Retired history teachers everywhere must be quietly lamenting that Mussolini: Son of the Century wasn’t around when they were building their Twentieth Century Europe modules. Joe Wright’s Italian-language TV adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s novel, which has just arrived in full on Sky and Now, is a world away from the fuzzy VHS recordings of old war documentaries that served as the multimedia element of many of our GCSE history classes.
Following Il Duce’s faltering first steps towards domination, from establishing his fascist party, through the March on Rome to the installation of a dictatorship in Italy, Wright’s eight-part drama has the fidgety energy of a student trying to make history more exciting and cool. “What if the scene where blackshirted goons violently attack that socialist paper was shot in a stylised, Tarantino-ish way?”; “Could we replace the characters with puppets here?”; “Wouldn’t it be cool if Mussolini played with a grenade on his desk in this scene?”; “How about we soundtrack the whole thing with frenetic big beat scored by one of the Chemical Brothers?”
