Living history

It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps to make amends it is treating us to possibly the most historian-studded, blue-screen-special-effects-enhanced, rare-documentastic, no-hyperbole-knowingly-under-employed series ever shown on television. Armada: 12 Days to Save England (Sundays, BBC2).

Having clearly spent a lot of money here, the BBC is taking no chances with its demographic spread. For the laydeez, in the Ross Poldark role it has Dan Snow, captured somewhat gratuitously piloting his handsome yacht into the choppy waters of the English Channel. (Just like in 1588! Sort of.) For the dirty old men it has no fewer than three yummy female historians, looking scrumptious in Tudor settings, while telling us about different aspects of Elizabeth’s beauty routine.

For the gamers, it has yet more boysy historians, pushing the English and Spanish fleets around a sandtable, talking tactics in the inevitable historic present (‘But your problem is that your fleet is divided, which means that these ships alone have to be able to try to stop our Armada!!!’). For classic soap fans, it’s got Ange from EastEnders (Anita Dobson) playing Elizabeth I with, for Blackadder fans, someone a bit like Nursie playing the Queen’s companion Blanche Parry.

And for the Modern Generation — anyone under 40 who wasn’t private- or grammar-school educated, basically — it offers the edge-of-the-seat possibility that England might lose this particular engagement. That’s why it opens (OMG — this historic present stuff is infectious) with a scene of a bald, emaciated Elizabeth chained in a dungeon, awaiting torture and execution, while, off camera, the victorious Spanish chuck the dismembered bodies of her people into the Thames.

For all its mild preposterousness and its queasy dog’s breakfast of a format (Election Night meets Troy meets Wolf Hall), I’m enjoying it quite a lot.