Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 1); The Art of the Vikings

There’s a new series just started called Treasures of Ancient Egypt, so of course we’re watching it not long after it airs (the day after, actually, but because of the way I’ve scheduled my blog posts this post has gone live 8 days after). The series is presented by Alastair Sooke, and is similar in format to the Treasures of Ancient Rome series that he did a while ago (post). It is a chronological survey of the art of Ancient Egypt from the early pre-dynastic through to Cleopatra, each episode will have 10 “treasures” and this first episode covered the period up till the end of the Old Kingdom.

I’m not going to name check each piece of art, but he covered quite a wide range of types and styles. Some were well known iconic pieces (like the Great Pyramid or the Narmer palette), and some were less well known. Although having said that, I think we thought we’d seen most (but not all) of the items in the flesh – we have seen rather more than the average number of Egyptian museum collections tho! He started with petroglyphs out in the Sahara dating from before the Sahara was a desert, which pre-dates the association of the people who will later become the Egyptians with the Nile. But he was able to point out features in this carvings that anticipate the later art style we expect (like figures with front facing torsos but legs in profile). Because he was looking at each piece as a piece of art rather than in terms of what it tells us about the historical context there were things I’d not thought of before. For instance he used the Meidum geese (a personal favourite of mine) to illustrate how the Egyptian artists used small variations in their strict symmetry to stop it looking sterile and boring – so with the geese there are differences in tail position etc that keep it interesting. There were also a handful of segments with modern Egyptian artists working in the same mediums as the ancient artists, which to be honest I found less interesting.

The next episode will cover the Middle Kingdom & the New Kingdom – so I imagine we’ll have Akhenaten-era stuff and something of Tutankhamun’s as our well known items.


Amongst the other programmes we watched over the week was a one-off programme presented by Janina Ramirez about Viking art, called The Art of the Vikings (part of the Secret Knowledge series, which are all one-off half hour programmes, I only recorded this one). Ramirez was showing us the Viking items from an exhibition in Edinburgh, and giving us some context for them – demonstrating that the Vikings weren’t solely the destroyers of popular culture. There wasn’t particularly any new information (to me), but it was nice to see the objects. Especially fine was a large silver brooch (for holding a cloak shut), and I also liked the bead necklaces.

But I mostly mention this programme because it was somewhat startlingly amateur. Ramirez was a good presenter as she generally is, and the filming was also good – but the sound was very variable, with some bits sounding like Ramirez was recorded in a bathroom. And the onscreen titles were dreadful – the chosen font/layout had really weird spacing between the letters, with every “i” seemingly suspended in space making words like “Ramirez” read more like “Ram i rez”.


Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 & 2 of Strange Days: Cold War Britain – series about Britain and British culture during the Cold War, presented by Dominic Sandbrook.

Episode 2 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Australia.

Episode 5 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Episode 1 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

The Truth About Immigration – one-off programme presented by Nick Robinson about immigration into the UK. He talked to immigrants, Brits, employers & politicians, and got across how complicated the subject is and how little it’s actually debated in an informed fashion.

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities; Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities was a series about the history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore that we watched in December last year finishing just before Christmas. Montefiore seems to be specialising in serieses about holy cities – his previous ones have been about Jerusalem (which we watched before I started writing blog posts) and Rome (post).

Byzantium started out life as a strategically well placed Greek town at the eastern periphery of the Greek (and later the Roman) world. It rose to greater prominence as the centre of gravity of the Roman Empire shifted towards the east, and Constantine moved his capital there at the same time as establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. The Greek pagan past was swept very much under the carpet as the newly renamed Constantinople was positioned as the Christian centre of a Christian Empire which it remained until 1453AD. Something easy to forget from the way the subject was taught to me as a child is that the Roman Empire continued in the East long after the fall of Rome – seamlessly becoming what we now call the Byzantine Empire. Montefiore talked about how Constantinople came to be regarded as associated with and under the protection of the Virgin Mary, one-upping in their minds the association of Rome with St. Peter. And he finished up the first episode with a discussion of the rising tensions between the Western Church and the Orthodox of Constantinople, culminating in the excommunication of the Patriarch by the Pope and the Great Schism.

The second episode covered the period between the Great Schism in 1054AD, and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453AD. This is a period characterised by decline from former glories, punctuated brutally by the 4th Crusade. The Crusades started off because of the worries of the Byzantine Empire over the rise of Islam and how this new faith had conquered vast swathes of territory, including the Holy Land, and were now eyeing up Byzantine lands. They invited the Western Christians to lend their military might to hold off the Muslims, but this was an uneasy alliance. With the added political differences between Constantinople and Venice (supplier of ships for the 4th Crusade) the unease spilt over into outright violence and Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders. Montefiore had a bit of an air here of an outsider handing out the popcorn while he was discussing the lead up to this disaster, but he sobered up for the discussion of the atrocities afterwards. The programme ended with the final fall of a weakened Constantinople to the Ottomans, after they’d taken over all the surrounding territory.

The third episode covered the whole of the Ottoman Empire’s time in the sun. This was a second golden age for the city, now known as Istanbul – once again the centre of a large secular Empire it also became the centre of another religion. The Ottoman Sultans moved the seat of the Caliphate to Istanbul, and discovered (or moved in some cases) relics of the Prophet Muhammed and those close to him in the city. Montefiore dwelt on different aspects of the Ottomans to the series we watched earlier in the year (post). He didn’t gloss over the institutionalised fratricide of the Sultans as much, and he told us about some of the less successful holders of the title whose incompetance or brutality also shaped the city. He also spent a bit of time telling us about how the Jews were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Western Europe. This episode ended with a discussion of Attaturk and the new secular Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

As always with Montefiore’s serieses I I liked the cinematography as well as being interested in the subject matter. There’s a visual style to the programmes that I like, though I’d be hard pushed to describe it or distinguish it from other things – but that’s me lacking the vocab and knowledge, I think 😉


The other series we finished off over the last few weeks was Sam Willis’s series about Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History. This was a three part series that looked at shipwrecks around the British coast or involving British ships since Tudor times, with the main focus being on the 18th and 19th Centuries. The format was part telling the stories of individual disasters, and part drawing out what effects these disasters have had on British culture and British history. Willis did a good job of making the shipwrecks sound every bit as hideously dreadful as they must’ve been, whilst not overdoing it. And there were lots of interesting tidbits of history – like in the last episode he told us about the first weather forecasting system, the first life jackets, the fight Plimsoll had to undertake to get overloading of merchant ships regulated and several more. An interesting series, worth watching.


Other TV watched over the last couple of weeks:

Calf’s Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food. Disappointing programme about Restoration era English food that couldn’t work out if it was about the history or about the food, and ended up falling short with both aspects.

Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony – a bit like the series The Burrowers that we watched a while ago (post) but about leafcutter ants not cute fluffy bunnies etc. An ants nest was reconstructed in a lab and science is being done on it (and we got told how the nest worked and about the ants biology etc).

BBC 4 Sessions: The Christmas Session – recorded for Christmas 2011 I think, this featured various folk artists including the Unthanks and was a lot of fun. We watched it on Christmas Day.

Egypt’s Golden Empire – a three part series on one of the Sky documentary channels that we watched at J’s parents’ house. I confess I wasn’t always paying that much attention, but what I did watch seemed like a rather good and thorough overview of the New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt.

Charlie Brooker’s 2013 Wipe – round up of the big events of 2013 presented by Charlie Brooker (and segments from others, which I felt worked less well).

Jool’s Annual Hootenanny – music and chat from Jools Holland and his guests (and audience). It’s our tradition for welcoming in the New Year when we’re at home – Jools on the telly and whisky to drink. Not the best one there’s ever been, but we still had fun heckling.

2013: Moments in Time – another roundup of 2013, this time of the main news stories of the year shown through the photos that illustrated them. And some discussion of the changing nature of these photos (and the rise of social media’s importance in news).

Episode 1 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Africa.

Episode 4 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

A Tudor Feast

One of the programmes we watched this week was something originally from 2007, but repeated this summer – A Tudor Feast. It was a one hour standalone programme, and the main presenters have gone on since to do several serieses about farming in various historic programmes (including Wartime Farm which we watched last year (post) and Tudor Monastery Farm which we’re watching at the moment but I haven’t yet written about). In fact it was slightly odd watching this, because we’re watching something 6 years newer so both Ruth Goodman & Peter Ginn looked jarringly younger than in the other programmes!

The premise of the show was to cook a Tudor feast using only authentic recipes and ingredients, and only the techniques the Tudor cooks would’ve had available to them. So it was (like the $TIME Farm serieses) a mixture of pseudo-re-enactment and documentary. For instance all the people involved were dressed up in Tudor clothes, as well as explaining how to do things Tudor style. The programme was filmed in Haddon Hall, which still has Tudor era kitchens (I think they said those hadn’t been used in 400 years, presumably new kitchens have been built at various points over the years). And they picked a specific period where they have some records of the occupants of the house at the time – the 1590s. So as well as the modern recreation we got shown a list of the food used for a feast during that time.

One of the things this programme made clear was why this food was luxury food and only for the nobility. Some things were conventionally expensive – like cinnamon, because it came from far away, or gold because it’s rare. But much of it was expensive because it required a lot of labour to make. For instance one of the centrepiece items they put together was a marchpane dessert. This was basically marzipan, that was then gilded and decorated. Which sounds quite simple, but the recipe started with sugar (already conventionally expensive) that had to be ground into powder by hand. Then grind your almonds. Then finally make the marchpane with these two and rosewater. That’s hours of work, probably carried out by the mistress of the house or trusted servants under close supervision. And you haven’t carefully iced or gilded it yet, let alone constructed the decoration.

Another of their centrepiece items was a peacock pie – not a bird one eats nowadays. The programme was concentrating on the food prep – the “downstairs” side of the feast – but they did discuss the taste of things a bit. In particular Goodman mentioned that peacock is often said not to be a good eating bird, but she’s liked it when she’s tried it. This pie looked like a conventional pie until the very end stage – and then (having taken great care to select a good looking peacock and to take his skin off in one go) they put the peacock skin over the pie, with a support structure (not sure quite what, twigs? wire?), to look like a peacock once more. When that was served up they put something burning in its mouth, following a period suggestion, so it looked very spectacular when carried to the table.

They also showed us how the table was set and discussed proper manners (“courtesy”, the word etiquette wasn’t in use yet). Where you sat was determined by social status, and top table got the most impressive dishes – the centrepieces I talked about above (and others like a boar head with an apple in its mouth), the better meat, the better cutlery and tableware etc. People were given napkins, which I didn’t realise were a thing that went back that far. But instead of putting it on one’s lap or tucking it into one’s neck it was to go on the left shoulder. There it was conveniently placed to wipe your hands (most food was cut up with the knife then eaten with the fingers) and to clean your lips. Food was served not in courses like we would today, but in what were called “removes”. Instead of everyone getting their own portion of the current dish, a variety of dishes would be set out on the table and you’d help yourself to what you fancied that was near you. There’d probably be 2 or 3 removes – this feast they did two, one of primarily savoury things and one of sweeter things. Choice was part of the conspicuous display of wealth that was the point of a feast – poorer people didn’t tend to get a choice in what they ate.

I enjoyed this programme (like I do everything I’ve watched from this team). Lots of little bits & pieces I didn’t know before, and sometimes you don’t really realise what things were like till you see them done even if you’ve read about them. I’m now curious what peacock tastes like … and I rather like the idea of a centrepiece at the dinner table of a fire breathing bird containing a pie! Not quite enough to buy a turkey with its skin on for Christmas dinner, however 😉


Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 and 2 of Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities – history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

The Bridges that Built London with Dan Cruickshank – one off programme telling the history of London’s bridges across the Thames. Interesting, but got a bit woo-woo at times towards the end.

4,000-Year-Old Cold Case: The Body in the Bog. One off programme about the discovery and investigation of a body in an Irish bog. This particular one was dated to 4,000 years ago, most across north-west Europe are from about 1,500 years later. They tried to present a theory for how & why these people were killed & buried – got a bit Discovery Channel (they Solved The Mystery and Proved The Theory), and a bit unclear how general their idea was but nonetheless interesting.

Episode 1 of Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History – Sam Willis talking about shipwrecks around Britain or involving British ships, their impact on history and our culture.

Episode 3 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Unreported World: Egypt’s Tomb Raiders

Unreported World is a current affairs series on Channel 4 & a little while ago they did a half-hour programme about damage to antiquities in Egypt. We put off watching it for a while because it was bound to be depressing, and indeed it was.

It was filmed after this summer’s coup where President Morsi was overthrown & it looks at the effect the unrest has had on the ancient sites, and on the livelihoods of those who work in tourism. One of the main strands was talking to two people who make their living offering camel rides at the Giza Pyramids. And since the coup there have been very very few tourists, at the point when they were interviewed it was a couple of weeks since their last customer. Who’d been the first for a while. These two were doing better than some and must’ve had some savings – their camels weren’t starving yet. There was a particularly unpleasant sequence where the reporter (Aidan Hartley) was shown the animals that had starved to death because their owners could no longer afford to buy food for them left lying in the desert. Hartley also talked to the two about their home lives, and visited there – the adult man lived in a fairly small house with his own family, his two brothers & their families, and his sisters. The three men all work in the tourism industry and have had no work for weeks. He’s wondering how he’s going to afford his children’s school fees, and about how that’s going to affect their future. The boy who works with him is only 13, and dropped out of school when he was 8 – he needs to work to support his family, because his father has a degenerative disease. All either of them have ever done for work is offer camel rides, and if the tourists don’t come back they don’t know what they’re going to do or what’s available for them to do. They were very anti-Muslim Brotherhood, who they see as causing the problems.

The other main strand of the programme was about the looting of antiquities that’s been going on since the coup. In many cases this grows out of the lack of tourism and lack of income for people who relied on tourism. Hartley managed to get an interview with someone who is going out into the desert to dig things up to sell, and he was explaining that he did know it was robbing from the future and that it was wrong but he saw no other way to earn money to get food. Obviously he’s going to be spinning that for what he thinks the Western TV crew want to hear, but we were just shown the dead animals, and other signs of people who are running out of options. But the main focus of that strand of the programme was on an Egyptian archaeologist, Monica Hanna, who is preparing to sue the government for basically allowing the looting to happen She was (at least on camera and officially) talking about the lack of security at the ancient sites and the knock on effects of the curfew in Cairo (ie people who might protect the sites have to be home overnight, but the looters don’t stop for the curfew). However in the interview with the looter he said he bribes the officials who should be looking after the sites to turn a blind eye to what he’s doing – that’s how they’re getting away with bringing bulldozers in, or with sometimes operating in broad daylight.

Hanna took Hartley to several different places to see the sort of damage that was being done. This included a variety of sites where nothing has yet been properly excavated – like the sands around one of the pyramids at Dashur, where it was known there were graves but no-one had dug them up yet. But now the looters have been in with their bulldozers and dug up any antiquities they can find to sell on the black market. Which means we’ll never know what has been stolen, because they didn’t know what was there before. And a lot of potential knowledge about that area is lost forever now the graves have been disturbed. It’s not just the truly ancient sites that are being disturbed – Coptic churches and graveyards from pre-Islamic times have also been disturbed. Rockcut churches have had holes blown in them with dynamite, looking for treasure, murals have been defaced, graves disturbed and grave goods stolen. Hanna said that as well as the looting for things to sell she sees an anti-idolatry strand in what’s going on – she talked about proclamations by religious figures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood which talk about destroying the pyramids or other examples of “idolatrous” sites from “bad religions”.

A thoroughly depressing programme to watch. There aren’t simple answers either – just got to hope the political situation settles down and tourists can come back to revive the economy before too much is destroyed.


Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

The Joy of Logic – one off programme about the history of logic and maths, and the birth of computer science. Good, and made me want to re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach again.

Episode 4 of Stories of the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited – Julian Richards returns to digs that were originally filmed for Meet the Ancestors more than a decade ago & sees what new things have been learnt. interseting but padded, as all the other episodes were.

Indie Game: The Movie – film length documentary about indie games, following the development of Super Meat Boy and Fez, and talking to the creator of Braid. Interesting look at the behind scenes of game development at this small scale, did make me wonder why anyone would ever put themselves through that.

Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World

How Videogames Changed the World was a two hour look through the history of computer games, presented by Charlie Brooker. We recorded it from Channel 4 on Saturday and it was very much made to be aired around the release dates of PS4 & Xbox One – and Sony had definitely bought a lot of the advertising spots in the breaks! I’d not actually had high hopes going into watching it – I mean, a mainstream programme about games might miss the mark. But it was clearly not just about games, but also by gamers – all the participants “got it”.

The format was a countdown of 25 significant games – although it was almost treated like it was supposed to be a chart it was really a chronological sequence. Most of the first hour of the show was a nostalgia filled trot through my childhood, and then the second half had a lot of games J or I have bought as adults. Very much the target audience for the programme 🙂 As well as Brooker there were lots of other contributors – some games industry figures (journalists or developers) and some relatively random celebrities (most of whom I didn’t know of). Well, they had a love of games & gaming, so not entirely random, but …

As someone who has spent a lot of her life playing computer games it was nice to find few things I’d quibble at. I think the biggest hole I’d pick in the list is that it’d be nice to’ve had something from the simulation/strategy/god game niche that wasn’t just The Sims. I mean, I can see they wanted to talk about The Sims (and had stuff to say specifically about it), but nothing about Civ or Populous or Sim City and not even name checking those felt like an oversight. In general tho I agreed with their choices – they were good or iconic, or in some cases neither but perfectly illustrated the point being made.

It wasn’t just a history of how games have changed, I thought the programme did a good job of showing how they fitted into the culture around them at the time and of illustrating how they’d affected the world. There are many positive ways that games have changed things – Minecraft was one major example used here, because it’s not just a game it can be used to teach things too. And just in general games are more interactive and less passive than, for instance, TV watching. I did have issues with the dismissal of books as less immersive than games, tho 😉

They also spent a bit of time on most of the big issues around gaming and gaming culture – not just the positive aspects of gaming. Obviously they covered the moral panic over video game violence, and equally obviously as a programme by gamers it was heavily on the side of how foolish this moral panic is. But even so space was given to examples that did cross lines – because the point is not that all games are OK for everyone, it’s that demonising all games because of a few is like saying every film ever made is pornographic because filmed porn exists. Another issue discussed was the way that gaming culture can be seen as a bit of a cesspit. The two strands of that that they discussed were again the obvious ones. The treatment of women gamers and particularly women gaming journalists can be abysmal, and CoD on Xbox Live in particular is notorious for foul mouthed teenagers. This is just a vocal minority, as they said on the programme, but it can seem relentless at times and probably more so from the outside.

The last “game” on the list was Twitter, which I felt was a bit of a cop-out and didn’t (to me) actually illustrate their point very well. The point Brooker & co were trying to make was that with the rise of social media and so on more of our day to day life has been gamified. I think there is a point there, but I’m not sure for most people Twitter is that thing. All the people speaking on the programme were in some ways celebrities – in the sense that people will follow them on Twitter because of what or who they are not because of a personal connection. So they were all discussing how things like follower counts are like game scores, and projecting a persona is like having a game avatar or playing an RPG, and you craft tweets for maximum impact. And, well, I’m not sure normal people do that? Maybe everyone else does, I do barely use Twitter myself, so I could be way off base here. What did strike me is how the public in that game of Twitter are the coupons that prove you’re winning (or not) – we’re like the gold coins that Mario collects. Which didn’t seem to be the point Brooker was making, but it’s an interesting one to me.

A good programme, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a look at a culture that’s one of my own 🙂


Other TV watched this week:

The Science of Doctor Who – a lecture by Brian Cox about the physics of space time, and the Fermi paradox.

Episode 1 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

The last episode of David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy – which covered the 19th and 20th Century.

Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide

I recorded Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide before the 50th anniversary special episode aired (post) but we didn’t watch it till afterwards. J’s very spoilerphobic and so we didn’t want to risk it being full of coy “teasers” about the upcoming episode – in retrospect I think they handled it pretty well, there were references to what the story was going to be about but nothing that wasn’t completely obvious from the end of the episode before.

This programme was a look at the whole of the Doctor Who series so far – running through the Doctors, and discussing the iconic companions and monsters. It did this partly with clips from old episodes, and partly by interviewing people who’d been in those episodes … and partly by interviews with “celebrities”. The scare quotes are there because I didn’t actually recognise many if any of the non-Doctor Who people (and in fact I didn’t recognise all the Doctor Who ones, Sophie Aldred no longer looks much like Ace for instance). I’m sure they’re all famous if you’re up on your modern pop culture … There were also a couple of framing vignettes with the 11th Doctor & Clara about the Doctor losing his memory, and there was a voiceover from Russell Tovey pulling the whole thing together. And someone had clearly had a lot of fun assembling clips from a wide range of episodes to have the Doctor respond to or join in with the commentary.

Obviously all the Doctors (including 8, but not the War Doctor) were covered. They had clips from everybody and tried to give some sense of the personality of that particular Doctor and what each actor had brought to the part. That was a bit more fleshed out when you got to the Fifth Doctor and onwards (except for Nine) as the actors were part of the show so could actually say what was in their minds. I’ve watched almost every episode since sometime early in the Fifth Doctor’s run, so a lot of the later stuff was very nostalgia fueled for me. It’s always a little odd for me to see the gushing over the Fourth Doctor, because I didn’t really see many of his episodes (perhaps only one at the time? I’ve watched Genesis of the Daleks since). So I’ve never been as fond of his interpretation as everyone else seems to be – the Seven/Ace era is the best of Old Who as far as I’m concerned. This programme did make me want to seek out the earlier Doctor’s stories though, but I think I’ll look for (library) books. J and I did try & watch through some Old Who serials a few years ago, and I think it’s my fault we gave up – my tolerance for televised fiction is variable and low, and the less modern pacing/story-telling drove me batty.

The companions weren’t as exhaustively covered – and the selection was a little odd, I thought. Like Susan was name-checked (and we had a clip of her departure) but Ian and Barbara weren’t mentioned by name (tho they were in some clips iirc). Obviously Sarah Jane Smith got some attention – and it was suggested that she was the first to have an actual consistent character, rather than being a scream-on-demand-question-asker – partly because she’s the one who returned in New Who, and partly because the actress (Elisabeth Sladen) recently died. Oh, and she was the iconic Fourth Doctor companion, in many ways. And that was also odd – we had SJS and Leela name checked, but not Romana. Tegan completely missed out (except a mention in a clip) and Peri really only talked about for her outfits. And because the Fifth Doctor’s death scene was memorable mostly for the camera angle straight down Peri’s cleavage … Ace did get a few mentions (yay!) and we got to see her beating up a Dalek with a baseball bat, but the Nitro 9 was kinda noted in passing and not dwelt on. Once into the modern era I think everyone got name checked, and a little bit of chat. Not everyone was interviewed, but a fair few were (including the guy who played Adam who I’d almost forgotten about).

Monsters were the obvious ones, really – a lot mentioned in passing, but we dwelt on the Daleks and the Cybermen. And the Master plus sidenotes on the rest of the Time Lords. I was entertained by the clip of the 2nd Doctor holding forth about how the Time Lords’ non-interference policy was immoral, because of course the modern era has had the Time Lords being far too keen to interact with the rest of the universe. And there was some talk about how in the modern era the alien races aren’t as often presented as monolithic – like there’s Strax the Sontaran who isn’t an enemy. There’s more of a sense of every race (short of the Daleks & Cybermen) as having good people and bad people and those that’re in between.

I’ve missed loads of stuff, I think – it was a fairly information dense show, not surprising given it was covering 50 years of back story both from a outside and inside perspective. It was a lot of fun to watch as a Doctor Who fan, and I’d recommend watching it if you are. Although if you’re the sort of person who knows every detail inside out I suspect you’ll find it shallow, and it’s very much focussed on celebration so there’s nothing about why it was cancelled back at the end of the 7th Doctor’s run or anything like that. The closest they get to negative is Colin Baker mentioning that a lot of people didn’t much like his Doctor at the time, and saying the outfit wasn’t what he’d’ve preferred.


Other tv watched this week:

The last episode of A Hundred Years of Us: a superficial look at how British society has changed over the last 100 years.

Timeshift: When Coal Was King: a programme using footage from the Mining Review features in cinemas in the 50s & 60s to look at what the mining community was like during that era.

Editorial note: I’m still trying to find the right way to write up TV from the week without it turning into a chore and taking over the blog. For now I’ll be writing about one or two programmes in depth, and just name checking the rest.

TV This Week Including Cave Paintings, Ceramics and Music

David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy

We watched episodes two and three of David Starkey’s series about music and the English/British monarchy this week. In the second episode he covered the 17th Century and an important theme of this era was the battles between the Puritans and the Royalists – in this context a major one was over the place of music in the church. Church organs, for instance, were a great source of discord between the two camps – with the Puritans firmly on the side of keeping them out of worship. The third episode was mostly about Handel (and I was surprised how much of the music in that one I instantly recognised) – he came to England to write operas, originally, and stayed after the Hanoverians took the throne to write a lot of the ceremonial and public music of the period. Georges I, II and III were fans and he got commissions like the writing of the coronation anthems for George II for this reason. As the role of the monarchy shifted to be more ceremonial & less powerful the music they commissioned stopped being just religious or ceremonial in nature and became entertainment. This episode also covered the development of the national anthem – apparently Britain has the oldest national anthem of any country. Interestingly not imposed from outside, but instead it started as a gesture of support for the monarchy during a troubled time and grew in popularity.

Ceramics: How it Works

The third episode of Mark Miodownik’s materials science series was all about ceramics, how they’re made, what their properties are and how they’re used. I hadn’t realised before watching the programme that glass can be grouped in with pottery. One juxtaposition between this programme and the one about plastics is that ceramics is all “old tech” that we may’ve refined but have known about for millennia. The Romans had enough command of glass making technology to make windows (not just bottles and drinking glasses) – but we’ve developed ways of producing purer and more consistent glass (making things like cheap pint glasses a possibility). And we’ve made closer to perfect glass sheets, which are much stronger than glass made using older technology. For pottery it’s porcelain that’s the developed form – the Chinese got there first, but in the West it took centuries after porcelain was known of to figure out how to make it. And the third material Miodownik discussed was concrete – again the Romans used it extensively, our modern wrinkle was to figure out how to reinforce it to let it carry heavier loads.

This series was really good – Miodownik’s enthusiasm for his subject was infectious, and there was plenty of stuff both historical & modern that I didn’t know in advance 🙂

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

We recorded this film about the Chauvet cave paintings off Film 4, and weren’t quite sure what to expect. It was made by Werner Herzog, and was partly showing us the cave paintings and partly about the cave paintings and the study of them. You could tell it wasn’t a British made programme – not just the accents of all the participants, but also it had a different sensibility to it. I don’t think I could articulate what was different, just that it was. And it had quite an odd epilogue about albino crocodiles which was trying to make some point about how one sees the world, I don’t think I followed what Herzog was doing with that at all. The best bits of the film were the bits where it just showed us the paintings (with suitably atmospheric music), because it’s not somewhere we’ll ever get to go & see – access is controlled and even the people studying it aren’t allowed to stay in the cave for long. The science etc was also interesting, but it’s also an exercise in displaying how little we’ll ever know – we can date them and so on, but we can only speculate about what they meant or why they were made.

TV This Week Including Congo, Evolution and Egyptian Mummies

Dan Snow’s History of Congo

This programme falls into the category of incredibly depressing stories about the state of the world. Dan Snow visits Congo and tells us about the history of this region of Africa – and how it’s been screwed over first by European colonial powers and subsequently by homegrown dictators & rebels (propped up by the West). Congo has vast reserves of natural resources, yet the people who’ve been in power over the last hundred and fifty years have all been very good at making the profits disappear into private hands, leaving the country one of the poorest in the world. Also depressing is how little I knew about the country before I watched this programme. Worth watching.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This programme was part a biography of Darwin, part a trip down memory lane for David Attenborough and part a discussion of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Rather surreally it was presented by current David Attenborough and co-presented by David Attenborough from 30 or so years ago. I mean that they re-used footage from earlier serieses of his, including Life on Earth (which I don’t actually remember watching as a child, but I remember getting the book out of the library multiple times). It ended up feeling like a programme which had a strict budget – not just the re-used old footage, but also an animation of the tree of life which had been made by someone else. There wasn’t really anything new to me in the programme, but it was a pretty good round up of the subject.

Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy

This programme was a cut down version of the two hour film that Chris Naunton made about Tutankhamun’s death, which we watched a couple of months ago while visiting J’s parents. I think this one hour version was actually a bit more coherent than the longer film – and it definitely had less of Naunton pretending not to know things so he could ask people leading questions. (Yes, I know that’s part of how you write the script for one of these, but it doesn’t mean I like it much when it’s obvious.) The programme looks at the mummy of Tutankhamun and presents a theory about his death and mummification to explain the physical evidence. As I said the last time I wrote about this programme “determining” the cause of death of Tutankhamun is always an exercise in deciding which wounds you think are real and which you think are artifacts of the mummification process and subsequent treatment of the mummy. Naunton & co’s theory was based around the significant damage in a straight line from Tutankhamun’s left shoulder to left hip, and the missing heart and sternum. They used modern crash simulation technology to show that a chariot crashing into a kneeling Tutankhamun would produce injuries consistent with those on the mummy – and suggest it’s possible this happened during a battle. But I’m pretty sure other egyptologists think those wounds are a red herring – there are also candidate wounds in one of his legs, for instance.

The more convincing theory they propose is the one that explains why the mummy is charred (hence the title of this incarnation of the programme). The basic idea is that the mummification of Tutankhamun was rushed and the oils used as part of the ritual weren’t allowed to dry out enough before he was wrapped up and put in his coffin. They suggest this would be down to the political situation at the time – Tutankhamun’s named successor was Horemheb, but his actual successor was Ay so there’s a suggestion that Ay seized power and buried Tutankhamun as quickly as possible (and they also suggest he was interred in Ay’s tomb, with Ay later being buried in a bigger tomb originally intended for Tutankhamun). But anyway, he was buried a bit too quickly, still damp from the oils – and some oils as they dry heat up. In particular linseed oil which Naunton did a test with and showed that oily rags bundled up as if they were in a mummy will very quickly reach over 300°C – sadly he didn’t say if linseed oil was one of the oils used in mummification, but I assume something similar is. So it is very likely that Tutankhamun smouldered away in his coffin after burial, and that this explains the charred appearance of the mummy.

TV This Week Including Witches, Sir Gawain, Ottomans, Musical History, Plastic & 20th Century Britons

The King’s War on Witches: Revealed

This Channel 5 documentary was about the witch hunts in England and Scotland in the 17th Century. As context it talked a little about the witch trials in Europe, which hadn’t spread to England & Scotland until after James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) began to believe he was the target of a conspiracy of witches trying to assassinate him. As the programme pointed out he’d been the target of more physical assassination attempts several times by the time of his wedding, so when a fierce storm blew up on his & his new wife’s way home from Denmark it didn’t take much of a leap of imagination for him to believe it was deliberately raised to kill him. Once safely home he had several local wise women, or cunning folk, and healers rounded up and eventually under torture some confessed to the witchcraft and assassination attempt and were burnt at the stake. James went on to write a book about hunting witches – what they could do, where they got their powers, what to look out for, what evidence was valid in court of law and so on. This became the primary text used throughout both countries – the programme detailed a few specific cases where women ran afoul of witchfinders and were burnt to death. It also showed some recent archaeological evidence that practices that James VI & I would’ve defined at witchcraft were continuing until at least the 1970s. These were some pits excavated in Cornwall that contain animal or bird skins and eggs, and appear to’ve been ritually laid in the earth at various points in time – one included some plastic, hence the “into the modern day” part.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Simon Armitage has translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the original Middle English into modern English, and this programme was partly telling us the story of the poem and partly about translating the poem. Armitage walked through the sorts of landscapes mentioned in the poem, mostly in the pouring rain, to conjure up the world of the story. Gawain is one of King Arthur’s knights, and one New Year’s Eve a green knight comes to Camelot and challenges the knights – is one of them brave enough to cut off his head, knowing that a year later the knight must go to him and he will cut off the knight’s head in return. Gawain steps up to the challenge, and most of the poem details his journey a year later going to his destiny.

The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors

The third and final episode of this series about the Ottoman Empire was mostly about the aftermath of its collapse, and the repercussions of that that are still being felt today. The Empire was torn apart partly by rising nationalist feeling, and partly by the Allies after the end of WWI – the Ottomans had been on Germany’s side. The first half of the programme was a catalogue of states & empires behaving poorly, and the horrific consequences. This included genocide of Armenian Christians by the splintering Ottoman Empire, brutalities brought about by the Greek invasion of Turkey (sponsored by the British, and leading to a “population exchange” where families with roots centuries deep in one country or another were deported “home” as defined by their religion), and the various problems caused by the British Empire promising the same land to multiple groups during WWI. In the second half of the programme Omaar concentrated on Turkey, as both the former heartland of the Ottoman Empire and as one of the success stories of the region. This was less unrelentingly bleak – although when discussing Attaturk Omaar did say that he “wasn’t as bad as Stalin or Chairman Mao” which strikes me as damning with faint praise! Attaturk and his successors strongly believed that the road to success was to Westernise, and that this meant secularise. The tone of the programme was disapproving of this, but some of the interviewees were much more positive (including a woman who’d been a child during Attaturk’s initial reforms and who felt her life was much better as a result of the rights given to women). Modern Turkey has managed to combine both democracy and being an Islamic state, and is also beginning to rehabilitate the reputation of the Ottoman Empire.

This was an odd series in some ways – there were several times when I thought Omaar was glossing over things in an attempt to make the Ottomans sound more tolerant than they actually were. And that continued with a blasé handwave past the more recent protests in Turkey as not really important. However it was still interesting (and reminded me how little I know about the Ottomans in general).

David Starkey’s Music & Monarchy

In this series David Starkey is going to tell us all about the impact the English monarchy has had on English music. It boasts newly recorded performances of the various examples, all of which seem to have Starkey standing or sitting and listening in a pseudo-regal style … The first episode took us from Henry V through to Elizabeth I. Along the way he told us (and showed us) how English church music evolved into a complex (and highly respected) art form. Henry V was a composer himself, as well as a pious man who felt that the best way to get God on his side was to make sure His praises were sung in the best possible way. The story also covered how the foundations of both Eton & King’s College, Cambridge were due to Henry VI’s piety and desire for choirs to praise the glory of God. Henry VIII’s break with Rome was almost disastrous for English church music – although Henry himself kept music as part of church services his much more radically Protestant son wanted to abolish all of that. The day is only saved by Elizabeth’s return to a third way between Protestantism & Roman Catholicism – and her Chapel Royal performed a lot of music as part of services (and leading composers such as Thomas Talis & William Byrd flourished during her reign).

Plastic: How It Works

This is the second episode of Mark Miodownik’s materials series – all about plastics, which he’s defining broadly to encompass any and all artificially created materials. It was a mix of history and chemistry, and started with the discovery of the vulcanisation process for rubber. The first century and more of plastic creation was all about chemical reactions that were poorly understood – Miodownik told us about the atomic structure & properties of these materials but the people creating them often didn’t understand it. In the second half of the 20th Century materials begin to be designed, and this is when plastics made from oil start to be created – the key realisation was that what you wanted to do was polymerise carbon based monomers, and that oil is rich in these building blocks. And the last third of the programme was about the future – we’re turning back to look at biological substances and then trying to engineer new materials with those properties. For instance a sticky tape that uses the same structure as hairs on beetle’s feet to grip glass without glue – demonstrated by sticking a handle to a suspended glass panel & Miodownik dangled from it. He also talked about upcoming medical technology – scaffolding material that encourages cartilage regeneration, for instance.

A Hundred Years of Us

There’s still just enough interesting content in these that we’re continuing to watch – the fourth episode included some fascinating stuff about GI babies. They’d interviewed a woman who was the daughter of an English woman & a black American soldier – she was given up to an orphanage at birth, and subsequently adopted by a family in a Welsh mining village. She did eventually track her parents down – her mother didn’t want anything to do with her because her husband knew nothing about the child & would divorce her if he knew. And her father had died before she could find him, which was also sad. Another interesting segment was about the women sewing machinists who went out on strike for equal pay back in the 60s. The main guest on the programme was Gloria Hunniford who had various anecdotes about the different segments as they related to her – the one that sticks in my mind was when discussing rationing she talked about her mother getting caught smuggling a pair of shoes back into Northern Ireland (from Dublin) in her knickers. Which … how does that even work??

This Week’s TV including Games, Antigua, Vikings, Ottomans, and Iron Age & 20th Century Britons

Games Britannia

This is a three part series about the history of games in Britain, presented by Benjamin Woolley – we only recorded the first one which was the earlier history. Just as well, I think as he got closer to the modern day I’d’ve got more irritated with him (a throwaway remark in his intro to the theme of the series about how “these days teenage boys play video games” put my hackles up …). Other infelicities included showing a picture from an Egyptian relief of a game of senet and talking about it as if it was an ancestor of chess (unlikely, I think it’s believed to be more like a race game than a war game). And an assumption that an Iron Age game board must’ve been for divination purposes and meant this burial was of a druid … which, er, why does everything “primitive people” do have to have deep religious significance? Can’t a game be a game?

Otherwise it was an interesting survey of games from Iron Age Britain to late Victorian times. The earlier periods are represented by a small handful of games we don’t really know the rules for any more, except Nine Men’s Morris – which you find boards for scratched into the stonework in cathedral cloisters & so on, and it’s a game that is found in some variant form or another right across the world. The games we’d recognise today start to come in after contact with the east – some brought back by crusaders etc and later from India. I didn’t know that Snakes & Ladders derived from a Hindu game that was more of a teaching tool about the Hindu religion that a game per se. Odd to note that this game was altered to remove the message behind it during the same time period that teaching games were being churned out by Victorian moralists – lots of games where the point was to race to the end and there’d be various moral snares along the way (“You landed in a tavern, miss two goes”).

Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered

A hurricane in 2010 uncovered 18th Century bones on a beach in Antigua – a place that Horatio Nelson once referred to as a “vile place” and a “dreadful hole”. In this programme Sam Willis followed the (fairly short) archaeological excavation that followed the discovery & told us a bit about the history of Antigua and why it was such an appalling place in the 18th Century. Antigua was important to the British Empire – both strategically and because it, in common with the other Caribbean islands, was where sugar was produced. The beach where the bones were found is in a place now called English Harbour – a natural harbour surrounded by hills where ships could shelter from the hurricanes. An obvious place to make your main base for the area – a couple of forts near the entrance & you can make the whole thing a safe place for your fleet. But the lack of wind & currents causes other problems – anything flung in the water just stays there. Parts of the seabed in the harbour today are feet thick in rubbish, industrial waste from the dockyards went in, any waste from the ships moored there including sewage. So instead of the pretty & clean beach of today the harbour would’ve been a stinking miasma of polluted water & air. Then you add in all the tropical diseases the sailors were exposed to, and the high mortality rate starts to seem reasonable. But then Willis talked to several archaeologists who have an additional theory about what was killing the sailors – lead poisoning from rum. Part of the sugar cane harvest was made into rum, and this was a staple drink for the sailors – they’d have a pint a day as part of their rations. But the rum was made in lead piping and lead distillation tanks, and the people Willis spoke to said the rum would’ve been contaminated. Perhaps not a problem if you had a bit now & again, but for the sailors it would’ve built up quickly.

The archaeological side of the programme was well covered, but was made at an early stage of the investigation – they had a few days of excavation but obviously hadn’t done any further analysis by the time the programme was made. But in that 5 days or so they got half a dozen skeletons from one small trench in the beach – the thought is that if a sailor died on board a ship in the harbour then he’d be hurriedly buried on the beach.

The Viking Sagas

This programme about the Viking Sagas wasn’t one of Janina Ramirez’s better programmes – somewhat padded out with lots of gushing about how wonderful the sagas were (rather than more discussion of the things themselves) at the start and some odd choices for imagery. It did get better as the programme went on, however, as we moved from generic “ooh this is wonderful” to a discussion of one saga in particular. The saga she chose was the Laxdæla saga, a story of lust, love & revenge. The point Ramirez was drawing out was that the Viking sagas were much more realistic than contemporary European literature which was heavy on tales of courtly love, and virtue being rewarded. The sagas are based on real events (in real places) with only a thin veneer of Christian moralising added at a later stage (like Guðrún, one of the protagonists, withdrawing to a nunnery at the end of her life in repentance). Ramirez also made a point of how British people were among those who settled Iceland (mostly women brought as concubines, i.e. sex slaves). And the sagas also influenced more modern British writers – Blake and Tolkein were the examples used.

Worth watching for the scenery & to hear bits of the saga read aloud (in Icelandic, with subtitles) in said scenery. But the In Our Time we listened to earlier in the year on the same subject was more informative (post).

The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors

In the second episode of this series about the Ottoman Empire, Rageh Omaar covers the second half of the empire from Suleiman the Magnificent (or Suleiman the Lawgiver) in the 16th Century through to Abdul Hamid II and the “Sick Old Man of Europe” (nickname for the empire) in the 19th Century. Omaar continues to be more of an apologist for the Ottoman Empire than I’d like (lots of “it was a tolerant place” while glossing over second class citizenship for non-Muslims & children of non-Muslims being taken to be slaves). It was during Suleiman’s time that the Mamluk Empire was conquered – bringing the heartlands of Islam under Ottoman control. Prior to this the Ottomans were only really nominally Muslim, and ruled over a predominantly Christian territory, afterwards they moved more towards embracing their Islamic faith as a mark of their legitimacy as rulers. The Sultan was now also the Caliph, and they imposed a hierarchy on the Islamic clergy where there was previously no such thing. Under Suleiman and his immediate successors the Ottoman Empire pushed its expansion westward – ending up at the gates of Vienna, where they were only defeated by all of Christendom coming together (in effect) to drive them back. The Turks were feared across Europe & from the perspective of Europeans it was very much a Holy War (but not so from the Ottoman perspective, that was about territory). Omaar pointed out that this historical legacy influences the way the more eastern countries of Europe see the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union to this day.

Suleiman’s Ottoman Empire was at its peak, after him & his immediate successors their technological advantage started to be outstripped by a Europe undergoing the Industrial Revolution and entering the Enlightenment era. When Napoleon took his army to Egypt the initial Ottoman reaction was an assumption they were clearly the superior civilisation so their rout by the French & the loss of Egypt was a complete shock. It’s all downhill from there – the Ottomans end up referred to as the Sick Old Man of Europe, and rising nationalist feelings start to tear apart the cohesion of the Empire. The Ottoman dynasty is also seen by parts of the Empire as not Muslim enough – a fundamentalist Muslim group rising in what’s now Saudi Arabia took control of Mecca & Medina for a while, and whilst their rebellion was put down by the Ottomans it was a sign of what was to come.

Which is presumably the subject of the next episode.

Metal: How it Works

Metal: How it Works is the first of a three part series (all called X: How it Works) presented by Mark Miodownik which look at the materials our civilisation is based on. It was a combination of history, engineering & metallurgy, and while it could’ve been quite dry it was saved by the fact that Miodownik is engagingly enthusiastic about the subject. Miodownik took us through the history of metal-working from the early discovery of copper, and then bronze, through iron-working to steel and more modern metals. Along the way he talked about what it is about the atomic structure of metals that makes them behave the way they do (atoms in a crystal lattice, but one where the atoms can slide along and bunch up). As well as the enthusiastic bits about what metal working has let us do there were also a couple of segments about times when our ambition outreached our knowledge & skills. The first of these was about the railway bridge across the Tay, which collapsed under a train during a storm killing everyone on board. Which was the impetus for figuring out steel production – because it was the first indication for Victorian engineers that iron alone wasn’t necessarily the answer to all the world’s engineering problems. And the second was the first passenger planes, where tragically the stresses that repeated pressurisation & depressurisation put on the metal fuselages of planes was only worked out after several catastrophic mid-air failures.

Stories from the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited

The third episode of Stories from the Dark Earth was a very padded hour about two Iron Age burials. Very very padded. Bourton-on-the-Water is a village in the Cotswolds that I’ve been to several times as a child, and apparently underneath its primary school there is a fairly large Iron Age site. As the school has expanded they’ve had archaeologists come in and excavate before they put new buildings up, so much has been unearthed. The original burial (a girl in a rubbish pit) was thought to be singular and perhaps a sign of human sacrifice – so the updated info was first debunking that theory and then discussing the other burials they found in the area. All were of women or girls who were in some way diseased or disabled – they speculate that this may’ve been what set these women apart so that they were buried rather than excarnated (left to decompose before burying the bones). One of the bodies was of an older woman who had clearly been paralysed below the waist for several years (her leg bones were withered) but was otherwise in good health (as far as they could detect) which is an indication that these women were well looked after.

The other burial was a chariot burial found in Yorkshire in a village called Wetwang. Subsequent to the original excavation they’ve found evidence that the chariot was in use before death – ie it wasn’t just for burying the woman with, it was her vehicle in life. The woman in the grave was also disfigured, her skull was lopsided – probably pushed that way by a fairly large hemangioma on one of her cheeks. (Wikipedia says haemangiomas disappear over time mostly going by age 10, so perhaps I misremember what they said on the programme as they seemed to be saying it would still be visible in her later years.) She was buried with a mirror, which they’ve now discovered may’ve been kept in an otter fur bag – which may have symbolic status.

We’ll have a gap before we can watch the fourth episode, for some reason it didn’t record last time it aired so I need to wait till it airs again (soon, I think). In it, I suspect he’ll tell us several hundred times how it’s been “over N years since” the original excavations 😉

A Hundred Years of Us

The third episode of A Hundred Years of Us was more of the same mixture as the other two. Phil Tufnell was irritating as a butler this time (but the butler teaching him was too polite to outright laugh). More interesting was the segment on motorways – brand shiny new in the 1950s and requiring informational films about how you shouldn’t do a U-turn if you missed your exit nor have a picnic on the hard shoulder. And they were empty! There was also an interview with a man who’d moved from Jamaica to England in the early 60s (not on the Windrush, his parents moved over on the Windrush). He talked about both the culture shock and the racism he faced – like how he’d corresponded with an agricultural college when he was still in Jamaica to organise becoming a student once he moved to England. But once he turned up (and turned out black) there was magically no space in any of the classes. He ended up having to get a job as a bus conductor in Birmingham. He was keen to stress how much England has changed for the better since he arrived (although this segment also covered how much it got worse before it got better).