Have we had it with ruff stuff?

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BBC

Damian Lewis stars as Henry VIII in the BBC's Wolf Hall

The world has gone Wolf Hall and Tudor mad: journalists jousting to see if they could hack it with a lance; speculating about whether Henry VIII was a fat wheezing wreck at the time of events or fit as a butcher’s dog; whether a red hat with an ostrich feather belonged to him; whether the woman playing Jane Seymour in the TV series is too pretty; whether everyone had rotten teeth or not; and how to give your house that authentic Wolf Hall look. 

Sales of mead have gone through the roof. And, come on, you can only take so many jokes about codpieces. Enough already.

TV historian Suzanne Lipscomb raided the dressing-up box in BBC Four’s Hidden Killers Of The Tudor Home and waded into a river in a long frock to prove lots of Tudor people drowned because their clothes got waterlogged and because the water was cold. A special sort of Tudor cold I suppose. Utterly daft. 

Lucy Worsley and David Starkey invited us to spend a night at Hampton Court with 100 extras in full costume. 

Thrown together those two are sometimes so arch you want to insert them head first in a butt of malmsey. 

Me, I was gripped by Tudormania at primary school.

Me, I was gripped by Tudormania at primary school

My best friend and I played “Elizabeth I”, constructing ruffs out of folded paper and putting flour on our faces to achieve a Gloriana pallor.

One of us had to be Walter Raleigh or Francis Drake. Walter spread out his cloak in the flowerbed for Elizabeth to trample across while Francis was endlessly knighted with the bread knife.

The historian Leanda de Lisle, author of Tudor: The Family Story, reckons that the almost universal obsession with the Tudors results from it being about events that ring bells with us all: “of a mother’s love for her son [Henry VII’s mother], of the husband who kills his wives, of siblings who betray one another, of reckless love affairs, of rival cousins, of an old spinster whose heirs hope to hurry her to her end [Elizabeth].” 

The ups and down of everyone’s family life writ large, dressed in jewelled brocade and lit by candles.

Then Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and the follow-up (we await the third novel) brought a new dimension to our fondness for a bit of ruff when she took Thomas Cromwell, the dour blank parchment of 16th-century history and made him oddly sexy and sympathetic.

So having decided I’d had it up to here with the Tudors (and that I would tell you as much in the strongest terms) I watched the first episode of Wolf Hall this week. And – um – thought it brilliant. As you were. Tudors rule.

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