My advance DVD from the BBC was marked ‘The Virgin Quenn’, which I thought was pleasing and evocative. Possibly the quenn was a mythical beast, condemned to live for only one generation due to its perpetual virginity. Or perhaps it was bawdy Tudor slang, used by Shakespeare: ‘Why, friend, a queen shall have a quenn, as well as Mistress Scapegrace!’, a line which would have made the groundlings collapse in ribald glee.
Either way it seemed a more promising introduction to The Virgin Queen (BBC1, Sunday) than that provided by Radio Times, which promised ‘a hotbed of erotic intrigue’, backed by a ‘Tudor rock’ soundtrack, with Essex played as if he were the late Marc Bolan, and Leicester ‘played by Tom Hardy in black leather britches and a codpiece Blackadder would kill for’.
In other words, what we were going to see was a meticulous recreation of the stock 21st-century idea of what a Tudor court might have been like.
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