Lucy Worsley’s Fireworks for a Tudor Queen BBC4, 9pm
Worsley turns up the historical heat
In her previous documentaries, historian Lucy Worsley has proved that she’s more than willing to throw herself into a re-enactment but in this latest programme she doesn’t just stop at raiding the BBC’s period dressing-up box. So prepare to stand well back as she lights the fuse on some Tudor-style fireworks.
It may sound like a potential healthand-safety nightmare but it’s all in a good historical cause. Worsley is attempting to recreate one of the first documented firework displays in England, which took place in
1575, when Guy Fawkes was still just a boy. The pyrotechnics were laid on by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, as part of an elaborate attempt to win the hand of Elizabeth I.
As a proposal it failed, but as a spectacle it was clearly something special, as we’ll see for ourselves as the historian re-stages it in the grounds of Kenilworth. Armed with eyewitness accounts and some of the earliest instruction manuals for making fireworks, Worsley and her team of experts, which includes artist and materials scientist Zoe Laughlin, set about making Tudor rockets, firework fountains and even a fire-breathing dragon.
When they’re not playing around with Elizabethan-style gunpowder, Worsley and co will be learning more about the role fireworks played in the Tudor era, discovering they weren’t just reserved for royalty. Proving special effects aren’t an entirely new phenomenon, it seems pyrotechnics were used at the Globe Theatre.