Prof David Cesarani: It’s not a historical documentary. But the producers have stressed just how much research they did, how accurate it is, how authentic it is, and as soon as critics point out something that isn't accurate or authentic, they say, “Oh yes, this is just a drama, you have to introduce a bit of poetic license because you can’t tell every aspect of the past. This is not a lecture.” (I think this series has let down in some ways by the playing of fast and loose with the past, because in many aspects it’s extremely accurate, it does capture the mood of the time and it is astonishingly representative of German points of view.)
Sir Richard Evans: What strikes me about television’s historical drama is that there is an awful lot of it and for us historians it’s great of course, cos it makes people into the past, it tells something about the past. And TV drama is fantastic when it comes to portraying the background. Every car you see is going to be of the right date, every tank the right model, every uniform has their buttons done up in the right place, and so on. But when it comes to portraying people, then it’s a very different matter, because in a sense, you can’t portray the people of the past, even the relatively recent past like this accurately. You can’t have Henry VIII in the drama spouting Tudor English to start with. We wouldn’t even understand them if they really thought like people in those days. What worries me is that viewers might not grasp that fact.
