The Winter King gives us a King Arthur for our times – dark, gloomy and violent

Every age reinvents Arthur in its own image and ITV’s adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s full-blooded warrior has little truck with courtly love and the Holy Grail, finds Ed Power

Iain De Caestecker as Arthur and Nathaniel Martello-White as Merlin in ITV’s gory drama (ITV)

The Winter King is coming. ITV’s big end-of-year drama is a dank, doomy take on the legend of King Arthur, adapted from Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord novels. The 10-part series stars Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Iain De Caestecker as the illegitimate warrior son of Eddie Marsan’s Uther Pendragon – a sweary bruiser trying to unite Britain’s tribes against the invading Saxons and also not a great dad. Packed with gore-strewn battlefields and sweary anti-heroes, it makes Game of Thrones look like CBeebies Storytime.

Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles are deliciously gritty. Yet The Winter King has its distinct sense of onrushing calamity and panic – one that feels plugged into contemporary social and political anxieties. It would be a stretch to say cost of living woes or climate change angst have directly inspired De Caestecker’s modern take on an ancient character. Even so, someone watching 20 years hence will immediately recognise this Arthur as the product of uncertain times.

But then, that’s always been true of King Arthur. Every new telling of his story is a product of its era. From the 12th-century writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth through the 15th-century tales of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to contemporary movies such as John Boorman’s Excalibur (the prog rock of Arthurian tales), Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur (the Marvel movie of Arthurian tales)… up to The Winter King, Britain’s ancient regent is forever speaking to the present day. Even Monty Python and the Holy Grail was suffused with Seventies gloom.