“Near to the present day city of Naples in southern Italy lies the volcano Mt Vesuvius. Man has lived here for generations, with the sleeping monster a latent menace to the cities that exist near her slopes. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 . . . ”
I could go on, and on, and on. When I was a little ’un, see, my school didn’t do lines. Instead, as a punishment, you were given “sides” — a blank page of green, lined, A4 paper, which you had to fill up with words copied from a textbook. It took ages, especially if you got a lot of them, and I surely did.
Somewhere between sides four and six, you could have a little fun, inserting bits of prose such as “the prefect who is making me do this has a face like a goat’s arse and fancies his own mother”, just for the thrill of seeing if anybody noticed, which they never did. For the bulk, though, the sensible strategy was to memorise a few paragraphs, and trot them out, over and over again. For me, that was my Classical Studies textbook, about Pompeii. “Near to the present day city of Naples . . . ” I’d write, often, and until now I thought I’d never write it again.
Near to the present day city of Naples this week, anyway, you got Mary Beard. With whom, as a TV reviewer, one must tread carefully. For you may have forgotten, but my tribe never shall, about the almighty hoo-hah of 2012, when AA Gill branded her “too ugly for television” and even the Daily Mail called him a sexist, alongside its sidebar of 14-year-old girls bravely filling out their bikinis. Which he was being, undoubtedly, as well as being mean and flatly wrong, because while one should not mention her looks at all, if one was going to, one might say they were in fact rather pleasant. Still, it does make for tricky gender politics. I mean, if her rival historian David Starkey popped up on telly and occasionally reminded me of Neil off The Young Ones, I sincerely doubt I’d give him a pass. Whereas here, for decorum’s sake, I shall make not a peep.
“Romans, she says, loved nothing more than a giggle at a wonky John Thomas
She’s ace, though. Thrilled and excitable, and in exactly the way you expect a classicist not to be. Although her interests, like Mr Gill’s, are often a bit prurient. “These are private baths,” she’ll say, exploring the relics of one fossilised structure. “No riffraff laughing at your willy here.” For Romans, she adds, later, loved nothing more than a good giggle at a wonky John Thomas. “Body image,” she notes, meaningfully. “Not a new problem.”
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Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed was half CGI reconstruction and half scientific probing into the mummified corpses scattered around when the big fiery mountain blew its top. Or, at least, I thought they were mummified corpses, but apparently they aren’t. It was believed — as she explains — the various archaeologists who started unearthing the buried city a few hundred years ago noticed cavities in the volcanic oomska around skeletons, and poured plaster into them, thereby revealing their fuller, human forms. Whereas lately, new techniques have revealed that quite a lot of these plaster statues contain iron bars. Beard rightly notes that this means we need to rethink how they were made, but sadly doesn’t reach the obvious, thrilling conclusion. Which was that they were Terminators.
Some are entwined couples, some tiny children, some were thought to be old men, and now turn out not to be. It’s hard to be unmoved by the horrifying, terrified poses in which they were preserved, although one slight oddity here was that Beard sort of managed to be. Sometimes, when handling the casts of suffocated innocents, she did seem just a little bit cold. Although obviously, well, not as cold as them.
Still, she’s thrilled, like I said, and it’s infectious. There she is, delighted by water running through ancient drains, and perhaps somewhat more excited than one ought to be at the spectacle of a petrified walnut. She’s not what you think she’ll be, Mary Beard. In the public imagination she has become the very definition of clever, withering feminism; the sort of person who makes you feel like a troglodyte for watching Mock the Week. And yet, there she is, sitting atop an amphitheatre, whooping at the thought of the slaughter which she might once have witnessed below. Near to the present day city of Naples. In southern Italy. One last time.
Churchill’s Secret, on ITV, was well worth an evening, and not only to remind yourself of just how much like Boris Johnson the great man wasn’t. Adapted from Jonathan Smith’s novel The Churchill Secret: KBO (with the “KBO” standing for “keep buggering on”) it was slow, but deliberately and richly so, concerning the bizarre period after Winston Churchill’s stroke in 1953. The public wasn’t told, which was a bold decision, not least because he was prime minister.
“How worn out the poor man must have been. Imagine being a prime minister at 79
Michael Gambon played Churchill, and very well, especially as the bulk of his lines in the first half were the word “gaaaaah”. Romola Garai was his nurse, with nursey nerves of steel. Surrounding them were a chorus of family members who were clannish, and vulpine, and utterly in his shadow, and for the most part fairly ghastly. Surrounding them were a bunch of fellow cabinet ministers, who were much the same, and mainly standing around in white tie, fretting.
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In time, Winston started getting his strength back, in preparation for the Tory party conference (brilliantly lo-fi back then; like a church hall bingo night) and for a while you thought it was going to turn into a very sedate sort of Rocky IV. Although, of course, it was all far cleverer than that, with undertones of loss, and duty, and the ragged ends of an age where great men were like gods, or at least felt they ought to be. Speaking as a hack, it’s obviously a bit outrageous that the public were kept in the dark about how sick he was. Speaking as a human, you could only admire his balls. How exhausted the poor man must have been, after all that. Imagine being prime minister at 79. Dave will be bald as a coot.