I’m warming to Meghan Markle – only joking

You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives; etc?

Well, if you’ve never had that urge, I’ve got some disappointing news: With Love, Meghan may not be the programme for you. Wait, no, actually, it might yet. But not for pleasurable reasons. Only for car crash-TV reasons. It’s like the lifestyle-TV equivalent of one of those rare public appearances by Mark Zuckerberg where he pretends he is not a robot. The harder Meghan tries to persuade us that she is warm, approachable, likeable, normal, homely, the more you’re inclined to suspect the opposite.

In the first episode, the very good friend Meghan has coming to stay at her fake house is no such thing. He’s essentially a cherished pet-cum-minion – the personal make-up artist she has known since even before Suits – whose sole purpose is to go ‘Wow!’, ‘Amazing!’, ‘This is, like, the most incredible home-made jam ever’, while Meghan goes through the motions of pretending to be a domestic goddess.

You almost feel sorry for her. At least you would if you weren’t thinking about all the hapless production team members whose lives were no doubt made a living hell during the making of Operation Make Meghan Seem Nice. It’s as if a rich, connected, bird-eating spider had commissioned itself an eight-part series in which it was to be portrayed throughout as a gambolling, newborn lamb: the challenge was always going to be tricky.

Some bits do just about work. The hippy beekeeper guy is lovely and the bees don’t attack even though the clearly petrified Meghan (who never much liked honey, anyway, she admits) appears to be expecting it any second. But some bits are a total disaster, like the elevator jazz soundtrack, which just amplifies the mood of cringe-inducing stiltedness and makes you wonder if originally it had better music that got vetoed, so they had to shove in something generic at the last minute.

Why on earth did Meghan feel compelled to put herself – and us – through this horror?

Meghan doesn’t help her cause by being so obviously ill-at-ease with any task you might categorise under ‘Good Wife Material’. When she cooks you think: ‘She really doesn’t do this very often, does she?’ And you rather pity her kids and that jaunty bloke she married (who remains off-camera till the barbecue in the final episode, apparently). Why on earth did she feel compelled to put herself – and us – through this horror?

Meanwhile on the Disney channel, the creator of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight, has a new series out. It’s called A Thousand Blows and tells the true story of a female criminal gang, known as the Forty Elephants, which terrorised late 19th-century London, and of the Jamaican prize fighter Hezekiah Moscow.

Well, true-ish. It’s irritatingly transparent why Knight has cherrypicked and bigged up these obscure characters from Victorian subculture. Couldn’t someone, somewhere, just for once, make a drama series about Victorian England as it actually was, rather than as yet another exercise in injustice-correcting wish fulfilment? (Anyone remember the early 1980s drama starring Alan Dobie as Victorian detective Cribb? That did the job, as I recall.)

A bit like with Peaky Blinders, you’ll find yourself torn between being annoyed by all the anachronisms and infelicities (some of the dodgy Brummie accents on Blinders used really to infuriate me) and being swept along by the shamelessly rollicking drama.

You can forgive it an awful lot because the performances are all good. Erin Docherty is especially fine as the chief Elephant Mary Carr (tough but with just enough of a glimmer of warmth for you not to want her to slip on some offal and fall to her death in the Thames), as is Malachi Kirby as relentlessly optimistic Hezekiah (lured to England for a job offer as a lion-tamer till he discovers that the real plan was for him to appear in a cage as a Wild Man exhibit). Stephen Graham looks right, too, as Hezekiah’s musclebound nemesis Sugar Goodson, though the scene where he stands, heedless, in a gutter running with animal blood and chucks the newfangled, namby-pamby boxing gloves he’s been given into the river irked me. Would a real-life Victorian have ruined his shoes if he didn’t have to?