Garrow's Law - series 3

The obvious opener is a call to 'Downton' fans to look no further for their Sunday-night costume drama fix.  Thankfully, 'Garrow's Law' is a very different beast.  Tony Marchant is one of our heroes.  Great idea to take a real legal reformer and make a wigs’n’all Sunday-night drama out of it.  The result is watchable, entertaining and intelligently scripted.  Without knowing it was Mr Marchant, though, we would never have guessed that he penned any of it.  It’s solid, without the dash and power of earlier work such as ‘Holding On’.

Ali loves the Georgians, and is outrageously fond of Mr Southouse, but even she can’t avoid keeping a mental tally of market scenes with livestock and baskets, a tsssk of irritation at the very clean nature of the London streets and the eternal opposition of Silvester in the courtroom as though he were the only other brief in the city.  Marchant has admitted conflating real cases, not all of which Garrow was personally involved with, to fit a structure of one-hour episodes.  Like Channel 4’s ‘City of Vice’, it features a mixture of 18^th Century curios – molly-houses and the like – and modern-day preoccupations such as the treatment of sodomy and women’s rights.  So into series 3....

Like ‘Frasier’, it suffers from the unfulfilled longing of earlier series being, umm, fulfilled.  At least we weren’t shown Niles and Daphne having soft-focus, low-light sex.  Not that Mr Buchan and Ms Marshal are unattractive, but we had guessed that Garrow and ‘Lady Sarah’ would be loved-up and loving it by now.  This brings us to another tangle of dramatising a person rather than a fictional character.  Garrow did live in nonconnubial content and eventual marriage with Sarah, who had had a son apparently by Viscount (Arthur) Hill.  However, she had not been married to Hill and was simply Sarah Dore.  The classic romantic triangle was never as fraught as portrayed and in terms of 18^th Century sensibilities the real and the fictional situations would be quite different.

Tonight’s opener otherwise dealt with madness, always dubious in a defence case then as now, and particularly so when the accused shot at the same King George whose madness inspired at least one great play, albeit over two hundred years later.  Garrow begins in adversity, as far from being knighted and celebrated as ever, and as usual is brought to his senses by his solicitor Mr Southouse.  The gallery of villains, from the gluttonous judge to the politically-minded lords, are all present and correct.  They all pale when Rupert Graves appears as Arthur, chewing the scenery as Sarah’s ex and Garrow’s arch-enemy.  The real Arthur’s bones must be rattling in the grave.