Almost everyone in The Tudors is young, thin and beautiful. Not only is this a little unlikely, it can also make it hard to tell them apart. Fortunately, everybody says everybody else’s name all the time. “Master Holbein,” says the king, to Holbein. “Sir Robert, you look out of sorts,” he says to Sir Robert Tavistock, whose name has already been announced by the bloke manning the door.

“You don’t even know who I am, do you?” says a woman who is having sex with Sir Francis Bryan. “Of course I do,” he says. “You’re Edward Seymour’s wife.” It might have been simpler, if less dramatically feasible, to chalk everyone’s initials on their foreheads.

It’s Christmastide 1536, and Robert Aske (”Happy Christmas, Mr Aske,” says the queen) is down from Yorkshire to explain his role in the late northern rebellion. The king appears to be in a forgiving mood, but you don’t have to know much history to suspect he’s lying. Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII is an unblinking psychopath; he doesn’t spend a lot of time playing tennis or writing Greensleeves. He glares, rants, broods and says unnecessarily hurtful things: “Your low birth, Mr Cromwell, deems you unfit to meddle in the affairs of kings.”

This double episode covered Queen Jane’s pregnancy and the search for a suitor for Lady Mary, but the main theme was hanging. There was a tremendous amount of it. The Duke of Suffolk showed a certain reluctance to carry out the king’s instructions to hang all of Yorkshire. Robert Aske’s slow-motion hanging, seen from below, was a particularly gruesome interlude. We also got a few heads on pikes, one red-hot poker up the arse and a glimpse under Sir Francis’s eye patch.

It’s almost impossible to watch television these days without accidentally learning something about Henry VIII, but The Tudors is a revved-up history lesson: light on dates and heavy on sex, glamour and lovely table settings.

You wouldn’t want to be a Tudor, though. Death would stalk you, with a red-hot poker. You’d be lucky to last two episodes. Jane Seymour, predictably, didn’t quite make it.