The opening of Gunpowder (BBC1, Saturdays) was just about the most knuckle-gnawingly tense ten minutes I’ve ever seen on TV.
It’s 1603 and James I is on the throne. At the Warwickshire great house of Baddesley Clinton, a group of aristocratic Catholics, including Robert Catesby (Kit Harington) and Anne Vaux (Liv Tyler), are celebrating Mass illicitly when a party of armed men begins hammering at the door.
Quickly, the various guerrilla priests — a senior Jesuit Henry Garnet and two young acolytes — are bundled into hiding, two in a priest hole set behind some panelling, one in a chest. The search party enters, led by an implacable witchfinder-general type who pursues his task with sadistic relish and grim efficiency. As the priests cower, their terror palpable, the search party sets about measuring the house within and without to see if there is any discrepancy in the dimensions.
And, yes, there is! But before the priest hole can be discovered, the acolyte in the chest — a pretty teenager with flowing curly locks — distracts the searchers by accidentally dropping a chalice. Big mistake. First he’ll be tortured. Then — in scenes that, unfortunately, we’re later forced to witness — he will be partially hanged, before he is cut open, still alive, to endure having his entrails unwound and his limbs severed one by one with an axe.
Meanwhile, the dignified lady of the house — one Lady Dorothy Dibdale — takes full responsibility for the illegal priest concealment. This, happily, spares the show’s biggest stars — Jon Snow and Arwen — for the next two episodes but at a terrible cost. Poor Lady D is taken to a scaffold, stripped naked and then laid with a large rock between her spine and the wooden deck, before being crushed to death by a door laden with heavy weights.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in