Queen’s crown of thorns
DO THE royals earn their money? I’m not sure. It must be exhausting, having to look interested as you open another dialysis centre, view local children’s artwork or listen to the High Sheriff of Hallamshire telling you the joke he told you last year.
On the other hand, has any of them ever run for a bus? Been told by their child, close to bedtime, that they need to make a sombrero for tomorrow’s assembly? Been told by their landlord that they need to leave, by next week?
You don’t have to go too far back in history though to find monarchs living lives no one would envy. ELIZABETH I (Channel 5) is a lavish docu-drama, with Lily Cole starring as the young Princess and Queen while historians Suzannah Lipscomb and Dan Jones provide the scholarly chorus.
If the early life of our famous Tudor queen had a theme, it was insecurity beginning with a mother so insecurely married to Henry VIII that her head lost contact with her neck.
After Anne Boleyn’s beheading, Princess Elizabeth was disinherited by her father and raised by governesses until the age of nine when Catherine Parr, her father’s sixth wife, moved in, took a shine to the girl and persuaded Bluff King Hal to accept her as his daughter again. This could have been a fairy-tale ending but, as so many fairy tales remind us, the princesses of yore were vulnerable creatures.
After Henry VIII died, Elizabeth was swiftly dragged into trouble at the hands of Catherine’s new husband, Thomas Seymour.
His romantic pursuit of the teenage Elizabeth ruined her relationship with Catherine Parr and ended with her being investigated for plotting to steal her brother’s throne.
She was tarred with the same brush under the reign of her sister, Mary, who kept her locked up in the Tower for five months and under house arrest for a further year. If Elizabeth was linked to any plots against her brother and sister, our historians didn’t mention it.
It seems more likely that she lived under permanent threat of losing her head for the simple crime of having been born.
There were similarly tough life stories revealed on LONG LOST FAMILY: WHAT HAPPENED NEXT (ITV). The “what happened next” bit is often a death knell for many a good show, a clumsy way of disguising a chopped-up repeat.
But with this particular show there are obvious reasons for going back to see how things panned out. The lost do not always want to be found and sometimes what’s found is not what was being looked for in the first place.
After siblings Ron and Christine found each other in a previous instalment of this heart-wrenching show, they realised both had similar, fragmentary memories of a wider family. They put the remembered words and images together and found two further siblings.
We saw at the end a brilliant sequence of them all meeting up, having experienced great hardships in their early lives and now forming their own new family.
Cliff went looking for his birth mother who ultimately didn’t want to make contact but the blow was softened by him finding sister Sue.
Amid the powerful scenes of revelation and reunion, it was impossible to forget why all these relationships had been ruptured. There were monster fathers and selfish mothers but also a system that favoured secrecy and shame.