A Room with a View, ITV1, 9pm
Joe's Palace BBC1, 9pm
You can spend weeks slumped in front of today's reality-format-obsessed telly with nary a sniff of a thoughtful play by a practised dramatist. Then two of the blessed things come shuffling along at once.
Not that A Room with a View or Joe's Palace were flawless, but they beat another evening spent avoiding Ant and Dec's Celebrity Ballroom Property Wife Swap by watching Discovery Turbo's endless re-runs of Wheeler Dealers (rusty old cars healed cheap!) Andrew Davies's adaptation of E M Forster's lightest comedy of manners made jolly use of the novel's original unspoken gay subtext. Its camp cleric, Mr Beebe, engagingly played by The Fast Show's Mark Williams, flounced about making sage observations on the need for emotional honesty in general, and for self-recognition among confirmed Edwardian bachelors in particular.
"Cecil Vyse is, like me, not the sort of man who should marry only he doesn't know it yet," Mr Beebe stated of A Room with a View's langorous young aristo-fop, portrayed with Wildean ennui by Laurence Fox. The blighter's unmanly reluctance to muck in, muck about and kiss the girls really should have warned off his unworldly fiancee, Lucy Honeychurch (the sweetly eager Elaine Cassidy).
Elsewhere, there was satire about the colonialism of the English abroad, clustering together in Florence to mock the horridness of the natives: "We're here to see Italy - not meet Italians." Sinead Cusack's free-booting novelist, Eleanor Lavish, lustily endorsed open-minded bohemianism: "One doesn't come to Italy for niceness - one comes for life!"
Best of all, Rafe Spall won upper-crust Lucy's heart as the grinning, instinctive George Emerson, a young railway clerk from the lower orders. When George wasn't suddenly snogging a willing Lucy in sun-dappled fields of poppies, he was climbing trees, playing tennis and stripping off for resolutely innocent nude swims with her young brother. Ah, romance across the class divide in the olden days: it was such a bittersweet thrill, dears.
The much-lauded Stephen Poliakoff authored Joe's Palace, a self-consciously elephantine drama which lumbered along for almost two hours with an episodic majesty that, towards the end, numbed the buttocks as surely as it addled the pate. Just when you reckoned you'd never quite work out what Joe's Palace was actually about, it at last revealed itself to be about two idiots-savant - from opposing ends of the socio-economic spectrum - and their compunction to overcome what the writer Hannah Arendt famously termed "the banality of evil" - ie, the readiness with which apparently normal people commit monstrous crimes.
In the case of Michael Gambon's reclusive, alarmingly gauche multi-billionaire Elliot Graham, his mission was to uncover and atone for a guilty secret from his family past: his father's willingness to pursue profit by turning a blind eye to a casual instance of Nazi thuggery committed one sunny afternoon in a Berlin park 70 years before.
In the case of the childlike and disquietening Joe, played with blank-eyed abruptness by Danny Lee Wynter, it was all about not succumbing to the chummy Mephistophelean blandishments of a man with no moral compass: high-flying cabinet smoothie and serial adulter Richard Rees (Rupert Penry Jones). What had brought this disparate trio together was the beautifully furnished but lifeless Belgravia townhouse that the billionaire owned: Joe was employed as concierge, and the duplicitious politician used it for illicit romps with heartbroken parliamentary popsies.
By the conclusion of Joe's Palace, Joe had extricated himself from the place's golden web, and Elliot had found himself free to revitalise the house - happily not using any experts from TV reality makeover shows.
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