Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC One) | iPlayer
Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)
Immigration: How British Politics Failed (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Penguin (Sky Atlantic/ Now)
I ’m a huge fan of Hilary Mantel’s double Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, and was frustrated and unimpressed by BBC Two’s 2015 dramatisation of the first two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Starring Mark Rylance as Henry VIII’s lowborn fixer, Thomas Cromwell, director Peter Kosminsky’s Bafta-winning adaptation felt as sluggish and laboured as Mantel’s writing was vivid and exciting. The series did ignite about two-thirds in, as Anne Boleyn (played with raw magnificence by Claire Foy) succumbed to trumped-up charges of treason, culminating in the unbearable, wind-lashed scenes of her beheading.
