So, some woman called Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson) goes and stands underneath a big oak tree in a forest. Edward IV rides past, take one look, and instantly falls in love with her.
This man is Elizabeth's sworn enemy, and the murderer of several members of her family, but despite this fact she also falls instantly in love with him. For some reason.
I Googled this historical event to see if it really took place under a tree in a forest and it seems it didn't. In real life, they met in a room. But wherever Liz and Eddie ("Leddie"?) first bumped into each other, had this meeting not occurred there would have been no Henry VIII. Because Elizabeth Woodville was fat old King Harry's grandmother. Such, my children, is the role of sex in history.
Set in 1464, during the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen (BBC1) is quite simply rubbish. The writing is woeful, the performances are wooden, and there are more historical errors than you could shake a polystyrene broadsword at.
Max Irons as Edward IV looks more Eton First XI than majestic, and James Frain as Lord Warwick appears to be an evil reincarnation of Gareth Hunt from The New Avengers. This is dark, curly perm acting at its most inscrutable.
Here we have another highly anticipated Sunday night costume drama crashing and burning because the BBC once again stubbornly refuses to spend our hard earned license money on decent scriptwriters. As usual the characters spend the whole time telling each other things they already know. "But he is your five year old son". "But I am this boy's mother." "But Edward, you are the King of England!". "But Sire, she is your twice married sister ." The Beeb still haven't noticed, but people in the real world don't speak like that. There is no sense of reality in this series, no feeling of actually being there. Only an endless, cringe-making string of crass backstory pick-ups, thinly researched historical facts and figures, and the occasional erect nipple to keep us watching.
Scriptwriting for Dummies: Day One: Lesson One: NEVER HAVE YOUR CHARACTERS TELL EACH OTHER THINGS THEY ALREADY KNOW! If you want to see good historical drama writing, I suggest you watch re-runs of I Claudius. The make-up may have been terrible, the sets might have been made out of cardboard, but every script was lovingly crafted by a real, card-carrying author. Not by a dreary, lazy hack writer who would clearly be more at home writing a Wiki page about minor English kings and their mistresses.
Where have all the real writers gone? I'll tell you. They're sitting at home on their own writing novels, because they are sick to the back teeth of having to deal with the new generation of pimply, useless, Excel-driven BBC Drama executives who wouldn't recognise a great script if it jumped out of a jiffy bag on their desk and clamped itself to their face like a newly birthed Alien on the good ship Nostromo.
The person who commissioned The White Queen should go and stand underneath an oak tree and wait for a proper writer to go past.
This man is Elizabeth's sworn enemy, and the murderer of several members of her family, but despite this fact she also falls instantly in love with him. For some reason.
I Googled this historical event to see if it really took place under a tree in a forest and it seems it didn't. In real life, they met in a room. But wherever Liz and Eddie ("Leddie"?) first bumped into each other, had this meeting not occurred there would have been no Henry VIII. Because Elizabeth Woodville was fat old King Harry's grandmother. Such, my children, is the role of sex in history.
Set in 1464, during the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen (BBC1) is quite simply rubbish. The writing is woeful, the performances are wooden, and there are more historical errors than you could shake a polystyrene broadsword at.
Max Irons as Edward IV looks more Eton First XI than majestic, and James Frain as Lord Warwick appears to be an evil reincarnation of Gareth Hunt from The New Avengers. This is dark, curly perm acting at its most inscrutable.
Here we have another highly anticipated Sunday night costume drama crashing and burning because the BBC once again stubbornly refuses to spend our hard earned license money on decent scriptwriters. As usual the characters spend the whole time telling each other things they already know. "But he is your five year old son". "But I am this boy's mother." "But Edward, you are the King of England!". "But Sire, she is your twice married sister ." The Beeb still haven't noticed, but people in the real world don't speak like that. There is no sense of reality in this series, no feeling of actually being there. Only an endless, cringe-making string of crass backstory pick-ups, thinly researched historical facts and figures, and the occasional erect nipple to keep us watching.
Scriptwriting for Dummies: Day One: Lesson One: NEVER HAVE YOUR CHARACTERS TELL EACH OTHER THINGS THEY ALREADY KNOW! If you want to see good historical drama writing, I suggest you watch re-runs of I Claudius. The make-up may have been terrible, the sets might have been made out of cardboard, but every script was lovingly crafted by a real, card-carrying author. Not by a dreary, lazy hack writer who would clearly be more at home writing a Wiki page about minor English kings and their mistresses.
Where have all the real writers gone? I'll tell you. They're sitting at home on their own writing novels, because they are sick to the back teeth of having to deal with the new generation of pimply, useless, Excel-driven BBC Drama executives who wouldn't recognise a great script if it jumped out of a jiffy bag on their desk and clamped itself to their face like a newly birthed Alien on the good ship Nostromo.
The person who commissioned The White Queen should go and stand underneath an oak tree and wait for a proper writer to go past.