It's been twelve years since Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North was screened on BBC2, a 9-part series documenting the lives of four friends in Newcastle between 1964 and 1995. It was epic in its scope and remarkable in the finely wrought portrayal of its characters, one of which went on to become James Bond (Daniel Craig) and another Doctor Who (Christopher Ecclestone).
So it's a reason to celebrate the arrival of The Devil's Whore, or A True Account of The Life and Times of Angelica Fanshawe to Channel 4, which Flannery has been working on ever since. It is noteworthy because it is an original piece of period drama, not a literary adaptation. Not only that, it centres on an era of British history strangely rarely touched upon in drama: the English Civil War.
The titular (anti-)heroine is played by Andrea Riseborough, most recently seen in the Donmar's superb production of Ivanov alongside Kenneth Branagh. Flannery's central character is a young woman bereft of God following the execution of her Catholic relatives, who has married into the court of Charles I. He parallels the Parliamentary uprising with her straining against the shackles of a joyless marriage, which sees her forced to be silent even in her marriage bed.
The first episode last night was very promising indeed, marrying stark and brutal conflict with near Gothic bombast. It was a little OTT, but in all the right ways. When John Simm's Edward Sexby (a Puritan officer straight out of a Spaghetti Western) pronounces that 'One side will draw its sword. . . It is the world' you can't help but smile.
The cast is extraordinary: The Thick of It's spin doctor, Peter Capaldi, turns monarch as Charles I; Hunger's IRA martyr Bobby Sands, Michael Fassbender, becomes steely insurrectionist Rainsborough; and perhaps most intriguing, The Wire's hard drinking Irish cop McNulty, Dominic West, becomes abstemious slaughterer of the Irish, Oliver Cromwell.
The portrayal of these Puritan upstarts brings in the Levellers (a sort of proto-Communist group) and the Ranters, a sect who thought the concept of sin a specious instrument of church subjugation and who, according to Flannery, 'sound like Abbie Hoffman in 1965'.
We'll have to see how the series pans out but it has already taken its place in an uneven but fascinating lienage of Civil War-inspired art: from John Milton's Paradise Lost, which thinly disguised Charles I as a tyrannical God lording it over His subjects, to 1968 film Witchfinder General which depicted the nefarious 'witch' executions in East Anglia carried out by Matthew Hopkins (played by Vincent Price in one of his best roles) as the conflict raged elsewhere in the country.
