Ray Winstone as Henry VIII and Helena Bonham-Carter as one of his wives.
What happens when Henry VIII starts going to the gym and eating his five fruit and veg a day? Television audiences are drawn in - or so US programme-makers hope. New US show The Tudors is a 10-part series expected to adopt the fast pace and sharp editing techniques of shows such as Lost, The Sopranos and 24. Johnathan Rhys-Meyers will play the king - not surprisingly, then, the series will focus on the lesser-dramatised early years of Henry's almost 40-year reign of England. The series is currently being filmed in Ireland, and its first two episodes will be directed by British TV director Charles McDougall (Desperate Housewives, Queer as Folk). Showtime, its makers, promise to bypass costume drama cliches in favour of a more scandalous take on Tudor England.
It all sounds a long way from the gout-ridden, pork chop-waving Henry VIII of popular imagination, still coloured by Hans Holbein's 1657 portrait, even recognised as iconic by Shakespeare. Henry has loomed large in the cinema age too. Charles Laughton was the first British actor to win the Best Actor Oscar when he took the role in the 1933 blockbuster The Private Life of Henry VIII, while Robert Shaw received an Oscar nomination for his interpretation in A Man Of All Seasons. More recently, Ray Winstone had a go at impersonating the monarch in 2003's ITV drama Henry VIII.
So, until now, not exactly pin-up material: indeed, at the time of his death, Henry had a four-and-a-half foot waistline. Will The Tudors shed any new light on history, or just ruthlessly apply the airbrush? And furthermore, who's your favourite Henry?
