Becoming Sixteen Again…

Like you, I read the Mail Online. It is a sewer, of course, but so much of it appeals to my morbid curiosity that I delve in regardless. It was there that I learned of a 71-year-old woman who strode out onto the stage of Britain’s Got Talent and bellowed a tuneless number titled Kiss My Ass. The clip is available on YouTube, and features thousands of young to middle-aged people shrieking with laughter as the grey-haired songstress yells out Bart Simpson’s favourite noun.

The rude old person has become a feature of the cultural landscape. Agnes Brown, the matriarch of Mrs. Brown’s Boys, curses her way through episodes of Britain’s most-watched sitcom. The Catherine Tate Show featured an old woman who did nothing except swear. Little Britain offered a sketch devoted to a young man having a sexual relationship with a grandmother. It was a recurring sketch. Did Father Jack start this? I hope not. I liked Father Jack. But perhaps he was a bad influence.

I have no wish to tell old people to conform to special standards of propriety. If they are going to warble on about pecking posteriors I am not going to bully them. Yet it would be great if younger people stopped cackling like idiots at such behaviour.

The septuagenarian singer was described as an “inspiration” by the botox businessman. Some might claim that this was for having the guts to perform, except that he had looked disgusted as she walked onstage; perhaps fearing that she was going to have the shameless audacity to try and show musical talent. Some might hold that it was because of her energy and spirit, but if singing R&B was enough to defy his preconceptions of the powers of the aged he cannot be acquainted with many old people. The reason he and the audience loved her was because she was being coarse, and, thus, defying those staid old values we associate with age. Reserve, politesse and prudence are disdained by our exhibitionistic culture, and old people are only welcome in the public eye if they are members of the royal family or behaving like young people. It is our world now and they are only welcome if they are trying to match our standards.

Of course, in many ways I think it would be great for us to encourage old people to regain their youthfulness. Few could match Elizabeth Jane Howard, writing novels at 90, or Robert Marchand, breaking cycling records after he has broken triple figures, but when the aged make use of the knowledge and resources available to us they can often retain and regain mental and physical abilities that allow them to live more pleasant and productive lives. What they need inspiration to do, though, apparently, is to say “ass” and mention oral sex. We don’t have enough references to the backside nowadays.

 

Under Real Combat Conditions…

I’ve been watching Spiral. It is a fantastically grim French series that not only includes the exploration of murder, rape, domestic violence and child abuse but is filmed in such a grimy, frenetic style that its authors could have based it at the Great Barrier Reef and it would still have looked ugly. Given this, and the fact that my post-Christmas reading list largely consists of books about the Nazis and the Mafia, I have needed some entertainment that cheers me up. This has been Dad’s Army.

I, like everyone, had always known that Dad’s Army was good. I had not appreciated, though, quite factor good it was. Which factor sets it apart? How about the fact that while most sitcoms struggle to maintain a cast of four substantive characters Dad’s Army had at least ten? It was the diversity that this offered its writers that allowed them to maintain high standards over nine series.

How about the fact that its actors so perfectly embodied their respective roles that it is hard to think of them as anybody else? It it is fantastic how perfectly they suited the production. John Laurie, for example, brought not only his thick Highland tones to Private Frazer but the maniacal bombast of a thespian who had performed Shakespeare alongside Olivier. Watching Sergeant Wilson grimly bear a tempestuous relationship with Mrs Pike, meanwhile, I have to wonder if Jimmy Perry and David Croft had John Le Mesurier’s string of wives in mind as they were writing.

How about its balancing of silliness and subtlety? We all know of the bombs in trousers and sardonic “stupid boy”s but I could spend hours marvelling over the delicate beauty of a line like, “There’s a voluntary church service on Sunday, so I expect you all to attend”. There is a Wodehousian quality to the delight its authors took in the potential of character and language, and the product has the same simple appeal and complex artistry of the great man’s works.

Well, yes, all of that made it the achievement it was. What makes it unique, though, more than anything else, is the warmth of its heart. As good as Father Ted, Fawlty Towers and at least two of the Blackadder series were they were all somewhat misanthropic: populated by self-serving cynics and complete buffoons. Dad’s Army adopted a benevolent perspective on the failings of its characters. They were often foolish but this was an endearing, enthusiastic foolishness; often allied to bravery and kindliness. They could be unpleasant but this too was cast as foolishness, and a foolishness that one could empathise with: the arrogance and coldness, for example, that are born out of reactions to insecurity. In the naive, muddled yet unfailingly exuberant manner in which they clubbed together to face their unfathomable and terrifying predicament they will always appeal as examples of the human condition.

 

On Gerry Anderson and Evil…

So. Farewell then, Gerry Anderson. Thunderbirds was important to me but not for the reasons one might expect. I never dreamed of being a superhero or even an astronaut. What distinguished it was the character of the Hood. A bald villain of ambiguous oriental origins, he was the eerie foreign contrast to the upstanding heroes. His eeriness transcended the cliches it sprang from and, for a kids’ series, was striking.

I was raised on Looney Tunes, in which the villains were morons forever being outwitted by the mischievous protagonists. It was the same in Tom and Jerry and Asterix and Obelix. The Hood, though, was a powerful man who acted through the creepy means of brainwashing International Rescue’s hapless servant. While his plans were inevitably thwarted I always felt as if he had the edge over the Tracy family because they remained pitifully ignorant of the fact that he had a man in their camp.

This ability to create sinister villains was also demonstrated in Captain Scarlet. The eponymous hero always seemed rather dull for the simple reason that his powers ensured that one could not even delude oneself into believing its conclusions were in doubt. That inextinguishable sod was never going to lose. The ghostly Mysterons with their sonorous threats, mind-altering abilities and unconventially substantive grievances were a far more affecting presence.

Such characters gently exposed us to the reality of maleficence; duplicitousness; evil. They demonstrated its ability to exploit human weakness and to fester in dark emotions. It is, perhaps, a shame that the pure-hearted heroes did not show similar nuance in demonstrating the nature of their virtue. Then again, perhaps I would have been to busy hoping they’d go down those slides to have noticed.

 

Fringe Ideas…

I can’t be the only one to notice the Bieberisation of male presenters in cultural programming? Everywhere you look on BBCs 2 and 4 eyelashes are being batted and fringes are flip-flopping. Brian Cox, the physicist girls want to get physical with, is the most prominent example. He’s a smart advocate of naturalism but to have a mop like this at 44 surely defies scientific explanation?

There is also Simon Reeve, the travel documentarian who was last seen offering a paean to Cuba’s economic reforms that was so gushing it made one feel tempted to offer the Simpsonesque question, “Are you going to marry capitalism?” He is sporting a touch of face fluff him but still, at 40, could be mistaken for a Sixth form commoner.

Some of you might have missed Alastair Sooke’s How the Devil Got His Horns… but it was ironic that he should choose this subject because his features are positively angelic.

I’m not trying to – what’s the word? – objectify these men. They are all extremely clever and suitably personable. Reeves’ series on the Indian Ocean was fascinating, and How the Devil… was among the best documentaries of the year. Yet I hope the unthreatening charm that’s incidental to them is not promoted at the expense of the older, gruffer great uncle model of man. It is in that spirit that I say…

RIP.

 

The Trouble With Aid…

The Trouble With Aid was a formidable achievement on the part of its creators. An analysis of the rise of humanitarianism, it exposed the many incidents in which aid work has complicated rather than solving problems: from Biafra, where offerings of Westerners strengthened secessionist forces and extended the war, to Somalia, where charities called for troops to protect their convoys and were answered by American forces who promptly worsened the conflict.

A veteran of aid work commented that many saw their humanitarian efforts as being comparable to fighting in a war in which you did not have to kill anyone. Children of the 60s strode off into the third world to fight. Suffering was their foe, and food and funds were the materiel with which they hoped to battle it. It is striking, indeed, how their rhetoric could mirror that of warmongers: crises demanded an urgency that sometimes obscured the need for realism; enemies were so dangerous and appalling that attempts to construct nuanced analyses of their causes and forms was almost disreputable; arresting their consequences was a simple matter of trying to directly remove them.

These saviour narratives, however, could result in their blinding themselves to complex political and social realities. In Ethiopia, for example, the oppressive government made charities complicit in a brutal resettlement programme that masqueraded as humanitarian assistance. Estimates suggest that between fifty and a hundred thousand people died as the result of actions Bob Geldof somehow never had the time to say “fuck” over.

To the doubters, brash humanitarians like the almost Hitchensian Geldof had a blunt moralistic response: we’re trying to help starving kids; what are you doing? While many of the blunders of charities were consequences of well-meaning people being understandably ignorant of situations that had never been encountered there was also a streak of egotism running through them. A red-faced Bernard Kouchner yelled at the filmmakers that intervention in Somalia was worthwhile if it saved even one child. Hundreds of people, which doubtless included children, died in the violence that resulted from that intervention.

Things had become even more dangerous as the line between humanitarians and militarists disappeared. Aid workers, faced with rebels and dictators instead of famines and floods, presumed that Western military power was a convenient tool with which to solve crises. They soon realised, however, that it was impossible to control and liable to have an effect more comparable to a backhoe than a surgical instrument. The faith in the power of military intervention – which, I should admit, counted me among its believers for a short period years ago – persists in the celebrities whose eyes grow moist over Darfur and the teens who share indictments of Joseph Kony.

In New York a policeman became famous for buying a pair of shoes for a cold homeless man. The tramp, however, did not actually wear them. He feared that someone might kill him in an effort to steal them. If such apparently simple generosity can have such complicated underpinnings it should not surprise us that crises involving millions of people in societies with significant and often unfamiliar political and cultural peculiarities are hard to understand and dangerous to negotiate. The Trouble With Aid was a necessary reminder that the sentiment that inspires people to do good in our world must be allied to realism that ensures that good intentions do not in fact lead to harm.

A final thought. I wonder if the rise of humanitarian thought has focused our efforts on ameliorating conditions in places where the worst suffering can be found at the expense of the places where the most good might be done. Staggering resources have been expended in attempts to change some of the worst dictatorships and theocracies of the world but these are also places where it’s hardest to do good. In the meantime, stable if struggling nations risk being denied the ideas and support that could aid them in developing their economies, securing their resources, stabilising their demographics and giving future generations the chance for a better standard of life or, at least, a better chance of avoiding the sort of catastrophes that might inspire belated responses. Ultimately, micronutrient interventions and family planning might not sound as romantic as ending wars and toppling tyrants but they seem more liable to effect positive change.

 

The Conspiracy of Stupid…

I thought Kookyville was a joke. Not that it was a comedy but that it was an actual joke: a satire on the miserable state of British popular culture. I was sadly mistaken.

Take the name. People who describe themselves as “kooky” or “quirky” are almost guaranteed to be tedious sods: Mighty Boosh fans; Monster Raving Loony voters and people who wear comedic slogans on their t-shirts. People who are unconventional in interesting ways are not so insecure that they have to make a big deal of how unconventional they are.

This does not begin to describe the awfulness of Kookyville, though. It is marketed in the same fashion as The Only Way is Essex and Geordie Shore: “normal people” delivering unscripted lines after, one imagines, a lot of prompting from the creators. This kind of show is beloved of producers who imagine they can do without writers and thespians.

Kookyville takes the form of a sketch show. It features a bleached blonde Mum and daughter talking about adopting a man with dwarfism; a coarse old woman who describes her ex-husband as a “cunt” and a pair of hoteliers describing an occasion where a victim of Thalidomide fell out of a window and struggled to return to his feet as he had short arms. Once can look at this two ways: the creators either wanted us to laugh at the disabled, which is obnoxious, or to laugh at working class naifs who had been encouraged to mock the disabled. This, it seems to me, is no less obnoxious.

The hapless performers had yet to be introduced to the idea of comic timing and spoke in voices that, it seems, would only rise or fall if they were confronted with a vampire. It was, then, a cross between The Only Way is Essex and Life’s Too Short. To create a worse formula for entertainment one would have to unite Michael Bay and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

These similarities are not coincidental. The company that made Kookyville, Objective Productions, have blessed us with the great Peep Show but have also produced tripe like Balls of Steel, Star Stories and, yes, Ricky Gervais Meets…. The creator of the programme, meanwhile, was Nichola Hegarty, who was, of all things, an executive producer of The Only Way is Essex. These people have worked hard to ensure that spitefulness and boorishness are ubiquitous features of our culture, and their union, like one of two great imperialistic powers, is dispiriting.

Yet am I a snob, sneering at working class people and their entertainment? Me, I think it’s the predominantly rich and well-educated men and women who promote an image of “normal people” as being almost universally coarse, bigoted morons who deserve such criticism. They are both inviting people to draw smug enjoyment from their relative sophistication and to think that such standards of thought and behaviour are common, acceptable and even worthy of aspiring to.

This is sad. Think of some of the greatest, best-loved entertainers of British television in previous decades: Tommy Cooper, Eric Sykes and Les Dawson. They were working class people who produced working class comedy that was perceptive, nuanced and relatable. These standards were not universal but they were there. People were challenged, inspired and consoled. Now they’re merely degraded – on the screens and in their living rooms. I’m not saying that there is a conspiracy to make us all stupid; I’m just saying that there if was such a conspiracy it is hard to think of how it could be more effective.

 

Fast Food Television…

Update: Everything below remains true but it must be said that the rest of the series was splendid.

I was excited for the new series of The Killing. I’m a sucker for crime dramas and this was about the only one that I had failed to watch. It was somewhat disappointment. The gushing reviews have encouraged me to express what I suspect a lot of viewers felt. All of the elements of a great story were there, and it may radically improve as the series progresses, but the manner in which it was constructed was alienating. The closing scenes of the second episode, where Lund attempts to bear ransom money to a kidnapper, were the most irritating. (The following contains spoilers.)

As Lund prepared to catch a train to the location where she was supposed to leave the money she glanced up and she saw her estranged son and his girlfriend further up the platform. She was pregnant. That Ms Lund would happen to spot these people, of all people, and at such a time as this, is quite hard to believe but it could happen and as long as such coincidences are infrequent and handled correctly there is nothing wrong with them. This wasn’t. She stared at the couple for what felt like an hour while the train waited, beeped and pulled out of the station. It made her look like an eejit. How about if she had been running late for the train and was distracted by a fleeting glimpse of her unknowing son? Our tension would have been provoked and it would have been easier to emphathise with her response.

Lund phoned the killer to report that she had missed the train and was given convoluted directions out of the station and towards the bus where he demanded the money be placed. How in God’s name did he do this? He couldn’t have known that she would miss the train and yet could give her detailed instructions without a moment’s pause. There is a difference between establishing a killer as a smart dude and implying that they are tediously omniscient. This ain’t God we’re dealing with. Or even Google Maps.

Once Lund had tossed the money into the bus the killer phoned and said that by arriving with a hanger-on Lund had broken the terms of their agreement. (What was her escort doing, by the way? He was as subtle as a “place ring here” tattoo on a girlfriend’s fourth finger.)  He then proceeded to launch a prosecutor off the roof of a courthouse with a noose round his throat. I don’t know. I have no great aversion to baroque murders but this was so bizarre; would be so hazardous and was so evidently useful as a capper for the episode that it felt too contrived. Perhaps this will be justified by following installments but if the public murder of a state official by outlandish means is reduced to a cheap thrill one might as well start featuring space aliens.

My big problem, a problem that I have with a lot of drama nowadays which explains my impatience, is that I feel as if the creators believe they are compelled to appeal to my senses and emotions with great energy lest I grow bored. Thus, gruesome deaths and melodrama are thrown up to shock and move me whenever it’s possible. This is condescending and makes for dull products. Such a preponderance of dramatic scenes and events can only be sustained with recourse to absurdities of scale, chance and consistency that make them impossible to believe in and disengage the viewer. Thus, one feels nothing. True feeling is the result of our emotional investment in characters and our anticipation of their experiences as well as the colourful realities of events they face. Sarah Lund is a character that I can get behind but I do hope she is not buried underneath a pile of contrivances.

 

If I Were Director-General of the BBC…

Just because commissioning a days television is something we’ve all wanted to do…

6.00 – Children’s TV

The classics. By which I mean “the children’s TV I could appreciate because I was a child”.

10.00 – The News

Apologies for the sins of omission and commission in the last evening’s news.

10.30 – Diagnosis: Murder

Because no sick day is complete without a rubbish American crime drama.

11.00 – Homes Under the Hammer

Cathartic programme in which buildings are selected and then lustily destroyed.

12.00 – Daily Politics

Lunch break.

13.00 – The Ladykillers

Fulfils daily requirement for Ealing Studios films.

14.30 – Weather

Jeremy Paxman’s post-Newsnight career.

15.00 – Agatha Christie’s Poirot

Because.

19.00 – The None Show

The screen fades to black as the nation is encouraged to spend time with their loved ones or pursue their hobbies rather than watch Chris Evans and Matt Baker.

20.00 – MMA

Sod your snooker.

21.00 – The Bridge

Fulfils daily requirement for grim Scandinavian drama.

The night would be stuffed with Japanese films, cricket and a looped video of the time Fathers4Justice invaded the Lottery and Eamon Holmes hid behind a little woman. It might not be to anyone’s tastes except mine but, still, I could hardly be less successful than George Entwhistle.

 

Against Comedians…

I’m bored of comedians.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t love comedy, any more than being of tired of chefs would mean one dislikes food. What I’m bored of are the practitioners of humour.

Comedians are everywhere these days. Stand-up DVDs keep HMV in business. Sitcoms emerge to provide bandwagons for different comics. Panel shows laden with them exist to pass humorous judgement on everything from sport to politics, from the arts to the sciences. Little happens in this nation that isn’t parodied, satirised or whimsically recounted. If a tree falls in a forest, the philosophers have asked, will some bright-eyed Merry Andrew reference it on Channel 4? Yes. Yes, they will.

Comedy should frame ideas, events and aspects of things in a manner that helps us to perceive them in unexpected and enlightening ways. Comedians are so ubiquitous, and their position in the media is so comfortable, that their jokes tend to be as surprising as a bruised banana and illuminating as a Hallmark card. Satirists reshape ephemeral phenomena to suit the idle prejudices of their audiences while fantasists create elaborate streams of gibberish about cigars that, once they’ve finished, were clearly just cigars. They’re less inspired by telling people things they didn’t know than flattering them for their preconceptions; less concerned with discovering significance than embellishing the trivial.

I’ve no wish to ape the people who respond to every tune that isn’t drowned in riffs by appealing for “real music”. Good comedy still exists; there’s just more of the bad stuff. It’s so cheap to produce and so accessible a form that it’s become the potatoes on the plate of entertainment: filler rather than nutrition or haute cuisine. The comedians that haunt our teles aren’t artists but journeymen; hired not to craft but mass-produce. Try, without referencing their physical characteristics, to describe the work of Jack Whitehall, Chris Addison, Rufus Hound, Russell Kane or Mark Watson. If you’ve come up with more than limp adjectives I salute you. These might be talented men but I’m sick of their appearing around one table or another to tell jokes that we forget within the time it takes to poach an egg in the microwave.

Am I just being a curmudgeon? After all, people must like these guys or they’d never be hired. Aren’t there better things to be complained about than jokes that I don’t happen to enjoy? Well, yeah. I know that if I dislike A League of Their Own I can touch a button on the remote and all my troubles will disappear. The problem, though, is that while comedy is being neglected as an art form it’s treated with reverence as a social institution. Comedians are viewed with a peculiar regard and deserve the analysis that they might subject others to.

Satirists are held up as our foremost dissidents. As Conrad Black visits Britain, for example, the press eagerly speculate about his appearance on Have I Got News For You. This is a show, remember, that has elevated rather more careers than it it has damaged. The thing one should bear in mind is that satire isn’t an effective political tool. One thinks of the Berlin cabarets, as Peter Cook observed, that did so much to prevent the outbreak of World War 2. Jokes can give us ammunition in political struggles but they can’t win them for us. Sometimes, indeed, laughter can be a relaxant when inspiration is required. Cracking wise about outrageous people or events can substitute amusement for emotion. If you can’t grasp how horrible it was to see Alastair Campbell face “WMD” jokes on Have I Got News You imagine a serial killer being spared a jail sentence and forced instead to endure a comedy roast.

This is incidental, to some extent, because few of our most notorious comedians strive to be profound. Outrageous comics of our time aren’t known for being incisive but for puerile and obscene. Ricky Gervais railed against “safe, adonyne humour”. What was his alternative? A programme in which a man with dwarfism was derided for being short. Frankie Boyle is a hugely talented bloke. One can’t help observing, though, that his reputation for edginess is built on wisecracks about the Queen’s vagina, Rebecca Adlington’s facial proportions and the disability of a supermodel’s child. What was gained from that? The smug, self-congratulatory pleasures of collective irreverence that will keep millions of loveless teens uploading jokes about the pain of strangers onto Sickipedia ‘til kingdom come.

There’s something peculiar about comedians themselves: they don’t offer a product; they are the product. They’re hired to appear in person and to be entertaining. There’s something inherently comedic about this, because while the guys who sit around their different tables joke and laugh about the issues of the day you can bet that at least some of them will be feeling grim. We spend very little of our lives feeling amused yet it’s these men and women’s job to act as if they are permanently. Once you’ve understood this it’s absurd and eerie to watch their strained grins and strange guffaws. It’s no surprise that some, once the cameras have been turned off, take to abusing their critics; bullying people on Twitter and – okay, I’ll admit that this happened in one case – screaming obscene abuse at their partners. Their whole shtick is completely unnatural.

Comedy, when it emerges from passion and craftsmanship, can be a form that inspires, consoles and educates. Comedians now keep us mired in cynicism and complacence. I never watched Black Mirror or Dead Set but I’ll give to credit to Brooker, a man who was famous only for being himself, for going away and trying to create something of lasting value. Would that more comedians would stop trying to amuse us every hour of every day and retreat to think of jokes that will make us laugh longer and, perhaps, even think a bit.

Thanks to Brit for the inspiration.

 

Tongues And Swords…

TV is a medium that can be hard to like. Programmes like The Valleys often give one cause to suspect that it’s devoted to the celebration of the most boring and boorish features of our species. I feel like revisiting I, Claudius, then, not just as it was a rare work of genius but as it was such a brutal indictment of human ignorance, debauchery and callousness.

The programme featured some of the more dreadful villains cinematic art has offered. These were not the sociopaths of modern television, though, whose charisma and thoughtfulness threaten to redeem them. When they weren’t appalling they were pathetic. Livia, in showing such favouritism to her miserable scion then investing her faith in her depraved great grandson, proved herself to be that which she loathed: foolish. Tiberius was too much of a coward to escape the destructive influences of his family. Caligula was, of course, a complete nutbag. Evil, in its world, is a force that ruins its perpetrators as well as their victims.

It is hubris that is the real villain of the piece: enabling the excesses of ambition and desire and blinding the characters to their own impending doom. They’re allowed to gorge on the fruits of their exulted status and become so corpulent with self-regard that they can’t see above their navels. Claudius is almost alone in being kind and this, perhaps, is due to his being alone in being modest – the disdain that his conditions earn him making sure that he never develops a big ego. In this, it warns against the pursuit and acceptance of absolute power but, more broadly, it satirises the uncritical regard for one’s own thoughts and feelings that allows people to take it.

One thing about I, Claudius that’s noticeable to the modern eye is how shonky its sets and, er, “special effects” appear. The grand villa of Augustus seems to have about three rooms and a garden so small it would shame an estate agent in the middle of London. The noise of the cheering crowds is so unnatural that one can almost picture a bloke lurking behind the camera switching the cassette deck on and off. Even the make-up is charmingly second-rate. Derek Jacobi looks as if he’s wearing the head of a mop while Brian Blessed’s method of appearing older than he was seem to have involved shoving his head up a chimney.

Does it matter? No, not really. Despite occasional splurges of exposition – one can drop into a conversation to have the last decade summarised in five minutes – the scripts tend to be elegant and the direction is witty and empathetic. The performances of the leads are tremendous. Derek Jacobi portrays the alternating clumsiness and cunning of the eponymous gaper with skill. Siân Phillips, as Livia, is an ice queen who melts during her sad, soppy declension. I hadn’t grasped that Brian Blessed can really act. It should be obvious from our ability to lose ourselves in theatre but it’s easy to forget nonetheless: our minds, when presented with a great story, adapt to suit its conventions and, thus, as long as its aim is not naturalism, a measure of crudeness in its staging matters little. I wish that commissioners would grasp this when they imagine that great drama is too expensive to produce.

I wish some contemporary artists would learn from its portrayal of wickedness as well. It was, perhaps, because of social mores that the horrors of the story tend to be depicted by implication but I like to think that it was an artistic choice because it seems more effective than if they’d been portrayed in full. By exposing the intentions of the evildoers and the consequences of the suffering of their victims we can appreciate the gravity of their wrongdoing without simply being grossed out by its messiness. It inspires a revulsion from evil rather than fake blood and Artaudian impressions. (Indeed, one of the less moving scenes of the programme was when a soldier barged in with Gemellus’ severed head. It might of course have been effective if it hadn’t looked like a cheap Halloween mask smeared with ketchup.)

Robert Graves’ deeper themes of liberty and order sometimes go unplumbed as the camera explores the outer layers of plots and intrigue. It is this baseness, though, that has lingered in my brain. The question that bothers me is what’s to stop people from behaving so awfully again? What precludes the flourishment of such ruthless ambition and careless debauchery? The answer, in many cases, is “nothing at all”, but what secures the braces that maintain some form of decency? I can’t summarise my thoughts in a crisp sentence or three but one thing that encourages striving for moral behaviour is reflecting on the magnitude of our capacity for vileness.