When will we be free of television’s Egyptian curse?
The pandemic has decimated the TV schedules, scattering soap operas, Olympic Games and major dramas to the four winds. And yet, Channel 4 and Channel 5 keep unearthing endless archaeology documentaries about ancient Egypt. By the autumn, the BBC and ITV will be rotating repeats of Dad’s Army and Vera, but Channel 4 and Channel 5 will be thrilling us with Tutankhamun: Was He British? and The Valley of the Kings: Maybe We Missed a Bit. What is it that our fourth and fifth TV channels are hoping to find out there in the desert? Viewers, presumably.
The Hunt for Cleopatra’s Tomb (Channel 5) wasn’t hoping to find Cleopatra’s tomb, but rather clues to where, maybe, she might, perhaps, have been laid to rest. For decades, Egyptologists have assumed that the pharaoh would have been interred in her home city of Alexandria, but the great fire of the Library of Alexandria and the tsunami of AD365 obliterated the evidence. Dr Kathleen Martinez, however, had a different idea, and has been excavating a temple complex outside Alexandria, Taposiris Magna, for the past 14 years.
Televised archaeology is, by its very nature, hardly pulse-racing. However, this documentary, fronted by
Dr Glenn Godenho of the University of Liverpool, had a rare money-shot – it captured the moment Martinez opened a catacomb at Taposiris Magna that had not seen the light of day in more than 2,000 years. “You have to come down and see this wonder,” said Martinez to Godenho, tipping her hat to Howard Carter. Inside lay a pair of desiccated figures, which stretched the definition of wonder a little, though it confirmed there were significant people buried on the site, and therefore…
Well, therefore not much, at this moment. There was a lighthouse on the site which Martinez believed “could” be a funerary temple, “although she can’t be sure”, and, while “other Egyptologists have their doubts”, Martinez thinks Cleopatra “may” have visited. Talking heads were wheeled out to remind us that Cleopatra was an educated leader, not Elizabeth Taylor in a plunging neckline, and we were treated to several lingering shows of Cleo’s computerised, smirking head floating over the desert, though it wasn’t entirely obvious why.
Martinez is clearly doing important work out there, but maybe the cameras should leave her and her colleagues alone for a bit.
‘Why can’t we be those people again?” Every parent with a couple of young children can sympathise with that sentiment. The man or woman you fell in love with, who you drank and smoked and laughed with, who you stayed out all night with, is now an exhausted, dull, stay-at-home zombie barely capable of full sentences, let alone anything more scintillating. What keeps most couples together is the thought that this phase is temporary. For Emily and Simon, however, with a baby daughter with severe learning difficulties which could require her to have 24-hour care, it feels like a life sentence.
It’s not a life sentence, of course, and that’s the beauty of There She Goes (BBC Two), Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford’s semi-autobiographical comedy drama. Cutting between 2008 and 2017, it shows how Emily and Simon (Jessica Hynes and David Tennant) went from the depths of despair to a happy, functioning family, with the irrepressible Rosie (Miley Locke) a whirling dervish of joyful chaos at the heart of it. In last night’s episode, we saw the modern-day Rosie demand Christmas Day in February, and we saw her parents, in 2008, on the verge of walking away from each other. “You’re so cold,” Simon spat at Emily, dragging up a humiliating story from, of all things, their first date, something that surely was previously a cast-iron happy memory. Pye, who based Simon on himself, must be exorcising some demons here.
The modern-day scenes drift into the standard family sitcom fare, but, having been so heavily flavoured by the harrowing flashbacks, the slightly clichéd knockabout fun feels a blessed relief. Simon makes dad jokes now, not unforgivable put-downs. Hynes’s performance, already Bafta-winning, is a marvel. In 2017, Emily looks like a frazzled parent. In 2008 she looks drained of all life, somehow looking 10 years older, not younger. All care and love and worry has been emptied out onto Rosie, leaving nothing for herself, nothing for Simon. But then, there they are in 2017, enjoying “Christmas Day”, drinking, laughing, playing a game. Those people again.
The Hunt for Cleopatra’s Tomb ★★ There She Goes ★★★★