Five, a television channel in the UK, has just shown a live broadcast from Pompeii and Herculaneum (though many of the sections were pre-recorded).
Overall: I don't think the gimmick of the live framework adds anything at all, and for a programme called Pompeii ... Live! they spend an awful lot of time at Herculaneum. But then Herculaneum's a fascinating site, perhaps more so than the over-familiar Pompeii. There's an awful lot of interesting stuff in these two hours (well, just over an hour and a half when you take the adverts out), and I learnt stuff I didn't know before. I hardly found myself shouting at the television at all (except at the very silly bit where the horizon of Vesuvius was used to illustrate the rise and fall of the Roman empire).
See, it is possible to make television programmes about the ancient world that aren't one-sided, sensationalist, or just plain ignorant.
1 comment:
I was partly expecting to see some digging - there's a team from Bradford University out there (http://www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/archsci/field_proj/anampomp/), though it may have been a tad too early in the season for actual digging. But I don't see why they weren't involved somewhere along the line. Still, as you say, there were some interesting aspects included in there. Was very impressed to see the wooden items.
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