This new drama might just work, you know, given the British audience’s great love of the legal and the historical. Cunningly (possibly too cunningly as it does seem a little up its own britches on the basis of the first episode), Tony Marchant has combined both genres in Garrow’s Law, which is based upon the papers of the great Georgian lawyer William Garrow, the chap who gave us the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
Certainly it seems like you were right up against it as a defendant in those days, with no lawyer by your side the cases hung on the witch-dunking defence - ’she’s drowned, m’lud, she was innocent’ - and Garrow, bless ‘im, is the only man in England to have spotted the injustice. He’s a pompous prig, unfortunately, with a big fat chip on his shoulder cos he’s from the lower orders, but he’s played by Andrew Buchan, the chap from Party Animals, who I seem to recall caused a few heaving bosoms on MN. (Personally I think he has a fat tongue, like Jamie Oliver’s, so I am Put Off). Rupert Graves is in it, for those of us of a Merchant Ivory disposition.
And to those MNers with whom I share a locale… Yes, it IS Pollok House. The whole thing as the Old Bailey and beyond, shot from a zillion different angles. How they managed to get my kids out of that blasted maze for long enough film it is a mystery to me.
