I am so tardy on this having just gotten the DVD of the Henry VIII 2-part show that I think originally ran on the BBC? It's the one starring Ray Winstone as Henry & Helena Bonham Carter as Anne Boleyn. I was rather creeped out at first because of how much Ray Winstone (whose work I'm not at all familiar with this side of the pond) looks like the recently deceased Aussie actor, Heath Ledger (only aged more & broader of stature, of course). Now THERE was a guy who could've done justice to Henry (Heath Ledger) because he was such a chameleon (loved A Knight's Tale, RIP 
).
At any rate, since I'm so behind (I think this is 3 years old or so?), I'm hoping lots of the UK peeps have seen it & can give opinions. I recall there was much made of Winstone's "cockney accent" when this 1st came out, & it was a little jarring at 1st because of course one thinks of H8 as being all chi-chi upper class cultured & not speaking like that. But it actually began to suit after a while, as Henry was being portrayed as this tough, brutal, almost "gangster" sort of king, like a Mafia don doing whatever he pleased. When Buckingham was executed I was ROFL as Henry was watching from a window having a snack like this was high entertainment & popcorn at the movies.
Opened with H7 on the deathbed ROFL looking nothing like him & telling a young teenaged Henry (not Winstone) that the most important thing about a king was to perpetuate the dynasty. They could've easily called this The Six Wives Club or something, as it went the TTOS route of immediately jumping to The King's Great Matter with a brief & bloody execution of Buckingham & a nod to the Pilgrimage of Grace in the 2nd disc, but the rest was all H8's love life.
Just once I'd like to see more details the early years of the reign. Not only for the contrast of the virile, youthful king at play, the repeated disappointments in childbed C of A & H8 went through, but all the backstairs intrigue with Ferdinand, Maximilian, & Louis, resulting in H8's jaunt to France to reclaim the Plantaganet empire while at home C of A & Surrey (AKA Norfolk) were kicking Scots behind, much to put H8's nose out of joint that his wife was more successful a "warrior" than he'd become.
Anyway, no Field of Cloth of Gold in this one, & it opened with Bessie Blount giving birth to Fitzroy (having given birth myself, I fail to comprehend why childbirth is always portrayed on film with the women screaming their fool heads off as who's got the breath for that? 
). Mary was rather age-accelerated but I was pleased to see C of A with auburn hair for a change 
Also thought HBC made a decent Anne Boleyn, though with the time constraints that whole period seemed rushed even though it took up the whole 1st disc. Cromwell was a stringy-haired little chinless a la Jane Seymour weasel ROFL instead of a portly guy as his portrait looks, & it took a while for me to get that was him. Interesting how Cranmer is always cast to look like Cranmer though. No More or Fisher in sight, Norfolk (who was hot in a creepy satanic sort of way ROFL) was running the joint after they hauled off Wolsey when Blackfriars went against the king. Anne basically demanded Henry choose her or Wolsey at this point; jolly good theatre as Henry then went in & played nice with Wolsey, hugging him & crying & telling him he was like a 2nd father & he loved him so, giving him false hope, then gesturing for him to be dragged off by the guards. It just seemed like something H8 would do.
It basically zipped through the courtship at a much faster pace than TTOS & also made it seem like getting The King's Great Matter settled was no big deal; they did use C of A's Blackfriars speech. Henry also turned on Anne in the blink of an eye & immediately began having affairs like crazy. When she dared to call him on it, there was an over the table rape scene resulting in the conception of Anne's last child (did TOBG writers see this?). When it was born dead, after blaming Anne for it (was anything ever Henry's fault?), he went outside, leaned upon a pillar, banged his head on a brick wall a couple times, & began sobbing like a baby.
They got Anne's execution right (one of many portrayed, but the others, like Buckingham's & Cromwell's, had them all bloodied from torture & not dressed nicely, which I don't think was done to nobility, & there was that whole casting into the dungeon thing when they were lodged respectably in Tower apartments, though they did have Cromwell's demise rather well botched as it supposedly was), except for Elizabeth being brought to visit her as she was about to walk out the door; rather doubt that happened.
Jane Seymour had a chin 
ROFL There was a goodly amount of the Pilgrimage of Grace on the 2nd disc, & didn't the guy who played Aske (Sean Bean) look nice & regal? He would make a fabulous Henry II. He looked more kingly than Henry 
Again, there was that whole cat-and-mouse aren't we the best of friends thing like was previously played out with Wolsey, ending up with Norfolk personally seeing to hanging Aske in chains above York's gates. When Jane dared protest, even though she was hugely pregnant, Henry was outraged at being told what to do by a woman & smacked her silly to the floor right into labor, then cried like a baby again when she died, wailing all over the bed.
I remember reading that the kings of France were not allowed to be in the presence of death, & therefore had to leave the deathbeds of family or friends before the person actually popped off....was there anything like this in England, anyone know? I seem to recall Henry being so taken with his heir that he never even saw Jane before she died, & putting out feelers for a new foreign alliance as she was being buried, but I wonder if other places also had the same prohibition against kings presiding at deathbeds?
Anne of Cleves was basically glossed over; there was literally a 2-second shot of her waiting anxiously for Henry on the wedding night & then another 2-second shot at his funeral. I thought women of that era didn't attend male funerals (idea from Alison Plowden, I think). Norfolk was splendid as the panderer of Catherine Howard, later trying to sell Jane Rochford down the river to paly down his own involvement (I was quite disappointed they didn't show her execution after CH's). Henry had him hauled off to rot in the Tower for years right then & there, when actually it was much later & had to do with Surrey's regency plans; cast into the proverbial dungeon 
They did use the device that Cranmer was so afraid to tell Henry about CH that he left him a letter in his chapel; more screaming & sobbing, then he ran to Catherine's chambers & held a knife to her throat, ranting & raving that she'd promised him shewould be a good & faithful wife even though, as Greens said, his little soldier offered her zed ROFL I'm pretty sure he never saw CH again after finding out. Maybe someone knows what this was supposed to be a representation of....when awaiting the cannon boom signaling CH was dead, Henry was rolling his bulk on the floor of what looked like a bunch of tombs set into the floor. Was this supposed to be Westminster Abbey, or perhaps St Peter ad Vincula? Anyway, more sobbing.
There was a great line when Henry was in pursuit of Catherine Parr, something about him wishing he could remember the time when he hadn't been surrounded by Seymours. If you think about it a sec, it really WAS those Seymours who were a plague on the House of Tudor, starting with hurling Jane in front of Henry & encouraging him to get rid of AB, consolidating their positions as uncles to the heir, intriguing to get rid of CH in an effort to knock Norfolk's power base down a few pegs, & then after Henry's demise Thomas Seymour's hasty marriage to CP & his pursuit of Elizabeth, Edward running the Protectorate until he was undermined by Northumberland....I thought that was a rather insightful bit of writing there to have Henry take note of it.
After being married to CP for about 5 min, finally the circle closes with H8 on the deathbed instead of H7, with young Edward in attendance this time, & Henry, as his father did before him, asking Edward what was the most important thing about being a king & showing by his correction of the child's answers that he'd come to understand, too late, what a royal mess he'd made of his own life & reign.
I thought this was much better than TTOS or TOBG; the costuming & interiors were fabulous, though when they switched scenes they kept showing this same tired shot of the same old castle like Henry never budged from it. Winstone was a believable (redheaded) Henry once you managed to get past the bad accent, & the writers really got his mercurial temperament down pat. He aged so subtly one was hardly aware of it; a little less hair here, a few more wrinkles & pounds there, until he became the bloated caricature of royalty that he ended up as. I just would've liked to see much more about something other than the wives, but I didn't think it was awful & seemed to be a reasonable interpretation of H8.
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