SWEARING THIN

Profanity has always been the heart of Guy Ritchie’s tough-guy offerings, but MobLand takes it too far. Helen Coffey mourns the loss of the c-word, our most beloved expletive

- Helen Coffey

When I started watching MobLand, Guy Ritchie’s new London gangster drama featuring an all-star cast including Dame Helen Mirren, Tom Hardy and Pierce Brosnan, I initially thought the most ridiculous thing in it was the accents. There’s Brosnan’s preposterous “Irish” brogue for starters – even more inexplicable when you consider that the man actually is Irish – an amalgamation of every terrible “top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” impression you’ve ever heard, and arguably even worse than his much-mocked turn in the 1988 film Taffin.

Then there’s Mirren’s equally scattergun attempt at convincing us she hails from the Emerald Isle, not to mention the myriad botched cockney dialects that frequently threaten to tip over into full Dick Van Dyke territory.

But before long, another element in the buzzy new Paramount show, centred around the Harrigan crime family, vied for top dog in the “suspend your disbelief” Olympics.

The first time it happened was nine minutes and 45 seconds into episode one: the c-word, flung out in a gritty East End nightclub, the mobster equivalent of a glove slap as the precursor to a duel. Another one landed five seconds later. A third swiftly followed. A brief spell of furious running from Eddie Harrigan (Anson Boon), and then “cunt” number four slid into view.