Scott’s most faithful supporter was called Edna Friendship.

And yet here was dark, appalling comedy. Hugh Grant played Jeremy Thorpe with the lofty look of a priest attempting to ignore the putrid stench of the gutter. Superbly attuned both to the story’s absurdities and to Thorpe’s cold hard hypocrisy, Grant’s performance was genuinely revelatory. Only now does it seem obvious that a light romantic actor once thought lost to the golf course was born to parse “bunnies will go to France” as “a generic noun in an imperative clause”.

Norman Scott, meanwhile, has put out mixed messages about A Very English Scandal. He loves it, he hates it - it’s the sort of inconsistency that enabled George Carman QC to present him as an unreliable witness. His endorsement was implied by the final shot which revealed the real Scott, now in his late seventies, a survivor with amusement playing on mobile lips. Ben Whishaw caught that flirtatious moue beautifully.

There wasn’t much doubt that the drama was on his side. When Scott entered the dock, Murray Gold’s jaunty soundtrack suddenly turned lush and weepy, as if witnessing a lamb’s slaughter. 

Aside from the two leads, every cast member seemed to find truth in archetypes: Michele Dotrice as Scott’s mothering landlady, Monica Dolan as Thorpe’s unshockable but credulous consort (“I’ve made cod in parsley sauce”), Paul Hilton as the cruelly rejected accomplice, Patricia Hodge as the mother with ice in her veins.

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Above all, the role of the weaselly brief Carman was a gift for Adrian Scarborough. In this telling, only Carman truly had the measure of Thorpe. Did their telling tête-à-tête about the perils of rough trade really happen? Probably not. It sounded like vintage Russell T Davies, who used this platform to lace a subtle but impassioned plea for tolerance into the tawdry parable of an establishment stitch-up.

“All the history books get written with men like me missing,” howled Scott in the dock. Not any more. Awards all round to this blissful, blistering trip down memory lane.