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The Tudors (2007–10) is a prime example of a relatively new type of post-national and post-historical television series that has become an established global alternative to BBC costume drama. Drawing on international rather than specifically British ideals of nationhood, it often runs counter to received history 1 while the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) gives
contemporary experience and projection of British national identity and ideas of nationhood. These stories and characters are also of course endlessly recycled in the present period in other media as well as through the heritage industry. The monarchy, its history and its present manifestation, is clearly highly marketable, whether in terms of tourism, the trade in royal memorabilia or artefacts, or images of
Hoping to cash in on that ‘good-will check’ again, Paramount tried a variant of the formula in The Pony Express , which visualised historical events while interpolating fictional characters whose actions affect the course of nationhood. The film depicts the machinations of California Senator McDougal Glen (Albert Hart) to control the Pony Express circuit. His alliance with the pro-slavery movement as
address in which he told Elizabeth II that she was ‘the person in which your people perceive their own nationhood’. As a critic of monarchy, Nairn believes the ‘enchanted glass’ it holds up to Britons is socially regressive and politically reactionary; but, he has to concede, it is a beguiling, comforting – and highly popular – national fantasy. 11 In promoting such a vision of the nation, the monarch
artificial as the border dividing Ireland, and crises of category in the realm of sex and gender are connected to other crises in the realm of nationhood. 24 Sophie Mayer has made a similar argument regarding Orlando ’s status as a queer film: Making Somerville the
nationhood made from interlocking tropes of modernity (such as the rocket range), development (‘wresting increase’ from a quiescent land) and the human assemblage of assimilation. This combination generates the film’s ‘chronotope’, its construction of the ‘intrinsic connectedness’ of space and time, as Mikhail Bakhtin notes. 65 Opening in the east-coast morning and closing in the west-coast evening at