Who’s to blame for fake news: the Donald or Robert the Bruce?
FAKE news didn’t start with Donald Trump. Scotland’s warrior king Robert the Bruce invented it 700 years ago, with a piece of propaganda that still resonates.
Historian Neil Oliver’s superbly vivid account of how bloodthirsty Scottish tribes joined forces in the early 1300s to drive out the English and form a nation included one very modern detail.
King Robert’s medieval army sent out ‘false preachers’ to spread rumour and promote the legend of the warlord monarch, Neil told us in Rise Of The Clans (BBC4). They spun a tale, still repeated to schoolchildren seven centuries later, about an inspirational spider.
Battered, alone and hiding in a cave from his enemies, Robert the Bruce — so the story went — watched a spider attempting to spin its web. Again and again it failed, but it never gave up, until the web was woven.
That spider’s example became a proverb: if at first you don’t succeed — try, try again. Uplifting. Heartwarming. Cobblers.
The truth, this show claimed, was that King Robert retreated not to a cave but to the Western isle of Islay, where he spent the winter feasting with the local chieftainess, Christiana.
She was a loyalist all the way — so loyal to her royal that by springtime she was pregnant. So much British history is over-familiar, especially the Tudor period, that it was marvellous to realise some parts of our past are half-known at best.
The reigns of Edward I and his son Edward II — one a military tyrant, the other a devious weakling — barely get a mention in Tv dramas.
This was a low-budget retelling, but it made good use of a platoon of extras and re- enacters. Neil stood off to the side, with the camera trained on the reflection of battle in his eyeball.
When he blinked, his eyelid made a metallic swishing sound like a claymore sword. In that damp Scottish climate, he must worry about rust. Imagine being unable to close your eyes without a squirt of WD-40.
There were lashings of gory detail and lurid language, too. The Bruce’s sister, Neil said, was captured by the English and displayed in a cage hung from castle ramparts — while his ally Angus Ogg headed a tribe so lawless they were described as ‘the Hell’s Angels of the Hebrides’.
And as the Battle of Bannockburn loomed, the presenter warned that things were ‘about to get very medieval’.
Swish, chop, shriek, longdrawn-out gurgle . . .
Things were getting very suburban in the true- life espionage story Mrs Wilson (BBC1), as widow Alison (played by her granddaughter, Ruth Wilson) took out her frustrations on the shrubbery with a pair of garden shears.
This dark little three- part drama of secret lives and family lies did not advance much in the middle episode.
We learned something more about the deceptions and infidelities of caddish Alec Wilson, a thriller writer whose three wives knew nothing about each other. The standout scene was a clash between two of them, Ruth and Dorothy — played with a tearful, broken pride by Keeley Hawes.
Fiona Shaw as Coleman, the chain- smoking, spinsterish spymistress, was superb, too.
One curious plothole was left gaping: Alec’s son Michael believed wrongly that his father died at El Alamein in 1942. But Wilson was a celebrated novelist in the Forties, whose Wallace Of The Secret Service’ books were described as a mixture of Agatha Christie and The Saint.
Surely the boy would have noticed that his dead dad was still writing bestsellers?