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Television

The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones

Plus: the start of the second series of Channel 4’s Fargo suggests this might be one of the highlights of the TV year

24 October 2015

9:00 AM

24 October 2015

9:00 AM

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’.

The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game of Thrones — and, as various thesps in furs and long beards began to attack each other with swords, it wasn’t hard to see why.

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