With David Mitchell playing the Bard as a flowery show-off,there’s lots to bask in in this knockabout sitcom with Liza TarbuckBen Elton has written a unusual sitcom and it’s humorous. Let’s start from there, because with a writing career like Eltons – bejewelled with brilliance and, or more recently,besmirched with ignominy there is no point looking back. I try not to think of Blackadder because for a writer to return to historical sitcom when the final one he wrote was basically perfect is a brave thing indeed.
Upstart Crow (BBC2) is a knockabout, well-researched take on the working and domestic life of Shakespeare, and which fudges his timeline to allow scenes in both Stratford-upon-Avon with his family,and with his theatrical muckers in London. It begins with lively monochrome drawings of yore which in no way make me think of Blackadders closing titles because we are looking forward. We find Will (David Mitchell) running Juliet’s lines from the balcony scene with his huffy teenage daughter Susanna, played by Raised by Wolves’ superb Helen Monks. It becomes quickly obvious Elton is going to mix the expected forsooth-ing with liberal dollops of “Don’t disappear there” and “Oh my God”.
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Source: theguardian.com