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VISIONS OF TRINITY

So what does it mean, then? There’s the Matrix, obviously. Charming girl. Not much in the way of conversation, but that’s probably a qualification rather than otherwise for sexual tension with Keanu Reeves. Moving down the scale of macro-importance, the Trinity is the intellectual core, or if you like the bitter pill of thought, within Christianity. It has long dissuaded buyers of what is otherwise considered a popular spiritual product, and its rebarbative complexity has engendered offshoots as varied as Arianism, Monophysitism and Islam.

More interestingly, Trinity is the brand name that adorns three ancient collegiate institutions; and also the target ITV2 selected when deciding to nail posho British tertiary education. Why so, we wonder; but not for long. Kieron Quirke and Robin French, the writers of Trinity (late undergraduates, needless to say, of Oxford and Cambridge) needed a single word name (snappier), equipped with esoteric, sinister aspects (more commercial, cf Dan Brown), and possessed of some ambiguity (less vulnerable to litigation). What better choice than a medieval college named after a theological concept, whose very country of origin is tricky to place precisely?

I come from Balliol, Oxford, myself. We are next to your namesake and we have an extremely boring relationship with them. Despite being a larger, richer and more popular college, Balliol is plagued by a barely hidden architectural inferiority complex, and so chooses to uphold an ancient bloodfeud with Trinity (Oxford) which the other lot have, by and large, grown out of. It is a bit like Orwell’s Ten Minute Hate in 1984, or the pervasive British nostalgia for evil Germans, sly French and red Russians; our loathing of Trinity keeps us strong and gives us something to talk about, in theory, when all else fails.

So when Trinity emerged on ITV, it was an instant hit round my place, but a slightly nuanced one. Should we be thrilled that our traditional rivals were being pilloried on telly every Sunday by means the most absurd stereotypes imaginable (“I know girls like a bit of rough, but in my experience they prefer a nicely laundered waistcoat”)? Or should we envy them the attention and cachet of exemplifying such glamorous evil? I am myself firmly in the latter camp. I’d love to see a TV series encompassing class-tormented sex, fascistic medical experimentation and rad tailcoats called Balliol, though I’m not sure the ratings would be as high.

Of course Quirke, French and their various directors lacked the spirit to actually approach one of the Trinities over the question of shooting locations (despite those friendly, tempting Irish tax-breaks on artistic enterprise), and so Royal Holloway was picked. In Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin alike the disapproval will have been felt, for Royal Holloway is suitable neither in terms of architecture, nor context, for the accurate representation of any Trinity. All of our Trinities are old religious foundations engrained within a town (Trinity Oxford was founded to resist the Reformation, Trinity Dublin to support it, but that’s by the by). Royal Holloway looks like a secluded, Victorian Gothic public school experiment. The TV series lost out on any town/gown opportunities for their plot (internalising these instead through the Dandelion Club/meritocratic freshers contrast), and bowed to a strangely alien structural cliché. The result is that our beloved Trinity aristocrats behave like students of Christ Church in buildings that look like Keble, or (perish the thought) Girton, Cambridge (a weirdly feminine castle entirely erected from blood red stone), buildings the Bullingdon Club wouldn’t deign to vomit in.

These aesthetic quibbles aside, I must confess what must already be obvious, that, as Professor Maltravers, played by the immaculate Charles Dance, admits somewhere in the last episode, “I love Trinity; the Dandelion Club is my life.” I love the half-implemented way that Trinity is actually made to function as an “internationally recognised centre of learning” (the best school leavers in, at least, Britain seem to head there), despite retaining academic serfdom which must lack a certain efficiency (the President of the Dandelion Club, viewers are constantly reminded, doesn’t have to do any work at all). I love the skewed vision of the academics which results in Maltravers apparently teaching medicine (he is supposed to have discovered a vital cancer treatment which murdered an arbitrary bunch of babies) as well as English (he retails Shakespeare and mauled Tennyson effortlessly and demands coursework in King Lear from Dorian), or in Dorian and Rosalind for some reason having votes on the college’s governing body. I hate the two idiots, ‘Angus and Raj’, and can’t bear to watch them, but I enjoy the fact that, like all true gimps, they possess inexplicable computing skills.

And though I may have focussed so far on the obvious butts of ‘Bridgeford University’, i.e. my establishment and its hated sister in the fens, I don’t think the miasma and atmosphere of Trinity is without debt to Trinity Dublin, either, though it may be a matter of indirect and knock-on effect rather than deliberate reference and resonance. Take the two characters in Trinity who between them decisively wrest the show into their hands: Dance’s Professor Edmund Maltravers, and Christian Cooke’s Dorian Gaudain. I would contend they are in at least one sense – the intellectual sense - Dublin-born.

It’s all in the name. Without Oscar Wilde, there could have been no Sebastian Flyte (Evelyn Waugh’s pretty boy is obviously the king of Dorian Gaudain’s particular sub-category). The philosophy the Dandelion Club under Gaudain espouses (“a society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure”) and Charlotte Arc rejects (“God, you’re boring: do you think about anything other than waistcoats and girls?”) is expressly Wilde’s own, and Trinity is able, for reasons of cultural context, to express its homoerotic side far more explicitly than is possible in Wildean drama (see the sometimes agonisingly heavy-handed love affair between Ross and Jonty: “We were lovers. You didn’t know that because you didn’t know him”). As for Edmund Maltravers, it should always be remembered that Wilde came to Oxford already a Trinity graduate, and a protégé of one of its most famous academics, John Mahaffy. Mahaffy it was who inducted Wilde into the details of Platonic homosexual ideals; and while Trinity’s Maltravers and Dorian Gaudain lack a relationship of any such intensity, there is suggestion of some close, at least, mental affinity between Maltravers and Richard Arc (“He had the most beautiful mind I have ever known”).

Nor, as it happens, is TCD without precedents for well-written, murderous trash. I direct the reader at once to a great, almost forgotten novel of Terence de Vere White’s, Lucifer Falling. This features the core struggle of Trinity – old guard academics vs modernisers – with the more spectacular, conspiratorial elements (weird science, building a master-race, etc) excised; with less nudity and more sexual agony. Basically, this novel (which is complete with a panicky disclaimer from de Vere White that “this is not intended to be a picture of Trinity Dublin”) toys with an archetype Trinity has gestured to without ever fully incorporating it – the Lecherous Lecturer. The ITV show allows its dons some kind of love life, with a triangle between Dr Gabriel Lloyd, Dr Angela Donne and (the late) Richard Arc, and a brief attempt by Rosalind Gaudain to seduce an academic’s “sexily honed brain”. But Lucifer Falling is from a seedier hand, less reliant on a youthful audience and happy to linger on the pains of middle-aged amours. It also contains, more like Trinity in this respect, a dramatic, well-timed and attuned killing:

It hit him between the shoulder blades, shattering his spine into several pieces. The bust was undamaged. The College has it in the Library now.

(For a less distressing literary take on your hothouse, there’s always Joyce.)

Aestheticism, mentoring and murder: Trinity would be nothing without Trinity (yours). Hold your heads high and grab that ITV internet player if you haven’t already.