Date Published: 12-Apr-2011

It’s a hell of a jump from playing the gormless accountant Brendan, stuck behind reception in The Clinic, to portraying an unhappy heir in Victorian London with a mad wife in the attic and a prostitute on the pay roll for devotion and diversion. But then Chris O’Dowd is nothing if not a versatile actor who has already made his name on the small screen on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The Sligo-born, Roscommon-raised star first emerged into the public psyche as Brendan Davenport in The Clinic, even if the Brits think he emerged from under a bushel to steal all the laughs on the IT Crowd.

In either case, he’s now William Rackham, star of the BBC’s dramatisation of Michael Faber’s bestselling novel from a few years back, The Crimson Petal and the White, set in the seedy streets of London in Victorian times.

And quite simply O’Dowd is superb as Rackham, the unwilling heir to a perfume business, married to Agnes, who’s daft as a brush, but crazy about Sugar – not The Apprentice guru but rather a decidedly unconventional young prostitute played by Romola Garai – who is clever enough to recognise a way out of her lowly predicament when it is literally staring her in the face.

They make an unlikely couple with more sides to them that might first appear – Rackham is cut off by his rich father for preferring to write instead of going into the family perfume business and, until Sugar sweetens his life, his main pre-occupation seems to be whether or not he should have his wife locked up.

Sugar knows how to please which naturally makes her very popular in her own chosen profession, but ultimately there lies within an understandably level of self-disgust and revulsion.

Rackham wants Sugar all for himself as his mistress and he’s prepared to pay accordingly – although what with, given his financial difficulties, is something of a mystery. And she, for all of the self-loathing, is cute enough to see a meal ticket out of her lowly life.

A stellar cast also includes X-Files star Gillian Anderson as the brothel Madam and Richard E Grant as the nutty wife’s doctor – but it is the fact that the BBC is ploughing this rich vein of costume drama with all of the style and expertise it can muster that provides the real selling point here.

If there were any remaining doubts about Chris O’Dowd’s ability to make it onto a higher level, then The Crimson Petal and the White will put that to bed – an unfortunate analogy perhaps given that so much of the action takes place on top of one.

Closer to home, I have to admit that I’ve never quite got Gaybo – legend and all that he is, there’s something almost condescending about his clipped tones and elongated questioning that suggests more of a headmaster than an interviewer.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.