Europe's Last Warrior Kings

Another well-done documentary by the BBC on one of Britain's most decisive eras, "1066: A Year to Conquer England" is docudrama as history and entertainment. Chronicling the build-up to the landmark Battle of Hastings and the battle itself to its aftermath the film features and highlights the individuals and events as Northwestern Europe headed to a showdown that would alter European and world history forever. Good acting and presentable battle scenes bring the past alive with interviews from historians providing further information to the events. Aside from a few misguided choices and an amusing tinge of pc the documentary is a watcher from start to finish. Compelling and thrilling this is an impressive series on one of history's most important and fascinating ages.

This documentary is about the fateful year 1066 and is composed of three separate parts:

1. An historical reconstruction of the events, with actors playing the main parts in costumes 2. Dan Snow, the presenter, visiting locations where the events took place, and 3. Three historians "playing" the parts of William, Harold, and Harald and who debate their strategies in what looks like a dimly lit cellar with a large interactive map of Britain

This last bit was quite bizarre and unnecessary since the strategies of the three kings could have been explained in a different way.

All this, interspersed with the occasional intervention of a guy who wrote a book about the Normans invasion based on an ancient book found in Brussels, made the rhythm of the documentary uneven.

Finally, as mentioned by others, the fact that in the reconstruction with actors, William's right hand was an African guy added a surreal touch to the whole documentary, seasoning it with an unnecessarily large portion of "woke".

Still, most likely that in the next documentary about William the Conqueror, the man himself will be from Senegal or Sudan.

On the whole I found it an interesting look at 1066, I was a bit surprised they spoke about the battlefield as being where it is as recent theories suggest it might have actually been somewhere else , but the most irritating thing about it was the casting of a black actor as one of Williams closest confidants and later as an envoy sent to parley with Harold. I understand from other reviews that this historical figure was definitely white and the program makers must have knowingly changed his ethnicity to make the program more inclusive to black people. Some will say what is the harm of this? - firstly Its highly patronising to black people, there are plenty of factual stories about black peoples contributing to the history of Great Britain without inventing things secondly this is a history series and history should always be rooted in fact , you can't change bits because it suits your agenda no matter how well intentioned your motives, because if an obvious fact like this can be changed then what other facts are changed to fit in with the history tellers political biases - it just undermines the whole programme and turns it into fiction. One of the joys of true stories is that these things really happened, normal people really did these things, when the BBC fiddles with history like this it just ruins it.

I can,t believe this tripe has been repeated yet again, the pro norman fake history resembled a carry on farce.michael wood not dan snow would have been a more erudite pair of hands

This programme was so disappointing. A factual documentary giving all the details of the Norman Conquest has long been needed but although an attempt was made to cover the various angles it just didn't work. The idea of three historians, each 'playing' one of the three contenders for the throne (Hardrada, Godwinson and William) and arguing their cause with each other was bizarre and didn't fit in with the acted scenes that were shown alongside. On a more positive note, the programme did give very fair and unbiased accounts of all three and just didn't portray William as the 'bad guy' which is how he is normally seen.