The propensity of actors to take on the manners and mores of people they clearly are not can lead to layer upon layer of confusion.
Take, if you will, the opening scenes of Da Vinci's Demons, the eight-episode British-American drama series that gives a fictional account of the man, sir, who surely tops everyone's top 10 list of Renaissance polymaths: the wonderful Leonardo da Vinci.
It begins with Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), Downton Abbey's gentlemanly, aristocratic and very decent Fifth Earl of Grantham, stark naked, relieving himself in a large ceramic vessel in a 15th- century Milanese mansion.
Then the fictional fellow, who served with distinction in both the Boer War and World War 1, throws back the heavy drapes on his luxury four-poster to reveal a naked lad with whom he has clearly spent an active night.
That, sir, is all very well, and it must be borne in mind the earl did have a batman on his campaigns, and there is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.
But then the man we have come to know and love as the son of the Dowager Countess treats his overnight companion in the most offhand and boorish manner.
''Out you go boy - get on with you,'' he says.
The earl clearly is not the earl.
It turns out he is, in fact, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the vile Duke of Milan, a brute whose lesser crimes included raping the wives and daughters of numerous Milanese nobles, and pulling apart the limbs of his enemies with his own hands.
But such is the way of the impersonators who lust for the tawdry glamour of stage and screen. And, of course, they do entertain us.
The show begins on Box on Thursday.
The Duke of Milan comes to an early end in episode one, when, as history tells us, he is assassinated in church.
Then we meet Leonardo, and the wild and quite topless little minx he is painting.
And yes, you are picking up a trend of quite excellent gratuitous nudity in Da Vinci's Demons.
The show is a fictional account of the life of the painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer and all-round good guy.
No doubt at some point our hero will knock out Mona Lisa and The Last Supper - if he finds time away from another sort of knocking with the lovely ladies of 15th-century Florence.
Tom Riley's version of the Renaissance humanist is too much the action man and too little the aesthete for my taste.
But the Welsh production is described as a ''historical fantasy'' and as such is entertaining and, of course, enjoyably risque.
- Charles Loughrey
