The Trial of Christine Keeler, review: A timely, scandalous story about sleazy politicians

At last, in a sea of festive remakes and reunions, an original drama, albeit on a subject that has been treated before. The Profumo affair, in which John Profumo, the minister for war, had an affair with a 19-year-old and lied about it, rocked 1960s Britain and ultimately helped bring down Harold Macmillan’s government. It popped up briefly in The Crown and before that there was Scandal, the 1989 film starring Ian McKellen and John Hurt, and an odd 2013 Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, Stephen Ward. If anything, it’s surprising it hasn’t already been given a proper TV adaptation. The story’s mix of attractive young women, celebrities, violence, aristocrats, country houses and sleazy politicians gives it a powerful grip on the British imagination. Julian Fellowes must feel he has been asleep at the wheel.

Where previous versions focused on the men, The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC1) is told from her point of view. It’s written by Amanda Coe, who knows the terrain. In 2008, she wrote another film about a controversial woman in the Sixties, Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story. Sophie Cookson plays Keeler as a vampish but vulnerable 19-year-old, with few illusions about what she wants from London and what it wants from her. Whenever she runs out of money, which is often, or she gets a call from her hard-up mother, there is a man ready to lend her a tenner. It’s a charismatic performance, sympathetic enough to hold the viewer’s interest without pretending Keeler was an ingenue.

The chronology is jumbled up, seemingly in order to get the infamous Cliveden swimming pool scene in as near to the start as possible. The sex, spies and shooting are one thing, but the pool marked the Profumo affair as truly salacious. A pool? In Berkshire? Pass the smelling salts. We see the fateful meeting, as Profumo (Ben Miles) witnesses Keeler emerging naked from the water. She meets his gaze and the wheels are set in motion.

Then the action cuts back to how it came about. James Norton’s Ward is a charming, handsome osteopath, obsessed with the aristocracy and conscious of being a minor public schoolboy. He meets Keeler when she’s working as a topless dancer in Soho. The two form a friendship based on a similar hunger for the high life. “We’re twins,” he says, towards the end of the first episode. “No we’re not,” she replies. The script obliges Norton to call Keeler “Little darling” an irritating number of times, but other than that he strikes a plausible mix of protective and scheming, as he sashays between his mid-century bachelor pad and various grand homes.

With six hour-long episodes to play with, The Trial of Christine Keeler has space to develop its characters beyond the headlines, and for Coe to tease out subtexts about racism, sexism, and nuclear anxiety alongside the central theme of powerful men abusing their positions. Admonished by a lover for a suit so tight that it reveals his penis, Profumo muses that after the bloodless Macmillan, the British public might be ready for a prime minister with a “working todger”. It’s a horribly timely thought.