(It would have made it easier on me if you'd used the C function names, instead of the names in the module.)

I agree.  In retrospect, it's not surprising that things in _tkinter aren't suitable, as it appears to be a shunt for calling things in Tcl.

For what it's worth, Argument Clinic is only intended for functions that use PyArg_ParseTuple or PyArg_ParseTupleOrKeywords to parse their arguments.  So something like call is and will forever be unsuitable.

(And reading _tkinter.c this has reminded me why I don't like Tcl ;-)