The Fall Of Anne Boleyn
Tuesday-Thursday, Channel 5
The Wall
Saturday, BBC1
Rating: 
A couple of years ago, Channel 5 gave us the lavish historical reconstruction Anne Boleyn: Queen For A Thousand Days. Currently, it is working on a colour-blind ‘psychological thriller’ about Anne Boleyn, starring Jodie Turner-Smith and Paapa Essiedu.
And this week it was The Fall Of Anne Boleyn, a documentary spread across three nights. I am beginning to wonder: might Channel 5 be even more obsessed with Anne Boleyn than it is with Jane McDonald (& Friends)?
And sending old people up and down canals? If Jane McDonald (& Friends) went up and down a canal, could that equal a show about Anne Boleyn? Perhaps if they hit an especially tricky lock, which is always exciting?
This week it was The Fall Of Anne Boleyn, a documentary spread across three nights. Might Channel 5 be even more obsessed with Anne Boleyn than it is with Jane McDonald (& Friends)?
But on to the programme in hand, which was written and presented by historian and author Tracy Borman with, thankfully, no dressing up Lucy Worsley-style. (We all have a soft spot for Worsley, but there is only room for one dressing-up historian.)
Most of us are pretty familiar with the details of Henry VIII’s second wife, who did not produce a son, so was made out to be a big, adulterous liar, and then had to have her big, lying head chopped off. So how might her story be made fresh?
This followed Anne’s final days, and ‘I’m going,’ said Borman at the outset, ‘to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to follow in Anne’s footsteps, take the journey with her, hour by hour, to find the truth behind her downfall.’
This wasn’t exactly ‘hour by hour’. Anne was watching tennis at Greenwich when she was suddenly summoned by the Privy Council, and from that moment to being led to the scaffold took 17 days, so if this programme had been ‘hour by hour’, it would have been 408 hours long.
Which might have tested even those as obsessed with Anne as Channel 5, frankly. And did Borman discover ‘the truth’? No, not really. I don’t know why they had to overstate their case in this way. It’s not like we wouldn’t find out.
But otherwise this was mostly engaging. Borman presented with knowledge, enthusiasm and lucidity, even if it did sometimes feel like a tour of Boleyn’s Wikipedia entry, and even if you did sometimes want to shout ‘But how do you know?’ at the TV.
‘Anne was known for her composure but then crumbled…’ Yes, but how do you know? However, there was definite value in seeing Borman rowed up the Thames from Greenwich and seeing the Tower of London loom exactly as Anne would have seen it loom.
My God, this really happened. And there were some proper highlights, as when Borman was allowed to handle the ‘Moost Happi’ medal, which Anne had made when she thought she was pregnant with a male heir, and is kept in the British Museum.
Borman’s excitement was so infectious and palpable, I was Moost carried away too.
This did become repetitive – how many times were we told that Henry had Jane Seymour waiting in the wings? – while Borman’s attempts to introduce tension were understandable but often fell flat.
‘Is it possible she’ll be found not guilty?’ Um. No? Still, even the most well-trodden of details remain fascinating. All those trumped-up charges, with Anne being accused of sleeping with four men, including her own brother.
It was one of the biggest patriarchal stitch-ups in history. However, Henry did arrange for Anne to have her head chopped off by a sword rather than axe, which was nice, as a sword is quicker.
But as soon as she was dead he had her body stripped of all her jewellery, which he immediately gave to Seymour, and also ate all her swans. And people say Charles was cruel to Diana…!
And now the new game show, The Wheel, which is on after Strictly Come Dancing. (Lay off Maisie, everybody! As for I’m A Celebrity…, if you’re the one voting for Jordan to perform the trials, lay off him too!)
The Wheel was devised and presented by Michael McIntyre (above), and I still don’t properly get it, even though I’ve seen it. It does seem overly complicated
This was devised and presented by Michael McIntyre, and I still don’t properly get it, even though I’ve seen it. It does seem overly complicated.
You have these celebrities, all of whom have obviously been told to look as if they are having a good time – so much forced whooping – sitting on a big wheel that spins around, and if the arrow stops at them, then they have to help the contestant answer a question.
Essentially. (I don’t have the space to go into all its many other components.)
The contestant can win ‘big money’, we kept being told, although the show was never that clear as to how. You were left to work it out for yourself. It didn’t seem especially fresh.
It was a bit like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, with the phone-a-friend part writ large. It was one hour that certainly felt like 408. And as for the wheel landing randomly, I lost my trust in this sort of thing when I discovered that the ‘clapometer’ on Opportunity Knocks was operated manually by a little man inside it.
However, that said, I don’t distrust this as much as I do Grace from The Undoing. (Did she do it? Did she? We find out this week.)