The queen's mistake

Historical dramas are usually rubbish, but The Virgin Queen was storming. It was good to see the nurse from The Singing Detective turn up as vitriolic Mary Tudor, her from Brassed Off, the one who brought tears to your eyes with Orange Juice, a lady in waiting, and as for Ann-Marie Duff from Shameless, she did Anne Boleyn’s daughter like a good’un. No costume drama, the first episode was a story of our times, with attack helicopters on the sound track and bleeding heads on spikes, about an English monarch wedded to the religious fundamentalist head of a foreign power, who dies screaming, giving birth to something that turns out to have been a lie.