This weekend after the Ducks lost to UCLA I was looking for something to take my mind off the Ducks loss detailed elsewhere on this blog and ended up watching the first 8 or so hours of the mini series "The First Churchills" on DVD. Some of what follows is from Wikipedia.
The First Churchills was a BBC miniseries from 1969 about the life of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough and his wife, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. It starred John Neville as the duke and Susan Hampshire as the duchess and was directed by David Giles. The series was broadcast in the United States in 1971 and was the first program of Masterpiece Theater shown on PBS
The miniseries presents the lives of John and Sarah Churchill from their meeting in 1673 until a time shortly before the first duke's death in 1722, and shows, along the way, much of the context of English politics at the same time. Like many BBC miniseries of the era, it was made on a low production budget, with sound studio sets, and generally avoided battle and crowd scenes out of inability to stage them in a convincing manner. The series is based on the the book on Marlborough's' life by his famous descendant Winston Churchill' and as such presents a very favourable portrait to Marlborough.
The closing credits theme is the second piece, a Rondeau, of Henry Purcell's incidental music, composed about 1695, to Aphra Behn's 1676 play Abdelazer, or The Moor's
The Duck of Marlborough was a great English military leader who defeated the French at Blenheim and as a reward Queen Ann gave the Churchill family the money to build Blenheim Palace which ever since has been the ancestral home of the Churchills.
The mini series covers a period in English History that is unfamiliar to most Americans. It covers a large part of the period between Queen Elizabeth I and the King George III of the American Declaration of Independence fame. With a little research I was able to follow the political maneuverings that covers a period during which six successive monarchs held the English crown. Most interesting was the political battles between the crown and the English Parliament. There were issues that are still relevant today such as how large the army should be and the desirability of foreign wars.
To read more about the mini series click on the title for a link to the IMDB page for the series.
