Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Alice von Rittennberg, John Heffernan, Oliver Zetterström, Jamie Parker, Romola Garai, Leo Bill, Ekow Quartey, Tom Cullen, Jacob Avery, Jamie Blackley, Alexandra Gilbreath, Bella Ramsey, Alex Macqueen, Jessica Raine, Ryan Nolan, Olivier Huband, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Stanley Townsend, Ben Moor, Robert Whitelock, Alfie Todd, Oliver Bennett, Lucy Speed.

For the vast majority of the population, we see historical figures in the form that we have been taught in directed classes in our youth, we look at certain pictures, paintings, and see the stillness, we are focused on the portrait and its intensity that we forget to imagine what they were truly like away from the propaganda, from the moment in which history decrees their strengths, their weakness, and the influence they had on the centuries that followed.

We forget to see the person behind the portrait, beyond that which the records implore us to learn ad nauseum. We wouldn’t like to be remembered in the modern age for one perfect photograph orchestrated by advertisement or publicity, and so it is too imagination and the coalescing of circumstance that we should envisage those to whom have created history, but before they became the figure of responsibility…we should see them as the child before they were the adult.

Whatever your view on British history and perhaps your division by being loyal to one side of the religious debate that split the country in the reign of Henry VIII, there is no doubting the significance of his young daughter, Elizabeth, and her place as England’s most dramatic, and fiercely drawn, noble Queen.

Becoming Elizabeth, despite running foul of audience figures after one season, does much to add colour to the speculation, in depth view to the one in which we see her depicted as England’s most famous virgin, and shows her for what she was, the manipulation, the burning desire within her young heart, arguably the need in modern parlance to absolve herself from the ‘daddy issues’ she had nurtured since her mother’s murder at the hand of her tyrant father’s behest.

The series gives Alice von Rittennberg in her role as the teenage future queen, perhaps her most crucial role to date, for carrying the series as the titular character is a blessing as much as a curse, and she aims high, and succeeds in her portrayal as a woman finding her way sexually in a world that was hostile to such emotions.

With superb support from John Heffernan, Romola Garai, Alex Macqueen, Jessica Raine, and Oliver Zetterström as the young Edward VI, Becoming Elizabeth is a piece of television cruelly cut short, it had the opportunity to allow misinformation of the woman to wipe away the rumour and inuendo, to lay bare the heart that beat in the chest of a future queen.

An enjoyable series, a period drama caught in the wake of unfortunate trends.

Ian D. Hall