They go on about accuracy, but if they want it to be accurate, why cast someone who looks literally nothing like Victoria? OK Jenna Coleman is short, but have you seen the portraits, Victoria was hideous, podgy, bulging eyes and this rabbity little mouth – that’s what people want to see – and they’ve had to put her in blue contact lenses? When contact lenses weren’t even invented. They’d have been blue spectacles.
Mind you her eyebrows are worse, the Victorians wouldn’t have had threading, and the Lord Melbourne thing, I’ve checked, he looked literally nothing like Rufus Sewell, he was fat, he had grey hair, he wasn’t a global sex symbol, I think they invented the whole relationship purely to make people watch it. Some of it’s basic stuff, they carry on about academic advisers, but if it’s so accurate why have her dancing to Strauss’s Fledermaus Quadrille at her coronation ball when it wasn’t written for another 36 years? It sounds completely wrong once you know.
And coming after the rats eating her cake, you don’t even have to be a historian to know that would never have happened – you know they’ve found cake tins in Pompeii? – plus the rats were too big and why would rats drive her mad, anyway, they hadn’t invented phobias. It ruined the whole thing for me, I’m just watching for the howlers now.
Same with Poldark, did you spot that television aerial the other day – you need to pause it, episode three, 21 minutes in – apparently the Cornish gentry would never have put up a visible aerial, not on a listed building, and don’t get me started on Poldark’s chest. I wrote in, I said, do you really want young viewers to think they could afford personal trainers in 18th-century Cornwall, and I don’t know why they bother with their advisers when anyone can see that Poldark is just pretending to chisel tin, it ruined that whole scene for me. Plus if they’re so accurate, is there any actual evidence Ross Poldark was arrested for plundering – what do you mean he wasn’t a real person?
