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I can't help feeling, after sitting through the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth so many times at home and at the cinema, I'm owed an honorary doctorate in Elizabethan history. But here we are again. Repeating Elizabeth 101 by watching the two-part, BBC mini series The Virgin Queen, which began last night.
It's easy to see why her story's so attractive to actors, writers and directors of course.
Elizabeth is something like Hamlet for female actors. It's a part offering a chance to dominate proceedings, to set big emotions against sweeping events. It gives them a chance to act.
The period is understandably appealing too. The Elizabethan age was the making of England as a world power. It has its religious schism, plenty of beheadings, an Armada. And it had lovely frocks too.
The latter certainly dominated Shekhar Kapur's much praised film Elizabeth (and his widely-panned sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age). The Virgin Queen's frocks are all that they should be, but this production differs from Kapur's work in that it has a more concerted crack at historical accuracy.
Instead of choosing one period of Elizabeth's reign - usually it's the drama of the Armada or her death-feud with Mary, Queen of Scots - The Virgin Queen attempts a chronicle of her reign in four hours. Understandably it's a squeeze. However even if all the set pieces of her life's story are here, they become a mere backdrop to the drama's stab at getting inside Elizabeth's head and fishing about for reasons why she remained unmarried and a virgin throughout her reign. Sex (or the lack of it) dominates, though it keeps its clothes on.
Many viewers may find that a relief after the fleshy reading of Henry VIII in the lush, hilarious bonk-fest The Tudors. Here there's no need for bouncing bums. This ruler is, after all, a virgin. Instead of flesh there is a well-cosseted sexual frustration as she alternatively lusts for and then spurns childhood friend Robert Dudley (played with wet ineptness by Tom Hardy). Unfortunately the script is so saturated in sexual frustration it leads to non-sexual frustration followed quickly by irritation.
It doesn't help that Anne-Marie Duff's Elizabeth is a schizophrenic creature prone to being girlishly silly one moment and then, a nanosecond later, a grumpy, queenly maid with fire in her eyes.
The former, the girlishness, is identifiable by the rush of slow motion filming and bursts of Renaissance-cum-dance music from an, at times, overly-loud soundtrack. The scene where, on hearing her sister Queen Mary was dead and that she was now queen herself, was typical. Our flame-haired virgin rushed into a verdant field beaming like she'd won the lottery. The soundtrack's voices and guitars chimed as Elizabeth snapped a leaf from an oak tree, closed her eyes, tilted her head and the bright light of destiny (or non-sexual ecstasy, possibly) bathed her radiant face. It was plain daft.
Alternatively, when Duff's Elizabeth is grumpy, she scowls and has a little shout, bellowing things like "I will have no man rule over me".
While this production, which finishes tonight, is long on honest intent, it's only fitfully entertaining because it feels too much like sitting through a history lesson that's constantly being interrupted by a tutorial on psychology - and I've heard it all before.
* The Virgin Queen last night and tonight, TV One, 8.30.
