Henry VIII

The serial was announced in 2001, with Alan Bleasdale as the writer. Granada Television's controller of drama Andy Harries could secure only £750,000 for each hour of Henry VIII from ITV, so had to attract co-production funding from other companies. He approached the American CBS network for the money. CBS executives wanted to replace Helena Bonham Carter with Sarah Michelle Gellar and dub all of the actors' voices with American accents. Harries declined CBS's funding and got the money from Powercorp, WGBH Boston and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation instead. The final budget was £5.2 million. Bleasdale had originally scripted an opening scene that featured Henry confronting the devil in hell. ITV's director of drama commissioning Nick Elliott told Harries, "I'm not having the devil on ITV. You'd better ring him and tell him I'm not paying £5 million to have the devil on ITV." Bleasdale then quit the project. He was replaced by Peter Morgan, who had written the Granada drama The Jury.