Secondary school teachers accused of not pointing their brighter students towards Oxbridge might feel vindicated by ITV2’s Trinity - although the messages were a little mixed. On the one hand the fictional elitist university college in this new teen dramedy-thriller is dominated by sadistic, floppy-fringed toffs and their debauched secret societies. On the other hand some state-educated freshers might quite like the idea of being asked by lithe, blue-blooded blondes, “Have you ever come on a member of the royal family?”
This unsubtle entreaty – addressed to Reggie Yates’s Lewisham lad Theo - acquired an added frisson by being delivered by Isabella Calthorpe (ne. Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe), a former Edinburgh University crush of Prince William now making her way in the world of cameras and greasepaint.
Calthorpe’s Rosalind, an arrogant hussy given to satisfying herself atop of her cousin, leaving him gasping and still fully-loaded, is probably the most socially authentic element in Trinity - a drama playing free and easy with genres, but like an over-confident Hooray lurching in a dangerous post-watershed nowhere-land between Hogwarts, an 18-rated St Trinians, Gossip Girl and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. That’s not necessarily a bad place to be, as ITV2 hope for another sexy ratings success like Secret Diary of a Call Girl and a large youthful audience of the kind that didn’t find Billie Piper talking dirty in a suspender belt inherently embarrassing.
The eight-part series is the first fruit of the new production company set up by Ash Atalla, risk-taking producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, so I’m inclined to give Trinity a second chance, albeit with no great relish. The writers have previous too – Kieron Quirke and Robin French having worked with Atalla on Man Stroke Woman as well as penning a short-lived series for American TV, Roommates. They’re both Oxbridge graduates as well, so they know their Bullingdon Club from their Piers Gaveston. In fact it was the media furore about such societies that gave Quirke and French their first impulse to write what eventually was to become Trinity.
Christian Cooke (Demons), togged out and tonsured like a prefect from Lindsay Anderson’s If, plays the chief swell, Dorian (what else), jealously looking on as his cousin Rosalind gets set to bestow her favours on Theo. Dubious favours, you could say, given how selfish she has already proved in bed. Subplots – or perhaps the main plots – involve virginal new girl Charlotte Arc (Antonia Bernath), whose father, an ex-tutor at Trinity, had died in mysterious circumstances two weeks earlier. And then there’s Charles Dance, as the Dean, up to no good with an Igor-like sidekick in a secret room near his study.
Playful, unabashed and mixing genres like the best of them, Trinity could well beguile a sizeable audience worthy of its seemingly quite lavish budget. But then it’s all very well mixing a whodunnit with campus comedy and a cast of pretty young things, as long as you are exciting enough, funny enough and sexy enough. The jury’s still out, but I suspect that that slightly unenthused foot-dragging sound is them on their way back.
