History may be ambivalent towards Louis XIV. Before the opening credits begin to roll, a frazzled king looks back at his humongous palace with grave uncertainty. “Versailles is a wondrous creation, sire,” he is assured. “An artefact for all eternity.” Who is this programme trying to convince?
Made by Canal+ and written by Spooks screenwriters Simon Mirren and David Wolstencroft, Versailles (BBC Two, Friday, 9.30pm) is the most expensive French TV show ever, and – with a general indifference towards historical accuracy and an unpatriotic commitment to the English language – is certainly the most hungry for international regard. Now Versailles even seems to have absorbed its own PR department, which makes sense, because the palace's gravitational pull has drawn in everything else.
This lavish drama’s idea of Versailles is as a gilded trap, beginning as an “all back to mine” invitation to the nobility of Paris from the boyish schemer Louis (George Blagden), which ensnared them in a paranoid police state. The series offers something similar, a racier regal drama, where bodies contort in erotic decadence, or wriggle under stabbings, poisonings and beheadings. As its second series begins, Louis is threatened from within and without, with conspiracies swirling around the palace, while William of Orange continues his sabre rattling. What is a king to do?
Not a lot, by the looks of it. With the kidnapped dauphin speedily recovered and the culprit in chains, Louis makes a trip to the theatre, where the audience is assured: "We are all of us making history." Many characters in Versailles make such proclamations, as though they've been frantically reading ahead. So, as Fabien, its resident detective, investigates another poisoning, and Louis builds bridges between his wife and wily mistress (the luminescent Anna Brewster), there are also dire prophecies. "You have built paradise, but a scourge is coming," warns a Tarot reader. "Terrible things happen to kings."
If Louis had been blessed with similar foresight, he may have worried less about how history would remember him than how glossy television drama would portray him. There is a touch of the moustachioed villain to Blagden’s performance, smirking under every subterfuge, wide-eyed with every trauma, and developing a taste for the sadistic. There are pleasures to be found among the show’s luxuriant surfaces, all marble and gold and velvet, or its radiant cast, or plots that are never taxing. But this Versailles, its makers know full well, is no artefact for eternity, and that may be Louis’s torment: that his legacy would eventually be funnelled into something diverting and forgettable.
