TV preview, Dark Angel (ITV, Monday 9pm): a tale of a truly nasty woman

Plus: Sisters in Country: Dolly, Linda and Emmylou (BBC4, Friday 10pm)

Joanne Froggatt as Mary Ann Cotton in ITV’s gripping ‘Dark Angel’ (ITV)

There’s nothing like a Victorian serial killer to cheer up a dank Monday night in post-Brexit Britain, is there? So thank you, ITV, for Dark Angel, a quite gripping account of a woman who may have been this country’s first (known) serial killer. Serial killer, that is in sense of the ordinary British citizen going about the homely business of slaughtering friends, family and the odd stranger. So not in the Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell or Field Marshal Douglas Haig sense of legal killings in the name of politics or religion or war. Just to be clear.

So this is the first episode of two telling the story of one Mary Ann Cotton. I wouldn’t want to spoil your enjoyment, so I’ll just sketch things out as best I can, and recommend that you resist the temptation to google the name. I mean, you know that a show with the title Dark Angel is going to have some, well, dark stuff, in don’t you? Well, you ought to.

Alun Armstrong is his usual masterful Geordie self as the man who spawned this pretty little piece of evil, as played by Joanne Froggatt. Froggatt, who you may recall from her turn in Downton Abbey, plays the too-charming-by-half Cotton with a quiet efficiency that reflects her character’s modus operandi. A lusty type, she is too: I feel comfortable in telling you that I don’t think Dark Angel has any predecessor or peer in television costume drama in one important dimension: the variety, intensity and frequency of what may be termed, with I hope appropriately colloquial antiqueness, “knee-tremblers”. Victorian morality and the shortage of affordable hotel accommodation evidently made a quickie in a semi-public place something of inevitability for those set upon sexual congress, and such couplings were carried out with breath-taking brevity. Anyway, there’s lots of sex as well as plenty of death in this show.

You’ll appreciate the meticulous attention to period detail too, if you’ve any eye for it, from the aspidistra in the window to the piles of florins to the diagnoses of “gastric fever”. Let’s just say that if you ever meet a potential spouse who takes an unusually intense interest in the life assurance industry, you should be careful about taking tea with them. Before or after your knee-trembler, that is. As one of Ms Cotton’s husbands remarks, “life insurance is an ugly fashion”. Mary Ann Cotton, then: a remarkable story remarkably well told. No googling, now.

When I think about Dolly Parton I can’t help thinking about what a wholesome figure she was and, no doubt, still is. Trendy now, too. In Sisters in Country: Dolly, Linda and Emmylou, I also learned that she was known as “the Tennessee mountain girl”, which I thought might be a reference to her physique, and rather a sexist one too, but is of course alluding to her origins in the heart of the country scene (which, when Dolly and her friends were stating out, was called country and western).

I’d also forgotten what a fine singer she was,

and how jolly and memorable were her hits – “Jolene”, “Nine to Five” and all that. Struggling, to some extent, in Dolly’s shadow, we also find Linda Ronstadt, with her California take on country, and Emmylou Harris, band leader, who were inspired by Dolly to smarten up country’s blue-collar worn-jeans-chewing-tobacco image and take it the new level of cheesy niceness in the 1970s. By the 1980s they’d teamed up to make the best-selling Trio album, and their influence is abiding. The girls are still going, though not always in the best of health. A touching and timely tribute.