The Hollow Crown and the BBC

For God’s sake let us sit upon the sofa and watch good things

Christmas was disease season at Metropolitan HQ, with the Editors taking turns to lie on the sofa and moan weakly while watching comforting moving lights on the TV. One of those watches was The Hollow Crown (2012—16), film versions of Shakespeare’s history plays Richard II, Henry IV (parts one and two), Henry V, Henry VI (parts one and two) and Richard III.

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These are not films of theatrical productions; they’re actual films. The scenery is ‘real’, there are multiple cameras and edits, and the actors speak at a normal volume. They are, however, charmingly low-fi. Battles consist of eight dirty men in armour waving gardening implements at each other and shouting; royal castles are played by National Trust properties.

But the direction, setting and staging is often excellent and the casts are jolly starry: theatrical princes including Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Anton Lesser and Jeremy Irons (whom

Tobias Sturt

had the good fortune to see play Richard II in 1986), plus younger movie star leads. Ben Wishaw is absolutely terrific as a deluded and preening Richard II and Benedict Cumberbatch goes full Olivier as Richard III, although Tom Hiddleston is sadly miscast as Henry V. Rory Kinnear gives a solid and quietly ruthless Bolingbroke and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff is absolutely perfect: vain, weak, boasting and bluff.

We still have Richard III to go, as it was not felt to be comforting enough for a comfort watch, so you’ll have to wait to hear whether the Princes in the Tower make it out this time.

Still, though: seven lightly adapted plays, with some of the best living British actors saying some of the best English words of all time. The Hollow Crown was put together (with NBC) as part of the Cultural Olympiad associated with the London 2012 Olympic Games. Absent another once-in-a-generation global-sporting-event-cum-marketing-exercise on home turf, would the BBC commission such a thing now? It’s hard to imagine it. Because the BBC’s fundamental operating assumption, these days, is that everyone in the UK is very stupid.

The thing about watching Shakespeare is that you have to pay attention. Even when you do, large parts of it will go over your head on first hearing. Amidst all the inane chatter about this singular English genius (‘Newsround’s Ricky Boleto and Leah Gooding go in search of the real William Shakespeare’), the one thing nobody ever says out loud about Shakespeare is that his language and ideas are — at a remove of nearly 500 years — very difficult for most modern people to get their heads around. But we have it on good authority that he’s worth the effort. Indeed, you might say that the difficulty — the complexity, the subtlety, the multiplicity of meaning, the allusiveness — is one of the reasons his work has endured. Wallace & Gromit, wonderful as it is, is really not the same thing.

Even in the not-quite-decade since The Hollow Crown was completed, the main BBC broadcast channels (both TV and radio) have been denuded of funding. Simultaneously, the BBC seems to be cursed with its worst generation of managers and commissioners since it was a gleam in Lord Reith’s eye. Channel controllers are hellbent on stripping out any programming that requires above-average standards of concentration. What they’ve done to BBC4 is a crime, and don’t get us started on the last time we saw a decent BBC documentary. One of our other comfort watches over the Christmas period was the Yes, Minister episode in which Jim Hacker becomes PM by mistake. Would that get commissioned now, with those scripts? Would it buggery.

Quite simply, at some level the BBC has decided that providing programming for well-educated/clever/intellectually curious people is… snobbish? Politically ill-advised in the post-Brexit climate? Insufficiently audience-attracting? Probably all three. Isn’t the BBC supposed to be for everyone? Because it’s a long time since we watched anything on it other than cop shows and live events. Forget ‘educate’ or ‘inform’; the only thing the poor, desperate BBC wants to do these days is ‘entertain’ people who it thinks are barely paying attention. Does the Corporation pay people to wander the halls shouting ‘BUSY MUM JUST WANTS SOME DOWNTIME WITH FRIENDLY REGIONAL ACCENTS’? Because it feels like they do. (One of the Editors is a Busy Mum, and the BBC’s output is definitely not working for her.) There are pockets of excellence — the World Service does some good work, as does Radio 3 — but mostly, all we can see is a metric fuck-tonne of identikit crappy his’n’hers podcasts on the execrable BBC Sounds, and multiple congealing puddles of low-effort slop on the telly.

So here’s an idea for you, BBC. Pick up an old play and give us a half-decent filmed production. Do it for the tiniest budget you can get away with: these things are out of copyright, and you can use hot, cheap young talent from the graduating classes at the UK’s many drama schools. Use the budget you’d otherwise have spent on one of those horrible drama-documentaries that explain things to you like you are five. How about a run of Shakespeare’s tragedies (we draw the line at the comedies). Or a bit of Marlowe, or Jonson; hell, you could go relatively modern and give us some Wilde. (Yes, yes, these are all men; don’t blame us, unless you want to lobby for some Aphra Behn.)

We’re begging here. For people like us (another old BBC series that wouldn’t get commissioned now) supporting the BBC is in our blood, like saying ‘sorry’ when someone bumps into you. Having a single trusted source of factual information and news is vitally important to British democracy; but, that aside, right now you’re making it really, really difficult to go into bat for you. Each time some neo-con asks us why the licence fee exists, we have a little less to say in response. News should be the BBC’s crowning glory, not its only distinguishing feature; and when we turn the TV on, it would be nice to occasionally find something we want to watch.

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Last week, The Metropolitan re-watched The Pink Panther, which you can read about here: