Sunday Times Culture Magazine,
August 19 2001 TELEVISION

A sexy young woman who danced until dawn? 
It's Queen Victoria, but not as we know her, says Sally Kinnes 
 
 

Send her Victorias: Victoria Hamilton plays her regal namesake in the BBC's new drama 

Victoria's secrets 

Queens of the screen

Queen Victoria lived her life like a butterfly in reverse. She began as a gay young thing, flitting from party to party, a fashion-loving dance addict, of whom it was said: "She never saw dawn but through a ballroom window." Then, abruptly widowed at 42, she crawled into a cocoon of mourning. So long did Victoria spend stitched up in her widow's weeds that part of her life has come to stand for the whole. In the popular imagination, she is like a black hole from which only one idea has escaped: that she was not amused. 

BBC1's new two-part drama, Victoria & Albert, changes all that. It concentrates on the butterfly years. Like a Hollywood weepie, it takes this relationship between first cousins and traces its transformation from cool indifference and what was more or less a marriage of convenience into one of the great love stories of the 19th century. The royal couple are given the Jane Austen treatment - and if Victoria is a capricious young Elizabeth Bennett, Albert is her Byron-loving Darcy. He's even played by the younger brother of Colin Firth (Darcy in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice). As the stuffy if misunderstood Albert, Jonathan is unlikely to set as many hearts pounding, but he makes a dashing young prince. 
Victoria Hamilton, as Victoria, with Jonathan Firth's Albert

This Victoria is one who could easily have grown into Mrs Brown. But whereas that 1997 film was an intriguing account of a spirited old monarch who always wanted a man in her life, this is about the sexy young queen, played by 30-year-old Victoria Hamilton. When the production was first announced, the producer, David Cunliffe, called Victoria and Albert "a lusty couple", and this statement, plus the programme-makers' proposal to dramatise the intimacy of the couple's wedding night, caused a right royal fuss. In fact, the intriguing thing is how much further the drama could have gone. "We know from her diaries and her letters to the prime minister, Lord Melbourne [played by Nigel Hawthorne], that her wedding night was 'wonderful - a taste of heaven'," says Cunliffe. "And when her doctor told her about the change of life, she said, 'Does that mean I won't be able to have fun in bed any more?' My belief is that she was very warm-blooded and passionate." 

One biographer has even said the couple's bedroom was full of nude statues, and they had a device that meant they could lock the door without getting out of bed. "Albert was interested in anything mechanical, and they were among the first people to have a lift installed, so it wouldn't surprise me," says Cunliffe. "You only have to look at the catalogue of Osbourne, their house on the Isle of Wight, to see they had statues of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and Hercules with nothing but the slimmest of fig leaves - though all very tasteful, of course." 

A hundred years after her death, Victoria still fascinates. By Cunliffe's reckoning, there have been more books written about her than anyone except Jesus Christ. But given the life she led, it's no surprise. Even her accession was a fraught affair, and from the outset, with Victoria's mother (Penelope Wilton) pitched against her uncle, William IV (a scene-stealing cameo by Peter Ustinov), the BBC's version is grand royal soap. As you might expect, the cast is stellar - Diana Rigg, David Suchet, Jonathan Pryce, Richard Briers, Patrick Malahide et al - and the production values top of the range. 
But what we'll see is only a taste of what might have been. If the BBC hadn't lost its nerve, says Cunliffe, the two-part series would have run and run. Originally, six parts were planned, taking the queen from cradle to grave. But it would have meant spending with as much profligacy as the house of Hanover itself (up to £8m instead of the £5m the two-parter has cost, co-funded by the A&E channel). And, as the writer, John Goldsmith, explains: "The story was too complicated, with too many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, too many prime ministers, too many wars." So it was decided to focus on the single narrative strand of the love story, enlivened by politics. 

As the series underlines, Albert was incredibly bright, but Victoria was queen. This disparity meant, to begin with at least, that he had nothing to do. "It seemed there were contemporary resonances," says Goldsmith. "Here, it is the woman who is more powerful and rich and important, and that's increasingly a phenomenon in the 21st century. Poor old Albert, he was like a puppy dog, walking two paces behind." The couple's rows shook the palace. 

But for all her steeliness, Victoria didn't really have a clue. "The beginning of the reign was little short of a disaster," says the historian David Starkey. "She was guilty of complete constitutional impropriety, and her whole relationship with Melbourne, the prime minister, was disgraceful. Not sexually, though he was a notorious predator, but because she was so outrageously partisan. The constitutional monarchy was only just being invented. The first king to say it was his duty to suppress his private wishes in favour of his duties to the commonwealth was William IV, whom Victoria succeeded." 

Albert was such an astute politician, he ended up running the show. His correspondence makes clear that eventually he was acting as a cross between the monarch and the prime minister. Even more than the vivacious Victoria, it is Albert who is the revelation. History hasn't been kind to him. "The English have always treated foreigners badly, as the Duke of Edinburgh would testify," says Starkey. "At the time, the English loathed Albert." It didn't help that he was cripplingly shy and hopeless in public. A figure of immense rectitude and correctness, he was also furious to discover Lord Uxbridge was keeping his mistress in the palace; Victoria didn't turn a hair. It's not hard to imagine Albert covering the piano legs. "What we think of as Victorian morality is really Albertian morality, which was imposed on her," says Firth. "I knew nothing at all about him when I started, except that he was German and had something to do with the South Kensington museums. But I came to like him very much.