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The first style guru
James Delingpole
If you’ve read Ian Kelly’s wonderful biography of Beau Brummell, you might have been a bit disappointed by the TV adaptation This Charming Man (BBC4, Monday) starring James Purefoy. ‘But there’s so much they’ve missed out,’ my soon-to-be-divorced-for-reasons-there-isn’t-space-to-explain-wife complained. ‘There was no Georgiana, no consorting with prostitutes, no syphilis, no explanation of how it was that he developed his charm in the first place — when he was at Eton and didn’t have nearly as much money as his rich friends.’
Though I see her point, I’m secretly quite glad that the team behind it decided to keep the drama as pared down and perfectly formed as one of Brummell’s outfits. For one thing, imagine if it had been a three-parter how depressing the final episode would have been where he goes to Paris and dies slowly and miserably. For another, TV drama is always far longer than it ought to be. At the cinema, fair enough, you can hack two or maybe three hours because you’re in the perfect viewing environment and because that’s how long films last and you’re conditioned to it. But at home there are so many distractions — bath, an early night, a good read — that really any drama over 90 minutes is the most tremendous imposition.
I’d been a bit off James Purefoy ever since that annoying preview ad he did for the HBO series Rome, where he talked, in a beyond-all-acceptable-bounds-of-luvviness way, about his character being called (cue extra poncy Italian accent) Marco Antonio. (That’s Mark Antony to you and me, squire.) But here he redeemed himself with a very plausible Brummell, looking fabulously buff both with kit on and off, and managing to convey the charm while never slipping into smarmy-git-dom.
Particularly true and terrifying, I thought, was his fragile relationship with Hugh Bonneville’s superbly drawn Prince Regent — a lethal mix of capriciousness, bonhomie, air-headed foppery, careful dignity, sly intelligence and utter ruthlessness. Terrifying, at any rate, to those of us who find themselves in a similar predicament to Beau Brummell’s vis-à-vis society.
Like Brummell, I have this unfortunate habit of telling people exactly what’s on my mind — my recent tribulations with piles being the latest topic — rather than the sweet pleasantries that English society seems to prefer. Partly I do this because it sometimes makes people laugh and like me and think I’m quite the card. Mainly it’s because I have this psychological defect whereby I imagine everyone I’m talking to has the power to see inside my head, so I might as well say what I’m thinking out loud.
What’s risky about this, as Brummell discovered during his awful ‘Who’s your fat friend?’ débâcle, is that what is recognised as delightful and charming bluntness when you’re flavour-of-the-month swiftly mutates into a widely reviled character-defect once the world has turned against you. This is why it’s so terribly important that I make a lot more money than I have at the moment. It’s not greed; it’s because I need to be in a position sufficiently secure never to have to rely on the fickle patronage of a modern-day Prince Regent.
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