The deliciously watchable Patrick Melrose starts tonight

MONDAY night TV has always been about the big hitters. Trust us, this is what you’ll race home for over the next five weeks.

THE one thing you definitely won’t get from Patrick Melrose is a romantic portrayal of the British upper class.

The five-part miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch in a career-defining role starts tonight on Australian TV and it’s as scathing of English toffs as Downton Abbey was deferent to the lives of the landed gentry with their perfectly laid-out dinner tables.

Adapted from the semi-autobiographical books by Edward St. Aubyn, the Patrick Melrose stories are five significant moments in the titular character’s life, from his traumatic childhood spent at his parents’ French chateau to coping with loss and alcoholism in his 40s.

The first episode follows a youthful Patrick in New York City collecting his father’s ashes while on the most intense, vicious drug bender fuelled by Quaaludes, heroin, cocaine and god knows what else. It sets the tone brilliantly, plunging you into a world of excess and pain. You won’t be able to glance away, even for a moment.

The show is also filled with the most scintillating and grotesque characters, including Hugo Weaving as Patrick’s domineering and sneering father and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his flighty and sad mother.

Benedict Cumberbatch has been nominated for an Emmy for his performance in Patrick Melrose. Picture: Ollie Upton/Showtime via AP

Cumberbatch’s name has been attached to the project for six years. The actor has called this role one of his two bucket-list roles (the other is Hamlet) and it’s clear he absolutely relished putting on Patrick’s skin. His performance is — almost at once — manic, resplendent, biting, bonkers, loathing, vulnerable and, above all, entirely entrancing.

But as much as the series is about Patrick’s addictions, demons and the abuse he suffered, what makes it sing is its scathing indictment of the British class system, or class systems in general because moneyed Americans don’t come out of this with their dignity intact, either.

Screenwriter David Nicholls adapted the books into the miniseries, a process that took six years and “30 or 40 drafts”. While Nicholls is best known for his novel One Day, which he later adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, his thoughtful screenplay adaptations of Thomas Hardy novels Far From The Madding Crowd and the Tess Of The D’Urbervilles miniseries, among other credits, have made him an in-demand scribe.

Patrick Melrose screenwriter David Nicholls is best known for tearing out your heart with his novel One Day. Picture: Mark Bourdillon/Contour by Getty Images

In Australia last week for the Series Mania TV festival, Nicholls told news.com.au that Patrick Melrose was always meant to highlight the rot in British high society.

“We wanted to get away from a picturesque portrayal of the British upper classes,” he said.

“The most popular shows in that mould are The Crown and Downton Abbey — and I really love The Crown, I’m full of admiration for it, it’s a fantastic show. But they go some way to humanising and arguably sentimentalising aspects of the British upper classes. I think we were quite happy to be scabrous and satirical about them.

“It’s quite refreshing for a British drama to not be so forelock-tugging of upper classes, to show snobbery and this complacency of the aristocracy as destructive and unpleasant rather than treat it in this rather 19th century way of noble guardians of a wonderful cause.

“I’m pleased it’s satirical and spiteful. I don’t feel hostile towards individuals from that world but I don’t want to be pretty about it.”

Several characters in Patrick Melrose embody the pomposity and entitlement Nicholls talks about, especially Patrick’s father David who calls ambition “vulgar”.

Patrick Melrose was one of two of Benedict Cumberbatch’s “bucket-list roles”.

In the third episode, there’s a parallel universe-y birthday party at a country estate in which Princess Margaret is in attendance. It brings out the worst instincts of the hoity-toity set, with one pair of gossiping partygoers relishing in the imminent divorce of the Lord and Lady of the manor — “Well, serves her right, all that cliiiiiimbing” — simply because their hostess comes from a middle-class background.

It’s the same toxic mentality that trailed Kate Middleton for all those years during her and Prince Williams’ courtship. In this world, the inheritances are tied up in unshakeable mental scars and prejudice.

Princess Margaret — then about 60 years old in the timeline of the episode and played by Harriet Walter — comes in for a particularly caustic portrayal, almost jarring after Vanessa Kirby’s performance in The Crown.

“It’s very hard to find an account of Princess Margaret in her later years in which she isn’t rude and snobbish,” Nicholls said. “I’m sure The Crown will deal with the journey from this rather sympathetic character to this monster. I think it’s OK to portray her like that because it’s not a distortion.”

That irreverence to those institutions, along with the sharp dialogue, its wicked sense of humour and Cumberbatch’s extraordinary performance is why Patrick Melrose is so deliciously watchable despite its incredibly dark subjects.

Patrick Melrose starts tonight on BBC First on Foxtel and Fetch at 9.30pm, followed by its on demand digital release an hour later.

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