...to find Wolf Hall really hard going

[catslave]

I like a period drama, really I do - but I'm sorry to say that Wolf Hall was incredibly dull. For starters: hopping about all over the place in time, miserable, one of history's most interesting characters - Anne Boleyn - was a spoilt cow with an 'Allo 'Allo accent...

Nothing was explained properly, either, apart form the blindingly obvious. Loads of shots of Cromwell's dad being a wrong'un, in case you missed it the first 20 times, then 'Oh, I need to be an MP again' (Cromwell). Eh? When were you an MP the first time?

I 'did' the Tudors at A-level 20 years ago, so my memory of the period is ok, but the specifics are fuzzy, and there's no way I'd remember the ins and outs of Thomas Cromwell's parliamentary career. Argh! I've cancelled series link... Or is it just me?

I find it hard because isn't he the voice of Bing's strange sock carer?

My husband was saying that the lighting is not enhanced, that they use the same animal-fat candles that were used in the day and that its deliberately dark enough to be authentic to the levels of dark/light during the day/night that were common of the time. Or something. He read that somewhere by the way in some coverage about the production.

Sorry. Missed a couple of pages. Realise that Bing has been mentioned!

Thanks all. Couldn't make head or tail of how they had all died!

I studied the Tudor period at college so thought I would love this, but I didn't.

I don't understand all the 'brilliantly understated' comments I've been reading - to me it was just a very slow and lazy dramatisation of a pretty decent (but not amazing) book.

But I'm sure the Mn Emperors New Clothes brigade will send me on my way with that opinion

I haven't read the book but luckily recently read a Philippa Gregory book on Anne Boleyn which helped with the detail a lot. I can imagine bits would be hard to follow unless you've read something recently as covering the Tudors in school was so long ago for me. I'm enjoying it.

Something jarred with me though although it might not be warranted - Grace scribbling on paper. I wasn't allowed to waste paper when I was a kid so I imagine it was more precious then even though TC looked fairly wealthy

Flop flop flop flop flop.

I have just watched this and enjoyed it!
I haven't read the books as I cannot best Hilary Mantel - but a bit of Shardlake and Phillipa Gregory stood me in good stead. I liked that it was a bit if a slow burner, but I will admit to finding the time switches a bit befuddling.
Was that a device used by HM in the novels?

Spot on, Penguin. I think " understated" is the new way of saying: "he didn't do much actually."

I agree with Penguin too. I didn't love the book and fell asleep after about 20 minutes of watching the first episode.

Not for me I'm afraid.

I thought it was absolutely cracking. The word understated did come to mind - that is to say not overplayed like so many period dramas. Anyway, I found it thoroughly atmospheric and engaging. Interesting that opinions on it are so polarised.

I enjoyed it and I have read Wolf Hall (still to read Bring Up The Bodies) and I have read a bit about old Henry VIII and his wives etc. so not coming to it completely without knowledge.

I can't understand the complaints about it being too dark? The only dark bits I saw were the nighttime scenes. The rest of it was perfectly fine.

I'm fairly sure they didn't have 60 watt light bulbs in the 16th Century...

I think that the BBC have done Wolf Hall a huge disservice by promoting it as part of a "Tudors" season. It is not really a novel/drama about "The Tudors" - i.e. it is not a boring snoring rehash of well-known Tudor history a la Philippa Gregory where everything is spelled out for you. What it is is a story about the interior life of one man, hung on the figure of someone who did happen to exist. It's not about "what really happened" or what Cromwell or anyone else was really like. When we see Anne, it's how Cromwell-the-character perceives her, not what the historical Anne was like.

If you look at the trailers though it looks like a straight up pacy "Six Wives of Henry VIII" story and I think that is misleading many people.

I thought it was excellent. The first episode of any series is always a bit slow, the scene needs to be set before launching into the action so to speak. With regard to the flashbacks, the abusive upbringing Cromwell escaped from very much featured in the books so I would have been very surprised for it to have not featured.

I find it very interesting that Mantell chose such an angle to write about Cromwell from. History is only ever written positively about the "victors" so our understanding of a great many historical figures is skewed by that though current research is providing different perspectives for a fair few now.

Henry VIII was a tyrant but in popular culture is considered a good king. He was a king who had wives murdered and squandered the impressive fortune his father had accumulated. Interesting and flawed, yes. Good, no.

The children's nursery rhyme, The King is in his Counting House is about Henry VII.

Thomas More is unlikely to have been the saintly man he has been portrayed throughout history either, recent accounts suggest he very much was not.

It is slightly confusing there are about 17 Thomas', including Cromwell, More and Wolsey but it reflects the time. I suspect Cromwell's ward, Rafe, was very unusually named indeed. ( it is explained who the boys are by the way, when Ann asks if she can marry Rafe).

Philippa Gregories books are hideous not least because she fails to make it clear just how much of her books are fiction with no basis in fact.

I find Mantell's writing style a bit...arduous at times but thought Wolf Hall was very good.

CJ Sansom's Shardlake series is an interesting take on the Tudor era without being about the Tudor royal family themselves specifically. I think they're well delivered and researched books.

To be fair to Philippa Gregory, she normally mentions in the notes at the back of each book that she's made quite a lot up, owing to the paucity of information about her female protagonists' lives.....

I may have just spent too much time with people who took her books as historical gospel stubborn. Trying to explain to one in particular that it is as likely Anne Boleyn had an affair with her brother as it was she was a witch with a magic animal was hard work. The concept of false accusations was totally lost.

Jane Rochford is a character we hear very little about and my does history have something to say about her. Interested to see how Jessica Raine plays her in Wolf Hall.

tiggytape Oh I don't have any problem imagining that the real Anne could have been quite brattish! And she seems to have been unpopular among many contemporaries, yes, so this could well have been how the real Cromwell really saw her.

I am just wondering whether Wolf Hall is getting mixed up with all the semi-dramatised documentaries that have been about on the Tudors. It's really a very different creature.

alvis...what, or that Elizabeth I really, really was boffing Robert Dudley (using a fantastic- sounding early condom) at every opportunity?

History is only ever written positively about the "victors"

yy to this. Interestingly, TC WAS one of the victors. In the name of the King he engineered the beginning of the modern state and dismantled the late medieval Catholic state

so why is he viewed as a ruthless arsehole? You'd think his PR would be a bit better, given that he 'won' (notwithstanding small matter of getting his head chopped off)

Ugh, I loathe Phillippa Gregory.

What I also hate in historical fiction is the pigeonholing of women. They're either saintly (like Mary Boleyn in The Boleyn Girl, which she probably wasn't irl) or ambitious and 'grasping' which is how AB is portrayed in just about everything.

Of course I realise that the problem with that is the fact that so little is known about them (compared to men. For example, we don't actually know when AB was born) but couldn't authors be a teensy bit more subtle? I mean Anne probably was ambitious, but I admire her for that. In a time when everything was in favour of men, her rise to power was extraordinary.

I like Phillipa Gregory but agree there is alot of fiction involved.

Henry gave the monasteries a hard time, often they would care for the sick etc.

also he wasn't exactly a liberal theologian, he did not like one bit the bible being translated and printed by Tyndale.

you meet Cromwell in C S Samson in some of the novels.

Slow. Dark. Poor sound quality. Ridiculous amount of hopping around in time.

Just watched 'The other Boleyn Girl' and 'The White Queen' and both were much better.

I think Thomas Cromwell is a fascinating historical character and his rise to prominence and to being a very difficult King's right hand man is extraordinary and a tale well worth telling. I understand from some of the history I've read that Henry bitterly regretted being manipulated into getting rid of him, but, again, we don't know for sure as it is just an interpretation from a distance. However, I still find Hilary Mantel's style of writing and her worship of him nauseating, but I will watch with an open mind.

I don't, and never have, held the view of Thomas More that is the widely accepted and portrayed one, I agree with a Alvis on that.

Phillipa Gregory writes about those times in a 'Mills and Boon' style which I find equally nauseating and the historical inaccuracies in her books drive me to distraction. Some of the bits about Elizabeth Woodville and her mother and their ability to cast spells and blow winds out across the Thames were just laughable, I can't take her or her books seriously.