TV review: Burton and Taylor

Indeed it is, and we're not even allowed near the bar, which is something Richard Burton would never have stood for.

Ah, Richard Burton. As famous for towering performances in Cleopatra and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold as he was for phoning in roles in utter schlock like The Wild Geese and The Medusa Touch.

People remember where they were when Kennedy and Lennon died. I can remember exactly where I was when Richard Burton went to meet the big landlord in the sky – on a campsite.

In Devon. And even now, nearly 30 years later, I can remember looking at that black and white newspaper picture of a very old man.

And I do mean old. Ridiculously old. Old as if he'd been knocking about since Christ was a lad. Good god he looked old.

And now I realise he was only 58, which is a tragically short life indeed.

Mind you, we'd probably all peg it before our time if we'd been through what he'd been through.

Rare is the man who'd look his true age after years of drink, hard living and two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor.

But at the start of BBC4's entertaining biopic, Burton was off the sauce, cleaning up his act and definitely no longer married to the most famous woman in the world.

The most famous woman in the world, on the other hand, was not only on the sauce but the pills too, and sliding not particularly gracefully towards the Betty Ford Clinic.

And yet they couldn't stay away from each other, even though they knew they were no good together.

They must have known that an American stage run as the divorced couple honeymooning with their new spouses in the same hotel, in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, had freak show disaster written all over it – and still they ploughed on, as last night's entertaining film showed.

As they argued and bickered to packed houses, we watched from backstage as they bickered and argued and punished and pretended they had moved on from each other.

It didn't matter that Dominic West looked nothing like Richard Burton, or that Helen Bonham Carter looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor, or that almost every scene revealed the cheapness of the budget, this was an absorbing 90 minutes.

The two leads perfectly captured the characters of the stars, and you felt a mixture of emotions towards them, from irritation with her selfish neediness, annoyance with his pretentions, and genuine sympathy as they finally faced up to the fact that no matter how much they loved each other, their relationship would always be toxic.

"We're addicts, Elizabeth. You and I," he told her in a cold, dark dressing room after the play had reached the end of its run.

"I'll always love you. As long as I live.

"But us together, it'll destroy me." Nine months later he was dead.

They don't make stars like Burton and Taylor anymore. They just don't. Today we have reality TV, soap actors and models. I imagine it won't be long before Peter Andre and Katie Price team up for a revival of Private Lives.

Please BBC4, whatever you do, don't make a film about it.

Andrew Owen