HBO Max's 'The Trial of Christine Keeler' is Entertaining, But Doesn't Have Much to Say
The six-part drama The Trial of Christine Keeler was originally released in the U.K. in December of last year and is now streaming on HBO-MAX. Apparently, the intention of the all-woman production team - writer Amanda Coe (Apple Tree Yard), Director Andrea Harkin, and Producer Rebecca Ferguson - was to tell the story of the infamous 1960s scandal's female protagonist; but has anyone ever ignored the presence of Christine Keeler in the sorry story of the Profumo Affair? Inevitably, the series will be compared to Amazon Prime’s A Very English Scandal, but where that series was a jolly all-boys-together romp, The Trial of Christine Keeler is a far sadder and darker exploration of male power and female sexuality.
This is a story about the powerless, defined by race, class, education, or gender, losing out against the male, white, upper-class Establishment of Britain in the early 1960s. This period was by no means the swinging sixties. Prime Minister Harold MacMillan and his Conservative government are still in power, and a series of disjointed scenes jumping around over a few years set the stage for what happened. Meet Christine Keeler (Sophie Cookson)—young, pretty, barely educated, in search of fun in London with vague aspirations of a career as a model or an actress by way of exotic dancing. She lives with a Black boyfriend, Johnny Edgecombe (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who’s trying to find work but invariably discovers a white man got there first. Does she view the nasty comments from white passers-by when she and Johnny kiss on the street as toxic racism? More likely she just enjoys shocking the neighbors, just as she enjoys sex, Caribbean music, drugs, and nightclubs.
Enter the osteopath to the rich and famous, Dr. Stephen Ward, played brilliantly by James Norton (Grantchester), an ingratiating voyeur ascending the slippery slope of social advancement. He’s relatively posh, but not that posh, and the truly powerful make sure he’s reminded of his lower status. He is there, after all, to provide them with exclusive services, the proprietor of a sexual buffet. Netflix’s The Crown covered the Profumo Affair with a great deal of imagination (must we remind you again that series is fiction, not history?), but it’s true that Ward liked art and he did sketch various members of the Royal Family. He meets Christine at the club where she dances and promises her ... fun. And he addresses her as “Little Baby,” which is creepy in the extreme.
