King & Conqueror is dreary, overlong and full of jarring anachronisms

But the new BBC One historical drama King & Conqueror, from Michael Robert Johnson, co-creator of the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, pushes the limits of belief. It’s set in the 11th century in the lead-up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold, the latter ending up with an arrow in his eye, as famously recorded on the Bayeux tapestry.

When the series begins, Harold, played by James Norton, and William (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who starred as Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones) are in the heat of battle. The sequence, shot in black and white, is a monochrome frenzy of Saxons v Normans, charging horses, chain mail, arrows and clashing swords, with the two leaders hunting for each other in the pandemonium.

The story then pulls back to prior events, shot in colour: a conniving tangle of regal succession involving the country’s three leading earldoms – Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria – and the newly crowned childless king, Edward the Confessor, played by Eddie Marsan as a hostage to religious delirium. Harold of Wessex wants the crown, but so does William of Normandy. The stage is set for seething ambition, deception and disaster. And yet it all just fizzles.

One problem with King & Conqueror is it looks so grubby and dreary: eight long episodes of mud, spit and dirty straw. The CGI is basic too: an invading fleet is so lacking in menace it might as well be led by Captain Pugwash. The violence is relentless – speared abdomens, decapitated heads – and the lighting is too dark.

William’s bushy moustache locates him squarely in the 1970s – Jason King in a cloak – and Norton’s Harold is the kind of hesitant toff Hugh Grant played in the 1990s. While it’s novel to watch a period drama not set in Tudor times, even with my slack standards for historical precision the script churns with anachronisms and clunky exposition. “Pull your head out of your arse!” is one gem.

Elsewhere, Harold is told he doesn’t “have the numbers” to fight. William and Harold are even shown hopping into adjoining baths, just two hot medieval dudes enjoying a soak together. If the aim is a sexed-up Game of Thrones, the effect is more Monty Python and the Unholy Fail.

But female characters punch through, including Juliet Stevenson as Edward’s scheming mother, Lady Emma, and Clémence Poésy as William’s shrewd wife, Matilda. And when the battle is returned to at the end, it’s well staged: a brutal ballet of chaos and pathos. Ultimately, what undoes King & Conqueror is not that we know what’s going to happen – history is full of spoilers – but that it fails to make the viewer sufficiently care.

Alfie Allen (another Game of Thrones star) leads the cast in Atomic, Sky Atlantic’s new five-part drama based on William Langewiesche’s 2006 nonfiction book Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches From T the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking. Created by Gregory Burke (Rebus), Atomic follows Max (Allen), a small-time drug smuggler working a route that crosses Russia, Algeria, Lebanon and Syria. After he’s joined by a mysterious loner he calls JJ (Shazad Latif), the pair realise that their cargo is uranium. There’s enough of it to destroy a city in a nuclear blast, and the drug cartel and the CIA are watching them.

Packed with action, desert vistas and a thumping soundtrack, Atomic is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s SAS: Rogue Heroes (again, featuring Allen). Considering the carnage the duo keep improbably surviving, the series has scant interest in realism. Its main asset is the chemistry between softie wide boy Max and enigmatic, troubled JJ, who is struggling with his faith. Atomic can be absurd, but there’s gonzo energy to burn, with an original twist.

On BBC Two, The Great Art Fraud tells the story of art wunderkind Inigo Philbrick, who grew up in Connecticut and became the intern and protege of Jay Jopling of London’s White Cube gallery.

Earning upwards of £500,000 in his 20s, Philbrick was given his own London gallery, selling to the world’s wealthiest collectors and opening another in Miami. It wasn’t enough to fund his hedonistic lifestyle, however.

Along with forging documents, he started selling shares of artworks (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rudolf Stingel) multiple times to different buyers, reaping an estimated £86.7m (legal cases continue). Known as the “mini Madoff”, he was sentenced in 2022 to seven years in prison (serving two) after following his lawyer’s advice to tell the judge why he did it: “For the money, your honour.”

Before that, Philbrick, interviewed here, went on the run during lockdown, to Vanuatu in the South Pacific, where he was arrested in 2020 and hauled across airport Tarmac watched by his aghast girlfriend Victoria Baker-Harber (known for starring in the reality series Made in Chelsea). Baker-Harber tells us of how she endured “abattoir lighting” in the downmarket hotel they’d stayed at – oh, the humanity!

Initially, she looks as if she’s going to be about as steadfast as a Rizla, but she stays with Philbrick through his sentence, and they are now married with children. Astonishingly, neither of them seems to think he did much wrong. Though, over the two episodes, art collectors, FBI agents, journalists and dealers assemble to explain that he did.

The tragedy is that, before his crimes, Philbrook seemed great at his job – a talent-spotting Mr Ripley. He even says he wants to be an art dealer again. As for the £86.7m he was court-ordered to pay back, he simply says he has no money. The Great Art Fraud isn’t just about Philbrick; it’s about the multibillion-pound art world, where so many pieces get locked away to appreciate in value, and the scammers and the scammed arguably deserve each other.

With Love, Meghan

(Netflix)

The return of the Montecito-based lifestyle extravaganza from the Duchess of Sussex. Check in for royal gossip (Harry said he loved Meghan first), celebrity guests (including Chrissy Teigen) and flowers sprinkled over your food.

Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story

(BBC Two)

In-depth docuseries about the 1988 North Sea oil platform disaster that killed 167 people.

The Jury: Murder Trial

(Channel 4)

Series two of the legal experiment that dramatically reconstructs a true-life murder case, using actors, and with real people as jurors. The shock lies in how some of the jury come to decisions and how forcefully they stick to them.

Photographs by BBC/CBS Studios/Netflix