It's a strange mixture, this Tudors malarkey. The opening episode of the fourth and supposedly final series spent an age spinning through the back story as if earnestly trying to educate us in the history of the bloodthirsty English ruling family. Then the credits rolled and everything returned to business as usual, in other words murder, lust, sadism, gluttony, treachery and avarice.
It makes for a televisual mixture bursting with calories and MSG, especially when combined with the opulent camerawork and Kerrygold Country Irish locations. It's a formula which has plainly rubbed off on other steroid-enhanced pseudo-historical potboilers like Spartacus: Blood and Sand and The Pillars of the Earth.
Still, history has always been at least as much to do with current perceptions of the past as with those slippery little devils known as "facts", so treating it like an animated copy of Grazia with added murder and soft porn doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Obviously we're in for lots of fun with Henry VIII's new queen, Katherine Howard, played by Tamzin Merchant like a nymphomaniac teenage Sloane. Surrounded by a bevy of giggling ladies-in-waiting who stand around tittering excitedly as though about to go backstage with JLS, she's royalty for the X Factor generation.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is still playing the king as unfeasibly slender and virile, rather then as Demis Roussos sewn into a set of velour curtains, but even his gargantuan appetites are struggling to keep abreast, if you will, of his insatiable young queen. One moment she's teasing him with pornographic shadow-puppets miming oral sex, the next she's lounging naked on a four-poster bed bedecked with red rose petals, in a knowing nod to Mena Suvari's famous scene from American Beauty (Tamzin Merchant gives it a whirl, pictured below).
But never mind the king, Katherine is also driving some of his entourage nuts, especially Thomas Culpepper (Torrance Coombs), who describes himself as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.Having drooled fruitlessly at Her Majesty from afar, his condition exacerbated by the boiling hot summer they were having in 1540, he rode out with a bunch of mates and slaked his lust by raping the wife of the local park keeper. When the park keeper came to remonstrate, Thomas ran him through with his sword. Odd, because he originally seemed a nice young man. This may cause trouble, since the king has already served notice that he won't tolerate yobbish behaviour by publicly hanging Ms Howard's cousin at Tyburn.
Historically, little of any significance seems to be going on. There were a few references to a bit of militaristic argy-bargy across the Channel, though to Henry's frustration this was settled by the French in a shock outbreak of reasonableness.
Henry also made a peremptory decision to free 500 prisoners who had been jailed for heresy, to the palpable alarm of his retinue, but he'd made up his mind so that was that. It seemed to have something to do with the French king's proposal that his son Henri should marry Henry's daughter Mary, but the historico-political thrust remained opaque.
Of far more significance is the arrival at Court of the queen's friend Joan Bulmer (Catherine Steadman), who is teasing Katherine by reminding her of her past behaviour with boys, details of which the queen would prefer not to reach the king. And not just boys either, judging by the way Joan climbed into Katherine's bed and started stroking her. I don't remember any of this sort of thing in A Man for All Seasons.
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