As a rather prim and unusual child, one of my favourite films when I was 12 or so was Anne of the Thousand Days, a long-forgotten and slightly dreary costume drama about Henry VIII’s relationship with Anne Boleyn. It was one of about nine videos that my parents owned: my sister was obsessed with it, and would mimic the film’s strident, declarative dialogue around the house. (“My. Elizabeth. Shall. Be. Queen!”)

Twenty-seven years have elapsed between my 12th birthday and the start of this year. How would the film bear up? Going in, I already cannot think what appeal it could have had back then. Most of the movie centres on Anne Boleyn’s famous blueballing of the monarch over a number of years – all of this is a bit silly, but kind of fun – and then it flounders terribly when it has to do the Reformation, with Cromwell and Wolsey reduced to oily figures gliding in and out of shadows in any number of tapestry-bedecked antechambers.

The film begins with a prologue in which Henry – played by a desperately hungover-looking Richard Burton – is about to sign Anne’s death warrant for treason. Thin piccolo music, blatantly studio-based scenery, drab camera movements, and the fact that the view out of the window is obviously a watercolour, conspire to give the film’s opening a bit of a Blackadder vibe. In fact, scenes at court are often unfortunately reminiscent of Monty Python; every mop-haired, tunic-sporting courtier looks the spit of Michael Palin.

Then we skip back to the early days of their courtship. Anne’s hilarious spurning of a horny Henry is where most of the movie’s fun is to be had. The film’s script, drawing from Tudors for Simpletons 101, lays it on thick. Early on, a hunting mate asks: “Dare I ask, has your majesty ever been refused by a wench?” He has not, but it isn’t long before Burton is groaning through the booze-sweats: “I think of nothing but you and me playing dog and bitch, of you and me playing horse and mare, of you and me in every way. I want to fill you up night after night.” Oh love, we’ve all been there. Geneviève Bujold, an Anne Boleyn of such exquisite alabaster beauty as to make Helena Bonham-Carter look like The Trunchbull, is a spry counterpart to this hulking Henry. Her line readings are perhaps rather theatrical for modern tastes but like, say, drag performer Sharon Needles, this queen is fierce.

You’ll have gathered that this is all rather sub-Mantel. At its best the film is a glossy Tudor-succession telenovela, with sublime, Oscar-winning costumes, and characters saying silly stuff such as: “Divorce is like killing – after the first time it isn’t so difficult.” At its worst it’s finicky, cardboard nonsense full of signet rings and fine pewter chalices that makes a whopping hash of history: it seems unlikely that Henry offed Thomas More purely as a bargaining chip with his wife for a spot of how’s-your-father, or that Anne would have chosen death by beheading over the gift of a bijou pad in France.
How much of this did I understand or enjoy at the time? Why did I watch it so much? (See above: there was next to nothing else.) Nothing ever really takes off in the movie, but at this stage of self-isolation anything goes; like comfort food, this trash fed a peckish part of my very worst movie-watching instincts, and I was grateful.