The Six Faces of Henry VIII

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Ian Hislop

Tom Alban

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BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Six Faces of Henry VIII

Can Ian Hislop create a photofit image of Henry VIII from the many created down the ages?

Can Ian Hislop create a photofit image of Henry VIII from the many created down the ages? With Alan Bennett. From 2009. 

Ian Hislop sets out to analyse six images of Henry VIII which turn out to be rather better portraits of the periods in which they were created than they are historical insights into the King himself.  

He's assisted by writers, historians, musicologists, film buffs and Alan Bennett.  

However, given that Henry's most famous portrait, by Hans Holbein, is itself an artfully drawn propaganda tool we shouldn't be all that surprised.

Henry has always been associated with numeric scale.  The eighth Henry with six wives; nothing associated with him comes in ones and twos.  And so it is with the images of our glowering, beefy, puffy-cheeked monarch.  The range is enormous.

Shakespeare produced an understandably careful dramatic portrait, but Director Alexander Korda used his 1930's film The Private Life of Henry VIII to show us Charles Laughton as the consummate spoilt brat, a glutton with the heart of a valiant schoolboy and the stomach of several kings.  

And then there are the Operatic versions supplied in the 19th century  by Saint Saens and Donnizetti respectively.  Meanwhile in Restoration History books he's a 17th century Hercules. 

So who gets closest to the real King?

Ian Hislop enjoys nothing better than debunking myth, and a lot accrued around Henry. But there's quite a lot of truth as well, not about the King but about the ages in which he was re-created.  It seems that he and his doings are a perennial story for 'our' times, whenever those times might be.   

But if the various images of Henry only serve to enlighten us about other periods long after the Tudors should we resort to the simple shock tactics of  Alan Bennett's savvy teacher in The History Boys and say 'for Henry VIII think Stalin?'  

Who better to answer that than Alan Bennett himself who joins Ian to create a sixth and, for our age, a final image of Henry VIII.

Producer: Tom Alban

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2009.

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