Mock Tudor

My advance DVD from the BBC was marked ‘The Virgin Quenn’, which I thought was pleasing and evocative. Possibly the quenn was a mythical beast, condemned to live for only one generation due to its perpetual virginity. Or perhaps it was bawdy Tudor slang, used by Shakespeare: ‘Why, friend, a queen shall have a quenn, as well as Mistress Scapegrace!’, a line which would have made the groundlings collapse in ribald glee.

Either way it seemed a more promising introduction to The Virgin Queen (BBC1, Sunday) than that provided by Radio Times, which promised ‘a hotbed of erotic intrigue’, backed by a ‘Tudor rock’ soundtrack, with Essex played as if he were the late Marc Bolan, and Leicester ‘played by Tom Hardy in black leather britches and a codpiece Blackadder would kill for’.

In other words, what we were going to see was a meticulous recreation of the stock 21st-century idea of what a Tudor court might have been like. This consists of bearded men marching through clanging gates, lots of torture and a couple of juicy burnings at the stake, the screaming childbirth scene (though Queen Mary turns out to have only a tumour), and the bearded men exchanging meaningful glances when the new Queen says something controversial, such as that all church services should be in English. There are lots of posh frocks, all lovingly caressed by the camera, and there was a bucolic idyll involving the Queen and Dudley which, if bikes had replaced horses, might have been the ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’ scene from Butch Cassidy. And the moment where the blissfully happy Elizabeth is released from the Tower owed more to pop videos than to history.

I liked Anne-Marie Duff’s performance in the title role.