History Repeating?
With the announcement of the new scripted series The War Room, can we call time on the seemingly never ending slew of WWII and Churchill-themed dramas?
The show looks to have drawn at least some inspiration from 2017’s The Darkest Hour, which featured many scenes set in Churchill’s Admiralty Citadel offices. Not to traduce the Great Man, but in the last ten years alone, the iconic war leader has featured in no less than eight TV dramas and seven movies.
Personally, I would rather see a show about his dissolute son Randolph (Randy?), of whom the novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote upon hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumour from him:
“A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.” (Diary entry, March 1964)
And it’s not just WC; over recent years we’ve been inundated with scripted fare on Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I, Edward VIII, Robert the Bruce, and Henry VIII and his six spouses, the latter surely the most overworked period of British history.
The portly monarch has been portrayed as both a proto-cockney bovver boy (Ray Winstone, Henry VIII, 2003) and as an atypically slim male model (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, The Tudors, 2007-10).
How about giving some other British historical figures a shot for a change, possibly James II (the last openly Catholic monarch), Lloyd George, Lord Palmerston, Henry I, Cromwell, the Stuart Pretenders or Llewelyn the Great?
Meanwhile, current Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s tiresome antics are proving a one-man cottage industry for drama producers.
We’ve already had Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019), When Boris Met Dave (2009) and a cameo in EastEnders, when the then Mayor shoehorned himself into a scene in the Queen Vic, an early example of the BBC’s indulgence of the fellow.
Johnson will soon receive the ultimate accolade in being played by uber-thesp Kenneth Branagh in Michael Winterbottom’s upcoming pandemic themed mini-series This Sceptred Isle, which I’m sure will be a must-see for all those keen to revisit the early months of COVID-19 last year.
Sounds a hoot.
Ken may have to cut the PM’s interminable habit of constantly ‘er-ing’, or elsewise infuriated viewers may be tempted to emulate the late Elvis Presley and reel off a few shots at the TV.
Presley is also the subject of an upcoming movie, with Tom Hanks as The King’s bunco-artist manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, alias Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk.
Johnson found the time to front two vacuous historical documentaries for Ch4 and BBC2 (another instance of The Corporation sucking up?) where, once again he got to show off his vaunted Classical erudition.
Unfortunately for him, the PM’s lack of substantive knowledge of the subject was cruelly exposed when he was soundly beaten by Mary Beard in a debate about Classical Greece and Rome back in 2015.
Qui totum vult totum perdit*, as the saying goes.
If/when the PM eventually gets the boot, expect a breakneck money-grabbing exercise to pay for his divorce, multiple offspring, and Carrie Symonds’ migraine-inducing Willy Wonka-style makeover of their Number 11 Downing Street flat.
Books, more hurriedly written columns and just possibly a gig with new channel GB News, where the former First Lord of the Treasury can spar and blather to his heart’s content in a late-night slot may all help fill the depleted Johnson coffers.
*’He who wants everything loses everything ‘(attributed to Seneca).
