THE EXPLOITED (THE TRIAL OF CHRISTINE KEELER)

 

Few scandals continue to have a hold on the British imagination than "the Profumo Affair".

The scandal had all the ingredients of a racy Cold War novel.

A tabloid newspaper's dream, it was a sordid tale that riffed on the sexual shenanigans of the British establishment

Its central players included a rising Westminster star, a Soviet attaché, two very glamorous, promiscuous women and a society pimp.

Over the years, the story has almost always been viewed from a male perspective.

The public image of two of its central characters, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies was highly sexualised, with them often being depicted as call girls and femme fatales.

The osteopath Stephen Ward, who arranged their liaisons with the rich and powerful, initially attracted tabloid disdain.

However, in time, he has also been portrayed as a sacrificial lamb for a hypocritical establishment desperate to cover up its worst excesses.

Government minister John Profumo has been depicted as willing fool whose rising political career was destroyed because of his dalliances with Keeler.

BBC1's 'The Trial of Christine Keeler' seeks to rectify the male gaze that has shaped how the scandal has been viewed.

Over the course of six episodes, Amanda Coe's screenplay dives into the complexities of a very messy scandal and challenges the conventional telling of the tale.

Directed by Andrea Harkin and Leanne Whelham and produced by Rebecca Ferguson, 'The Trial of Christine Keeler' embraces the flaws of its central characters but is fiercely determined to hold its female gaze throughout.

The miniseries is impressively cast, with Sophie Cookson and Ellie Bamber bearing a striking resemblance to the real public figures they portray.

Coe's story depicts Cookson's Keeler as an often naive young woman of humble working class origins who believes she has to exploit her good looks to secure a colourful life.

Christine meets James Norton's Stephen Ward in a go go club where she is working in London and they strike up a friendship that develops into a platonic relationship.

Ward brings her together with Bamber's more flighty Rice-Davies and introduces them to the rich and powerful.

Rice-Davies becomes the mistress to Jonny Coyne's businessman Peter Rachman, while Keeler moves in more politically risky circles.

At the start of the miniseries, she encounters Ben Miles' Profumo for the first time while she is emerging naked from a swimming pool at a country retreat where he is staying with his wife, the Northern Ireland-born movie actress Valerie Hobson, played by Emilia Fox.

Profumo and Keeler embark on an affair, while Ward arranges orgies involving women procured for the rich and powerful.

Ward also enjoys a particularly close friendship with Michael Maloney's Conservative peer Viscount Astor.

His big mistake is to forge a friendship with Visar Vishka's Soviet naval attaché Eugene Ivanov who he introduces to Christine.

Outside of this seedy environment, however, Keeler also has a chaotic personal life.

She is involved with Nathan Stewart-Jarrett's West Indian jazz promoter Johnny Edgecombe, having previously been the love of Anthony Welsh's jazz singer Lucky Gordon.

The latter is particularly obsessed with Keeler to the point where he rebukes her publicly for being involved with other men and hits her in the street.

A confrontation involving all three in a club results in Edgecombe cutting Gordon in the face with a switchblade and going on the run as the police investigate the incident.

Keeler's refusal to help Edgecombe leads to him turning up in a distraught state at Ward's flat which she shares with Mandy Rice Davies.

He fires a pistol into the flat and flees the scene.

It is this incident that will ultimately lead to Edgecombe going to prison and the police and media exposing the Profumo scandal as they start to focus on Keeler and her associates.

Christine gives evidence against Edgecombe at a pre-trial but she is spirited out of the country as journalists start to look into rumours about her involvement with Profumo.

With Rice-Davies starting to talk to reporters, Keeler attracts considerable media interest in her story, while Profumo tries to suppress the growing fascination with his links to her.

Inevitably, something has got to give and the scandal erupts, with tragic consequences.

Coe's drama is a refreshing, if not entirely successful take on a well known scandal that helps fill out Keeler's often overlooked back story.

Sophie Cookson does a good job, portraying a naive working class woman who does herself no favours and who is often out of her depth in the company she keeps.

She is ably assisted by Ellie Bamber's more knowing portrayal of Rice-Davies and by Norton's more complex depiction of Ward - a curious mixture of charm and condascension.

Ben Miles, however, is a frustratingly stiff Profumo and he is not helped by a script whose weakest, most one dimensional characters are those from the establishment.

Emilia Fox does her best with her depiction of Valerie Hobson but other actors struggle from Jonny Coyne's Rachman to Anton Lesser's lawyer Michael Eddowes and Aidan McArdle's clichéd MI5 chief David Hollis.

Danny Webb and Buffy Davis can do little but trot out stock performances as the Opposition Labour MPs, George Wigg and Barbara Castle.

Visar Vishka feels too much of a bit part player in a role that is pretty integral to the fall of John Profumo.

However some of the cast are much more effective in overcoming the miniseries' deficiencies.

Tim McInerney makes a decent fist of portraying Conservative chief whip Martin Redmayne, as does Michael Maloney as Viscount Astor.

There are decent performances too from Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Anthony Welsh as the West Indian men in Keeler's messy life.

The always reliable Paul Ritter turns up as Keeler's Defence barrister Jeremy Hutchinson and it is good to see Peter Davison as Ward's Defence barrister Peter Burge.

Coe's script is at its best when it sheds light on Keeler's background and particularly her uneasy relationship with her mum, played by Amanda Drew.

It is a curious parasitic relationship, with her feeding her mother's demands for money but gaining little in return.

Its strongest suit is the ambivalent relationship between Ward and Keeler which is no less parasitic - full of surface charm but extremely patronising and really seedy the more you think about it.

The power dynamics between them mean Christine is sucked into an exploitative relationship with a man who becomes something of an alternative father figure - a point the miniseries rams home when her estranged dad, played by Neil Morrissey, suddenly turns up at her darkest hour to offer a sympathetic ear, only to cash in on her fame.

It is these elements that justify 'The Trial of Chriistine Keeler' revisiting a well known scandal.

It's just a pity that Coe's screenplay doesn't quite get the balance right and leaves us wishing there was more depth to some of the other major players the series depicts.

But it is also clear as the final credits roll that this is a scandal that will continue to fascinate people for generations to come. 

('The Trial of Christine Keeler' was broadcast on BBC1 on December 29, 2019-January 26, 2020)