Glum, good Richard vs fun, bad Richard

Well, at least one of my New Year's resolutions proved easier to keep than expected. There was, mercifully, only one episode left of The White Queen. It was very much like the others: relentlessly earnest, at its best when women were taking a bite out of each other and containing an innovative but very far-fetched historic theory.

The bitey women in this case were Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor's mum, and Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV's daughter. Margaret calls Elizabeth a whore (I'll come back to why) and claims that her perfect son will never marry the girl. Elizabeth, humble so far, suddenly hits back. She points out that Henry has no chance of getting his "backside on the throne" if he doesn't marry her, and so, according to her, she will be Queen of England whatever happens, "and this will be the last time you sit in my presence".

"Whatever happens?"Ah, yes. Here's where the unlikely theory comes in. At this time - as also related by Shakespeare - there was a rumour flying about that King Richard III was planning to marry his own niece, Elizabeth. You'd think, wouldn't you, that any rumours concerning Richard and Elizabeth would be put about by his enemies? Well, according to the inventive Gregory, it's Richard himself who pays special attention to his niece and strings her along - she's smitten by him - so as to make people believe they're having an affair and make Henry Tudor, whose betrothed Elizabeth is supposed to be, look ridiculous.

Come again? The rumours will make Henry look bad? Surely, no-one can be more damaged by them than the man supposedly carrying on with his brother's child? And how could Elizabeth, or anyone, believe for a moment that she could marry Richard? He is her uncle. The Pope would have a fit. Their offspring could have two heads. The only reason to circulate such a rumour would be to blacken Richard's name, yet in The White Queen the Tudors, who must be behind the rumour-mongering in the first place, seem to believe in it themselves, as does Elizabeth. Sorry, but I don't buy it for a second.

Apart from, according to this storyline, dealing shabbily with his niece, Richard gets a good press in The White Queen. Sort of. The only problem is, while he is shown to be innocent of at least most of the dastardly deeds he's accused of by Shakespeare and Co., he is also a little dull. That is something you could never call Shakespeare's unhistoric Richard, bloodthirsty though he is. It's hard for me as part of the pro-Richard team to accept, but the witty, charismatic personality of Shakespeare's Richard is probably just as much an invention as the rest of the play. Gregory's glum Richard may be a great deal closer to the truth, though nothing is going to make me believe that he ever even came close to boning his niece.

Alias Grace is proving a harder resolution. At least Grace has now reached the household where the murders will take place. Her narrative, with its mixture of naïvety and cunning, is convincing, but the problem is I still don't like her. I lost the book on the bus the other week - not by design, I promise! - but I dutifully collected it from the buses' Lost and Found department in the middle of nowhere. Plus I'm on page 278, so now I do feel I should finish it. However, I will have to take breaks, and when I'm done there will be only self-indulgence reading for a considerable time.                     

Can a cosy crime drama tick too many boxes?

One of the main channels in Sweden has a Saturday slot which appears to be reserved for English costume dramas and/or cosy crime dramas. This was the slot for Downton, and it's always worth keeping a lookout for what they'll show next. As it happens, it seldom suits me to watch the shows live, but that's what new modish TV boxes which can record programmes are for.

Needless to say, I'm impatiently waiting for Swedish TV to send Mr Selfridge on this slot, but no luck so far. Instead, at the moment, we have Grantchester.

Don't you just love ITV? They really try their darnedest to give the people what they want. Think of those glorious Morse spin-offs, which are even more enjoyable than Morse itself. Notice how they managed to bring Lewis back after what looked like a very final episode where Lewis retired and Hathaway talked about quitting the police force. Nonsense - of course Hathaway can't quit, and someone at ITV seems to have realised it. It's hard to decide what's more watchable, Lewis or young Morse, his role model Inspector Thursday and his hot, envious colleague Jakes in Endeavour. Hold on, I've mentioned the hotness of Jakes before once or twice, haven't I? But Morse is a dish too, and Thursday's extremely likeable - a copper who can be efficient without being grumpy.

You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Yep, it's true: I'm not as convinced by Grantchester as I am by the shows previously mentioned. Yet it's stuffed with crowd-pleasing ingredients. Idyllic small town in the Fifties; a reasonably personable vicar solving crimes; a curmudgeonly inspector with whom he becomes touchingly matey; a comically strict housekeeper who has a heart of gold and says "What the Dickens?" a lot; a sweetly awkward curate ("he's homosexual" his then room-mate proudly proclaims, but how does she know? Has this shrinking violet actually ever made a pass at someone?); classic whodunnit plots. Yes, it's nice and relaxing, but after the first two episodes it still feels like a poor man's Agatha Christie. Maybe the show just tries a little bit too hard to be likeable. If it weren't sourced from actual crime novels, I'd have thought that a group of bright sparks at ITV had tried to come up with a show which contains all the things a certain market segment (mine) likes.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the Bad Toffs are back. Sidney's (that's the vicar's) upper-crust love interest is about to marry an equally upper-crust geezer who's just about tolerable, but not the brightest or the most open-minded of men. When a theft takes place, he immediately presumes that Sidney's sister's jazz-singer boyfriend (another box ticked) did it - because, duh, he's black. The upper-crust love interest - a bit of a minx in my view, of the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-and-be-sort-of-tragic-at-the-same-time kind - sighs to Sidney: "His father and mine are friends... What I wanted was rather low on the list of priorities." Don't you try that, my girl. Fathers had a hard time marrying off their daughters against their will in the 1850s, never mind the 1950s. Anyway, the love interest's father is, of course, a stuffed shirt. Of her fiancé I have already spoken. The minx's, and Sidney's sister's (she was a scholarship girl) school friends are pretty horrible. The husband of one of them is running for Parliament - which is code for "upper-class twit with potentially damaging secrets". Look, I enjoy kicking the aristos as much as the next bourgeois girl, but the crime-drama clichés surrounding the upper echelons of English society are getting to be a little tiresome.  

In the midst of all this cosiness, Sidney sometimes mopes about the war or the minx and drinks too much. But it doesn't make this series any less of a harmless but forgettable trifle of a show. Still, I'd rather have sweet trifles like this than worthy and dull Parade's End-style dramas. But when, oh when will they be sending Mr Selfridge?