Catherine the Great
Sky Atlantic

I’m not sure Sky’s sumptuous new drama about Russia’s eighteenth-century empress is really as much about the brilliance and statecraft of Catherine the Great as about the brilliance and stagecraft of Helen Mirren. Dame Helen looks marvellously regal in the gorgeous costumes created for her by a host of needleworkers who’ve stitched their fingers to the bone; she glitters at candlelit banquets; and naturally she confirms her flag-flying reputation as a seventysomething sexpot by convincingly playing a rather more lissom version of the original fortysomething Catherine whose energetic sexual appetite is legend.

Mirren – sorry, Catherine – only has to snap her fingers and men swoon, eagerly queuing up to roll in a rambunctious, eighteenth-century manner on the imperial sheets. Most notable among these is Grigory Potemkin, an ambitious young lieutenant (played by Jason Clarke) who became the most important of Catherine’s favourites.