Ridley Scott’s new film confronts viewers with an unfamiliar paradox: it is both wildly unreliable and resolutely demystifying, simultaneously implausible and deliberately underwhelming. The costumes are exquisite, the sets magnificent, the cavalry charges thunderous. The execution of Marie-Antoinette (Catherine Walker) is spectacular. It is also set in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with Napoleon in the audience, which he wasn’t.
The comments from Huw Merriman also singled out the BBC s reporting on universal credit, came a day after culture secretary Lucy Frazer said that the broadcaster had on occasion been biased.