Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard
BBC2
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right
Channel 4
It’s fair to say that the TV historian’s job has changed since the days when Kenneth Clark stood up straight in front of a camera in a brown suit and, in a cut-glass accent, lectured the masses. That was in the excellent 1969 BBC series Civilisation.
Now the emphasis is as much on amusement as education, Lucy Worsley slipping into period costume lest our tiny attention spans wander and, in Meet the Roman Emperor, Mary Beard sitting on a multiseater palatine toilet and miming wiping her bottom with a sponge on a stick.
We probably didn’t need that demonstration, Mary, as it’s fairly obvious how a bum-sponge works. But thanks anyway. Horrible Histories did a funny sketch on it — for kids — years ago. In any case, the other strands examining the private insecurities and lives of the emperors were far more interesting.
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In a lively, roving hour she laid out the impressive lengths some went to to intimidate and terrify dinner guests. Full marks for creativity, emperors. Our intro was Domitian’s “black banquet” in which the walls, plates, food and slaves were dyed black and each guest received, as a party bag, a sort of gravestone with their name on it. Which would certainly mess with your mind more than a slice of cake in a napkin.
Beard, who traversed Roman ruins in her gold trainers, confided that she often felt sorry for the emperors’ paranoiac existences, having to have food-tasters lest someone poisoned their food, their lives not usually ending well.
But some of her scatalogical detail was memorable, such as Marcus Aurelius trying out an early form of suppository, with the physician Galen treating his stomach infection with a pad up the “mouth of his bowel”. Bowel-mouth. There’s another euphemism for the jotter. She said that Claudius’s last words after being fed poisoned mushrooms by his wife were: “Blimey, I think I’ve shat myself.” Try as I might, I can’t quite imagine Clark saying that.
★★★★☆
Watching Defiance: Fighting the Far Right sent me down a rabbit hole online googling the likes of John Kingsley Read, former chairman of the National Front, who responded to the murder of an 18-year-old Sikh boy, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, in Southall, west London, in 1976 by saying: “One down, a million to go.” Astonishing.
It took me to a 1976 World in Action documentary about the rise of the National Party in Blackburn and it is grimly fascinating. This powerful three-parter used some of its footage to tell the story of how Asian people united to fight racism because the police completely failed to protect them.
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In fact, as a policeman guarded the pavement where the stabbed teenager’s blood was splashed, he told a passer-by: “It’s just Indian blood.” The killers were jailed for just four years.
A striking feature of the film was seeing the young men who had formed activist groups (such as the Southall Youth Movement) to defend themselves and stand up to the far right sitting here now. Five decades older, they reflected on an age when racist leaders called them, for instance, “khaki-coloured multiracial bastards” and when a white man came out of his house like a raging ball of fury to tell journalists: “You call me racist. Yes, I am a racist! Now put that on your television.” As one activist said of the fightback: “You can’t be a gentleman always. Sometimes you have to be brave.”
★★★★☆
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