TV Review: 'What a dreadful noise plebs make when they're happy," observed a Roman aristocrat on his way to the forum, perhaps, to be ritually doused in bull's blood.
BBC and HBO are attempting to keep the plebs happy over the next 11 weeks with Rome, the epic new drama which has arrived to bathe our screens in "blood, iron and mud". Crucifixions, floggings, stabbings, gurgling mucus and fountains of blood battle it out with lascivious impalements, pagan gods and fat whores in a fast, violent and highly entertaining history.
Episode one saw Caesar (Ciarán Hinds) return from Gaul after eight years, with the spoils of war. The streets of Rome looked like a 52 BC car boot sale. This was not a classical city of marble temples and whispering assassins; it was a filthy, pungent place teeming with "the piss-drinking sons of circus whores".
Caesar was being hailed as the greatest thing since sliced goat's testicle, but his rival, Pompey Magnus (Kenneth Cranham) - described as having "the cunning of a sardine" - wasn't joining in the plebeian din. When the tattooed head of Pompey's unsuccessful hired assassin was returned to him by Caesar in a box, the stage was set for political mayhem.
Rome is a big, confident production, and the acting is terrific. The social elite populating the crisply cool interiors include a smarmily duplicitous Brutus (Tobias Menzies), a friskily ambitious Mark Antony (James Purefoy), and a scheming, sexy Atia (Polly Walker), all plotting and inflicting casual cruelties on the lower orders of their pagan society. It's fantastically heartless. Atia makes Lady Macbeth seem like Mother Teresa ("Bring him back safely," she says chattily to the soldiers guarding her son on his journey to Gaul, "or I'll use the eyes of your children for beads").
Sexual morality is thin on the ground too, with buckets of casually vigorous sex, all observed by exhausted slaves waving feathered fans around like human air-conditioning systems, or sleepily propping themselves awake over their macramé until it's time to change the sheets or offer their owners a post-shag milk-bath. If the debauchery and chaos get you down, expect no mercy - as Atia would say, your squeamishness is "nothing that a good leeching wouldn't cure".
BEING WOKEN FROM a 3,000-year sleep by a couple of mediocre actors in well-pressed linen with a surfeit of facial hair can't be terribly pleasant, so it's hardly surprising that Tutankhamun arranged some messy deaths for his intrepid tomb raiders (but that's the exciting bit and, believe me, we're not there yet). Episode one of Egypt, a three-part dramatisation of the colonial rape of the pharaohs' ancient resting places, focused on Howard Carter (Stuart Graham) and his pedantically exacting search for the young King Tut's elusive tomb.
Egypt is as turgid as an uphill walk in the sand dunes, and it suffers from a bad case of dramatisation sickness - a limbo state where the cast don't know whether they are in an educational video for Leaving Cert history, a Milk Tray advertisement or the offcuts from Out of Africa.
Like a torn Tintin comic strip, Egypt is populated with stock characters, including archaeologists and fortune-hunters in safari suits, their pockets full of artefacts, their handlebar moustaches twitching with delight as they violate the Valley of the Kings, throwing antiquities out of the desert like plastic buckets from an over-stuffed sandpit.
By the time the more measured Lord and Lady Caernarvon and their toothy daughter (all played by actors apparently hired for their rangy aristocratic walks rather than their talent) employ Carter - who convinces them that the discarded playground still holds one more treasure: gold, the flesh of the gods - it's all a bit late and you don't want grumpy old Carter, with his perspiration sheen, to further disturb the desert.
But this is an underwritten, overacted history, and we are obliged to trace the story with the same detailed attention as Carter gave to the grid maps he used to systematically deflower Egypt of her antiquities.
THE PILLAGE OF King Tut's tomb was cultural violence inflicted by European treasure-hunters - men out to make their fortunes and etch their names in history, who paid no heed to the curse of the pharaoh.
Not much earlier than Carter's escapades, but much closer to home, in Co Tipperary, a woman's life was taken barbarously by a handful of her male relatives, apparently motivated by their belief in witchcraft and the evil powers of the fairies. Hidden History: Fairy Wife - The Burning of Bridget Cleary told the tragic, almost unbelievable story of the burning to death, in the fireplace of her own home, of Bridget Cleary, née Boland, by her husband, father and cousins.
This chilling tale of ignorance and brutality in the Golden Vale took place in 1895, at a time, we were told by writer Angela Bourke, when society was looking forward to a technologically bright new century, when movies had begun and X-rays had already been invented.
Bourke told Bridget Cleary's harrowing story with clarity and compassion. A seamstress by trade, who wore feathers in her hat and gold earrings, she was a stylish and independent woman, described as being "ahead of her time". But more significantly, in the view of her male relatives, after seven years of marriage she remained childless.
Bourke detailed the torture and humiliation Bridget suffered, primarily at the hands of her husband, Michael, a man who had "hung up his hat" in her father's house. Cleary's motives for his wife's murder were extraordinary: he believed, or so he said, that an evil fairy had entered her body. Given the societal pressures on the couple, their childlessness and her independence, it seems likelier that Cleary's rage was fuelled by suspicion that his wife had been entered by another, more human, presence. Whatever was being felt in "the fairy house" where the couple lived (the cottage built next to a fairy fort was viewed by some locals as being dangerously close to the unknown), nothing could atone for the brutality of Bridget's torture and death.
Her aunt and her cousin Johanna, who were in the house over the two nights that led to Bridget's death, were both acquitted at the subsequent trial.
Johanna's testimony, sensitively re-enacted by Catherine Walsh, described her brothers and uncle holding Bridget down on the bed - one holding her by the ear lobes, another lying across her body - while her husband dowsed her with urine. She went on to describe Bridget being held over the open fire and her husband screaming at her "are you my wife, Bridget Cleary, in the name of God?", and her reply, "I am your wife, Bridget Cleary, in the name of God".
He chose not to believe her, pulling the scapular from her neck before throwing oil over her and burning her alive. The autopsy report told of her burned back and lower body parts, charred muscles, exposed bones, congested lungs. Her husband was found guilty of manslaughter and served 15 years before his release and subsequent emigration to Canada.
Bourke stood uneasily in Bridget Cleary's home. Her discomfort was not due to a fear of ghosts or malevolent spirits; it was an entirely man-made residue of pain that chilled Bridget's parlour.
'THIS IS MY third show and I can't remember what I used to do." Cautious yet twinkly, Des Lynam is attempting to fill the chair of the recently departed Richard Whiteley as presenter of the hugely popular afternoon gameshow, Countdown. Twenty-three years old now, the show has, mused co-presenter and slinky mathematician Carol Vorderman, probably been seen by everybody in Britain at some stage or another. Lynam, whose thousands of sports broadcasts have now been superseded, described meeting a Les Dawson-esque granny in his local supermarket who quizzed him as to whether or not he was going to fill Whiteley's shoes. "You're not my favourite," she told him. "But even if you do do it, I'll still watch."
Meanwhile, over in dictionary corner (don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about), a somewhat fey and increasingly puffy Martin Jarvis recited gentle poetry and demure lexicographer Susie Dent was encouraged to read aloud the definition of "todger": "a man's penis, of unknown origin" (the word, that is, not the organ).
Dear oh dear, Des, and you thought football was a mucky business.
Rome BBC2, Wednesday
Egypt BBC1, Sunday
Hidden History: Fairy Wife – The Burning of Bridget Cleary RTÉ1, Tuesday
Countdown Channel 4, Monday to Friday
