Roasted with a side order of veg ... now that’s a sticky end
Rotten luck for Mackenzie Crook. He must have thought he was set for life, playing a pair of 10,000-year-old twin druids in a hallucinogenic fantasy about ancient Britain.
‘the Romans stayed for 400 years,’ he said optimistically earlier this year, ‘and we’re only two years into the invasion. I’ve got a couple of series left in me!’
Uh-oh. Spoiler alert... the last run of Britannia (Sky Atlantic) ended badly for one of his characters, Harka — shot through the head with an arrow the size of a javelin.
But 49-year-old Mackenzie, star of the office and Detectorists, still had his main role: the high priest Veran, a skeleton wrapped in scar tissue, who walks like a zombie thunderbirds puppet and gobbles more narcotics for breakfast than Keith Richards could swallow in a whole global tour.
His old enemy, Roman general Aulus (David Morrissey), didn’t seem thrilled to see him. A few obscene insults were exchanged — that’s probably the only part of this bug-eyed and gibbering show that is historically accurate, because the Romans did enjoy dirty jokes.
But with the reappearance of teenage heroine Cait (eleanor Worthington-Cox), Veran’s immortal luck took a bit of a dip.
He might turn out to be fine, of course. You don’t get to be 10,000 years old without surviving the occasional fatal injury.
It was a reminder, though, that Jez Butterworth’s creation obeys no known laws of storytelling. everybody betrays everybody else. Major characters are slaughtered on a whim.
Aulus’s most trusted bodyguard inexplicably decided to plot against him. ten minutes later, he was not just dead but roasted on a bed of coals with a side order of vegetables by Aulus’s cannibal wife, Ratched.
Ratched (Sophie okonedo) is a newcomer, who threw herself into the loony spirit by crawling all over her husband’s tent, sniffing like a spaniel on a scent.
In flashbacks, we were treated to a vivid CGI vision of Rome, and learned that Aulus had a young son whom he adored. Adored, and then betrayed, sacrificed and ate.
Britannia has always aspired to being the most violent show on tV. though it avoids the misogyny and gratuitous sex of Game of thrones, it is extraordinarily bloody. A massacre in a Roman camp two years ago left a death toll on a thermonuclear scale.
the only way to enjoy Britannia is as demented nonsense, and that’s what Morrissey does.
Veering from false bonhomie to mystical fits to foaming furies, he overacts hysterically during his quieter moments and just explodes the rest of the time, like an attention-seeking volcano. the only way to make it more bizarre would be to have Alexander Armstrong doing a voiceover.
the Pointless host narrated a compendium of viral video clips, Unbelievable Moments, Caught On Camera (ItV), and seemed honestly appalled by everything he saw.
‘Roads can be dangerous and unpredictable places,’ he warned, before showing us dashcam footage of a lorry slewing out of control in Russia. In case we missed the moment when it jack-knifed, he replayed it about eight times.
Alexander also had a dire warning of what might await us if we went canoeing. ‘Water can be incredibly dangerous,’ he declared. It was for holidaymakers Liz and Julie in California, though the really dangerous thing wasn’t the water but the whale that tried to eat their canoe.
If you missed the show, just go to Youtube and click on a random selection of videos. Don’t forget to keep saying, ‘this can be incredibly dangerous.’