A thing came in the post today...
Isn't it funny how, regardless of all of today's technological marvels, I can still be made very happy by the arrival of a simple thing from the 1970s?
I found it after I posted my Shadow of the Tower ficlet to AO3 and picked the fandom up to wrangle. I had to check there were no other films/books/shows of the same name. (Strangely, given what it is, there don't seem to be). And instead I found this official BBC TV tie-in book for the series from 1971/2! It has James Maxwell and the little monkey on the front and cost 1p. Much better than the Dutch DVD cover that either can't tell the difference between Elizabeth of York and Katherine Gordon, or doesn't care. It's funny to think that for about thirty-five years or so, this little book was all that was left of the TV series. (The BBC were not, as we all know, careful enough with their archives.)
Anyway, it is quite a slight thing and doesn't even have a foreward about the TV series or anything, but it is interesting, because it's written by Joan MacAlpine, the researcher for the series, so it's quite fun to see what she was giving the BBC and where the writers changed it or shifted emphasis. (For instance, she doesn't have much to say about Elizabeth of York, whereas the TV series gave her a distinct interpretation of its own, while she has more to say about Margaret Beaufort than the series did.) Mostly the writers did really interesting things from those starting points, and that's fun to be able to see. However, it's quite clear that it was her picture of Henry VII that is the overall keynote for the show and that what she's writing here is very much the performance that James Maxwell gives.
Liking odd old TV too much is like going back two decades in being fannish, where you snatch on the smallest of things with much joy. As a history book, it's very slight and biased - as background to the series and where they were coming from in their portrayal, with snippets from original sources that various incidents were based on, it's very satisfactory to me.
Plus, it has the monkey on the cover. (The back-cover tells me solemnly that this is a picture of James Maxwell and it was taken by Herb Schmitz. It doesn't credit the monkey, though.)
(I'm only talking about happy/fannish things for the moment. This is both. And it's not crossposted, because I couldn't be bothered to use Photobucket this morning.)
I found it after I posted my Shadow of the Tower ficlet to AO3 and picked the fandom up to wrangle. I had to check there were no other films/books/shows of the same name. (Strangely, given what it is, there don't seem to be). And instead I found this official BBC TV tie-in book for the series from 1971/2! It has James Maxwell and the little monkey on the front and cost 1p. Much better than the Dutch DVD cover that either can't tell the difference between Elizabeth of York and Katherine Gordon, or doesn't care. It's funny to think that for about thirty-five years or so, this little book was all that was left of the TV series. (The BBC were not, as we all know, careful enough with their archives.)
Anyway, it is quite a slight thing and doesn't even have a foreward about the TV series or anything, but it is interesting, because it's written by Joan MacAlpine, the researcher for the series, so it's quite fun to see what she was giving the BBC and where the writers changed it or shifted emphasis. (For instance, she doesn't have much to say about Elizabeth of York, whereas the TV series gave her a distinct interpretation of its own, while she has more to say about Margaret Beaufort than the series did.) Mostly the writers did really interesting things from those starting points, and that's fun to be able to see. However, it's quite clear that it was her picture of Henry VII that is the overall keynote for the show and that what she's writing here is very much the performance that James Maxwell gives.
Liking odd old TV too much is like going back two decades in being fannish, where you snatch on the smallest of things with much joy. As a history book, it's very slight and biased - as background to the series and where they were coming from in their portrayal, with snippets from original sources that various incidents were based on, it's very satisfactory to me.
Plus, it has the monkey on the cover. (The back-cover tells me solemnly that this is a picture of James Maxwell and it was taken by Herb Schmitz. It doesn't credit the monkey, though.)
(I'm only talking about happy/fannish things for the moment. This is both. And it's not crossposted, because I couldn't be bothered to use Photobucket this morning.)