The Borgias

Right, as promised here's a speculative blog about Showtime's new series The Borgias. It could well be all over the place (the blog, not the show... well possibly the show) because I have Manflu and am currently off my tits on Sudafed and Strepsils. I know that it doesn't come out until 2011 and even then us Brits will have to wait even longer for it, but I want to comment on a few things that the TV execs may or may not have taken into account. I digress.

Showtime look set to cash in on the success endured by its historical romp The Tudors, by bringing us a similar tale of a Renaissance family with a good deal of murder, simony, incest and corruption up their immaculately tailored sleeves, The Borgias. For the uninitiated the Borgias (an italian corruption of Borja) were Valencian nobility who made their name in the eminent circles of Renaissance Italy. Now arguably the most famous patriarch of the family was Rodrigo Borgia (to be played by Jeremy Irons), the man who would become (by less than papal means) Pope Alexander VI. Now, 'how did a someone from this family become Pope?' I hear you say. Well be quiet, I'm getting there, who asked you anyway? Rodrigo was able to grasp the most influential role on the planet by good old fashioned simony and corruption. Seriously, this guy makes Berlusconi seem like... Mother Theresa (I was going to say the Pope but in this context, it's perhaps not the best analogy). But surely as Pope he must have cleaned up his act right? Wrong. Alexander VI went on to profit enormously from foreign invasion of and general unrest in Italy. Indeed his son Cesare formed an alliance with the French king and went on to capture Milano from the reigning Sforza family during his papacy. Alexander VI also freely paraded his much younger mistress Giulia around for all to see. He used his sexually corrupt daughter, Lucrezia to forge several alliances - sexual politics and corruption were two very strong reasons why the Papacy was little more than a joke during this period. On the plus side Rodrigo had a fairly benign attitude towards Jews, so much so that he was accused of being a marrano. He died suddenly in 1503 (speculated to be the corollary of him and Cesare drinking a bottle of their own poisoned wine) after convulsive fever and intenstinal bleeding, he died - his last words supposedly 'wait a minute'. So, an all round stand-up guy (and you thought that being a member of the Hitler Youth made you a dodgy Pope...). Machiavelli called him 'a successful politician', yeah that Machiavelli. Talk about damning with faint praise.

So, I know what you're thinking, a lot of scope for a rip-roaring TV series, well you'd be wrong. In the 1980s the BBC had a crack at the tale in their version of the Borgias, hoping to recapture the audience that had tuned in en masse to I Claudius. Clearly this was a historical melodrama too far and was an abject failure with critics and viewers alike. It was a rare failure in producer Mark Shivas' glittering career and perhaps the frequent, graphic violence and nudity and Adolfo (yes, the one out of off of Thunderball) Celi's thick accent contribtued to the derision. So, interesting that an American cable network would decide to have a bash at it 30-odd years later, despite the presence of Oscar winner Jeremy Irons and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game).

Interestingly French channel Canal Plus appears to have commissioned a startlingly similar series, penned by Tom Fontana (Oz) for release at the same time. And it's not just TV that's had a pop- visionary, acid-trip director Alejandro Jodorowski attempted to tell the tale in two graphic novels and French literary giant Victor Hugo wrote a play about Lucrezia Borgia.

The timing of these two series is odd however given the recent release of Assassin's Creed II (this bit will spoil the plot for you, so don't read unless you've already completed or never intend to complete the game). In ACII you play Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Florentine noble who's father and brothers are wrongly accused of treason and hanged by conspirators and guess what? The head conspirator is none other than rotund, dastardly Spaniard, Rodrigo Borgia. Yeah, that's right, by the end of the story, your main antagonist is the Pope. There's several other plots happening alongside - the continuation of the Templars vs. Assassins war from the first game, the travails of modern day hero Desmond Miles (featuring an unexpected but perfectly pitched appearance by British comedian/writer Danny Wallace as Assassin techie Shaun), a marvellous feature known as The Truth where you solve complex historical puzzles to reveal a few fleeting seconds of revelatory film (reminiscent of 'the footage' in American Cyberpunk-god William Gibson's Pattern Recognition), a blossoming friendship with a young Leonardo da Vinci and a Tuscan villa to restore, as well as being able to explore the fully realised Renaissance cities of Firenze and Venezia - but the main story concludes with a showpiece- stealthing your way through St Peter's Basilica and performing an aerial assassination on the Pope, mid-Latin mass in the Sistene Chapel - sensational. But you can't keep Borgia down (not in 1499 anyhow) and he uses his papal staff (one of two Pieces of Eden, that along with the Apple from the first game, open a vault beneath the chapel) to vaporize the congregation in the hope of obliterating young Ezio with them, but it doesn't quite come off for the chunky pater and another showpiece ensues, a fistfight with the Pope underneath the chapel. I won't quite ruin it entirely, it is a marvellous game, play it for yourself, the ending is both ludicrous and brilliant at the same time. However it strikes me that this is perhaps a coup on the part of the TV companies, who have just won themselves an audience of gamers for their new historical series.

So another case of canny publicity garnering by TV execs? 2 in 2 days, surely not? Well, who knows? With the lavish production values, neither series will air until next year at the earliest and by then details of ACIII will be being drip-fed to an expectant gaming community and those more casual among us will have forgotten the treachery, sex, murder and corruption of His Holiness Pope Alexander VI aka Rodrigo Borgia.