Imagine … Philip Roth Unleashed; Penny Dreadful – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/21/imagine-philip-roth-unleashed-tv-review

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Philip Roth, arguably America's greatest living writer, especially among people who like to argue about that sort of thing, announced his retirement from writing two years ago and has now chosen to give what he says will be his last interview – "my absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere" – to the BBC and Alan Yentob, who says he had been trying to make a film with and about Roth for 20 years. The result is the two-part Imagine … Philip Roth Unleashed (BBC1), which began last night with Roth saying drily (and from now on, please mentally insert that adverb whenever Roth begins to talk): "Now that I don't write, I just want to chatter away."

It got your hopes up, possibly too much. There wasn't, in fact, that much of Roth in between the lengthy readings from his books (and there was an excited little giggle from Yentob after one passage about female orgasms that I would give a lot of money to be able to unhear), archive footage of his neighbourhood, his family, earlier interviews with them and him and occasional tributes (varying from insightful to merely hagiographic) from other writers and his biographer Claudia Roth Pierpoint.

That said, what there was was wonderful. As scabrous, combative, fiercely intelligent, funny and uncompromising as you would expect – that muscular mind flexing for a moment and firing off its answers to (or dismissals of) his interlocutor's questions. For example, when Yentob queried Roth's claim that he had very little sex at college (his fellow students remember things differently), Roth put the young upstart back in his box with an effortlessly sardonic Newark snarl: "This great memory of mine you say I have? I have it." Or when Roth said that after his first marriage he felt himself coming undone and so, "psychoanalysis befell me". Great line. Great tactic.

I wonder, though, whether ardent Roth fans would have felt themselves cheated. Most of the material and the game of matchy-matchy between the art and the life was familiar even to me, a non-ardent fan, and some absences glaring. Most notable, perhaps, among the latter was any mention of the claims by his second wife Claire Bloom that he was a violent husband, when Yentob briefly broached the subject of the misogyny perceived by many in Roth's books. This isn't, particularly, a feminist point. If the game is drawing parallels between the books and their creators, do they, should they get to choose them all?

Failing that, a few academics and scholars to talk us through how his books work – individually, in their various sequences, as an oeuvre – in between crony contributions might have dispelled both the sensation of a giant love-in and that everyone was engaged in nothing more than a game of biblio-biographic pelmanism. That's something anyone with time to sit down with everything from Goodbye Columbus to Nemesis and a detailed timeline can do. Dissection is a rarer skill.

Let us turn to unquestionably funner stuff. Namely, Penny Dreadful – Sky Atlantic's gallimaufry of gothic madness. Take a ladleful of Bram Stoker, a dash of Dorian Gray, a soupcon of Mary Shelley; add a few hundred gallons of gore and boil furiously. Season with Timothy Dalton as a brooding gentleman whose daughter has been dragged down to a viscera-splattered demi-monde, Eva Green as his mysterious, fortune-telling companion, Josh Hartnett as somebody to bring in the US audience and – no sir, madam, your eyes do not deceive you! – Simon Russell Beale as an eccentric Egyptologist in orange wig and lavender makeup, on hand to decipher the hieroglyphics found by a young but and fearless surgeon whose name possibly rhymes with Shmictor Brankenstein (underneath the corrupted exoskeleton of one of the deceased inhabitants of the aforementioned demi-monde during one of Eva, Timothy and Josh's exploratory missions and voila! A stew of concentrated delight.

Like Sir Timothy of Dalton as he roams the sewers of London with his boon companions, I hope you are still with me, for we have hardly begun. There's also the evisceration of a pore wummun and 'er chile in the nearby slum (did I say we were in Victorianish times? Did I need to?) that has outraged public and police alike. Is Jack the Ripper back or is something much, much worse afoot? I'll give you a clue. It's something much, much worse.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed myself. Woody Allen was wrong – it's not sex that's the most fun you can have without laughing. It's this. There is nothing more cheering than spectacular silliness done with gusto and good heart. And gore. Lots and lots of gore. Hurrah!