Hilarious costumes, dire dialogue ...Harlots is lip-smackingly awful: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

By Christopher Stevens Reviews Last Night's Tv

Published: 00:18 BST, 4 April 2017 | Updated: 00:18 BST, 4 April 2017

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Harlots

Rating:

Broadchurch

Rating:

Bad telly is so hard to do well. The Georgian period drama Harlots (ITV Encore) made a hopeful start, with dire dialogue and hilarious costumes, but it still threatened to dribble tepidly away.

Instead, the second episode was magnificently, lip-smackingly awful. Harlots is more embarrassing than naked karaoke, and tackier than superglue on a toilet seat.

For heaven’s sake don’t pay extra for this trash but, if you can find this obscure subscription channel anywhere in your TV package, you should relish it.

In ITV Encore's Harlots everyone wears 18 layers of satin and fake taffeta

Jessica Brown Findlay (Lady Sybil from Downton) appears to be loathing every moment, in a wig that looks like cold candyfloss. She’s a courtesan whose aristocratic lover (Hugh Skinner, the dim intern on W1A) crawls around besotted in his nightshirt, pleading with Madam Candyfloss to ‘forgive my naughty serpent’.

Everyone wears 18 layers of satin and fake taffeta. Bedroom scenes look like explosions in Boy George’s laundry basket, a bare bum protruding here and there.

The script, crammed with dubious 18th-century obscenities, deserves to be nominated for a Bad Sex award. One middle-aged strumpet (Samantha Morton), shocked to be propositioned by a punter, exclaimed: ‘I haven’t been with another man since 1758!’

Dictum of the night

Designer Kenneth Bordewick told How’d You Get So Rich? (C4) that he sacks any employee who says the word ‘No’ to a client. The customer is always right — that’s how you make money.

Because this is entirely written, produced and directed by women, all the male characters are fools. Con O’Neill plays a slave trader who is gravely offended by racist remarks. Rory Fleck-Byrne is a sedan chair carrier who does a striptease at a funeral.

Star turn of the night was Amy Dawson, as a streetwalker dying noisily from ‘French pox’, which was apparently a strain of terminal acne. One minute she was lifeless in the gutter, the next she was running about the house screaming for gin and roast chicken.

Once she spluttered her last, the harlots took her body to the house of their sworn enemy in Soho, surrounded her with scented candles and waited in the shadows.

Spend an hour watching Harlots, and everything else this week will feel like five-star telly

When the hated brothel madam (Lesley Manville) opened her door to see where the smell of pot pourri came from, the ladies stepped forward one by one, scowling silently, as though auditioning for the most pretentious Duran Duran video ever made.

The cheesiest Eighties electro-pop would be better than the hideous noise of the Harlots soundtrack, which alternates between heavy metal folk music and weirdly tuned drums that sound like a harp made from rubber bands.

Spend an hour watching Harlots, and everything else this week will feel like five-star telly.

The slow-burning crime serial Broadchurch (ITV) has been genuinely five-star for weeks, as detectives Hardy and Miller (David Tennant and Olivia Colman) comb through dozens of suspects and fragmented clues in their hunt for a rapist.

This time, though, it opened and closed with Twin Peaks-style dream sequences that were at odds with the low-key, methodical writing that characterises the rest of the series.

Bereaved father Mark (Andrew Buchan) dreamed of playing video games with his dead son, as he slept in his van. After confronting the boy’s killer, he stood at the top of the Broadchurch cliffs and made a farewell phonecall to his daughter.