A Greek Odyssey With Bettany Hughes

Channel 5, 9pm

You can leave other historians to labour their academic credentials: Bettany Hughes prefers to wear her learning lightly. Her enthusiasm is seductively entertaining, successfully making tales of the distant past as immediately accessible as a primetime drama.

In this six-part series, Hughes (right) adds a welcome dose of travelogue to the mix as she retraces the ten-year journey made by Odysseus (at least according to Homer) as he returned to his home of Ithaca after victory in the Trojan War.

In this opener, Hughes visits Lesbos – site of a magnificent ancient theatre – and then, in Samos, she tells of the island's most famous son, Pythagoras. A philosopher and mathematician, he also invented a cup that ingeniously stopped workers from drinking too much wine. ★★★★★