JODIE Turner-Smith made her debut as Anne Boleyn in a new Channel 5 drama series last night. Anne Boleyn explores the final months of Henry VIII’s second wife before her execution.

Another Tudor drama? Do TV producers know history didn’t just happen in 16th-century England?

Possibly not, but it’s the casting of Turner-Smith that has surprised some and raised a few hackles. The star of Queen & Slim and Nightflyers is the first black actress to play Anne.

Why did she want the part?

“Anne Boleyn is such a fascinating woman and I was really excited to play her, to get to unpack some of the things that we’re imagining internally she was going through,” Turner-Smith revealed in an interview with Variety.

She also told the magazine that she was fascinated by “how incredibly polarising” Boleyn is.

As is her own casting presumably?

Yes, there has been the usual Twitter storm and Jeremy Vine-hosted controversy. And yet, as some have pointed out, no one complained when Jesus was portrayed by such white actors as Ewan McGregor or Joaquin Phoenix.

In fact, the programme’s real focus is in retelling Anne Boleyn’s story from a feminist perspective. The drama is written by Eve Hedderwick Turner and directed by Lynsey Miller.

Faye Ward and Hannah Farrell of production company Fable Pictures said of the new drama: “We feel that history has sidelined the voice of this ambitious Queen in favour of the men who brought her down.”

Turner-Smith, meanwhile, has noted, “More than anything, I wanted to tell the human story at the centre of all of this.

“When we put characters of colour in stories where we’ve typically only seen white people,” she added, “it is not in some effort to erase white people, which is not possible.”

Anne Boleyn wasn’t a woman of colour of course, but were there any African Tudors?

There were indeed. In her book, Black Tudors, the historian Miranda Kaufman tells the stories of a number of Africans who had a role in the Tudor court, including John Blanke who was the royal trumpeter to Henry VII and Henry VIII.

Kaufman has pointed out that Africans were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England and paid wages like other Tudors. More than 300 Africans lived in Tudor England at the time.

Why are we so obsessed with the Tudors anyway?

The writer and critic Stephanie Merritt,has argued that the Tudors offer a recognisably human story. “It’s about rivalry and marriages and love, and then beyond that, in the next generation, it’s a story of sibling rivalry, which is also a family drama.”