KEY POINTS:
Jonathan Rhys Meyers, said a huffy bloke looking at a raunchy promo for The Tudors, "looks about as much like Henry VIII as I do".
Actually Myers, in this gorgeously painted version of life at the Tudor court (last night, TV One; then Tuesdays, 9.30pm) looks exactly right
as Henry.
That is if you want your Henry to look like a vain, randy bovver boy who goes in for jousting and that other sort of jousting (don't blame me; this is a very rude depiction of life at the court), hunting and thrashing nobles on an indoor tennis court.
He seems bored out of his pretty tree. He is, wisely, kept distant from political intrigue. So he has to have something to do with his time. This involves, sigh, jousting.
He wants a grand battle. So did I, if just as a relief from all that bodice-ripping, on the one hand; and all that brooding and plotting behind the king's back, on the other.
The Tudors opens with those murdering French bastards. We knew this because there was a great shout: "French bastards! Bastards!" They had stabbed the English king's uncle. "In cold blood!"
There is blood, cold, presumably, on mosaic marble floors. Meanwhile the king is hard at it. "How is your husband?" he murmurs to one of his bits on the side. "He says he'll put me in a nunnery," said the bit.
"Oh, that would be a terrible waste," said the king, smirking.
He's a bit thick, or so puffed up in appreciation of his status and good looks, that thinking is not what he is best at doing. He meets his ambassador to France to gain some inside info on the French king.
"What about his legs?" he asks Thomas Boleyn, whose daughters are being groomed to one day provide much pleasure to their king. "Are his calves strong, like mine?" Mr Ambassador is ambassadorial: "Your majesty, no one has calves like yours."
No, and almost certainly Henry VIII didn't have such calves either. This is not history, it's the Tudor court as a giant whorehouse, kept exclusively for one man.
Henry? They could have called him Hef. Although Meyers has better calves etc.
There are some distractions. Oh, look, there's Sam Neill (as a laconically scheming Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) on a little donkey. He looked as though he was having a hard time keeping a straight face too.
Anne Boleyn wore a necklace with pearls and the letter B, a very Sex and the City accessory. Henry had already had her sister, whom he chatted up with the line: "You've been at the French court for two years. What graces have you learned?"
This was not left to the imagination, not much was - except history.
