Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Janet Suzman, and you might get some idea of what ITV’s Vicious is like. Alternatively, I suppose, you could just watch the thing and realise that no, you’re not drunk — you really are seeing Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Frances de la Tour acting their socks off in a sitcom that would have been considered rather creaky in 1975.
Jacobi and McKellen play Stuart and Freddie: a pair of gay actors who’ve been living together for decades despite the fact that their main mode of communication is to trade personal insults while the studio audience laughs dutifully. De la Tour is their friend Vi, a sex-starved older woman of the kind not often seen since Mrs Slocombe and Dick Emery were in their pomp.
And that’s just the set-up. With commendable attention to dodgy-sitcom detail, Vicious also serves up plots that manage to be utterly predictable and completely implausible at the same time. On Monday, for example, Vi’s sister Lillian came to visit her for the first time in years. The trouble was that Vi had told Lillian that she was married with servants, and would now be rumbled. So what on earth could she do? Cue, needless to say, Stuart pretending to be her husband, with Freddie as the butler.
Yet, perhaps the weirdest thing of all about Vicious is that it’s not terrible — or at least, not just terrible. Each episode tends to contain a couple of moments so unexpectedly sharp that they seem to have come from another show altogether. At times too, there’s something almost touching about the sheer level of shamelessness involved — a shamelessness fully shared by that inexplicably distinguished cast.
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