Mention 1066 in Britain and people think of the Battle of Hastings, the Bayeux Tapestry and King Harold getting an arrow through the eye.
But now BBC1 and CBS have attempted to flesh out the story in a muddy, bloody eight part miniseries.
'King and Conqueror' by Michael Robert Johnson boasts a 'Game of Thrones' star and one of Britain's most prolific screen actors.
Denmark's Nikolaj William Coster-Waldau is best known for playing the thoroughly bad egg, Jaime Lannister in the HBO swords and armour epic.
Meanwhile James Norton has made a name for himself playing a broad range of roles from a twisted thug in 'Happy Valley' to the soldier Andrei Bolonsky in 'War and Peace,' a Russian Mobster's son in 'McMafia' to a terminally ill working class Belfast dad in 'Nothing Special'.
Both men are accomplished actors who you would imagine would enjoy sinking their teeth into a historical epic with swords, shields and armour.
Alas, 'King and Conqueror' is a dreadful slog and, as always, it's all because of a woeful script.
The miniseries, directed by Icelandic actor Baltasar Kormakur, Hungarian filmmaker Balint Szentgyorgyi, Swedish director Erik Keijonborg and Coster Waldau, is an international affair with 'Game of Thrones' ambitions with a cast hailing from Britain, Denmark, France, Iceland, Sweden and Germany.
The show is full of sword wielding men, scheming ladies and plenty of vexed conversations in freezing, damp, muddy villages and ice cold castles.
Johnson's show traces English history from the ascendancy of Eddie Marsan's Edward the Confessor to the throne in 1042 and the uneasy peace between warring families to the battle that pitted Coster Waldau's William the Conqueror against Norton's Harold.
To get there, though, we have to wade through an awful lot of leaden dialogue and one dimensional acting.
The first episode sees a frankly bonkers Edward crowned King following a truce between the warring families of Wessex, Northumbria and Mercia.
In Wessex, however, Harold is far from convinced by the new King and expresses his doubts to his boorish father, Geoff Bell's Godwin who blithely ignores them - only for the family to have a very public falling out at the coronation with Edward's mother Juliet Stevenson's Lady Emma.
Prior to the coronation, Harold has his first encounter with William, earning his respect by intervening when the Duke of Normandy's party is attacked by bandits on their way to London, mashing the attackers' heads in.
William is shocked by the falling out between Lady Emma and Harold's family and eventually finds himself on opposite sides to the Wessex warrior.
The Norman Duke has troubles in his own backyard, though, to contend with, with Jean Marc-Barr's King Henry expressing disappointment that a pretender to the Norman crown Guy of Brionne has escaped William's captivity.
Annoyed that William has gone to England to attend Edward's coronation, Henry sets out to recapture Guy.
Suspicious of the King's motives, William's wife, Clemence Poesy's Matilda has Guy tracked down and tortures him, only to discover that Henry was behind the killing of her husband's father and is determined to undermine any alliance between Normandy and England.
With William having to negotiate betrayal in France and Harold and his family also being punished by Lady Emma and the Mercian forces who have seized their lands and captured his wife Emily Beecham's Edith, both men face tricky paths to the Norman and Anglo-Saxon crowns.
But are we invested enough to care about how they get there?
In short, no because 'King and Conqueror' is a miserable affair - a show devoid of any passion.
Shot on location in Iceland, the scripts by Johnson, David Mar Stefanson, Sam Hoare and Rachel Kilfeather try to bring a modern sensibility to a period of English history that has been so rarely dramatised.
But while the show longs to ape the political scheming and the shocking violence of 'Game of Thrones,' its more modest budget hampers those ambitions.
As a result, it just ends up looking like a lot of ashen faced actors struggling through a very grim and very damp shoot.
The show's international cast is weighed down by lifeless dialogue and they deliver their lines with all the passion of someone reading the instructions for an IKEA self assembly wardrobe.
That goes for Coster-Waldau and Norton too, while the normally reliable Marsan delivers an uncharacteristically over the top performance, full of eye rolling mannerisms.
History buffs have had a field day pointing out how 'King and Conqueror' drives a coach and horses through real historical events.
But the makers of the miniseries might have got away with that if their show wasn't so drab.
If you're going to tinker with history, at least do it with some passion.
('King and Conqueror's was broadcast on BBC1 in the UK between August 24-October 5, 2025, with all episodes made available on the iPlayer on August 24, 2025)
Let's move from swords and shields on the battlefields of Essex to cellphones and cocaine on the mean streets of Cardiff.
Four part Welsh thriller 'The Guest' is a weird tale about a cleaner and a wealthy benefactor whose friendship goes awry as disturbing facts start to come to light.
Gabrielle Creevy is Ria Powell, a bright young Cardiff woman scraping together a living as a cleaner in the face of clients pressurising her to drop her charges because they can get cheaper Eastern European labour.
Ria has a bit of a useless boyfriend, Sion Daniel Young's Lee Mace who she has known since their schooldays.
Struggling to get by, she lifts food one day out of a supermarket food bank collection box but is confronted by a store security guard who humiliates her in front of shoppers at the tills.
Leaving the supermarket in disgrace, she is approached by a modern day fairy godmother, Eve Myles' fabulously wealthy Fran who notices Ria is a cleaner and offers her work.
So far so good.
Ria takes up Fran's offer and heads out to the wealthy businesswoman's plush rural home, where Clive Russell's elderly gardener Derek Abbott also does jobs around the house.
Fran takes an unusual interest in Ria's wellbeing and starts to become her mentor, encouraging her to live her life to the full and raise her ambitions beyond a life with the deadbeat Lee.
Encouraged by Fran, Ria goes on a dating app, is given a dress and winds up meeting Joseph Ollman's Mike Rice on a date who seems like a nice bloke.
However Ria isn't a complete gombeen and as she cleans around Fran's house, she starts to notice some odd things.
She spies her employer in more than just a romantic clinch with Derek's shady, married son Emun Elliott's Richard Abbott and even records footage of it on her smartphone.
When a second rendezvous with Mike Rice in Fran's home gets horribly wrong, disturbing details start to emerge about his connection to Ria's employer.
Soon the two women are pitched on a collision course.
All of this sounds fine until you actually watch writer Matthew Barry and director Ashley Way's miniseries.
What begins promisingly very quickly disintegrates into a preposterously silly story of shady wealthy people, dodgy buried secrets and frankly unbelievable crimes.
Barry and Way's drama falls into the trap of a lot of low budget British TV thrillers which aim for sensational twists and cliffhangers that never match expectations.
These plot developments don't just stretch credibility, they torch it.
One minute there's a bit of sexual shenanigans involving Fran and Richard, the next there's Derek mumbling something cryptic about a previous employee.
One minute Ria is jumping out of her skin when Derek appears at the window of her employer's home, the next she's receiving warnings from him to get out of Fran's life.
Eventually it all leads to the rather underwhelming sight of Ria running around Cardiff city centre during a rugby international day trying to avoid police drones like she's Butetown's answer to Jason Bourne.
All of this nonsense saps Creevy, Myles, Elliott, Russell and Young's performances of any credibility and not even Bethan Mary-James' spirited turn as Ria's loyal best friend, Sharla can save the show.
'The Guest' is simply a waste of its audience's time but it is also a waste of its cast's talent.
('The Guest' was broadcast on BBC1 between September 1-22, 2025 with all episodes made available on the iPlayer on September 1, 2025)
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