Meet the Romans with Mary Beard

Wish I had seen before visiting Rome a few years back. Would have added many of these sites to my tour. Will do so if I go again. I did see the bakers tomb so there is that-had a great guidebook on food of Rome. Found this documentary interesting and engaging and educational. Did not notice any speech issues or girl powerism. Was surprised to learn this was from 2012 and looking forward to the follow on BBC documentary.

I enjoyed this series quite a bit. Mary Beard guides us through much of the social history of the roman empire. It's the ordinary people who fascinate Mary Beard, not all the well known emperors. Surprisingly quite a few accounts of then as individuals remains, often on tombstones. It's the kind of history which thinks we can learn ss much from a roman joke book as we can from an imperial biography.

Episode 2 was probably my favourite, looking at the roman Insula housing and the toilets and baths too. The series is not just Filmed in Rome but also far flung places like Algeria.

The series also argues our idea of a roman also needs adjusting eventually a roman coild be someone from Britain, Spain, France, Algeria, Syria.

I give Mary an A for effort but she is a bit hard to take for an ordinary ole American like me. The British must have a very high tolerance for the extremely untelegenic hosts with bad teeth. I'm sorry to sound shallow but my goodness. Poor old Mary, stringy grey hair, dirty fingernails, frumpy persona, bad teeth and all...take her or leave her. I enjoyed most of the program despite how distracting Mary's bad teeth are. However in one segment Mary was apparently visiting Rome at the height of summer and was sweating like a pig. Her hair was sticking to her neck and sweat was pouring down her face and I just couldn't take it anymore. Good lord, have some self respect and tidy up before rolling the cameras. I have no idea how good the rest of the show is.

We had high hopes for these series, expecting detailed account on lives of common roman people. However there is way too much adult content and spicy remarks which makes it unsuitable for viewing with children.

Right from the start there is a sense of sensationalism and self-advertisement, since the first 3 minutes of each film is just a roughly chopped trailer of things that would be repeated later. Overall we though that the first film in the series was watchable but it becomes worse with the second and third being almost unwatchable, with the main focus being on vulgar and dark aspects of roman life. There is very little logic or plan in the story and most of it consists of reading tombstones and over-excitement after finding on them Mr. Eroticus, Mrs. Volupta and similar names.

The authors probably thought that it is very hard to say something new about such well studied subject and this drove them to another extreme.

A great subject, and we have no doubt the host is an expert that could lead us to knowledge.

But Mary Beard narrates, and she has prominent speech impediments which turn the letter"S" into an irritating sensation in the listener's ear. And she uses the letter"S" (possibly, tens of) thousand of times in each episode. (count the number of "S"'s, and soft "C"'s, in this short review. Multiply by one hour)

This series also suffers from a common modern blight on documentaries, the desire to make them ultra-exciting in every second of the show.

Mary Beard is overly familiar with her audience, indulging in clumsy vulgarities, just minutes into the first program.

You also feel a sort of tension from the rapid edits, bombastic music, and a new image every half second throughout the program.

The viewer never gets a satisfying look at the marvelous Roman architecture and art that are a substantial portion of the narrative in the show.

Perhaps the producers believe that the audience does not posses enough of an attention span left to enjoy informative documentaries without pyrotechnics.

Pity, the subject matter is most interesting, but the viewer will have difficult job of relating due to the over blown production values and the constant spitting noise in the narration.

And this is typical of other recent BBC documentaries.

We need a new champion of documentaries and history based TV. The BBC used to be that, but not so much anymore.