The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC One) is the story of the Profumo affair told from a rare perspective: hers. The opening episode is a cracker and the rest – with so much ground still to cover, as by the end the seeds of the scandal have barely been scattered – promises to be likewise. It captures the tremendous sense of fun the 19-year-old model Keeler (Sophie Cookson) had, but it never turns her into a dolly bird or airhead, or paints the time and place as a hip and happening idyll. Racism, experienced directly by her black boyfriend Johnny (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) who is habitually passed over for white applicants at job interviews, and indirectly by her as his companion in the street, is endemic. The capital is a bubble into which she has escaped from her deprived childhood and within which she thinks herself protected, despite its periodic punctures by her mother’s phone calls and constant requests for cash.
The man who brings her into the bubble within the bubble, upper-class London, and introduces her to all the right people who are so very wrong for her, is society osteopath Stephen Ward (James Norton, perhaps too earthy a casting choice for the part, though his creepily patronising delivery of “little baby”, his nickname for Keeler, is worth the price of admission). He’s a man who knows people. And who likes to watch them, from a safe distance. He winds them up like clockwork toys, sets them off and waits for the collisions to entertain him. I would watch a drama from his perspective, too. Who doesn’t want to know what the voyeur thinks? Although I’m most interested of all in the psychology of a man who can live with the title “society osteopath” and make it work for him.
We flash back at various points to Keeler’s first meeting with Profumo (customarily convincing stuff from Ben Miles, giving the secretary of state for war a steely charm that goes precisely so far and no further) and watch as she becomes increasingly tangled in a web whose reaches she can barely imagine. The question of whether history happens to her or she makes history lurks in the shadows of every scene. “Look what you made me do,” says her jealous ex-boyfriend, Lucky (Anthony Welsh), when he sees her in the street and, maddened by her continued existence without him, hits her. It is a sentiment, we understand, she has met before – from the men who groped her as they took her home as a teenager from babysitting their own children – and will again in the near future, as men with ever more to lose cast around for someone other than themselves to blame.
By the end of the opening episode, Ward and his circle have come sufficiently to the attention of the secret services to make a crisis inevitable. In the closing scenes, Johnny – by now another maddened ex – shoots at Ward’s flat with Christine inside and the quality of attention on them all shifts. “I didn’t know it then,” comes the final voiceover. “But I still had a hell of a lot to learn.”
If The Trial doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of last year’s A Very English Scandal, about the 70s equivalent of Keeler and its fallout, it remains a furiously fast, fun ride which doesn’t let the deeper, darker issues fall from its grasp. And it works, incidentally, as a great companion piece to the closing episode of The Crown’s second series, fleshing out the people with whom Matt Smith’s Prince Philip may or may not have partied the night (or many nights) away, watched by Ward.
Like The Crown, it could also have a scroll atop every scene reading “O tempora! O mores!” In the decades since the Profumo affair we have moved from a time when a politician having sex with a woman tangentially associated with Russia caused the establishment to have a near nervous breakdown, to the leader of the free world snuggling up to Putin while soliciting favours from Ukraine with near impunity. To say nothing of our own government now being led by … well, insert your own term here. But I shall go out on a limb and say that “a man who evokes all of Supermac’s pragmatism, wit, unshakeable calm and firm grasp on how many children he had fathered” is probably not among them.
