Here’s fun. Why not pimp the Bayeux Tapestry? Proper nerd fun. You can reinvent history by dragging and dropping soldiers, kings, beast, buildings and boats into the most unlikely combinations, adding text to move your story along etc etc. I made a loose six-frame mashup riffing on William the Bastard’s invasion of England in 1066, Lemuel Gulliver’s visit to the Houyhnhnms, and this morning’s breakfast. It was quite fun. I can’t get the Gallery to work at the moment or I’d post a screengrab. But go, see this masterpiece of the Internet age for yourself…

Hat-tip: Geeks are Sexy

Click here to read my review of this splendid new history of the Conservative party since the fall of Thatcher.

And click here to buy it.

It’s a decent exhibition, although one can see why Delaroche was out of fashion for so long. His sentimental, even mawkish renderings of great moments from Tudor and Stuart history manage to be both gruesome and twee, often at the same stroke.

The exhibition centres around his portrayal of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Much wailing from the ladies-in-waiting; compare and contrast with the ambivalence of the axeman, who stands impassive, as though it were not an act of human cruelty he were about to commit, but a pre-determined act demanded by a higher power. Delaroche has layed on the pathos in spades by having a blindfolded Lady Jane grope helplessly for the block - you have both weepy sentimentality and a sort of grotesque historical determinism in the same canvas.

This is the model for most of the major works on show. The Princes in the Tower tremble before their murderer (represented only by a shadow under the door) while a pathetic little toy-dog yaps bravely but pointlessly at impending doom. Cromwell lifts the lid of a coffin to peer at the ashen face of Charles I’s corpse; everything about him is blood-red, to the point that it looks as though his very boots are brimming over with blood. There is a holiness to the dead King’s visage, but it hardly lights up the canvas - this is a painting literally coated in gore and cruelty.

Delaroche was, of course, a product of the French Revolution, so had seen his fair share of gore; this also contributed no doubt to the depressing inevitability of death in his major works. He is not a subtle painter, nor are his paintings especially demanding. Still, the exhibition is pretty well lit and certainly worth half an hour if you are loitering in Trafalgar Square. But as for Delaroche as the purpose of a day out? There’s not much to separate it from a quick squizz around The London Dungeon.

The provenance of that figure seems to be this Guardian profile from 10 years ago. In which case one would suspect that there are now another 1000 or so books on the shelf. If they are all on medieval history then it sounds like a magnificent collection indeed.

So. Episode 2 was a little better than the first. We had Henry II dying, betrayed and heartbroken, as his beloved Le Mans burned to the ground. Then we had Richard I giving Saladin’s heathen johnnies the right royal runaround in the Holy Land, then falling out with his ‘lover’ (never bought that, myself) Philip I of France and draining England of its gold in the process.

But this series is still pretty undercooked. The characters are too thin, and their motives painfully oversimplified. It’s not a subtle family drama, but it’s not a political thriller either. There are some infuriating tics: the habit of referring to the ‘King of Anjou and England’ has started to really get my goat.

And weirdest of all, this episode was narrated by a breathy, almost orgasmic Eleanor of Aquitaine, who seemed to be auditioning for a job doing the next batch of M&S food ads. It right gave me goose-bumps, and not in a good way.

Sigh.

(Note: I’ve not tried this, so can’t guarantee the quality. It’s Nigel Slater all the way in our house tonight.)

The first episode, ‘What is a Man?’ focused on the squabbles between Henry II and his sons, Henry the Young King, Richard and Geoffrey, which dominated his reign from the Great War of 1173/4 until the elder Henry’s death in 1189. Fantastic material: this is perhaps one of the stormiest stories in the whole of the later Middle Ages, as the politics of dynasty-building are played out through the folly of human ambition. There was also one hell of a war (in 1173/4), which involved virtually every major magnate from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

Walker’s storytelling was surprisingly tame. He painted the scene by numbers: the conflict between family and kingship exposing the troubled contradictions between the instincts of kings and princes, and the instincts of fathers and sons. But in doing so, the politics were oversimplified and watered down, the characters never fully fleshed out, and the battles literally non-existent. Here were a load of rich folk squabbling. Nothing more.

There were also some clumsy inaccuracies, and while I don’t have any massive objection to historical liberties being taken in the name of improving drama or dialogue, in this case they didn’t really seem to do that.

For example: the old myth about Henry’s family descending from the devil was rehashed. Fine, but none of them subsequently came across very diabolical. A bit peeved and pottymouthed, maybe. But hardly Satanic. Likewise with the Eleanor of Aquitaine stereotype: as per usual she was painted as the jilted poet queen of the south, but in her scene with the old king, as he swept her off to exile in England following her conniving in the rebellion of 1173, she was unflustered and leaden.

There were also a number of howlers. Henry as ‘the King of Anjou and England’? That’d be the King of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou (etc) then. And right at the start, Henry II was addressed as ‘your majesty’ - a term introduced for the English monarch by Henry VIII. There were more, but it’s pedantic to list them.

I feel bad hating on a serial I was really looking forward to, and which I applaud Radio 4 for commissioning. But it was just a little bit thin. As I have mentioned here before, I am writing the history of the Plantagenets at the moment, for publication next year. So I wished this series nothing but well - these rich and wonderful times deserve their place in the zeitgeist. I’m hoping it will improve next week, when the story moves on to Richard I’s reign. I will certainly be tuning in.