The Lady review – this maddening drama’s take on Sarah Ferguson utterly fails to read the room

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‘This drama has been inspired by a true story,” announces The Lady, ushering us into the solemnly lit antechamber that is the miniseries’ introductory disclaimer. The italics continue: “Some names have been changed,” they read, “and some characters, events and scenes have been created and merged for dramatic purposes.” Hmm, we think, as a queasily off-balance piano lurches and stumbles in the background. “Created and merged”? This, surely, is the language of a school theatre project, with its glue guns and earnest pretensions, not that of a lavish ITV four-parter that focuses on the very real rise, fall and eventual conviction-for-murder of Jane Andrews, a former M&S employee from Grimsby who served, from 1988 to 1997, as a dresser to Sarah Ferguson, the then-Duchess of York. This does not, surely, bode well.

Still. The Lady is produced by Left Bank Pictures, who also made The Crown. And it’s written by Debbie O’ Malley, who did many wonderful things with Channel 5’s unexpectedly excellent “reboot” of All Creatures Great and Small. So, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. And we do. Until, that is, 16 minutes into the first episode, when Sarah Ferguson (Natalie “Game of Thrones” Dormer) bursts into Jane Andrews’ (Mia “Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials” McKenna-Bruce) job interview at Buckingham Palace and … Oh. Oh dear. Any hopes that The Lady might offer a serious and sensitive depiction of the complex real-life events that led a mentally unstable young woman to brutally murder her partner instantly wilt. What we get instead is a gaudy mess; a strange and exasperating thing that clomps between aerated royal soap, plodding police procedural, exuberant coming-of-age period piece and hand-wringing domestic drama with the grace of a pantomime horse at a black-tie buffet.

Jane played by Mia McKenna-Bruce stood by a window.

Talking of which, here comes Dormer’s Ferguson, crashing into the aforementioned interview in a polka-dot frock and directing the full force of her publicly funded bouffant at our tremulous young protagonist.

“Have you come far, Jane Andrews?” she foghorns, before wondering whether the 21-year-old’s decision to relocate to London might be because she finds it “too grim ’oop north’, hah hah”.

The ambitious, fragile Andrews is immediately smitten and soon the pair are bonding over chiffon bows and their erratic love lives; Andrews determinedly burying her Lincolnshire vowels and myriad mental health issues in pursuit of the high life.

Threaded throughout the froth (shopping montages! Champagne receptions! Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough!) is the police investigation into Andrews’ brutal murder, in September 2000, of Thomas Cressman; a former stockbroker who reportedly incurred the royal aide’s wrath by refusing to marry her. That screeching sound you can hear is one of many tonal gear shifts as reality gatecrashes the fun; the dual timeline treading great clods of messily unpleasant fact into the royal carpet. So here comes DCI Jim Dickie (a never-wearier Philip Glenister) in his raincoat, harrumphing blearily around the crime scene as the camera zooms in on the victim’s bloodied feet (“textbook domestic, innit?”).

Natalie Dormer plays Sarah Ferguson in The Lady.

What a maddening concoction this is. Scenes in which an increasingly unstable Andrews attempts to seek comfort from her well-meaning mother (Claire Skinner) offer tantalising flashes of a subtler, knottier drama lurking beneath the suds. But then we get a bit where Fergie shouts “olé” while trying on a big hat and…well.

So huge is the shadow cast by the ex-Duchess’s presence that it’s nigh-on impossible to take the rest of it seriously. And while we’re spared any appearances from Ferguson’s ex-husband, there’s still something uniquely dispiriting in The Lady’s failure to read the (royal) room. (Following the recent revelations regarding Ferguson’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, Dormer has said she will donate her fee to charity.)

Ultimately, for all its regal bells and kazoos, its creating-and-merging-stuff-for-fancy-dramatic-purposes, The Lady is just another TV series that turns a horribly bleak and upsetting real-life crime into entertainment. And surely, surely, we’ve had enough of those?