Another Shakespeare scene rewritten

Following our previous dialogues, here we have some alternative dialogue from Henry VIII, as used in the ITV version with Ray Winstone: HENRY VIII: Cor blimey, Cromwell me old china, that Enn Blin aint half a right pain in the Gregory, and no mistake. {By the end of the show, both “Enn Blin” and Cromwell…

Dyer or Dire?

Many of you will remember the episode of “Who do you think you are” in which Danny Dyer was revealed as a descendant of Edward III. In this new two part series, he “meets” a few prominent ancestors, some even more distant. The first episode began with Rollo, ancestor of the Dukes of Normandy, which…

She isn’t “going through the card” after all

As you probably know, the list of women who have been beheaded in England is very short. Helena Bonham Carter has played two of them so far – Lady Jane (1554) in 1986 and Anne Boleyn (1536) (opposite Ray Winstone’s Henry VIII on ITV) in 2003 and I heard that she was about to play a royal…

The anachronism that wasn’t

This article lists a few errors in two current popular drama series but its criticisms are not as authoritative as they may seem. On “Victoria”, it quotes Professor Jane Ridley, who is a leading expert on that monarch and is a descendant of one of England’s first married bishops, and A.N. Wilson on several points. However,…