Well...this was interesting. A nice bit of history programming. But Lucy and the "talking heads" (now there's a name for a rock band) didn't go deep enough. To be sure there were a lot of pretty scenes, but there were several places where Lucy's innate "Englishness" gave her away. Somehow strong and deep emotion seem to elude her intellectual understanding. The words are right - from a certain perspective. But the deeper understanding of "Russian-ness" is missing. The whole business of the serfs for instance, is looked at very much from a "Triumph of the West" point of view. Nobody would ever dispute that serfdom of any kind is entirely wrong, nor that in Russia it went on for far too long and that it was one of the root causes of the Revolutions of 1917. But there are other ways of looking at not just this aspect of Russian history that Lucy and her team seem to be either glossing over or missing altogether. The facts seem mostly correct. But history is not just facts and gloss. And the emotions of the times need to be understood - in the context of the times in which they occurred - not from the perspective of a 21st century person living in a different society and possessed of 20/20 hindsight. To do that in a programme that purports to be historical fact is just plain lazy.
9/10 for facts. 1/10 for everything else.
Now what will happen in Part 3 when we get to the real meat of the consequences of the Romanov's slowness and failure to acknowledge what was coming until it was way too late to stop the juggernaut crushing everyone? Let's see...
(Thanks to the BBC for the lovely picture of Lucy)
9/10 for facts. 1/10 for everything else.
Now what will happen in Part 3 when we get to the real meat of the consequences of the Romanov's slowness and failure to acknowledge what was coming until it was way too late to stop the juggernaut crushing everyone? Let's see...
(Thanks to the BBC for the lovely picture of Lucy)