I had never heard of this series and found it by accident as a suggestion after watching 'The Accursed Kings' on a streaming service which I will not name in case the series is blocked before I can rewatch it. The series is not for bingeing! It needs to be watched slowly to give each episode time to sink in. As I need captions due to hearing loss, I took off one star for the inferior automatic captions which seemed to be translating a different show at times.
I won't go into the 'plot' as anyone who has studied history, Shakespeare and countless dramas of the Platangenets will be well familiar with the events. I have to praise the brilliant originality of the sets, which I dismissed at first as too theatrical with backgrounds on the level of the school play, but as I watched more, I realised that the stageiness and painted backdrops were intended to evoke a medieaval manuscript, and it worked beautifully, especially on the small screens of the time. Confining the action to a very small area also made it more immediate and drew in the audience as if we were eavesdropping. Sometimes a scene would begin as an illustration with an illuminated frame around the edge, then as the camera zoomed in the figures would begin to move and we would be drawn into the scene. This worked very effectively in the representations of battles as set pieces. When three European monarchs were discussing the fate of Richard the Lionheart who had been captured in Austria despite the free passage guaranteed by the church to Crusaders, they were seated on their thrones side by side in the flat manner of paintings of the time. I could watch it all again for the sets alone. The sets were no loss effective for being 'budget' but showed how much originality can flourish when forced to economise.
My only other complaint ( losing one star) was not with the series itself, but with the quality of the recording currently shown on TV. In 1978, the BBC and ITV were producing some fine dramas such as I Claudius and Fall of Eagles, with sharp clear definition. The Devil's Crown appears to be from a French copy. This may be exactly what it is and the original may have been destroyed as the BBC tended to reuse video tape. I did hear that the series was thought to be lost for many years, so what has turned up may well be a copy made by a viewer. What is needed especially in this time of production halted due to the pandemic, is for a cleaned up restored copy with new captioning or subtitles with which we could sit by the fire and watch a DVD. Games of Thrones fans would have a field day seeing the real stuff.
