Up Pompeii!

As a teenager, my than girlfriend gave me the first series on video ( this is going back quite a number of years), in the first month of us of going out.

We are now celebrating 36 years together!!

If you have a taste for the classic attributes of Roman comedy such as slapstick, coarseness, and blatant sex jokes this one's for you. Roman comedy was pretty crass, far "worse" than the Three Stooges, but sometimes you just have to let go and laugh a little, or a lot. The characters, after all, are funny. And the situations hilarious...my favorite being the episode in which Lurkio pulls a "Lysistrata" stunt. The jokes are silly and corny with awful puns amok but, come on, loosen up, this is humor very much in the vein of Plautus. Such gimmicks as Lurkio's eternal prologues and Nausius' inept odes afford lots of low quality giggles, too. Some early episodes and the feature length film used to be available on video, and I hope they will resurface someday soon.

Technically: a peculiar cross between "A Funny thing happened on the Way to the Forum" & "It's That Man Again", "Up, Pompeii" is a music hall-styled satire built around the character Lurkio (Frankie Howerd). From the opening prologue - a story from classical mythology which hardly ever gets started, much less completed - to the final "Salute!", FH is hardly ever off-camera, acting, overacting &/or commenting on the plot, script, camerawork or sets... hardly anyone gets much of a lookin.

About 90% of the jokes are ancient enough to have first been told in Pompeii (the rest are somewhat older); but are played with the carefully-scripted/apparently-improvised style which was FH's trademark. Warning: if the series didn't treat its menfolk even worse, one could easily describe it as misogynistic (it probably is anyway).

If Howerd's peculiar genius (a word often overused; but probably useful in this case) doesn't appeal, avoid like the plague... otherwise: catch it whenever you can....

With the release of this series in its entirety on the Frankie Howerd DVD boxed set, I've had a chance to review these episodes. Surprisingly, they were as good as I remembered. They were shown during my mid-to-late teens (early 1990s) and I recall having a good giggle at the double entendres and Nausius' terrible odes.

The image quality was rather poor in some instances due to the archive nature of the episodes. This has been fixed in the DVD release with quite clear images and sound. If you're not offended by sexual innuendo, bad puns and corny jokes, I'd highly recommend this show. The last episode in the first season is hilarious ('The Love Potion'), especially the scene with the sorceress! Fans of Frankie Howerd would call this 'his series' as although he had many shows of his own, this is the one he is best remembered for.

As far as Americans go, I probably grew up with more BBC shows than most, but recently I've been going and digging up a lot of classic BBC shows I have never seen. Especially ones that involved people who did other shows I liked. David Croft is THE MAN with all the projects he worked on, which is what made me want to check this one out. If you're not familiar with him, he and a couple others he worked with were responsible for half of the best Britcoms ever written, check them out!

I would say this is a solid 8/10. It's got great writing, and the cast, especially Howerd is amazing. One odd thing for something that is objectively funny is that I found binge watching it to be a bit too much... A lot of the running gags are very funny, but back to back to back it loses some of it's oomph. So I would say only watch one or two at a time and you'll be laughing harder. Other than that great show!