Trunk and disorderly
ROOTING through a junk shop years ago, I found a delightful old pamphlet. “Did our Lord really visit Cornwall?” was the title, underneath it the line “as legends have it in those parts”. Its author, an Edwardian clergyman, was unable to do much beyond listing all those legends. As the good reverend said in his introduction though, some bloke visiting some place almost 2,000 years ago, doesn’t leave much trace.
You’d have thought that 40,000 soldiers, 9,000 cavalry and 37 elephants might be easier to spot. But as we learned from HANNIBAL’S ELEPHANT ARMY: THE NEW EVIDENCE (Sunday, C4) the transalpine route taken by the Carthaginian general has lain buried for 22 centuries under snow, rubble and academic bickering. Cooperation, thankfully, was the order of the day in this interesting documentary and an army of experts almost as large as Hannibal’s own came together to provide their four penn’orth.
We had a geologist, a specialist in the works of the Roman historian Polybius, an authority on ancient elephants, a microbiologist specialising in dung, an elephant behaviourist, a learned vet, a mountain guide and an Alpine geographer.
Had they all been gathered in the same place at the same time, we’d have had a splendid opportunity to see whether Hannibal could have driven a massive number of souls over a treacherous mountain pass.
As it was, this platoon of PhDs had one bit of “new evidence” and not a great deal else. Even the new bit wasn’t that new because geologist Professor Bill Mahaney discovered it in 2016.
In any case, he was returning to a site first mentioned in the 1950s as a possible route for Hannibal’s surprise attack on Rome.
He did find, with more advanced kit than they had in the Fifties, evidence of a lot of churned-up soil, from an era roughly fitting Hannibal’s 218 BC campaign. Examining the same layers, the dung expert also found concentrations of the bacteria prevalent in horse manure – I guess 9,000 nags leave more manure than 37 elephants but I’m not certain.
Ultimately though the precise path Hannibal and his mobile, trumpeting, manure-dropping battle machine took was of less interest than the things that were not answered. Why cross the Alps with elephants in winter? Why not choose another route?
STRIKE: CAREER OF EVIL (Sunday, BBC1) is a very different product to the first TV outing of Robert Galbraith’s (aka JK Rowling’s) grown-up detective.
Gone are the Soho stairways and A-listers tumbling from exclusive balconies. In their place, child rape, dismembered legs, Corby and Barrow-in-Furness. It is a good pot boiler with damaged sleuth Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) being framed for the murder of a teenage girl and seeking answers among a fistful of grudge-bearing nasties from his past.
Along the route he’s growing closer to sidekick Robin (Holliday Grainger) who seems finally to have cut loose the appalling boyfriend. It feels like it’s missing something – an originality it promised and has never properly delivered.
There’s nothing unique about the places Strike’s going to, nothing that rare about a case that involves dismembered limbs in the post and paedophilia. It’s precisely as grim as a lot of other crime shows. Less making a career of evil, more making evil into a high street chain.