The Lady (ITV)
Anything you want… you got it! The eerie voice of Roy Orbison, echoing as Sarah Ferguson guzzles champagne and tries on rails of designer clothes, sums up the Fergie philosophy of life.
Her greed, her self-indulgent extravagance, her thoughtless contempt for anyone but herself, is skewered in The Lady – ITV’s four-part drama telling how the former Duchess of York‘s personal dresser, Jane Andrews, battered and stabbed a boyfriend to death.
But Natalie Dormer, as Ferguson, also captures her self-destructive insecurity and her moments of pitiful vulnerability, as well as her infectious sense of fun. She’s portrayed as a loveable monster.
The country did briefly adore her, after all, when she and her husband stood on the balcony at Buckingham Palace on their wedding day, Fergie planting a smacker on her prince’s lips.
He’s no longer a prince, and her affectionate nickname seems obscenely twee, now that we know the depths to which she was prepared to stoop for money.
This crime drama couldn’t have been better timed – so close to the headlines that it almost feels like part of the news coverage.
Dormer clearly was not expecting the story to be so current. She has refused to promote the show, following revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein files that Ferguson remained sycophantically close to the billionaire paedophile even after he was jailed for child sexual abuse.
ITV’s four-part drama The Lady tells how the former Duchess of York’s personal dresser, Jane Andrews, battered and stabbed a boyfriend to death
Natalie Dormer, as Ferguson (right), captures the former Duchess of York’s self-destructive insecurity and moments of pitiful vulnerability, as well as her infectious sense of fun, writes Christopher Stevens
She makes a barnstorming entrance, charging into a job interview at Buckingham Palace, obviously sloshed, raging about a tabloid picture spread that accused her of copying Diana’s style.
Not quite drunk enough to be embarrassing, she’s still too sozzled for the ladies-in-waiting to pretend they haven’t noticed. This, we don’t have to be told, is a normal state of affairs.
The interviewee is Jane Andrews, played with a conniving slyness by Mia McKenna-Bruce (seen earlier this year as amateur detective Bundle in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials).
Though her experience of high couture extends no further than selling bras in Marks and Sparks in Grimsby, the 21-year-old instantly gauges how to manipulate the duchess with a mixture of deference and chumminess.
Her duties include waking her with a cup of chamomile tea, and placing a folded bathrobe on a chair, ‘so she can sit and pull it up around her’. No mention of squeezing toothpaste onto a brush, but that was implied.
Their friendship is sealed when Andrews finds Ferguson secretly stuffing her face with chocolate digestives. By Sunday’s episode, they are best buddies, visiting a psychic together and sharing details of their lovers’ bedroom performance.
The other courtiers regard Andrews as an outsider: Wrong school, wrong accent, wrong social class. They snigger at the way she says ‘bath’ and ‘run’.
We begin to understand, though writer Debbie O’Malley is too clever to state this plainly, why Ferguson felt more comfortable with Andrews than with any of the palace regulars.
Ed Speleers (left) as Thomas Cressman and Mia McKenna-Bruce (right) as Jane Andrews in ITV’s The Lady
Natalie Dormer as Sarah, then Duchess of York (left) and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Jane Andrews (right)
The duchess was a chancer and an imposter, and she suspected everyone of seeing right through her.
The girl from Grimsby was the only one who believed in her. They were outsiders together.
And it’s impossible not to feel a sliver of sympathy for Ferguson when she emerges wide-eyed and slack-jawed from an audience with the Queen.
Her Majesty didn’t often read the Riot Act to junior members of The Firm but, when she did, it left an impression.
We don’t see the Queen, Andrew or any other Royals, apart from the back of Princess Di’s head. Quite who Andrews is suspected of killing is also not spelled out, as the story jumps ten years, to a bloodied corpse in a bedroom and Philip Glenister as the investigating copper.
‘Oh Jane,’ sighs an older Sarah Ferguson, helping the police with their inquiries. ‘How did it come to this?’
How indeed.
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