A romp through Troy, but did the Iliad have so many bare bottoms?

Let’s get the obvious complaint over with at the start: switch the flaming lights on, Auntie. I mean that literally — gives us some blazing torches and firebrands to see by, in the ancient epic Troy: Fall Of A City (BBC1).

In night-time corridors, gloomy banqueting halls, deep woods and shadowy bedchambers, viewers were left straining their eyes.

the Beeb might claim that all this low light is for the sake of realism, to convey an authentic sense of the world 3,200 years ago.

But within the first five minutes, a spectral wolf had led our hero Paris ( Louis Hunter) into an enchanted glade where the king of the gods, Zeus, demanded he choose which of three quarrelling goddesses was the most beautiful — with the prize to the fairest being an apple made of molten gold.

You don’t need Professor Mary Beard to point out that bits of this story might not be entirely faithful to historical fact. Realism isn’t relevant.

Lighting aside, this was a rumbustious romp through the legend of Helen of troy — the ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ and just as many books, movies and tV spectaculars.

the first version was composed by the blind Greek bard Homer, in his twin poems the Iliad and the Odyssey: this adaptation

SEEDY B&B OF THE WEEKEND:

On the trail of an adulterous husband in Endeavour (ITV), Morse found himself at a cheap place called the Crossroads motel. Older viewers will have chuckled at the soap reference. But what would Miss Diane say? but the most famous war in ancient history is about to start, which ought to speed things up.

Nothing was slow about Hold The Sunset (BBC1), John Cleese’s first tV sitcom for nearly 40 years.

A series of deft scenes sketched the set- up: Cleese is a curmudgeonly old Romeo, who has been carrying on with his neighbour edith ( Alison steadman) for donkey’s years.

Just as he persuades her to sell her house and use the cash to fund their dotage in sunnier climes, her middle-aged son Roger ( Jason Watkins) ruins everything — he’s left his family, ditched his job and is moving back into his childhood bedroom.

Cleese splutters and trots around like an elderly ostrich with high blood pressure.

Fans who were hoping to see a return of Basil Fawlty discovered instead that he has matured into a relative of the mad old Major Gowen, played by Ballard Berkeley. It was inevitable, really. Hold the sunset is an old-fashioned sitcom, a cross between One Foot In the Grave and Ronnie Corbett’s sorry.

It remains to be seen whether audiences still have an appetite for laboured slapstick where ageing men get into scrapes and women cluck over them.