The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker Read Free Book Online Page A

of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, er, Lady Jane Something (?), another one called Anne (I think), one called Catherine, and another one. He was either involved in the Wars of the Roses or he wasn’t, and he reigned from 15-something to 15-something-else.
    That’s about it. History isn’t my strong point. Try me on theme tunes. Anyway, as you can see, I’m hardly qualified to point at The Tudors and chortle derisively about how inaccurate it is, which is a pity because everyone else seems to be doing it. The other day I heard someone snorting that they couldn’t take any of it seriously because they’d amalgamated two of Henry’s sisters into one single character. Well whoopee-doo! I didn’t know he had ONE sister, let alone a pair of them.
    This probably makes the whole thing easier to watch. Historians are doubtless chewing their fists with frustration every time they spot an anachronistic shoe buckle, whereas from my perspective, they could lob in a scene where Henry invents the gramophone or has a holiday in Jamaica or plays Trivial Pursuit with Lloyd George – in fact, virtually anything – and I’d take it at face value.
    Even I, however, am unconvinced by a few things. For starters, Henry appears to be using some sort of hair gel. And he looks distractingly like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange , to the point where, in my head, the whole thing has become a bizarre medieval spin-off from the motion picture.
    The similarities are legion: Henry, like Alex, is a spoilt, selfish brat who enjoys ultra-violence and plenty of the old in-out, in-out. He’s moody, prone to boredrom, and has a hair-trigger temper. And he’s surrounded by a small coterie of droogs (one of whom appears to be played by Chris Martin from Coldplay, so with any luck he’ll get his head lopped off at some point in the next few weeks). The only thing that’s missing is the spacey Moog soundtrack. Maybe next week Henry will invent the synthesiser and perform an impromptu space jam. I probably wouldn’t notice anything wrong.
    Unlike Alex, however, Henry doesn’t have a sense of humour. Ormuch charisma. In fact, he’s wholly unlikable. All he does is strop around like he owns the place (which, to be fair, he does), scowling at underlings and screwing anything that moves. In short, he’s a massive arsehole, and as such it’s impossible to care about him.
    In last night’s episode he discovered he’d fathered an illegitimate child, and was so overjoyed to have finally proven his spunk worked well enough to produce male offspring, he rode around on a horse bellowing ‘I have a son, God! I have a son!’ at the sky.
    This may or may not be historically accurate, but it definitely makes him a twat. Not a fascinating villain, or even just a flawed human being, but a twat. I’m giving him two more episodes to show some redeeming qualities. Or even just mildly interesting ones. And if he can’t manage that, he can sod off back to Tudor-land. Or wherever it was King Henry came from.
Smartarse kitchen [20 October 2007]
    Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Taste buds for one. As I write, I’m suffering from a heavy cold; in fact, I’m having to pause SHNORRFF every few moments to SHLORRRP blow my SSCCCHHHPORFFFF nose.
    I don’t know why I typed those sound effects in; sympathy probably. This stinking virus has turned my taste receptors down to a barely functioning minimum, to the point where everything I eat tastes of chewy oxygen and not much else. You could grind a dog’s head and a shoe together into a paste and spoon-feed it to me, and I’d probably think it was chicken liver pâté, provided I kept my eyes closed, and provided you plucked all the dog hair out beforehand, and provided you’d managed to find a pestle and mortar big enough to mash it all up in, and provided – look, it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m just saying I can’t taste anything. There’s no need to get carried away. What’s the