television reviews
-
Well, I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t post anything more about The White Princess, but the articles below proved too much for me. I will isolate a small paragraph from one of them, about Emma Frost, the writer of the series:- “In writing this scene, Frost had to make a choice between accurately depicting horrifying…
-
According to Mark Twain, “A cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.” And maybe he’s right, but the BBC documentary series “1066: A Year to Conquer England”, starts off with cauliflowers that must have had a Tesco education. There they sit, large, super-white, plump, and nestling in beautifully tender, pale green supermarket-trimmed…
-
A fictional police officer lies in a hospital bed and his mind wanders to a historic case. However, it isn’t Inspector Alan Grant and the disappearance of the “Princes”, as related by Tey, but Inspector Morse and the definite murder of Christina Collins. Written in 1989, The Wench is Dead was broadcast on Radio 4…
-
As you can see, Kit Harrington will soon portray Robert Catesby in a BBC drama about the Gunpowder Plot. Catesby, shot while resisting arrest, was one of the lucky ones. Then again, our folk memory of the seventeenth century is not entirely accurate. Here it is.
-
Not long into the final episode of Lucy Worsley’s wonderful series about British History’s Greatest Fibs, the one about India, the British Empire’s Jewel in the Crown, she makes the astonishing statement that Britain’s first arrival in the then Calcutta was not in the Victorian era, but in 1619 by ‘buccaneers’ of the East India Company . Well…
-
The picture left above is from https://tinyurl.com/h3s5pds, the one on the right is from https://blackcatrescue.wordpress.com/tag/black-cat-myth/ Last night I watched a programme in which the family history of the actor Ioan Gruffudd was traced. Rather amusingly, right at the end, he learned he was descended from Edward I, the very king who subjugated Wales. Oh, what…
-
BBC TWO: Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, information concerning which will be found here. This programme is very interesting, and I recommend it, but it’s not the content that has prompted me to write this, rather the treatment of an ancient copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings…
-
I awaited Lucy Worsley’s latest series with great eagerness. Her impish character and entertaining presentation is always worth watching. And so it was again on Thursday, 26th January, in the first episode of British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley. It concerned the Wars of the Roses. Well, obviously, as a Ricardian I was keen…