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The Ahistorical Nonsense of the BBC’s King & Conqueror
It was in the early months of 2019 that the English conservative commentator Peter Hitchens found himself waging a one-man campaign against the British Broadcasting Corporation, after registering a complaint with its Executive Complaints Unit alleging a breach of its Charter and Agreement duty of impartiality. Recent episodes of the long-running period drama television series Call the Midwife had, according to Hitchens, made “no effort to observe due impartiality on a major and contentious issue,” namely that of abortion.
Since we cannot place much faith in the entertainment industry … the solution must be, as ever, to read old books.
Even the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye, no bastion of right-wing opinion, had observed around that time that Call the Midwife had become “a series of liberal editorials on medical and social issues,” prompting Hitchens to argue that the series’ failure “to portray any likeable or important character as opposing abortion at that time (especially the nuns who are such important parts of the drama) is as absurd as having a character use an iPhone.”
What was once an “engaging historical drama” had devolved into a “relentless politically correct propaganda vehicle,” leaving the Mail on Sunday columnist to suggest a name change that might better reflect its increasingly monomaniacal focus: Call the Abortionist.
The BBC’s position, which ultimately prevailed, was that
Where the BBC’s editorial guidelines refer to “due impartiality,” the term “due” refers to requirement for impartiality “adequate and appropriate” to the output in question. This means that for drama the bar is set lower than for, say, a documentary.
It is true that a certain amount of artistic license is to be expected in historical fiction. We would not read a Sir Walter Scott’s novel for a veracious blow-by-blow account of the Jacobite risings, or an Alexandre Dumas romance for a scrupulously accurate portrayal of Catherine de Médicis’s character and actions, anymore than we would watch, say, HBO’s Rome or Deadwood for history lessons on civil strife in the late Roman Republic or the events of the Black Hills Gold Rush, though we would expect such works to capture something of the characters, incidents, general atmosphere, and lasting relevance of those eras, and to remain generally faithful to the spirit of the times under consideration. In any event, we can readily admit that “too scrupulous an accuracy,” as Count Harry von Kessler once said, “can but end by impeding the freedom of imagination,” at least when it comes to the world of drama.
Hitchens astutely noted in his complaint, however, that the past is often viewed through the prism of popular entertainment:
Who would claim, in studying the development of thought in the modern world, that Shakespeare or Dickens were not at least as influential as their overtly political contemporaries? In fact, who remembers the political thinkers of the same era half as well as they remember the authors of fiction and drama? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is still recalled as a denunciation of slavery, when a thousand eloquent abolitionist books and pamphlets are wholly forgotten.
Call the Midwife has, over the course of its run, pulled in ratings of between six and 10 million viewers per episode in the United Kingdom alone, before we take into account worldwide streaming on PBS, ABC (Australia), and so on, numbers which dwarf more sober printed accounts of the era and subject matter. There is surely a point at which insufficiently scrupulous an accuracy to historical fact will begin to color and eventually distort our collective memory of an event or era.
The situation has only become worse since Hitchens’ quixotic effort to convince the BBC to impose a modicum of due impartiality on its writers and producers. It is one thing to prefer dramatic potential to rigorous historical accuracy, but it is another thing altogether to abandon any pretense of verisimilitude.
Consider the illuminating case of the recently-aired BBC epic historical drama series King & Conqueror, which ostensibly depicts the run-up to the Norman Conquest of England. Aside from the inept acting, poor production values (particularly the sound mixing, which one usually takes for granted), and lazy reliance on the infamous desaturated gray and brown “Hollywood medieval palette” — an assault on the eyes completely at odds with the colorful reality of medieval daily life — viewers were subjected to scenes which, in a cack-handed attempt to imitate the unpredictable and blood-soaked dynastic mayhem of Game of Thrones, make an absolute mockery of the historic record.
In the fourth episode of the series, “So Be It,” we encounter King Edward the Confessor, played by the character actor Eddie Marsan in the manner of a quivering milksop, as he confronts his mother, the imperious Emma of Normandy about some funds paid to Norway’s King Harald III Sigurdsson:
Interior. A dimly-lit palace at night.
Emma: We need a real king.
Someone who can take charge of this mess
and wipe out the Godwins for good.
Edward: You had no right! I am king!
(He petulantly stamps his foot, like a toddler.)
Emma: King? You’re barely a man!
Tricked and beaten by the savages who murdered your brother!
Edward: I was chosen! I was chosen by God!
Emma: Chosen by God?
You think God would choose you?
Do you think that the All-Knowing would pick
someone so deficient, so weak.
Do you think you have God’s ear?
Edward: Stop it, mother, stop it.
Emma: God’s laughing at you! God’s laughing at you!
Edward: Please stop it, stop it.
Emma: It shouldn’t have been you!
(Edward then beats his mother to death with his golden crown,
accompanied by lots of squelching sounds, like the foley artist is punching a side of beef.
Edward: It is a godly calm.
The scene ends with the blood-flecked king praying alongside his wife Gunhild,
and the viewer’s eyes rolling back in the head as a sort of protective reflex.
Not very good, is it? And perhaps it bears mentioning that Emma met no such end. Edward the Confessor was in fact canonized for his piety and spiritual kingship, Edward’s wife was Edith of Wessex, not Gunhild, and, what is more, the last king of the House of Wessex probably did not speak with Eddie Marsan’s trademark Estuary English accent.
The Critic’s Sebastian Milbank, rightly appalled by this ahistorical nonsense, put it very well indeed:
What is truly egregious is not the fictionalisation of details, but the outright misrepresentation of the morals, manners, and minds of medieval man. If the past really was a foreign country, then the BBC would be rightly besieged by those outraged at the bigoted, hate-filled and slanderous portrayal of that alien nation in this drama … Quite apart from a script that resembles something from Eastenders, the most startling element is the utter lack of ceremony and ritual….Two of the most important elements of early medieval society of the time — the importance of aristocratic rank and the centrality of Christian faith — are essentially missing.
No characters offer prayers or blessings to departing guests, nor is any reference made to the regular cycle of days of fasting and feasting which would have defined not only the daily life of courts, but also determined whether battle could be joined. The elaborate world of oaths, gifts and marriages, of honour and piety, dignity and disgrace, is flattened into a dull procedural punch up over political power.
“The tragedy of bad historical drama,” Milbank concluded, “is that it renders our shared past as both forgettable and contemptible, spreading complacency and ignorance.” A society that depicts Edward the Confessor as he appears in, for example, those majestic Victorian stained glasses by Augustus Pugin and Edward Burne-Jones, has precious little in common with a society that depicts him as some sort of morally-warped, cringing, matricidal Cockney git. The comparison certainly does not redound to our credit.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila proposed that “Historia es lo que reconstruye una imaginación capaz de pensar conciencias ajenas (History is what is reconstructed by an imagination capable of reflecting on the consciousness of others.”) It would seem that we are gradually losing our ability to do so. Presentism leaves us unmoored, incapable of understanding pre-modern values or recognizing the merits of our heritage. What a blinkered existence life becomes when we lose all curiosity about the past, when we have no theory of mind for anyone whose existence precedes our own, when we view history as something to forget or condemn, or as something on which to project our present values or biases.
King & Conqueror has proven such an abject failure, critically and in terms of viewership, that we can hope that the tide is beginning to turn. Normally, one would worry that a popular television series would overshadow the contributions of historians like Frank Barlow, Peter Rex, or Harriet O’Brien, among others, who have treated these medieval events with sensitivity and objectivity, but the ratings and reviews have been so terrible that we hardly need worry about King & Conqueror’s lasting impact.
Still, there are plenty of other offenders. Viewers of Netflix’s The Empress will learn almost nothing about the life of Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) of Austria, or even about the fashion of the time (the bloggers at Frock Flicks have mercilessly dissected the ludicrous “Vera-Wang-for-Kohl’s wardrobe” and “AliExpress specials” used in the show).
Entire subplots of The Crown have been described by various royal biographers and historians as “shockingly malicious” and “monstrously wrong,” including the libelous implication that Prince Philip was responsible for the death of his older sister, vilifications that have presumably been accepted by the more credulous among the audience.
Even far more competent series, like the lush and wonderfully-acted Netflix adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s incomparable novel The Leopard, have fallen victim to the need to modernize the source material, as when (spoiler alert, I suppose) the final episode concludes not with Concetta Corbera di Salina as an old maid, disposing of the taxidermied remains of the beloved Great Dane Bendico, as in the source material, but with a spunky young Concetta taking over the Salina estate and courageously matching wits with the local parvenues and arrivistes, thereby basically inverting Lampedusa’s entire narrative.
Since we cannot place much faith in the entertainment industry — a shocking revelation, I know — the solution must be, as ever, to read old books. The thirteenth-century Japanese writer and Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō understood that “the pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known,” while the poet Petrarch gratefully acknowledged those “friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me: they are the ones who are dead and yet speak to me.”
Through the works (and deeds) of those who are dead, yet still reach out to us, we are able to gain unfiltered access to pre-modern mindsets, undiminished by the biases of (almost invariably leftist) writers, producers, and directors who view the past with contempt, and whose goal is to spread complacency, ignorance, and destructive ideologies.
“Every age has its own outlook,” wrote C.S. Lewis in his essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” a point of view which is “good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes…. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
What we need now, more than ever, is that “clean sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through our minds, clear away the cultural cobwebs, and thereby enable us to connect with the past while recognizing the not infrequent errors of our ways. The past need not be a foreign country, an alien civilization, an object of calumny. It can be an ally, a helpmeet, an object lesson, or even a deterrent example, but it should never be treated with the sort of casual contempt that the writers of King & Conqueror have exhibited.
Networks and streaming platforms are unlikely to realize this any time soon, invested as they are in their ruinous, iconoclastic agenda, and having already done their utmost to lower the bar of due impartiality and historical accuracy. It will instead be left up to us, or at least those of us still capable of reflecting on the consciousness of others, past and present, to correct the ahistorical excesses of this faltering culture.
The epic historical drama television series and complete botch job King & Conqueror is currently available on BBC iPlayer, and will be available to stream in the United States on Amazon Prime at an unknown future date (unless Amazon can somehow manage to renege on its content distribution deal before then).
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
‘All Under Heaven’: The CCP’s Distortion of Chinese Philosophy
Altars of Fire, Oceans of Milk: Mytho-History and the Thai-Cambodian Border Conflict
Down With the Bastille (Opéra)
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