From the people who brought you the CBBC TV show Horrible Histories comes the latest iteration of the franchise. This feature is a very funny, if derivative panto-ish romp about the early life of Shakespeare. There are hints of the Carry Ons, Blackadder and especially Python, with one gag that must surely be a specific homage to Holy Grail. Shakespeare is played by Mathew Baynton with a soft-spoken intensity that Ben Whishaw might admire. This Bill originally played lead lute in a Stratford band called Mortal Coil; sacked for his self-indulgent solos, Bill was forced to take up literature. His meeting with Christopher Marlowe is not dissimilar from the way Tom Stoppard imagined it in Shakespeare in Love. Spy chief Sir Francis Walsingham displays some fantastically bizarre disdain for non-Protestants’ physique: “Catholics can’t put on muscle mass because God hates them.” Helen McCrory plays Elizabeth I with a speech impediment that may be intended solely to build to a gag referencing one of our greatest thespians. Big laughs.
