Two Paths for Television History

'Why does history on TV have to be (almost always, but increasingly) so stupid, patronising and awful.' That was the question posed to his social media followers by the historian Matthew Parker, author of the acclaimed Goldeneye, his book on Jamaica during Ian Fleming's time there.

Parker's outburst has the air of exasperation common to anyone frustrated at the simplicities and stereotypes pedalled too often by the makers of history documentaries. The timing of the tweet, two thirds through the BBC's heavily trailed three-part series Armada, suggests that programme was the source of his frustration. He is not the first to be critical of the series, which too often wasted its access to top-flight historians, including such illustrious figures as Geoffrey Parker and Jessie Childs.

Kate Maltby in the Guardian expressed her anger, following the first episode, at what she perceived as the programme's division between male historians (guns! galleons!) and female historians (clothes! make up!) and in particular the series' portrayal of Elizabeth I. It's bad enough putting up with comedy Spaniards, but to portray Elizabeth as a sterile grotesque was profoundly anachronistic. At the time of the Armada, the great Tudor monarch was almost exactly the same age as Margaret Thatcher was when, in 1979, as a bustle of energy and moral certainty, she first entered Downing Street. Not that Britain's first female prime minister escaped the caricatures unique to her sex, even in death.

Oddly enough, in the same week that the second part of Armada was broadcast, so was another BBC television documentary about a powerful woman who became the incarnation of a nation: Joan of Arc. In just one hour, with little whizz bangery, the excellent Helen Castor, Joan's latest and best biographer, offered a clear narrative, conscious of the latest scholarship, of one of the most remarkable stories of the European Middle Ages.

For whatever reason, Joan has been better treated by both the small screen and the big than has Elizabeth: think of Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) or Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent 1928 classic The Passion of Joan of Arc, both of which were based on the actual trial transcriptions.

Let me guide you, however, to a more obscure title that will need some tracking down. Sarraounia is the 1986 film by the Mauretanian director Med Hondo, which tells the story of the eponymous queen of the Azna of West Africa who, in 1899, led her people in a sustained and, ultimately successful, guerilla war against French colonial forces. If there is a better cinematic representation of a female leader, I have not seen it.

Paul Lay is the editor of History Today.