If you’ve been a schoolchild in Britain over the past half-century, you’d be forgiven for believing our nation’s history exists only in four key moments: the Second World War, the industrial revolution, Henry VIII, and the Battle of Hastings. Of these canonical events, the clash between Saxon and Norman forces in 1066, which brought the High Medieval Period to our sceptred isle, is perhaps most ripe for small screen translation, which it achieves this week, through BBC One’s (overripe) King & Conqueror.
After years of civil war, three rival English nations – Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria – come together to anoint a single king: Edward the Confessor (Eddie Marsan). But Edward’s ascension rapidly alienates the Wessex clan, led by the Earl of Wessex, Godwin (Geoff Bell), and his earnest second son Harold (James Norton). In exile across the Channel, Harold bonds with a Norman noble, William (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who has dynastic struggles of his own. Despite their burgeoning friendship – and the sense of destiny driving both men to their thrones – we know that they will end up, in 1066, head-to-head on the battlefield at Hastings. One king, one conqueror.
“Harold fears the worst,” his father confides. “That’s a good quality for a leader, but not while we’re at peace.” But peace, in late-Saxon Britain, proves fleeting. King & Conqueror is a story of two self-serious men attempting to drive their kingdoms towards something resembling modernity. Both Norton and Coster-Waldau embrace this sober fate. Their kings, Harold and William, are rather bland vessels, bobbing along on the tide of internal politics. Their wives – Edith (Emily Beecham) and Matilda (Clémence Poésy)– are equally staid. The history of this period is filled with large, unknowable gaps – as is the characterisation. “How time escapes us,” the French king Henry (Jean-Marc Barr) opines, but it’s not just time that proves elusive. The figures that emerge most distinct from these mists are brow-beaten Edward and his venomous mother, Lady Emma (Juliet Stevenson).
This can be an issue with historical drama. There is an often-misplaced belief that “world building”, the meticulous illumination of a society and its culture, is the preserve of fantasy. Yet Anglo-Saxon Britain, before the Norman conquest, is a slippery backdrop; its players largely unknown save for fleeting appearances in a famous tapestry. King & Conqueror, however, spells out its domestic context only in a quick title card and then proceeds to present a vision of medieval Europe that largely involves members of the barony having tense conversations on roads between towns we rarely see. It makes the world feel small and, equally importantly, the show feel cheap. This is not Wolf Hall – set 500 years later in the palaces of Tudor London – but a land of tents and huts, where actors smear mud on their faces as though it distracts from their 21st-century dentistry.
All of this is subsumed by a bigger problem: the show is almost unwatchably dark. The two issues are not unrelated. High contrast and a colour grade that crushes every black, like pepper in a mill, can cover shortcomings in the production design or VFX budget. But this has been an issue with so many BBC period dramas (Great Expectations, Jamaica Inn, The Luminaries etc) that it must also be interpreted as a conscious aesthetic choice. This was an era, after all, before electric light, so candlelit parleys have a certain logic. But when Stanley Kubrick used natural light to shoot Barry Lyndon, he accompanied it with a letter to projectionists. “An infinite amount of care was given to the look of Barry Lyndon,” Kubrick wrote. “The careful handling of the film will make this effort worthwhile.” But TV viewers are not aided by a projectionist to monitor the lamberts and adjust the aspect ratio. They watch on TVs, laptops, mobile phones – and much of King & Conqueror will dissolve for them into blackness.
The real question is why shoot for this verisimilitude in a show that takes such liberties with even the scant historical recollections of contemporary encomia? “Power is like a fire,” Earl Godwin warns his son. “It will warm and protect you but if it burns unchecked it will destroy everything.” The treacheries, the violence, the intrigues, and the dialogue are all more George RR Martin than William of Poitiers. In its commitment to ahistorical detail, King & Conqueror becomes a frustrating watch – that is, if you can make out anything at all.
