Carry On Round The Table

Camelot  - Channel 4, Saturday nights 9pm.

Spoiler alert – if you’ve not watched episode 5 there is a spoiler here, but the described scene is so bloody obvious you’ll work out what happens about ten seconds into it anyway!

I know I had my lines written here somewhere...

Despite warnings that watching this would be a waste of time, we’ve stuck with it and we are now up to episode 5 of 10. The one reason we’re still watching is the fabulously arch Joseph Fiennes as Merlin, whose actorly skills stand head and shoulders above the other cast regulars. Jamie Campbell Bower as Arthur is the least plastic, or wooden, call it what you will, of the others. Eva Green as Morgan tries to camp it up à la Fiennes but falls short to much unintentional (?) comic effect, and I’m convinced the only reason Tamsin Egerton as Guinevere is there is for her fabulous body. That or the budget wouldn’t stretch far beyond Fiennes’ fee.  Egerton would not look out of place on a dreadful soap in the style of Crossroads, or Waterloo Road for those of you too young to remember the shaking sets and plank-like acting of the Brummie soap. Still, nice to look at though!

Second in the acting stakes to Fiennes’ is Sinead Cusack as a deranged nun on the “bad” side with Morgan. She manages to play it straight while somehow injecting gravitas into the juvenile script. 

Ah, the script…There was a laugh out loud moment (well every scene involving Morgan made me laugh, but this didn’t have her in it) in last night’s episode when a persecuted peasant called Colfur played waay over the top by the normally dour Liam Cunningham, who was on trial for murder was explaining to Arthur (acting as judge) away from the court room why he couldn’t give the court his defence in front of his daughter as she was the result of Colfur’s wife being raped by the brother of the man he was accused of murdering, but of course she was unaware of her true parentage. The brother as head of the village “has his way” with all the village maidens in lieu of rent apparently. These things doubtless still go on in Cornwall…..Anyway, Colfur’s daughter is asked to leave the room while Colfur tells Arthur his motive in a VERY LOUD VOICE interspersed with wracked sobs. Of course the door is left open and she hears everything, and the second Colfur has finished confessing his reasons for the dastardly crime, she reappears and says “But father, I knew this already”.

It was bit like the classic silent movie scene  where you are the victim tied to a railway line and you can see the train that would kill you approaching from miles in the distance. It was like something out of a play wot Ernie Wise wrote.

Last night’s episode centred on the trial and the effects of the new rule of law which Arthur imposes in his guise as a Dark Ages Tony Blair on the village dominated by the maiden stealing brother of the deceased and his similarly bullying family. A new era of fairness and equal opportunity (well, raping women for rent money is now a no-no anyway) dawns on the inhabitants of Ringstead. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

As Merlin, a sort of cross between Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, with added wizardry and sundry mental problems, had little to do, they showed him descending into a permanent dark night of the soul throughout the episode, replete with manic grins and twitches. His troubles are caused by him effecting the death of the Lady Of The Lake parallel in the previous episode. The scenes involving Fiennes leaping about while perusing runic charts pinned up all over his hovel were a joy!

I think where the program falls down, apart from the daft script, is that it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It started as a passable fantasy drama with lots of gratuitous sex which mysteriously dried up (fnarr fnarr) after the second episode, then it got all po-faced and moralising, and now we have Eva Green playing it for laughs, deliberately or not I cannot tell.

Personally, I’m now looking forward to the next episode in a “so bad it’s funny” way, and of course there’s the brilliant Fiennes who almost makes it worth watching on his own.