The good old days of historical drama

It's strange, when it comes to period dramas from the Seventies and Eighties, that dramas based on historical lives age better than literary adaptations. It's not that the dialogue flows more easily. It often sounds a little stilted - especially when an attempt has been made to capture the language of the age - and exposition-heavy. There are no pace-making cuts or original camera angles: like the literary adaptations of the time, the historical dramas have a certain whiff of filmed theatre. But as filmed theatre, it somehow works better. The exchanges may not be realistic by any standards, but someone has put some thought into them, and they have been conceived as a TV play from the start. When you have a wonderful novel as a source, it is perhaps easier to think that its words will do all the work for you. It doesn't work that way: I've become more and more aware that a good deal of work needs to be done for a great novel to become good TV. Novels and drama are different genres, and filming even the best actors parroting as many of the novel's words as you can cram in is not the way to do it justice.

Examples of surprisingly good older historical dramas are the excellent "Elizabeth R", which in my view knocks spots off the more recent Elizabethan biodramas I've seen (the one with Helen Mirren and the first Cate Blanchett film); a sweetly partisan TV series about Disraeli; "Edward VII" (which made me feel sorry for the Kaiser - I'm not sure that was intentional) and "Will Shakespeare", a series from as early as 1978 which I have recently watched.

"Will Shakespeare" is very much a case in point here. You could never guess the scriptwriter was John Mortimer of Rumpole fame. The only resemblance I could find with the Rumpole stories is a certain bitter-sweetness: like the crusty barrister, Shakespeare does not have a very easy life, and yet you are somehow not too depressed by his setbacks. Language-wise, though, this is cod-Shakespearean throughout, but thought-provoking enough to get away with it. It's nice to see Tim Curry in a serious part. No flashing of the famous wolfish grin here: poor Will didn't have much to smile about. Nicholas Clay as the dashing Earl of Southampton steals the show rather, though. It was quite hard to imagine him as the golden young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Unlike poor Marlowe's potentially murderous squeeze in the first episode - continuing the poisonous-youth trend quite nicely - there was nothing even faintly androgynous about Southampton. Nature clearly meant him to be a man from the start.

I was going on to making a point about authors' lives rarely being as thrilling as their work, and dramas about them having to make the best of what they got in different ways. That is why a biodrama of Shakespeare must needs have a golden young man and Dark Lady in it, though there may not have been any such persons outside Shakespeare's imagination at all. I think I'll leave that argument for another day, though, and wrap up instead with another strange thing. How come, when recent literary adaptations are mostly - though not always - more sure-footed that the old ones, that recent historical drama is often so underwhelming? Think of "The Tudors", or (if it qualifies as historical at all, which is doubtful) "Desperate Romantics". Sorry, but a lot of bed-hopping does not a thrilling drama make. You have to invest something in the characterisation. As with Cromwell in "The Tudors", Ruskin in "Desperate Romantics" is saved by a sterling acting performance. Tom Hollander's Ruskin may not know much about what he likes, but he knows about Art - this is definitely the man you would hire to buy an art collection for you. More's the pity that actors playing interesting historical characters don't get more to work with: instead they have to make do with quite clumsy scripts, which will as likely as not shove their guy/woman aside contemptously because he/she won't bed-hop. Some things really were better in the old days.