BBC1’s ‘King & Conqueror’ attempts to retell the Norman Conquest, but historical blunders and awkward dialogue leave viewers questioning its authenticity.
It takes a special kind of stupidity to make a pig’s ear of the Norman Conquest, but BBC1 have managed it with King & Conqueror. The gloomy, £2million-an-episode eight-part saga, co-produced with CBS, is riddled with historical howlers and duff dialogue (“Do you get the picture?”).
The Battle Of Hastings was a turning point in English history. King Harold II lost largely because he had just defeated Harald Hardrada’s invading Norwegians at Stamford Bridge before marching his tired, depleted forces to the south coast to face William, the Duke of Normandy.
James Norton as Harold, Earl of Wessex in King & Conqueror (Image: Lilja Jons)
Thrilling enough you’d think. But lead writer Michael Robert Johnson couldn’t just dramatise the facts, he says, because “the peaks and troughs of the emotions are never in the right place”. Instead, he’s taken more liberties than the Taliban.
For starters, William was 14 when Edward the Confessor was crowned in 1043. He wasn’t there, he didn’t speak English, and he didn’t meet Harold Godwinson, the future king, until 1065 – the year before he invaded.
Edward, re-imagined as a wet blanket (probably because he was devout), had his mother Emma arrested for treason in 1043, confiscating her land and property. Although he later relented, she was never the Machiavellian power behind his throne as portrayed here by steely Juliet Stevenson. He wasn’t wet, he was shrewd.
Other blunders so far include: Mercia being portrayed as a threat, despite losing its independence in 879. Tostig’s wife dying young when she outlived him, and London being portrayed as a wooden fort little larger than F Troop’s Fort Courage.
In an era of fake news, do we really want fake history as well? They’ve changed so much, you wonder why they didn’t make the series entirely fictional, “loosely based on 11th century history” (Game Of Thrones drew heavily on England’s War Of The Roses), which would have made James Norton and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s rivalry easier to enjoy.
Trusting the Beeb to accurately portray our past is like trusting Miliband to deliver cheaper fuel prices. They are too wrapped up in cultural self-loathing to ever get it right. In 2020, a BBC2 documentary deliberately distorted historic slave trade realities in Sierra Leone. Romesh Ranganathan (born Jonathan) forgot to mention that the “raiders” enslaving people were African…
Netflix’s Downing-Street-set Hostage was equally suspect. It had kidnapping, murder, bombs, and (more believably) a French PM blackmailed for sleeping with her son-in-law. For inexplicable reasons, she wanted to police Britain’s borders with French troops. The soapy story gripped like an F1 driver’s gloves without ever once ringing true. And guess who the baddies were? That’s right. Ex-British soldiers with a grudge against Suranne Jones’s PM. Groan.
The best fictional PMs? 1) Francis Urquhart (House Of Cards) 2) Jim Hacker (Yes Prime Minister) 3) Alan B’Stard (The New Statesman).
Sticking in the realm of fantasy, Meghan is back for a second season of her concocted Netflix lifestyle/cooking show. With Love, Meghan is smug, dull, and as free of humour as it is of Harry. And Meghan is still as full of herself as a self-catering cannibal.
Like a Maldives lagoon, the Duchess is beautiful but shallow. That kitchen isn’t hers and those gushing friends are as real as a $3 bill. Meg “marbles” silk scarves, arranges flowers, calls vases “vessels” and delights guests you’ve barely heard of like Queer Eye’s Tan France and chef David Chang. Ideal recruits for the next run of Celebrity SAS Who Dares Wins.
As predicted here, can-do Lucy Spraggan was one of the three who survived the special forces course, along with Troy Deeney and celeb drug smuggler Michaella McCollum. The highlights came when interrogator Ian ‘Dilksy’ Dilkes turned on them like week-old fish. Give him politicians to interview. He’d make Paxman look like Des O’Connor.
BBC4 beamed down What Are UFOs? – another topic awash with nonsense. Mercifully experts were on hand to calmly explain how imagined “sightings” were down to infrared cameras and optical illusions caused by parallax. Sightings of alleged alien craft peaked in the 1960s at precisely the same time as LSD consumption became widespread…
If the little green men do come, what odds anyone objecting will be branded “anti-green racists” by infantile ultra-leftists waving “Martian invaders welcome” placards?
My verdict on The Jury: Murder Trial? It’s guilty of wasting our time. These aren’t normal jurors, they’re volunteers. And Channel 4 have inevitably gone for people with sob stories. Some made their minds up within minutes. So much the presumption of innocence. Thankfully, their decisions have no real-world consequences.
After so much recent lacklustre TV dross (that’s you, And Just Like That) it’s a pleasure to see Sky’s Atomic and season two of Prime’s The Terminal List, along with Netflix’s Long Story Short – a smart, rapid-fire Jewish comedy animation from Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of the excellent BoJack Horseman. Enjoy!
