‘This drama has been inspired by a true story,” announces The Lady, ushering us into the solemnly lit antechamber that is the miniseries’ introductory disclaimer. The italics proceed: “Some names have been changed,” they read, “and some characters, events and scenes have been created and merged for dramatic purposes.” Hmm, we expect, as a queasily off-balance piano lurches and stumbles in the background. “Created and merged”? This, absolutely, is the language of a college theatre venture, with its glue weapons and earnest pretensions, not that of a lavish ITV four-parter that focuses on the very actual rise, fall and eventual conviction-for-murder of Jane Andrews, a former M&S worker from Grimsby who served, from 1988 to 1997, as a dresser to Sarah Ferguson, the then-Duchess of York. This doesn’t, absolutely, bode effectively.
Still. The Lady is produced by Left Bank Pictures, who additionally made The Crown. And it’s written by Debbie O’ Malley, who did many great issues with Channel 5’s unexpectedly glorious “reboot” of All Creatures Great and Small. So, let’s give it the good thing about the doubt. And we do. Until, that’s, 16 minutes into the first episode, when Sarah Ferguson (Natalie “Game of Thrones” Dormer) bursts into Jane Andrews’ (Mia “Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials” McKenna-Bruce) job interview at Buckingham Palace and … Oh. Oh expensive. Any hopes that The Lady would possibly provide a severe and delicate depiction of the advanced real-life occasions that led a mentally unstable younger girl to brutally homicide her companion immediately wilt. What we get as an alternative is a gaudy mess; a wierd and exasperating factor that clomps between aerated royal cleaning soap, plodding police procedural, exuberant coming-of-age interval piece and hand-wringing home drama with the grace of a pantomime horse at a black-tie buffet.
Talking of which, right here comes Dormer’s Ferguson, crashing into the aforementioned interview in a polka-dot frock and directing the full drive of her publicly funded bouffant at our tremulous younger protagonist.
“Have you come far, Jane Andrews?” she foghorns, earlier than questioning whether or not the 21-year-old’s resolution to relocate to London could be as a result of she finds it “too grim ’oop north’, hah hah”.
The formidable, fragile Andrews is instantly smitten and shortly the pair are bonding over chiffon bows and their erratic love lives; Andrews determinedly burying her Lincolnshire vowels and myriad psychological well being points in pursuit of the excessive life.
Threaded all through the froth (purchasing montages! Champagne receptions! Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough!) is the police investigation into Andrews’ brutal homicide, in September 2000, of Thomas Cressman; a former stockbroker who reportedly incurred the royal aide’s wrath by refusing to marry her. That screeching sound you possibly can hear is considered one of many tonal gear shifts as actuality gatecrashes the enjoyable; the twin timeline treading nice clods of messily disagreeable reality into the royal carpet. So right here comes DCI Jim Dickie (a never-wearier Philip Glenister) in his raincoat, harrumphing blearily round the crime scene as the digital camera zooms in on the sufferer’s bloodied toes (“textbook domestic, innit?”).
What a maddening concoction this is. Scenes during which an more and more unstable Andrews makes an attempt to search consolation from her well-meaning mom (Claire Skinner) provide tantalising flashes of a subtler, knottier drama lurking beneath the suds. But then we get a bit the place Fergie shouts “olé” whereas attempting on a giant hat and…effectively.
So large is the shadow forged by the ex-Duchess’s presence that it’s nigh-on unattainable to take the remainder of it significantly. And whereas we’re spared any appearances from Ferguson’s ex-husband, there’s nonetheless one thing uniquely dispiriting in The Lady’s failure to read the (royal) room. (after the current revelations concerning Ferguson’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, Dormer mentioned she had donated her charge to charity.)
Ultimately, for all its regal bells and kazoos, its creating-and-merging-stuff-for-fancy-dramatic-purposes, The Lady is simply one other TV sequence that turns a horribly bleak and upsetting real-life crime into leisure. And absolutely, absolutely, we’ve had sufficient of these?
