brianjohn-83250

Although this movie was obviously intended for family viewing, it was so banal, badly acted and formulaic that it took on a sort of bizarre charm. The landscape is beautiful, but the starring wolves were so obviously hand reared and trained that there was impossible to portray them as being dangerous on threatening to anybody or anything. One situation after another (not to mention the behaviour of the baddie with his gun) left one wondering what on earth was going on. Nothing seemed to make any sense. The storyline was so absurd, and the filming of the action sequences so stiff and badly edited that the film came over as a spoof rather than anything to be taken seriously. A candidate as one of the worst films of the decade........

This is a truly appalling documentary packed with speculation and based on the flimsiest of evidence. Alice Roberts, in spite of her academic background, proves to be the most gullible of presenters. Almost every assumption in the documentary involved vast "interpretative inflation", as was pointed out by some of us while the digs at Waun Mawn were going on. Sadly, since this programme has been shown several times, many thousands of viewers have simply been carried away on a wild goose chase.

The so-called bluestone quarries do not make any sense at all, and there are NO monoliths at Stonehenge made of rhyolite from Rhosyfelin. The evidence of quarrying is hotly disputed, and earth scientists are quite convinced that all of the so-called quarrying traces are natural features. Not a single stone at Stonehenge has been precisely provenanced, in spite of the claims made in this programme. The assumptions about sockets and missing stones made by Prof Parker Pearson were so dodgy that they have been criticised and questioned by all sorts of people including fellow archaeologists Darvill and Pitts. The "alignment" speculations were wildly inaccurate. Stone 62 at Stonehenge came from the far east of Preseli and has nothing to do with Waun Mawn. The monoliths and other scattered rocks at Waun Mawn are all locally derived and have no known matches with Stonehenge. The radiocarbon and other dates tell us nothing about stone circles or Stonehenge. There were no control digs. The presumed circumference of a "giant circle" was never adequately supported by evidence. There is nothing at all at Waun Mawn to demonstrate any link with Stonehenge, and the proto-Stonehenge and "lost circle" propositions are shown to be fantasies. Two recently-published research papers (June 2022) have shown that "proto-Stonehenge" and the "lost circle" are simply fantasies. This documentary, selling dross as if it was gold, should never have been made or transmitted.

I really enjoyed episode one. OK -- there are anachronisms, and everything should be grubbier, and there should be lots of Irish navvies about the place, but this is a very refreshing drama which knocks spots off the BBC's "War and Peace" and "Poldark" -- both of which are so dumbed-down and banal as to be rather embarrassing. The characters here are credible, and already one cares for what will happen to them. The direction is smart and effective, and I think Steve Thompson's script is good, even though one might complain about a lack of regional authenticity. There is some beautiful imagery, and sound quality is great (compared with "War and Peace" in which everybody mumbles, and in which there never seems to be a microphone anywhere near the action). So what if it's a Western, set in Yorkshire? Nice idea. Promising -- I think this will get a really good devoted following.