Rome, sweet Rome
James Delingpole
For some time now I have been aware that there was something badly wrong with my life without ever being quite able to put my finger on exactly what. Now, having watched Rome (BBC2, Wednesday), I know: I was born in the wrong place, 1,953 years too late.
Take religion. I don’t wish to knock my beloved Chelsea Old Church but I’d be lying if I pretended that it answered all my spiritual needs. I’m superstitious. I do kind of believe that there are lots of other minigods and spirits out there besides the main one. I’m constantly looking for signs and portents. I touch walls to ward off evil when I walk down corridors. I like tradition and extravagant ceremony. Now how cool would it be if you lived in a time where, say, your son was going on a dangerous journey, and you could find out whether he was going to live or die by the following means: suspend a huge black ox in a cage above your kneeling naked body; have the beast flayed by slaves and then its heart ripped out by priests; take a long shower in its hot, dark, pumping blood?
Then there’s sex. Of course, I love my wife and she’s very beautiful. But that has never stopped me wishing to shag pretty much every even remotely attractive female I ever meet, and I do find it a tremendous bore that one isn’t supposed to do so. In Rome, though, in AD52 I could have had my end away all the time: with the wives of my social inferiors; with slave girls; with shepherdesses that I happened to be riding past and with whom I fancied a quick one up against a tree, while my cavalry escort dutifully looked in the opposite direction.
And war, obviously. You all know by now about this hang-up I have, forever thinking meanly of myself for not having been a soldier. Well, in Ancient Rome, it wouldn’t have been an option. Of course I would have been a warrior; of course I would have been a fine horseman. And I would have been so superior to the opposition that, say there was just me and a mate on foot and armed with only short stabbing swords against a party of a dozen brigands armed with bows and arrows, well, we’d stride up to them and have ’em, easy.
Quite a few critics have been hedging their bets about Rome but I’m not going to: I think it’s utterly fab and so long as it maintains the intricately plotted, sex-, goreand violence-studded standards of the first episode, that’ll be my Wednesday post-Pilates treat sorted for the next eight weeks.
But how historically accurate is it? Perhaps Peter Jones will correct me if I’m wrong here, but I personally doubt that, if Caesar had just had his gold eagle kidnapped, he would have sent only two of his soldiers into barbarian country to retrieve it. I don’t think these tension-raising dramatic cheats matter, though, any more than I’m bothered by the way the dialogue veers between cod-Shakespearean (‘Bring him back safe or I’ll use the eyes of your children for beads) and EastEnders (‘Brutus, me old cock, what are you doing here?’). The point is that Ancient Rome in its latter years was a very weird place with mores thrillingly different from our own, and Rome makes this point with delicious verve and relish.
It’s great, too, given that it’s an HBO coproduction, that the casting (Ciaran Hinds, Kenneth Cranham, etc.) is almost wholly British. I don’t know as much about Ancient Rome as I should, but I do know for certain that they spoke with RSC accents, not American ones. But I’m equally grateful that its lavish production values (the title sequences alone I expect cost more than most UK drama series) and its action-drama sensibilities are firmly rooted in Hollywood. The scene, for example, where Titus Pullo, pursued by a mob, hides in a water butt, his head bursting up for air just seconds after they have scurried unwittingly past, is an awful cliché. But it’s just the sort of feel-good, escaping-deathby-the-skin-of-your-teeth moment you want in an epic, edge-of-the-seat, Roman TV drama.
Am I saying, though, that historical accuracy doesn’t matter at all? Well, no. But I know how tempting it can be to cheat. I’m writing a novel set in the second world war at the moment, and try as I might to get all my machine-gun calibres and dates scrupulously right, there’s always the odd moment where you can’t resist tweaking details to make the plot more satisfying.
I was thinking about this when watching BBC1’s exceedingly enjoyable drama-doc Egypt (Sunday). In real life, Howard Carter’s early career as an Egyptologist was blighted when he allowed his Egyptian guides to defend themselves against a party of drunken French tourists, who later raised a stink with their consul and got him sacked. This didn’t happen in the TV version. Instead, he blots his copybook with his vulgar American employer Davis by discovering a tomb that turns out, at the public opening, to be empty. The writers had also inserted a slightly implausible scene where Lord Carnarvon’s gorgeous blonde daughter Lady Evelyn flirtatiously tries teaching the dry, ageing Carter how to dance.
Perhaps these elisions and inventions are a tiny bit naughty in the context of a programme which, with its narrator and semi-documentary form, purports to represent historical truth. But there’s no arguing with it: they made it tighter, and more watchable. And Alexandra Weaver, the bit of tottie who played Lady Evelyn Herbert — any excuse to shoehorn more of her into the script had to be a wise one.
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