Alright - so people who know me will roll their eyes at this - but I have just been watching "Let Them Eat Cake" again. This is the one with Jennifer Saunders as the vapid, scheming and casually evil Countess at Versailles just before the revolution. Dawn French plays her lusty, smart maidservant, Adrian Scarborough plays her effeminate and quick witted courtier, Alison Steadman play her rival Madame Du Plonge and Lucy Punch plays Du Plonge's increasingly sensuous daughter.
The series was a bit hit and miss, with the crassness sometimes reaching saturation point and the central character too nasty and annoyingly stupid for the audience.
"The Black Adder" had the same problem - with Prince Edmund being altogether too vulgar, mean and annoying for the audience to find a hook. A mean, unsympathetic character is fine - but the audience needs to identify with them in some way. Fortunately, "Blackadder" was given another chance and was reworked. Edmund Blackadder was still an awful person, but somewhat smarter so that the audience could get into his frustration with his stupid underlings who failed him.
I am sure if "Let Them Eat Cake" had been given a second series they would have picked up on the errors and corrected them. In essence, the Countess also could have done with being a little cleverer and Lisette more frustrating.
I wonder what would have happened. Would the Countess and her underlings have stayed and faced the revolution - eventually being guillotined, would they have escaped and found new lodgings with the Prince of Wales in England (imagine the Comtess De Vache meeting up with E. Blackadder Esq. - terrifying!), would it have gone the "Blackadder" way and picked up with the characters descendents as part of the French Empire or the restored monarchy in the 19th Century?
We will probably never know, but this show was (is) deserving of a second chance.
