I loved the scene where the horrid Vikings turn up to negotiations expecting to bully him into submission, only to find their table-upturning bluster overmatched by Alfred’s cool intelligence. What works best is Cornwell’s reimagined King Alfred as a wimpy, slightly prissy intellectual with a core of steel. Some prat, somewhere, clearly decided that, unless characters like the cute hero Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) dressed like something from a boy band, the vital yoof demographic might find it all off-puttingly historical. You sense this timidity in the costume design, which is much more Merlin than echt 9th-century Wessex. But I fear it has had its wells poisoned by the conviction and shocking daring of Game of Thrones.
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I’d hoped to find a bit more of that in The Last Kingdom - the ongoing TV adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Anglo-Saxon novels.
It’s a formula that works because it’s what we most want from our TV: cosy, reassuring, familiar escapism. Creativity under pressure arcane skills endearing losers dark-horse winners competitive brutality sweetened with jokes. The camera loved it and so did we at home. We knew we were in safe hands when, in the opening episode, the male judge - ceramics designer Keith Brymer Jones - broke down in tears at the raw emotional upsurge induced by the beauteous bowls created by a contestant he had imagined would be a no-hoper.
Clearly it wants to be the new Bake Off - and it is the new Bake Off, with Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox doing the jaunty banter à la Mel and Sue, and a couple of potheads (or whatever you call clay experts) standing in for Paul and Mary. The Great British Pottery Throw Down (BBC2, Tuesdays) is proving to be a much safer bet. How did he get there? Don’t care, don’t care! I refuse to endure any more of this brooding turgidity, a shame though it might be not to catch more of Jim Broadbent doing his twinkly turn as a wise old queen with an air of Smiley-esque inscrutability. The handsome but incredibly dull and taciturn lover ended up zipped into a bag, just like that real spy who, it is now suspected, was bumped off by the Russians.
Luckily, the first episode ended happily. Why? I find straight sex enough of an embarrassment but watching two men going at it - even pretty ones like the stars of London Spy (BBC1, Mondays) Ben Whishaw and Edward Holcroft - really is an ordeal too far, especially when, as a viewer, you’re clearly expected to find it all languorously romantic and lovely, whereas what you’re actually thinking is: c’mon, you’re a spy series, so let’s have less shagging and more intrigue and killing. But the reality is that you end up doing stuff like I found myself doing on this Monday night just gone - cringing at pert male arses heaving up and down in a sensitive gay love scene in some moody new BBC spy drama that is going to be occupying our screens for the next five weeks. It’s not that I’m against it in principle: I like my evening’s televisual soma as much as the next shattered wage slave with no life. The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so much TV.
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