CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

Royal History’s Biggest Fibs With Lucy Worsley 

Rating:

The Split  

Rating:

Please, Auntie, give it a rest. Enough of the shows chiding us for making the ‘wrong’ decision on Brexit by showing us the myriad errors of our ways.

Historian Lucy Worsley was intent on proving that British muddle-headedness about Europe went all the way back to the original Leaver, Henry VIII, on Royal History’s Biggest Fibs (BBC4). The 16th century’s Dirty Harry didn’t just dump four of his six wives: he and his adviser Tom Cromwell, the Tudor version of Dominic Cummings, ditched the Continent, too.

‘Henry VIII and Cromwell used a dodgy reading of history,’ Prof Lucy fumed, ‘to spin a story about a proud and independent nation . . . one that sees Britain flourishing without interference from its European neighbours.’

What a bounder that Henry, eh?

Like Jeremy Corbyn, the Prof was insistent on ‘winning the argument’. If persuasion was just a matter of talking yourself to a standstill, she’d be unstoppable.

In fact, she talked so much that, by the time she reached the ruins of Tintern Abbey on the Welsh border, to illustrate her points about the dissolution of the monasteries, her voice was just a croak. Always husky, Lucy now sounded like a 60-a-day gal.

To give her throat a rest, she dived into the dressing-up box. Prof Lucy is never happier than when she’s in costume, and she took advantage of her revelation that no contemporary portraits survive of Anne Boleyn to show us what the unlucky queen might have looked like.

According to her enemies, Anne was a right witch. Lucy stuck boils on her face, a lump on her neck and an extra finger on one hand to conjure the image. She even added a protruding tooth. I don’t know how closely she resembled Anne Boleyn, but she’d be brilliant as Worzel Gummidge.

The show exploded a few myths: Protestant reformer Martin Luther didn’t actually nail his famous 95 theses to a church door, apparently, and Good Queen Bess executed almost as many people for heresy as her sister, Bloody Mary.

But the documentary, the first of three, was at its most interesting when it stuck to straightforward history — such as the story of secret Catholic Humphrey Pakington, who commissioned carpenter Nicholas Owen to install hidey-holes around his home, Harvington Hall, near Birmingham. Here, priests could lie low from the Queen’s thought police.

Owen was arrested and tortured. He died in prison, but he never divulged the secrets of Harvington Hall. He was declared a saint in 1970. There’s a brave Englishman who deserves to have his story told in greater depth . . . and no one gives a stuff what it’s got to do with Brexit.

You won’t find any brave and noble chaps in The Split (BBC1), the divorce drama where every man is a different flavour of nasty. There’s no telling why heroine Hannah (Nicola Walker) is so smitten with needy colleague Christie (Barry Atsma). He’s an emotional drama llama, so immature that he can’t even bear to see her answer the phone to her sister when he’s with her.

But he compares well to her husband, pervy Nathan (Stephen Mangan), who got caught trawling for sex on a no-strings dating website. But the worst is Richie (Ben Bailey Smith), a sexist control freak who physically bullies his PA and leers over Hannah.

Writer Abi Morgan creates great characters, such as Hannah’s mother Ruth (Deborah Findlay) — always smiling and never meaning it. Donna Air is good, too, as Richie’s scared wife, plucking up the courage to leave him. But why does every bloke have to be as beastly as Henry VIII?