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It’s 1705 and a young widow has returned home to the village of Tottenham, near London, after fighting the French overseas. Following the death of her husband who was “blasted in half at the battle of Blenheim”, Nell Jackson (Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland) has a new companion in the form of Nick Mohammed’s Billy Blind, a Tinkerbell-meets-Jiminy-Cricket figure who appears at her shoulder whenever she is in a spot of bother.
Thanks to Billy’s magic powers, Nell can fight like a lion and bat away bullets with her bare hands, which comes in useful when Thomas Blancheford (Jake Dunn), the boorish son of the local landowner, pitches up at her dad’s pub and begins throwing his weight around. The resulting fracas, in which Blancheford is humiliated in front of the entire village, has grim consequences for Nell as she is framed for murder.
Renegade Nell is a stylistic about-turn for its creator Sally Wainwright, whose last project, the awards-festooned crime drama Happy Valley, wrapped up after three impeccable series last year. A long way from Happy Valley’s gritty realism, this eight-part swashbuckler is closer in spirit to Gentleman Jack, Wainwright’s period romp about Georgian landowner Anne Lister who lived a life unbound by convention.
Like her, the gobby, tomboyish Nell prefers highwayman garb to flouncy frocks — except, of course, when she is impersonating an aristocrat to evade the chancers hoping to snag a ransom. But unlike Gentleman Jack, which explores Lister’s queerness, this big-budget series is aimed squarely at a family audience: everyone keeps their clothes on, the fight scenes are played for comedy rather than gore, and the sorcery, which takes a dark turn in the hands of Adrian Lester’s Earl of Poynton, comes with a side order of camp.
Unable to prove her innocence, Nell is forced to go on the run, joining forces with Frank Dillane’s highwayman, who also has a price on his head, and former slave Rasselas (Enyi Okoronkwo). Her reputation soon precedes her: rumour has it she eats babies for breakfast, a story that mercifully hasn’t reached the ears of the travelling actress whose baby she reluctantly delivers. Renegade Nell rattles along well as our protagonist gets into one crazy scrape after another. There are some nice supporting turns from Craig Parkinson as Nell’s father, Sam, and Joely Richardson as newspaper magnate Lady Eularia Moggerhanger, though this is really Harland’s show: a typical Wainwright heroine, her Nell is tough, charismatic and she’s not putting up with your nonsense.
★★★★☆
On Disney+ from March 29
