Christine Keeler is back in spotlight as new BBC drama revisits Profumo
A MAJOR new BBC drama will revisit the sex scandal that helped to bring down a faltering Conservative government more than half a century ago.
The six-part series, called The Trial Of Christine Keeler, centres on the 1963 Profumo Affair, which saw politicians caught up with prostitutes and Soviet spies in a scandal that rocked the Establishment.
Keeler, a teenage model, had an affair with cabinet minister John Profumo and a Russian diplomat at the same time — and the politician was eventually forced to resign after lying to Parliament when his personal life was uncovered.
Writer Amanda Coe said she wanted to “bring a fresh lens” to a story that had become “a powerful fable of our national identity”.
She said: “The astonishing story of Christine Keeler and the so-called Profumo Affair is the Salem Witch Trial meets OJ Simpson — a perfect storm of gender, class, race and power that resonates into the world we’re living in today.”
BBC drama controller Piers Wenger said the BBC1 show, which starts filming next year, digs “more deeply than ever before on the nature of the taboos that were busted and the lives shattered”. It is part of a series of new dramas announced today including Trigonometry, which is described as “a very adult romcom” and deals with a love triangle that develops when a pair of c ashstrapped young Londoners take in a lodger.
Also unveiled today is a “landmark” seven-episode series, World On Fire, telling the story of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people on all sides of the conflict, including a young woman factory worker in Manchester and a Berlin family trying to protect their disabled daughter from the Nazis’ euthanasia programme. The series is written by Peter Bowker.
BBC2 will also show Arctic thriller The North Water, based on Ian McGuire’s Booker long-listed novel. Andrew Haigh will adapt and direct the story of a 19th-century whaling expedition which he said was “both beautiful and brutal”.