Plainly made for TV, this austere earlier version of Philippa Gregory's revisionist 2001 novel flaunts its small screen origins with swaying camerawork in drab, grainy colours like a Ken Loach docudrama of the 1970s.
Although apparently no more accurate a picture of life at the court of Henry VIII - when he was still relatively young and dashing - than the other bawdy or Technicolored romps that preceded it, it still paints an appropriately harsh and claustrophobic picture of life as it probably really was in sixteenth century England.
Although apparently no more accurate a picture of life at the court of Henry VIII - when he was still relatively young and dashing - than the other bawdy or Technicolored romps that preceded it, it still paints an appropriately harsh and claustrophobic picture of life as it probably really was in sixteenth century England.