Is it a Beard? Is it a plane? No, it’s super-prof Mary in a helicopter
Professor Mary Beard isn’t given to strong language in public, but as the helicopter rotors howled she couldn’t contain herself. ‘ Blimey!’ she exclaimed. ‘off we go — never done this before.’
And swooping over the Gaulish countryside, she battled to suppress the quaver in her voice while she explained how Caesar’s armies had wreaked genocide around 50BC.
The chopper was just one of the prof’s daring modes of transport in Ultimate Rome: Empire Without
Limits (BBC2). Pedalling furiously like an undergrad late for a lecture, she whizzed past the Colosseum on a bicycle. Then she adopted rome’s best- loved vehicle, the Mini — though unlike Michael Caine in The Italian Job, she wasn’t sporting a Union Jack on the roof.
In fact, there was no roof. Mary was driving a convertible with the top down. It’s official: she intends to have as much fun as possible in this show.
That transforms her TV tutorials into sheer entertainment. Her sense of happy enjoyment carries the show along, so that we hear all the references to Carthage and Pompey the Great and Vercingetorix without the uncomfortable feeling of being 11 years old again and stuck in a classroom.
she also has a knack for drawing out parallels between ancient history and current headlines. That reference to genocide in Gaul was not glib: she calculated that roman troops slew up to a million Celts across what today is france, a death toll to match the slaughter in rwanda during the Nineties.
rome was like a modern- day superpower, she suggested, unable to ignore pleas from smaller countries to intervene in their wars. And the roman general Pompey’s campaign to wipe out pirates in the Mediterranean was akin to the War on Terror. These parallels helped us to understand what had really been going on, instead of seeing history as a set of facts to be memorised.
The prof wasn’t hanging around — Hadrian’s wall one minute, tumbledown Grecian ruins in Corinth the next, the sands of North Africa a moment later. But she has an eye for the telling detail, which gives meaning to the grand sweep.
examining battering rams from the prows of warships, she pointed out the Carthaginians carved prayers into theirs . . . while the romans inscribed a quality control mark. That’s how empires get built — not with high hopes, but with red tape.
one small oddity did seem to escape her eagle gaze, though. Crouching in a yellow hard-hat beside the tomb of an early roman warlord, scipio Barbatus, she pointed out his surname meant ‘beardy’.
And who else do we know with that name? Professor Mary Barbatus, that’s who.
students of roman history might feel a guilty frisson over
(ITV2), a sitcom set in the days of Caesar, which makes Up Pompeii look like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. screened on Mondays with a repeat on Wednesdays, it’s crude, puerile, repetitive and cheap. It is also indecently funny.
The characters and stories are modern: two lads, Marcus and stylax (Tom rosenthal and Joel fry), work in an office, skiving off whenever they can to chat up girls. They live in squalor, and they’ve never got enough left over after a friday night to pay the rent.
What lifts Plebs out of the humdrum is its setting. Instead of office parties, the staff throw orgies. The police carry swords, and petty criminals are executed in inventive ways. so far this series, the boys have managed to extinguish the sacred flame of the Vestal Virgins, and been thrown to the lions in the arena.
It’s a comedy you can watch just to savour an individual performance . . . and there are two of them.
Doon Mackichan also stars as the rapacious manager who enjoys humiliating her staff, a sadist with wandering hands.
And ryan sampson is the boys’ house-slave, Grumio, whose speciality is a dead-eyed stare. This is the same actor who minced around like oscar Wilde in Up The Women last year, but in Plebs he’s almost motionless, as though his brain has been replaced with suet pudding.
I’ve no idea what Professor Mary Barbatus makes of it, but Plebs makes me laugh disgracefully.