The Tudors, Season One, Episode 7

"And this ointment will comfort your cock if it is sore..."

So, we get a sweating sickness episode. In a sense, this is padding, a means of having the plot tread water for an episode to allow us to get to the end of the season before Wolsey's inevitable downfall. The facts remain the same: Henry wants a divorce. Catherine doesn't. Wolsey is under pressure to get said divorce. Catherine's uncle, Charles V, is the most powerful man in Europe, has Pope Clement by the balls and will never allow said divorce. Irresistible force, meet immovable object.

Wolsey's mates, the French, are at war with said Habsburg dominions, and they and the Genoese besiege the Emperor in Naples. Henry sends a diplomat to Pope Clement, but nothing of substance happens. A papal legate is on his way, but nothing has changed, or will change.

Still, it's interesting seeing the main cast succumb to the plague, one by one. Only Sir William Compton dies (Thomas Tallis observes discreetly), but Henry, Anne Boleyn and Wolsey all survive. Henry's state of mind is much affected, however: why is God punishing his kingdom thus? He still refuses to sleep with Anne in his stubborn piety.

There is, of course, a bit of "Bring out your dead". Which inevitably recalls Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There are hints of the future as Sir Thomas More angrily denounces Lutheranism as a "disease", which has ignited civil war in Germany. But this is, for the first time, an episode in which not enough happens.

The Tudors: Season One, Episode 5

"I have yet to decide whether to make your bedmate a head shorter...!"

Things don't go very well for Henry in this episode, meaning he's in a bit of a mood and others are therefore in peril. The Boleyns are in the ascendant- Sir Thomas Boleyn is ennobled and Anne Boleyn is made the King's official mistress. This doesn't mean she's getting any, however; Henry refuses to shag her until he's divorced Catherine and married her. So Wolsey, whose responsibility this seems to be, had better get that divorce. Or else.

Of course, getting said divorce requires the cooperation of Charles V who a) has the Pope by the short and curlies and b) is inordinately fond of his Aunt Catherine. Worse, he seems rather dismissive of Henry, releasing France's King Francis without even thinking to notify his supposed bezzie mate Harry and, worse, marrying his son to a Portuguese princess instead of Mary. It must be somewhat emasculating for an autocrat to be reminded of his less-than-alpha-male status on the European stage.

Still, he may not have an heir but at least he has his toy sword-wielding (aaah!) little Fitzroy to remind everyone that he is definitely all manly and virile and so forth. The Queen doesn't quite feel the same, and her own position is looking perilous; Mary is to be sent away from her, and Catherine's good friend the Spanish ambassador receives a bollocking from Henry. It's all gone very wrong, a line has been crossed and if Henry doesn't get that divorce then heads will roll. Except he won't.

Meanwhile, our new Duke of Suffolk may not have particularly offended the new King of Portugal in marrying his Tudor stepmother, but Henry is furious and has a potentially homicidal falling out with his friend. Elsewhere at court, a young Thomas Tallis is getting some cock.

Henry, however, officially confirms Anne Boleyn as his official mistress, a title which reminds us of the fundamental decadence of monarchical power. He will not, however, shag her until they marry. This is going to lead to a lot of sexual frustration for Henry, which will probably cause a fair few deaths.

The real meat of the episode, though, comes in the clash of principles between Wolsey, he of the realpolitik, who seeks to get the King his divorce, and More, who suddenly seems less progressive. The humanist is quickly becoming yesterday's man, and there is much friction. Wolsey, of course, is far more interested in manipulating the King into an alliance with the French.

It all goes horribly wrong at the end, as our little Fitzroy dies of that most Tudor of ailments, the sweating sickness, and the 1525 sack of Rome by Charles V happens right on cue. However autocratic Henry may be in his own kingdom, he is at the mercy of greater forces.

The Tudors: Season One, Episode 3

"That will make me happy."

"It will also make you King of France..."

Occasionally history must be changed or distorted to keep a coherent structure to the drama, and Henry's sister Margaret, a composite of two of his real life sisters, is one of these. Here, she is married off to an elderly and distinctly unsexy King of Portugal, whereas, in reality, one of Henry's sisters married a King of France in similar circumstances, but this happened years before the series started. It therefore follows from this that Brandon's being tasked to follow her to Portugal, his being made Duke of Suffolk, and his illicitly marrying the king's sister and getting a ticking off, didn't happen exactly like that. But they're the sort of thing that did. And I don't criticise Michael Hirst for doing this sort of thing to knock out a structure for the season. Let's just go with it.

Meanwhile, the Imperial ambassadors and Sir Thomas More discuss that nasty man, the heretic Luther, who is, we're told, a thoroughly bad sort. Henry thinks so, too, and he's written a pamphlet to prove it, in his own hand, no less. He's such a good little Catholic. For now.

Plans are aoace for Mary to marry the son of Charles V, much to the chagrin of Cardinal Wolsey. And Sir Thomas Boleyn, splendid father that he is, continues his plotting to pimp out his daughter Annecto the King. That's what I love about The Tudors and, indeed, the Tudors; there's just so much skulduggery.

We get to meet the young Charles V, who is awfully keen on doing something about France's occupation of the Duchy of Milan. The Emperor's other job is, of course, King of Spain (well, one of his other jobs, the moonlighting little scamp...), and the ambassadors of said Kingdom are making themselves extremely popular with his Auntie Cathetinez, who just so happens to be the Queen of England. It's complicated. Such was Sixteenth Century Europe.

Henry, meanwhile, wants more ships for his navy, lots of them. He's not parsimonious like his Dad; he wants to spend, spend, spend. He also wants Anne Boleyn, who is to become, er, one of the Queen's Ladies in Waiting. Awkward. Anne, meanwhile, seems to be shagging the poet Thomas Wyatt. I'm fairly sure that last bit is artistic licence but, again, it works.

Charles V gets on awfully well with Henry, and seems to be a very similar character: power obsessed and an expert in the dark arts of early modern international politics. Yet he paints on a larger canvas than Henry, King of little England, speaking of the Americas, and the "treasures of Montezuma" unlike with Francis I lady episode, the position on alpha male isn't up for grabs. It's Charles.

And here we come to the point; if Henry should ever wish to divorce Catherine, a purely hypothetical situation at least, then there is no way that her loyal nephew Charles would allow it. There's a moral here, and one with relevance to politics today: England's fate is bound up with Europe. We must be at the heart of it, or we will have no say in it.

We end with more plotting: Sir Thomas Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk seem to have it in for Wolsey...

The Tudors: Season One, Episode 1

"Be a pigeon and shit on everything!"

So, the first episode of a brand new series. Been a whole since that happened, hasn't it? In fact, I've actually watched all of The Tudors and made all my notes; the blog is in serious catch up mode at the mo. But fear not; all of the ongoing serieses (er...) will continue on to the end.

So, we have a 2007 series which, being an Irish/Canadian co-production, uses mostly actors for those two countries, a refreshing change from overly obvious casting. Although many of the best American actors are in fact Canadian, while many of the best British actors are in fact from the Irish a Republic, despite their stage-schooled RP accents, such as Michael Gambon and Peter O'Toole, of whom more in another season.

Anyway, in spite of the dynastic title, this is a series about the reign of Henry VIII only, beginning in 1520, on the eve of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. This cuts out Spurs, Flodden and, more to the point, the entire period during which Henry was far too young to be portrayed by the excellently menacing Jonathan Meyers, who convinces perfectly as a spoiled brat born to power.

The series begins, though, with the continental power games between Francis I's France and the Holy Roman and Spanish Empires of Charles V. This year' pawns are the city states of North-West Italy, and the ambassadors are all a kerfuffle. The English envoy has been killed, and possible war looms. Yet the king's chief advisor, the wily Cardinal Wolsey (the solid but somewhat miscast Sam Neill), seems suspiciously pro-French. He couldn't possibly be corrupt, n'est-ce pas?

Henry is, of course, thoroughly Catholic at this point, and happily married to Catherine of Aragon (a suitably self-pitying Maria Doyle Kennedy) as long as he can have his bits on the side and sire his little Fitzroys. And the future Bloody Mary is just a cute ickle girl. Catherine, of course, wants war with France. She is a Habsburg, after all, and cheering for Dad to gain yet more territory.

Yet Henry is not sleeping with her, which upsets her, not because of any apparent libido, but because of her supposed Christian duty as a wife and all that. The seeds are all there.

It's weird to see a thoroughly Catholic England, with all the trimmings, but that's how it was, with cardinals and everything. It's also weird to think that Europe, in 1520, was still a place of lances and jousts, although this would change as the decade wore on. One such jouster, the priapic Charles Brandon (Superman himself, the moderately wooden but pretty Henry Cavill) is a close friend of the King, and something of a semi-invented character. History must, after all, be shaped into drama-friendly form.

The King jousts against Yorkist plotter the Duke of Buckingham, whose accent is inexplicably northern. Being a dynastic rival the duke is, of course, somewhat akin to a turkey in mid-December. Rather safer, for now, is Thomas More, a sympathetic humanist, intellectual and friend of the King, who grounds him and symbolically calls him "Harry". The King agrees with his humanism although, of course, only as far as it suits him to do so.

That, then, is our dramatis personae. We can now move on to your actual Field of your actual Cloth of Gold, in English Calais, which is presented as a kind of proto-European Union, with "collective institutions" and that. How very anachronistic.

There is tension as the King fathers a Fitzroy but has no son with Catherine; is it because she was once married to his late brother Arthur...? I think this one might run and run.

Not long after this we first meet Mary and Anne Boleyn (the superlative Natalie Dormer), while the King and Wolsey share a wonderfully symbolic chess scene. Buckingham's eventual treason and death is somewhat inevitable; his father, of course, was the right hand Man of Richard III, as we well know from Shskespeare's play.

The pieces are set. How will the game play out...?

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Eternity Trap

Part One

“I bet he made a mean balloon giraffe at children’s parties.”

I knew this was going to be great as soon as I heard the splendidly Dickensian name “Erasmus Darkening”. Absolutely no ambiguity about who the baddie is here.

A ghost story is something very new for SJA, and this feels very fresh. It’s also great to see everybody’s favourite Lib Dem peer, Floella Benjamin, as Professor Rivers, who now even gets given a first name: Celeste. And then promptly, er, disappears. I like the well portrayed and Uriah Heep-like Toby, too, in spite of the fact that he was a bit of an obvious red herring. But this story from Phil Ford is superb not because of any particular stand-out gimmicks but because it feels fresh, it’s very well-told and it’s got oodles of atmosphere. This is simultaneously very kid-friendly and yet as scary as anything I’ve come across during the Marathon.

It’s fun to see Sarah Jane playing the sceptic for once, and as this is a Luke-lite story it’s nice to see more of the developing chemistry between Rani and Clyde. I love the way this story shamelessly and deliberately has fun with all sorts of ghost story tropes, and we even get a blatant Nigel Kneale reference which almost made me fall of my chair. “Stone Tape manifestation", indeed…! The nursery is very scary indeed. A million times more so because of that rocking horse, for some reason. Reminds me of Ghost Light.

This is great. We get Rani being really investigative and Clyde being really witty. We get the missing Professor Rivers “ghosting” through her walkie-talkie, like Miss Evangelista. We get secret passages. Secret passages are cool. We get ancient electronic oojimaflips. And we get “This is Hogwarts, Tim Burton style”. I’m loving this.

Part Two

“Oh boy, this is worse than The Sixth Sense.”

There’s inevitably a slightly disappointing air to part twos in general as the way the plot is resolved is seldom quite as satisfying as it could be, even in a good quality drama. But here it’s satisfying in very possible way: from the plot mechanics side, the all-apparent-magic-is-really-science, Dæmons-fashion, side, from the loads-of-atmosphere side, and from the lots-of-fun-with-tropes side. This is unremittingly great.

I can’t do enough gushing. It all ties up, there are some nice plot revelations, it all looks fantastic, the dashing Lord Marchwood gets to be heroic, Toby turns out not to be such a Uriah Heep after all once Sarah Jane has broadened his horizons, and we get to see Clyde and Rani being very brave and stoic. This is a top 5/5. And although it’s not an “arc” story, or a particularly important story for any particular character, I see no reason to mark it down for being a non-“event” episode. This is the best episode of SJA yet.