Fasten your seat-belts, it’s The Tudors again.Inevitably the second series of TV3’s (Ireland) take on the story of Henry VIII and his wives begins, by reminding us who everyone is – handy since so many of the key characters look very alike.
Henry’s pout makes him easiest to spot, even if he never had one.
Thomas More is inseparable from his gold collar of state, despite refusing to wear it in real life except when sitting for his portrait.
Katherine of Aragon, the Wronged Wife, is solemn and suffering, the Pope dresses in scarlet, and the clergy look, well, like clergy.
What’s extraordinary, though, is that almost everyone has the elixir of youth.
In 1532, which is when we start this week, Henry should be 41, More 54, and Henry’s best chum, Charles Brandon, 48 – but they all look about 28.
Only Anne Boleyn’s father, the scheming Earl of Wiltshire, looks his true age.
The script combines deeply researched, accurate details, such as Katherine mending Henry’s shirts, Cardinal Campeggio’s gout and More’s refusal in the opening scene to accept a letter from the Emperor Charles V, with glaring historical hogwash.
Just consider the scene in which a lowly musician, Mark Smeaton, instructs a smouldering Anne Boleyn in the art of violin-playing. Smeaton, in reality, was a keyboard-player, a virginalist.
The Tudors had lutes and viols, but not violins, and they didn’t care for Irish tunes. And yet, such anachronisms mislead us less than ignoring the fact that Anne, for all her sharp words to Henry, always behaved royally in the presence of social inferiors: the smooching between her and Mark gives us a thumping clue that she’s a seducer.
It already looks as if, in another episode, Anne might stray, enabling Henry to execute her and marry Jane Seymour, even though he really shabbily discarded and framed her.
Chronology, throughout, is swept aside.
This week’s happenings, supposedly from a single year, are an amalgam of four years’ events.
Thus Parliament confirms Henry’s title of Supreme Head of the English Church even before he decides to break with the Pope, Thomas More stays on as Lord Chancellor until long after he’s actually resigned, and Brandon marries his fourth bride – her real name is Catherine Willoughby, and she was 14 not 17 – before his wife, Henry’s sister, Mary, is dead.
Quite why the Pope has to be the wrong one is a mystery, unless it’s because this one, Paul III, will excommunicate Henry later. It scarcely matters, because Peter O’Toole gives such a juicy performance as a devious pontiff that it’s churlish to quibble.
Where dialogue is concerned, characters juxtapose language that diligent researchers have trawled out of genuine Tudor documents with current slang.
Thomas More comforts Katherine by telling her that she is the “Queen of Hearts”; and, in an ironic twist, the Other Woman, Anne, complains that “You can’t have three people in a marriage!” Now where have we heard that before?
Still, The Tudors conveys brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of Henry’s court: it’s a place where back-watching is second-nature, plotting endemic.
The most visceral scene – the execution by boiling alive of Richard Roose, Bishop Fisher’s cook, here bribed to poison the outspoken bishop – did indeed happen, more or less in the way it’s gruesomely portrayed, even though Roose wasn’t in the pay of the Boleyns and different, less important people were poisoned.
And if the characters tend to be one-dimensional, Henry did become a monster, dominating his court, Stalin-like. While he would never have demeaned himself by beating up a messenger, as he does in a final scene, his rages could be terrifyingly unpredictable.
Katherine’s courage, her human dignity as she fights to save her marriage and her daughter’s claim to the throne, is movingly and authentically shown.
Anne and Thomas Cromwell, here depicted as an artful Machiavellian, could both be shocked by Henry’s sheer vindictiveness.
These are deft dramatic touches, and a valid point of view.
If you value true and accurate history, this isn’t for you.
But then, it isn’t meant to be.
It’s a rumbustious romp through the life and times of “Horrible Henry and the Terrible Tudors”, a fiction loosely based on fact, and when the facts get in the way, they’re ditched.
If you can accept that, then watch and enjoy, for that’s what the real-life characters would have done.
Thomas More, who always loved a comic turn, will be spinning in his grave if he’s watching this new series.
But at least he’ll be smiling.
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