Wicked Little Letters
MA, 100 minute
In cinemas March 21
Reviewed by SANDRA HALL
★★★★

Armando Iannucci, creator of the scabrous political spoof The Thick of It, has revealed he hired a consultant to further embroider the diatribes delivered by the series’ notoriously foul-mouthed anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker.

This set me wondering if the same expert had been at work on the script for Wicked Little Letters, which also delights in some extremely creative swearing.

It’s a fictionalised version of the case of the Littlehampton Letters, a story that transfixed the British public in the early 1920s when a series of obscene poison pen letters started circulating in the Sussex town of Littlehampton. Long forgotten, the case came to light again in 2017 when historian Christopher Hilliard wrote a book about it and screenwriter Jonny Sweet spotted the comic potential.

Olivia Colman weighed in next to play Edith Swan, the main victim, and Jessie Buckley was cast as Rose Gooding, the free-spirited Irishwoman who was charged with writing the letters and arrested despite the lack of evidence.

She and Edith, who are next-door neighbours, have been feuding. Put that together with Rose’s taste for smoking, drinking and tossing four-letter words around, and the Littlehampton police force decides it has a case. At least two of its members do. The third, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), Sussex’s first and only female police officer, believes Rose is innocent and refuses to change her mind no matter what.

This is all nutritious fodder for what British comedy does best – sending up national attitudes and institutions. Class, snobbery and the claustrophobic nature of a certain kind of village life feed into Sweet’s script as his highly developed taste for the absurd kicks in.

The street of cramped terraces at the centre of the story hardly fits the conventional picture of an English village but it has all the other credentials. Everybody knows much too much about everybody else and wild speculation fills in the blanks to give us a joyously exaggerated microcosm of the values and customs of working-class England between the wars.