TV: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall - Bewitching, brilliant - and that’s just what the continuity announcers said.

There’s been a lot of praise for the BBC series of Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, and it’s been extremely popular - according to a recent Guardian article it is the most popular drama since the modern ratings system began.  So why didn’t I get it?

"But did I leave the gas on or not?"

I tried reading the book of Wolf Hall a couple of years ago to see what the fuss was about, and found it really hard to get into - so hard that I didn’t in fact get into it and got distracted by something else.  I found it quite dry and boring, (which surprised me because I’m interested in the Tudor era in history and liked learning about the story at school).  Although technically it was still on my ‘things to finish’ list, it was way down. 

But I had the same thing with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - a bestseller that I’d found hard to get into but saw the film, and saw the light.  Seeing the film made me go back and reread the books and recognise that there was something I’d missed.  So I settled down to the dramatisation of Wolf Hall bearing that in mind, and you know what?

Well - it was a bit dry and boring… wasn’t it?

I was disappointed all over again.  I was being told this was ‘the new I, Clavdivs’ in the papers and most friends and colleagues seemed to really be enjoying it. too  The ratings seem to prove I’m wrong.  Everyone says that Mark Rylance was brilliant whereas I thought it looked like he sleepwalked through it with one expression (a man having a long and quizzical senior moment) before finally coming alive in the sixth episode.  Damian Lewis was admittedly brilliant as a charming and menacing Henry VIII.  Jonathan Pryce and Anton Lesser were well cast as Wolsey and Thomas More respectively.  And it all looked very authentic (whatever that actually means) in that Beeb Costume Drama way.  But the story seemed surprisingly divorced from emotion somehow - it showed other people’s emotions being enacted on screen but failed to inspire any in me.  I guess I was hoping to see something along the same lines as a Tudor House of Cards or The Thick Of It, a behind the scenes view of an arch-manipulator at work.  But we didn’t see that much of Thomas Cromwell’s Machiavellian skills until the end.  Instead of seeing ‘under-the-hood’ of Tudor politics, each episode seemed like walking in on a  series half-way through despite having been watching them all - you know, in order and everything.

So then I tried to enjoy it as a drama about Thomas Cromwell - The Man.  But with Rylance looking either mournful or like he’d forgotten to feed the cat I didn’t care enough about him.  And he doesn’t have that exciting a private life anyway - apart from a sequence in the first episode where his wife and daughter are killed by a fever, and a few other scenes here and there (he nearly gets off with Anne Boleyn’s sister, for instance) there’s not much to it.  Or rather, his private life and his political life were completely entwined.  

I, Clavdivs worked by taking a fairly marginal character (until his unexpected crowning as Emperor) and allow us to see events and characters through his eyes (although when it was dramatised Derek Jacobi managed to imbue the TV Claudius with liveliness and charm).  But the balance was all wrong in Wolf Hall - it felt to me we were seeing Cromwell’s life at the expense of seeing events build.  It felt like there were scenes missing that had been replaced with trivialities.  And the I, Clavdivs historical drama model doesn’t fit Wolf Hall in the end because Cromwell wasn’t by any means marginal - he was pivotal to the politics of Henry VIII’s court during this period.  

Wolf Hall also an intensely humourless production, bursting with a sense of the emotionally arid and dull.  A story that by rights should be very varied had exactly the same story arc for an entire three individual episodes (The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey; The Fall of Thomas More; The Fall of Anne Boleyn).  The sixth episode came alive (by comparison to the previous five at any rate); we saw Rylance absolutely take command and finally show the audience why his character has a fearsome reputation. 

Mark Gatiss wasn't very good either

Apart from a few forgettable one-off scenes in previous episodes, menacing relatively minor characters, we’d not seen evidence of him actually doing Henry’s dirty work.  Well ‘show don’t tell’ is a cliche, but like all cliches there’s some truth in it, and having people tell us that Cromwell has a fearsome reputation but not showing us why (until so late in the game) made for drama lacking in drama.  

I hated not liking Wolf Hall, because I was really looking forward to it.  Maybe I am missing out on what the biggest BBC2 audience of all time found in it, but I’m going to blame Wolf Hall and not myself for missing something this time round.