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.

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.

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.

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 made the mistake of watching Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome Empire Without Limit (i'd score it 5/10). What a major disappointment (it's BBC, 2016, so it's newer than Meet The Romans).

What I particularly like about Mary Beard's style is that she's down to earth and easy to relate to. She does a great job of getting under the skin of the Romans in a way that almost all historians fail to do when talking of the past. Mary draws many similarities between today's people and those from thousands of years ago. This is something that has always made sense and it strikes me as odd when people say how much we have changed (when we haven't changed all that much). This is why Mary's documentaries (on the whole) are very meaningful to watch.

Where Mary lets us down is that she isn't always consistent on her facts. For example, she often re-iterates how women had little or no rights and were not allowed to be anything but a good housewife who mended clothes. She then talks about women who ran their own businesses and were quite wealthy (one young woman had the equivalent of 10 years solider pay when she died at Pompeii). She also talks about several women who freed their slaves (male) and married them. It just doesn't add up, unless you're trying to push a barrow of revising history. I really do get it. 2010s are the decade of "make bullcrap up about the past to falsely promote women today, irrespective of the truth". However, Mary (mostly) seems to be different from the pack. Why is Mary lowering her standards? She also narrated a TV show about women needing to shut up, so, maybe, Mary has developed a strong gender bias as she's aged. This is sad to see because I really, really love some of her earlier work where she presented a balanced, consistent and non-prejudiced view.

If you are fond of sexism (girl power) in your documentaries, Mary upped the stakes in her follow up series Ultimate Rome Empire Without Limit. It was borderline offensive. However, as most of us digest our local news, Mary's other work will probably seem tame compared to BBC News / ABC News / your local news outlet.

Another reviewer talked about Mary's speech impediment. I rarely notice it, but I don't have sensitive hearing. It obviously upset one reviewer quite dramatically. You do notice an impediment in one section of her newer documentary, Ultimate Rome Empire Without Limit. I think BBC forgot to edit the sound for about 2 minutes of the video where Mary has a very strong speech impediment. However, in Meet the Romans, I did not find her speech to be an issue at all. Her dialog is very natural.

If you really want to get into the heads of the Romans, Mary does a fantastic job in most instances. Just be mindful that there is some gender prejudice leading to some inconsistencies in the material presented. Despite this, it's still definitely worth 8/10. Highly recommended.