Why the Beeb’s Atlantis will leave everyone drowning in confusion
HARD l uck i f you tuned in to the new series of Atlantis (BBC1) and couldn’t remember what was going on from last year. The heroes of Greek myth were intent on leaving us in the dark, literally.
The f i rst f ew scenes were a bewildering maze of dungeons and palace passageways by night, lit only by flickering candles.
We could have seen what was going on a lot better if someone had set light to the wooden dialogue. It would have burned a treat.
Aiysha Hart as Ariadne had lines that were dry as tinder: ‘These are dark times and I will need your counsel . . . Now tell me, what news from Thera?’ Don’t try saying that too close to a naked flame.
Some returning shows treat viewers to a quick retrospective, a summary of what has gone before. ‘Earlier!’ intones a voice that makes the speakers buzz, and a flurry of images whirl by to remind us who are the good guys and which are the bad eggs.
Current TV theory says none of that is necessary, since the important consumers are not the poor mugs who pay their licence fees but the big spenders who will shell out later for a box set. When you’re binge-watching 13 episodes in an allnight splurge, recaps are worse than superfluous: they slow you down.
But what Atlantis contrived to do was even more annoying: we got a summary of everything that lies ahead, twice. First the musclebound Jason (Jack Donnelly) took a swig from a potion offered by an oracle. The cup was smoking, which is always a suspicious sign in a beverage, and he promptly had visions of the next three episodes.
Half an hour later, Jason was bleeding to death from an arrow wound and buried by a landslide. You’d call that a cliffhanger, except the cliff had fallen on him.
Then, to entice us to watch next week, we got flashes of all the best bits to come. Jason, hale and hearty, featured in all of them. In fact, so much was revealed that you could probably skip straight to the finale, three months away.
Atlantis is a brave attempt to emulate the grand spectacle of Game Of Thrones on a fraction of the budget. But instead of multiple plotlines, it focuses all the time on Jason and his two mates, Hercules and Pythagoras, who are a sort of Homeric anti-terrorist unit.
Sarah Parish, as the warrior queen Pasiphae, and Mark Addy as Hercules are both excellent. When they weren’t on screen, though, it was mainly a succession of throatcuttings and impalings, knife-fights and beheadings: Atlantis has become more violent, and is probably no longer suitable for under-tens.
But something, unlike Game Of Thrones, that it does avoid is naked breasts . . . unless you count the moment when tubby Hercules lost his shirt playing dice.
Over at the European Space Agency’s mission control HQ, one comet-chasing scientist is desperately wishing he’d lost his, too.
Dr Matt Taylor appeared on camera l ast week wearing a Hawaiian shirt emblazoned with bikini- clad Bond girls, and drew down the wrath of the internet. The wretch e d man wa s condemned as a sexist, a chauvinist and a disgrace to science.
What should have been the pinnacle of his career was ruined by the hysterical feminist reaction to a silly shirt — he was forced into a tearful apology on air.
The bully mob on Twitter accused him of making the lab a hostile place for young women. Frankly, any girl who is deterred from science because she’s afraid of the shirts she might encounter should never have been allowed near a Bunsen burner in the first place.
On Rosetta: A Sky At Night Special (BBC4) Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock did an excited — if sometimes confused — job of rounding up the news of the space probe Philae, which landed on a speeding comet far out in the solar system.
But the Sky At Night, so long the domain of the irascible, wildeyed Sir Patrick Moore, lacks a voice to tell all the shrill Thought Police on Twitter to stuff their politically correct clamouring.
What i s missing, i n other words, is old Patrick. It’s not rocket science.