TV review, Lucy Worsley: Elizabeth I’s Battle for God’s Music (BBC4): bringing a dry subject to magnificent life

Plus: Chris Packham: Asperger's and Me (BBC2)

Lucy Worsley with the Choir of the Chapel Royal and its director of music Carl Jackson at Hampton Court Palace (BBC)

A television history of Evensong? No, it doesn’t sound too promising on the whole, but then again, in the hands of the right sort of telly historian...

Enter, then, Lucy Worsley (who else?), whose peripatetic talents are unequalled and who succeeded magnificently in making such a dry idea come regally and musically to life. Even for a determined atheist, there is something entrancing about choral music, The richly political story of its elaborate Latin ambition – when England cleaved to Catholicism – and its plainer monophonic English-language version – with simpler but still attractive melodies under the flinty influence of Protestantism – was a fascinating one. The music made the show.

The problem for the Tudors was the Reformation: although Henry was well up for the protestant break with the Pope as a way of “taking control”, as we’d now call it, funding his royal navy and providing a convenient procedure for divorce, it usually meant that the beautiful music that most of the dynasty adored was junked along with the monasteries, corrupt priests and papal absolutism.

Having witnessed her half-siblings and Henry’s immediate successors, Edward VI and Mary, pursue hard-line ecclesiastical revolutions and counter-reformations of their own, Elizabeth, so the case was made, sought to heal the nation’s wounds when her turn arrived. Her aim was to guide the nation into an easier relationship with itself – a Protestant state, yes, but one where priests and the archbishops of any persuasion would no longer find themselves burned at the stake simply for holding a mass with the wrong kind of hymns.

Much has been made, probably too much, of the parallels between today’s traumatic and divisive Brexit and that earlier break with Europe, but there was a certain echo bouncing its way down the centuries. No one has yet suggested burning Boris Johnson or Philip Hammond alive, after all.

We heard a great deal, then, of various versions of Evensong, and from composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd given voice by fine choirs at Hampton Court Palace and in the chapels of Oxford colleges, which was certainly divine, and, in the words of Elizabeth I, “for the comforting of such that delight in music”. Like modern-day older folk jeering at pop, the puritans contended that, being in Latin and so stylised as to be rendered into pure if lovely noise, the Catholic tradition of Evensong meant that “you can’t hear the words”. For the Protestants, the whole point of church music (if there was one) was to deliver “The Word”, which meant it was to be sung in English and with one syllable per note, and with the words plastered on the walls of the church where once there had been colourful medieval paintings so the few literate worshippers could get the message. On top of that, the Rome-ish stuff was too rich, too glam, too fussy for the Protestants’ austere outlook on life. Thus did music become weaponised in the theological and political wars of the time.

We learned other stuff, too. Worsley treated us to a chilling first-hand contemporary account of the dissolution of the monastery at Evesham, when the Kings Commissioners broke in on the monks one night in 1539, and “would not suffer them to make an end” to their worship of their God at Evensong. We also discovered, thanks to some clever detective work at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, that Queen Catherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth’s stepmum, wrote some stirring lyrics for her husband Henry, including the superb line: “Stand up, Lord, and punish those naughty people, for they are rebels and traitors”. The Lady Gaga of her day.

When Worsley catalogued the acknowledged virtues of the first Elizabeth, who did in the end prevail in her guileful defence of a reformed Evensong against the militant puritans of her realm – the 16th century antecedents of the hard Brexiteers – I found myself reflecting on how many of these applied to Worsley herself: courageous (prime-time TV); wielding power in a world of men (Schama, Starkey, Dan Snow); clever (she’s a prof); human (obvs); and with a love of music and the gift of choral evensong (she plays keyboard). Part of the BBC’s “Reformation Season” (it’s 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his complaints about the Catholic Church to the door of a church in Saxony), Worsley’s polyphonic chronicle of Evensong proved itself an excellent notion – and a comfort to such that delight in television.

It was quite a way through Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me that I noticed quite a deep and revealing irony about the show, and why I wasn’t quite engaging with it as much as I wished. It was, you see, strongly marked by an obsession with Chris Packham himself, who hardly left a frame unfilled without his voice and image appearing. All the way through I was waiting for some other voice to come along and offer an alternative view, or just make a change.

They were not entirely absent; there was his partner, Charlotte, who loves him but doesn’t live with him, his stepdaughter Megan, who plainly also adores him, and some American medics, some of whom have attempted a “cure” or treatment for autism, plus some guys at Microsoft who, rightly, cherished the special talents that autistic people can bring to their work. But they didn’t get much of a word in.

Even so, I was convinced that, as Packham argued, the world should adjust to autistic people rather than try to have them forcibly changed in some way (a futile as well as a cruel exercise in too many cases). He explained, touchingly, about how his childhood obsession with a pet kestrel alerted him dimly to the fact he was “different”, and not that great at dealing with other humans – the other boys in his class “didn’t want to listen to a 15-minute monologue into the breeding habits of kestrels. They liked girls.” Likewise, what amounted to a one-hour monologue by Chris Packham about Chris Packham was a little too much for this boy to endure too.