Poor Cate

Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t up to much, and it isn’t. It may even be a dog’s dinner although, I should stress, not our dog’s dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks before cracking the top of his crème brûlée with a teaspoon. You’ve never met a dog more particular. But I would certainly use ‘dog’s dinner’ in the way it is generally meant, as in such a mess. Now, the question is: where to start?

OK, how about the paralysing banality of the supposedly romantic scenes? How about the Queen inspecting her face in the mirror and berating it for its wrinkles when she doesn’t have any; not the one? How about the King of Spain being portrayed as a bow-legged mincing lulu? How about Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh jumping from a ship into the English Channel during a fierce storm and surviving without so much as a sneeze? Listen, I’m all for Clive Owen in a wet shirt (no complaints from this quarter) but wouldn’t hypothermia have got him almost instantly? And, if it hadn’t, wouldn’t he have been dashed against the rocks? The problem with this film isn’t where to start.