Wolf Hall coming soon

Wolf Hall is a upcoming British miniseries that will first broadcast on BBC Two in 2015. It is a six-part adaptation of two of Hilary Mantel's novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

On 23 August 2012, BBC Two announced several new commissions, one of which was Wolf Hall.^[5] According to The Guardian seven million pounds will be spent on the adaptation.^[6] BBC Two controller Janice Hadlow said it was "very fortunate to have the rights" to the two novels and called Wolf Hall "a great contemporary novel".

Peter Kosminsky, the director of the series, said:

This is a first for me. But it is an intensely political piece. It is about the politics of despotism, and how you function around an absolute ruler. I have a sense that Hilary Mantel wanted that immediacy. ... When I saw Peter Straughan's script, only a first draft, I couldn't believe what I was reading. It was the best draft I had ever seen. He had managed to distil 1,000 pages of the novels into six hours, using prose so sensitively. He's a theatre writer by trade.^[6]

The drama series will feature 102 characters and it was revealed that Kosminsky began casting the other parts in October 2013. Although originally set to film in Bruges, most of the filming took place at Montacute House and Barrington Court in Somerset in May and June 2014.^[6] The series will consist of six episodes and is expected to be broadcast in 2015.^[6] PBS will also broadcast the series, made in association with Masterpiece Entertainment and Playground Entertainment.^[9]

Straughan and Kosminsky working on the same series suggests a harder take on British history is what the BBC wants, rather than series like The Tudors or The White Queen.^[6]Mantel called the scripts written by Straughan a "miracle of elegant compression and I believe with such a strong team the original material can only be enhanced."