Ancient Greece by Train with Alice Roberts, review: Michael Portillo has nothing to fear here
Ancient Greece gave us many things, from mythology to democracy by way of the Olympics, but if I recall my (very) old primary-school project correctly, one thing Archimedes and pals never got around to was a functioning railway system. So Professor Alice Roberts tacking 'by train' on to a whistle-stop tour of the cradle of Western civilisation added novelty value.
Michael Portillo can call off the lawyers: the train connection in Ancient Greece By Train (Channel 4), which turned out be a fairly standard academic tour, was notional at best. It largely consisted of Roberts cheerily asking 'can you drop me at the station' to a passing archaeologist, just so we remembered what was supposed to make this programme different to a million others.
Thankfully the trains in modern Greece appear to run meticulously on time, otherwise this track-based round trip would have been scuppered. It largely consists of Roberts chatting with excitable local academic types – pick of the bunch was Ted, who really can talk, reducing Alice to a bystander in her own show – or gazing admiringly at assorted relics.
It's not clear yet how Roberts intends to take a train to the island of Paros, en route to the final destination Troy, so the theme may come unstuck there. But it scarcely matters, such is her ability to muster genuine enthusiasm for what amounts to a guided tour of museums, digs and crumbling ruins. I'm not entirely sure the intention was to serve as a travel tease, but it did make me want to go back to Greece, so rich is the history.
A bit more rigour would not have gone amiss. Roberts rather unquestioningly swallowed the local view of Alexander the Great as a heroic genius rather than a war-mongering tyrant. Horses for courses, of course, but it sent me scuttling back to my history books. Books not Google! Guess that makes me ancient.
Did I learn anything about Ancient Greece that I didn't garner from that mistily remembered primary-school project? Not really. But it scarcely mattered as the past floated by from a train window in an amiably awestruck travelogue, back to a world where everything must have felt fresh and new. Imagine that.
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