TV Eye: Reality TV Tudor style

5:00AM Friday April 25, 2008
By Frances Grant

Those historians complaining about the screen trend for sexing up the Tudors have a point, but there is a certain amount of entertainment value in such naked attempts to squeeze history into the preoccupations of our age.

The Boleyn sisters, it seems, were rather like the Nicky and Paris Hilton of Tudor England, in the latest Sunday Theatre, The Other Boleyn Girl. Okay, they didn't have lapdogs or the ability to control their own brand, but they had the long tresses, heaving cleavage and a clutch of nearest and dearest who didn't seem to mind how tarty their daughters had to be, so long as they kept the family name in the limelight.

I wondered, at first, why the drama had its heroines indulge in so many of those heavy, artificial, straight-to-camera confessions, then realised the references to reality shows was deliberate. Here was history being co-opted into a plodding modern morality tale about the perils of celebrity.

Unlike the Britneys of our day, however, who only end up in rehab or benign facilities for the famously deranged when they go off their heads, poor old ambitious scheming Anne (Jodhi May) lost hers literally.

Her more modest older sister Mary (Natasha McElhone) survived being the mistress of randy King Henry VIII before settling down to the much more rewarding and safer business of being a nobody.

The path to the Tower was strewn with erotic rose-water baths and lots of shagging behind gauzy bed curtains. Characters spouted such oddly contemporary lines as "nobody's judging you, Mary". Anne yelled at Henry: "Tell me which one is your syphilitic ho!" with the gusto of a 21st-century ladette after a few lagers.

The BBC tried hard to dress up this fanciful piece as quality drama, with plenty of shots of lowering Tudor skylines and a soundtrack continually plucking at the heartstrings. Perhaps as a metaphor of the courtiers' lives lived in the dazzle of the king, many scenes were filmed with sun-strike-type lighting.

Bleak House, being much better, darker, more sombre, is of course banished to the late Sunday-night time slot. There is no sex in it, gauzy or otherwise, and its message of the corroding effect of false hopes and repressed truths isn't so easily absorbed. Perhaps we don't want reminding that the only winners in long, intractable legal battles are the lawyers.

The heroes and heroines of Bleak House are self-sacrificing. And the spirit of charity which pervades the story in the form of gentle, sensitive John Jarndyce is the sort that is unshowy. Helping the deserving poor didn't require film crews and battalions of makeover experts. You wonder what Charles Dickens would make of the latest bit of prime-time do-gooding, Home Sick, with its crowds brought in at the end of episode to applaud the results.

Of course its a boon for people who couldn't otherwise afford to get help to make their homes warmer, drier and safer, but there's still an element of public humiliation about having the innards of your toilet paraded on prime-time television.

It might be a hard task to make ripping out rotten wall linings entertaining but the show tries hard, sending in the forensic experts through green miasma-filled credits - the female doc in shades and high heels - like the team from CSI. The villains of the piece could have a freak show in their own right: beware the toxic black mould that creeps through the place while you're sleeping.

The mould is banished, we all feel good and one family is better off. Meanwhile, there's the much wider issue of New Zealand's bleak housing.