Happily, help is at hand in the form of a gratuitous, feisty and progressive red headed woman determined not to take no for an answer. The tone is set in the early scenes in a typical stuffy Victorian members’ club (The Reform), where, would you believe it, stuffy Victorian gentlemen sit stuffily in their stuffy leather chairs with nary a woman anywhere in sight to point out to them how stuffy and Victorian they are being. It’s as if the whole endeavour has been arranged, not for the purposes of entertainment, but just so a chippy lefty can stand on his soapbox and lecture us on what a terrible sexist, racist and classist enterprise the British Empire was.
So unbearably lame is his pallid, put-upon, charisma-free Fogg that you really wouldn’t want to spend even one day in his company, let alone 80 of them.
Truly if David Tennant had been offered the role of a giant, steaming dog turd, he could hardly have approached it with less enthusiasm than he gives to his sour, bloodless, joyless impersonation of Jules Verne’s upper class English adventurer.
Potentially, it’s a story about an England that should elicit very little sympathy,’ says David Tennant, explaining, better than any review ever could, exactly why every fraction of a second’s time spent watching him in Around the World In 80 Days (BBC1) is life spent utterly squandered. ‘In many ways, Phileas Fogg represents everything that’s alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire.
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