The Borgias or The Whitewash of Cesare

Well, this is something I didn't see coming. Jeremy Irons plays the villain in a TV series - and very well too - and I end up rooting for his worst enemy, a ruthlessly idealistic cardinal who seems to be Renaissance Italy's answer to Maximilien Robespierre. Nevertheless I proclaim it without hesitation: Cardinal Della Rovere as pope! And whoever he wishes as king of Naples!

Yes, I've been watching The Borgias, season one. Irons is, as always, great at playing a villain, and I'm far from being out of sympathy with his corrupt but purposeful pope. But his kids, now, that's a different story. Most enervating is Lucrezia - not as black as she's painted, it is suggested, still I wouldn't trust that slyly smirking maiden one inch. And then there's Cesare.

The most surprising thing about the series is the way it always appears to take Cesare Borgia's part. Now, I must admit I know little about late 15th-century Italy - what I do know has been snatched up from holiday tours in Italy, sumptuous films about famous painters made in the Fifties etc. But Cesare Borgia a sensitive, misunderstood figure? Really? Granted, the series-makers don't go as far as to deny that he is deeply involved in all kinds of Borgia skulduggery, but they are eager to furnish him with all sorts of excuses for his behaviour. Yes, he bribes cardinals to vote for his father as pope, but his father's rivals do the same. Yes, he poisons a cardinal, but the said cardinal wanted to kill him and the rest of his family. Yes, he frames Della Rovere for murder and later tries to have him assassinated, but he is only trying to protect his dear old dad, whose idea it all is anyway. When Cesare kills a man whose wife he has taken a fancy to, we are given almost half-a-dozen extenuating circumstances. The man was a brute to his wife. He insulted Cesare's mother. The swoony wife asked Cesare to "release her". And he was really in love with her - it wasn't just lust at all. And anyway, it was a fair fight. With all these things in Cesare's favour, it seems downright perverse that the "released" lady should flee to a nunnery.

We are also invited to sympathise with Cesare's frustration at not being allowed by his father to take up arms. Instead, he must content himself with being a cardinal, while his younger brother Juan - who commits at least one faux pas per episode - is given the military commands. It's so unfair, we're surely meant to think. Look what a mess Juan makes of everything. The Commander in Chief should be sensible Cesare instead! In fact, as being a soldier requires a great deal less diplomatic skill than being a cardinal, one may argue that Irons's pope has reasoned well when distributing high offices to his children.

You can tell that the makers of The Tudors had a hand in The Borgias as well. There is the same over-reliance on sex scenes to hot up the story, though they add little - yes, even the ones with Jeremy Irons in them. However, either the source material is richer or the scriptwriter has been more inventive: The Borgias doesn't drag as much as The Tudors sometimes did. The high points of the series are the adventures of cardinal Della Rovere who, ousted from Rome, tries to raise a foreign army that will capture the city, rid him and Christendom of the Borgia pope and make him pope instead. It is not out of personal ambition that Della Rovere wishes to do this, though the cynical rulers he encounters keep trying to make him admit to a selfish motive. His real aim is instead to purify the Church - and if that means that civilians will be slaughtered on the way, well, tough. Della Rovere is sorely tried, though, as he travels from one extremely eccentric ruler to the next. You see the pain on his intelligent face as he realises: oh dear, it's another nut case. I don't care how many "Della Rovere and mad ruler" scenes they pack in: they're a great deal more interesting than seeing Lucrezia cavorting with the groom.