The Borgias review

The Borgias wrote the book on papal bull.

The Borgias

Rodrigo Borgia: it might be the name of a champion Formula One racing car driver. Rod-Bo. He was, in his way, a celebrity. The infamous, murderous, possibly incestuous head of the Borgia clan put a Spaniard in the works at the Vatican by becoming Pope Alexander VI in 1492. The rest is history and, now, a sumptuous drama series starring Jeremy Irons. It has the pithy tagline “Sex. Power. Murder. Amen.”

Well, we keep saying we want more quality period drama. Though, increasingly, it comes with blood dripping all over the gorgeous opening titles and then things really get messy.

The first episode of The Borgias featured homing pigeons – homing doves, actually – paternity issues and a pouty, seductive teenager. In some ways it was Coronation Street in cassocks and Lucrezia Borgia is just the Rosie Webster of the Renaissance. It’s said that Mario Puzo based The Godfather’s Corleone family on the Borgias. There’s also a touch of Lucrezia in Outrageous Fortune’s Loretta and the treacherous Livia, matriarch of The Sopranos, who wasn’t above taking a contract out on her own son.

Families have always been problematic, which is no doubt why series about dynasties even more dysfunctional than one’s own have always been such a staple of television drama and reality series. Some episodes of Wife Swap make the Borgias seem positive paragons of cosy domesticity.

There was a BBC series called The Borgias in the 80s, too, but no one much remembers it. We were too busy, some of us, mooning over a young Jeremy Irons and his tortured soul in Brideshead Revisited. That wonderful series was responsible for a lot of languid young men taking to carrying teddy bears around and contemplating conversion to Catholicism.

In this version of The Borgias, Rodrigo’s son Cesare, a reluctant cleric, briefly carries around a monkey. But I imagine this series will not have a beneficial effect on Church recruitment. The poor monkey, so far the only appealing character we had to work with, soon expires of poisoning after relieving itself, with heavy symbolism, on the ambitious Cardinal Orsini’s obscenely opulent banquet table. Orsini plots against the new Pope but is soon frothing at the mouth himself, which is a shame. He’s played by Derek Jacobi, who set the benchmark for this sort of thing with I, Claudius, back in the 70s.

Of course he deserved it. They all do. The trouble is the Borgias hardly stand out in the bad company they keep. “Let him without children cast the first stone,” remarks a Cardinal, when the matter of the Pope’s illegitimate brood comes up. The clergy had a rather elastic view on the celibacy part of the job in those times. And on just about everything else of a moral nature. They wined, dined, fornicated and laid up for themselves treasures on Earth like they had never heard of Purgatory.

Then there’s the bribery and corruption. Cue disgruntled speech from Cardinal Orsini about the Throne of St Peter being bought by “a Spaniard up to his elbows in simony!” If you had a drink every time someone cried “Simony!” you’d never have made it to the end of the first episode. The same applies to references to monkeys and metaphors. The monkey was, in fact, a metaphor. At the banquet, when the monkey tastes the wine in the interests of keeping the new Pope alive for the rest of the season, Cardinal della Rovere remarks pointedly, “A good wine, like the Papacy itself, mature, rounded, its roots in the soil, bouquet in the heavens, consumed by a monkey!” To which Rodrigo replies, even more pointedly, “I suspect a metaphor is lurking there!”

Before long, aware that over-explained literary figures of speech are all that is holding this script together, Cardinal della Rovere proposes a toast: “To metaphor!” Or was it monkeys? Never mind. By then, I was monkey-ed and metaphor-ed out. But the series is worth persevering with. There are moments of hilarity, such as the old custom of checking that the Pope is not – horrors! – a female. “Go on. The suspense is killing me,” sighs Rodrigo, sitting on a sort of commode as a doctor prepares to fumble about under his robes. The verdict is in Italian but Orsini translates: “Two testicles, well hung.” It’s not giving too much away, I hope, to say that I’m awaiting with some trepidation the scene involving a character who has the enemies of his father stuffed for display. Even Dexter couldn’t out-psychopath that.

This is created by Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) who, as well as being a bit heavy-handed with the symbolism, has his characters critique the plot. “It’s not very subtle,” remarks Cesare, of Orsini’s doomed plot to poison him and his father. “No subtlety needed tonight,” agrees Orsini’s turncoat assassin. Television like this reviews itself.

THE BORGIAS, Wednesday, TV3, 9.30pm.