It's only been a couple of years since I remember watching the three part big-budget BBC dramatisation of the lurid divorce trial of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll in their own similarly titled "A British Sex Scandal" series as well as an accompanying real-life documentary of the time, so I was surprised to see her story exhumed again so soon afterwards for public consumption in this latest documentary. Of course it is a juicy story, the type that will always fascinate the general public, as they get to peep through the keyhole of the privileged rich, plus it seems to be part of a continuing revisionist rewriting of her story, which from all the evidence presented, seems only fit and proper.
No one's claiming that the Duchess was an angel, but there's little doubt that she was terribly treated by her monstrous husband the philandering, alcoholic, brutish and above all penniless Duke of Argyll, who once the initial love had faded from their marriage, bled her and her multi-millionaire father out of oodles of money to renovate his crumbling castle as well as finance his extravagant lifestyle.
It all ended disastrously for her in their sensational divorce case in 1963 which saw not only the notoriously severe judge, himself a clan member of the Duke's Campbell family and just as importantly, the burgeoning tabloid press, who called her "The Dirty Duchess", excoriate her in public. The most damning evidence against her comprised her personal diaries which laid bare her lifestyle containing as it did the names of 88 men, stolen from her London flat allegedly by the Duke himself accompanied by his daughter and of course the infamous Polaroid snapshot, here cheekily recreated in cartoon form, of the Duchess giving fellatio to a man whose face was conveniently cropped from the snapshot, which gave rise to much speculation as to who the "headless man" actually was.
Given the times, with the permissive society still in the future, never mind the much later emergence of women's rights, feminism and the "#MeToo" movement, with the cards so loaded against her, there was no way she was ever going to win the case, leaving her out of pocket, kicked out of her beloved Inveraray Castle, (a magnificent building, one I've personally visited) and with her reputation in the mud.
This Channel 5 documentary, the third in their own series on high-profile sex scandals in recent UK history, was in a similar style to its predecessors, being quite flashy and trashy in presentation and leaving cliffhangers at every advert break. It also proved quite selective in how it told the story, omitting some of the Lady's own underhand tactics as she tried to fight fire with fire against her nasty husband.
Nevertheless I think I learned one or two new things about her, in particular her affair with the future Hollywood actor David Niven and an abortion carried out when she was only a young teenager and it does include some tantalising television interviews with her in later life, especially one with Russell Harty you'd love to see in full, in all of which she's resplendent in her fine gown, pearls and of course that magnificent bouffant hairdo she always wore.
We've had the documentaries and the mini-series, surely leaving only perhaps a feature film to complete the set in putting to rights this most salubrious and scandalous of lives. The Duchess herself would no doubt approve.
