Did anybody watch this on BBC1? I thought Hugh Grant was brilliant as Jeremy Thorpe.

Can't wait for next weeks episode.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... emy-thorpe

I knew Jeremy quite well, I almost regarded him as a personal friend.

He was brought down by a snivelling little rat, one of a monstrous band who, taking advantage of the mores of the time,, preyed on homosexuals, compromised them, and then explored them.

They drove people to suicide, bankrupted them, ruined careers and marriages and alienated children.

No-one who was not around at the time can i imagine the abhorrence with which homosexuals were regard. While I have, I hope, become more tolerat, it is so engendered in me and my generation that I still feel sick when I see men kissing on television.

That is what these scum relied on.

I thought Hugh Grant played a totally believable Jeremy Thorpe, somehow managing to look very like him. However, I thought that the music and some of the dialogue were flippant, trivialising and bordering on farce.

Jeremy Thorpe's ultimate demise was not due to anything else other than his plot to kill his one time lover and far from being exploited by the young Norman Scott, that boot was very definitely on the other foot. Jeremy Thorpe was arrogant, cynical, manipulative and totally amoral in that he treated his mother like some old fool and, in order to further his political ambitions, he married some unfortunate woman and sired a child by her; not a nice person at all nor one to be admired.

Jeremy Thorpe's ultimate demise was not due to anything else other than his plot to kill his one time lover

But he was cleared of such charges!

Jeremy's ultimate demise was because he was a homosexual, and got caught, a fate suffered by many others back then.

laurie53 wrote:But he was cleared of such charges!

He was cleared because the prosecuting counsel was unable to establish his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Doesn't mean he was innocent!

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual activity between consenting adults in private (quite rightly and long overdue) and I never heard of anyone being retrospectively prosecuted for alleged offences before that time. John Preston's book upon which this series is based convinced me that, while Thorpe had no reason to fear prosecution if his homosexuality became public knowledge, he was obsessed with image and the public persona he had created for himself. Thus, Scott was a potential embarrassment and had to be eliminated.

While Scott comes over as a loathsome, whingeing individual who sees all his misfortunes as somebody else's fault, one can at least perceive in his background and early life some reasons why. Thorpe, however, comes over as an unpleasant and arrogant individual with an over developed sense of entitlement. Witness the fact that he spent so much of his final years trying to enlist the help of anyone and everyone to get himself nominated for a peerage. Out of touch with reality, or what?!

I haven't seen the tv series and, having read the book, I don't want to. My abiding sentiment upon closing the last page was one of utter sickness that the elected representatives of you and I are, collectively, such a bunch of self serving scumbags - because I really don't think anything much has changed in 40-odd years.

Obviously we all have our own opinions, but having lived through it, and been close to it (He was my MP and a regular visitor to my workplace and drinking haunts) ny opinions are based on my own experiences,not somebody else's.

Another good episode last night.
At times it was like a comedy - the bumbling assassin etc....

More like a farce.

He should never have been prosecuted.