Trinity
ITV 2
Scotland On Screen
BBC 4
I wonder if David Cameron is watching new drama series Trinity on ITV 2 and, if so, whether he recognises the high jinks depicted from his days in the Bullingdon Club. Let’s hope not. Set in the present day, Trinity features an ivy-clad college – apparently modelled on Oxbridge – not merely stuck in a timewarp. It appears to be travelling back in time with each episode, to the days of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline And Fall via Porterhouse Blue and Brideshead Revisited.
Students sport mortarboards and gowns and sit at long tables for dinner, Harry Potter-style, where they are forced to recite a complicated Latin grace. Porters in bowler hats scurry about, waiting on arrogant young aristocrats called Dorian who quiz everyone they meet about their “good breeding” and country estates. The braying toffs who belong to the Dandelion Club organise an annual “Feast Of Fools” party, a wild orgy at which two lower-class students are ritually abused and humiliated. Even when I survived Cambridge as a state school kid in the 1970s, it was never as bad as this.
Or was it? After all, I hardly moved in Bullingdon Club circles. Like the proletarian freshers caricatured here – chippy working-class black youth, Christian Union wimp, ditzy Welsh girl and naive techno nerds – I was a bemused observer of the more arcane attitudes and traditions.
In Trinity, however, there’s no avoiding the maelstrom of kinky sex and snobbery, with the blue bloods hooting: “You bloody blighter” at each other or sneering at our black comprehensive school hero: “Are you from Lewisham? My uncle owns Lewisham.” Presiding over the decadence is a leonine Charles Dance. The passing years have seen him promoted from posh totty acting roles to a prototype James Bond villain. Has he played a Bond villain? If he hasn’t, he must. His college principal is clearly up to something, hissing orders at a mad scientist living in his basement and trying to cover up the sinister death of an academic rival.
I can’t decide whether Trinity is the magical realist fantasy of a scriptwriter who has never experienced Oxbridge or the warped revenge of someone who has. Either way, it is so bad it’s fascinating. I fear it may become one of my guilty televisual pleasures.
More fantasy came my way on BBC 4 with Scotland On Screen. Part of the channel’s Scotland Season, this nippy little documentary took a peep into cinematic history to trace the way that Scotland has been portrayed on the big screen. Scottish thespian Alan Cumming – in rugged, non-camp, cagoule-wearing mode – set off on a tour of the relevant movie locations, assuring us that he was never more at home than when behind the wheel of a Landrover.
In the highlands, he admired the heather-clad mountains starring in epics from Brigadoon and The 39 Steps to Highlander and Braveheart. Scottish actors recalled Mel Gibson seeking reassurance about his blue face makeup and film pundits reflected on the Scots’ propensity to create romantic myths about themselves.
In Kirkcudbright, Cumming tracked down the lady who had been Britt Eckland’s body double for the nude scene in The Wicker Man. In Edinburgh, he asked a party of genteel housewives if they recognised themselves in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.
Misty mountains, swinging kilts and military lost causes, he informed us, were rendered instantly redundant by the release of Trainspotting in 1996. A bagpipe-free urban nightmare which – as several cast members proudly affirmed – transformed having a Scottish accent from an embarrassment to the epitome of cool.
Never a searching analysis, Scotland On Screen danced merrily over the surface, offering more behind-the-scenes gossip than cultural or political insights. But it did mention the fact that the release of Braveheart had been perfectly timed to boost popular support for the Scottish Nationalist Party and devolution voters. No doubt, Alex Salmond has a DVD of it prominently displayed on his shelf, alongside I Know Where I’m Going and Local Hero.
Helen Chappell
