I was once talking to a Fox PR person just before Titanic, the most expensive film ever made, was released by her studio. The rumours were flying and most of them said it was going to be a turkey. The PR wondered why. If Ford had spent $150m designing a new car, the expectations would be high, not low. But there it was - and our prejudices were duly confounded. I think, in retrospect, we Brits had been confused by the memory of a magnificent Lew Grade flop called Raise the Titanic, of which the great man reportedly said it would have been "cheaper to lower the Atlantic".
Our expectations for BBC2's Rome were rather different. Once, it is true, the ancient world was synonymous with box office disaster. The joke, "Who do I have to sleep with to get out of this movie?", is said to have been coined on the set of Cleopatra sometime in 1962. But since then, toga-sagas have had a better press. The 1970s I, Claudius rates in most people's top ten for television drama. More recently, Gladiator was most boys' idea of a good night out. And there was another reason for us to have high hopes of Rome: it was being made by HBO, source of all clever American television from The Sopranos to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Add the news that the director was Michael Apted, and that some $100m was going to be spent on filming it in the Cinecitta film studios in Rome.
Well, Rome certainly has its merits. The sets are a real change from the usual screen versions of the city that seem to confuse it with Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. The outfits look similarly authentic. There are also so many extras around that the director is confident enough to stage minor military skirmishes as just that. There is a sense of scale and also of intimacy.
But Rome (Wednesdays, 9pm) suffers from one great drawback: it is not very watchable. I kept being reminded of other quality dramas I would prefer to be watching. The Sopranos, with its Italian roots, sprang to mind, but although Rome is as violent as the gangster soap, it somehow lacks its macabre poetry. The plotting in the Senate in episode two - in which a veto is pulled out of the bag at the eleventh hour - was a little like The West Wing, but not enough. The second instalment also features a gruesome operation in which a metal plate is nailed into a man's head. I thought about the crude operations performed by the doc in Deadwood, but here the patient's pain was taken as read, whereas in Deadwood it is the focal point of the scene. The only field in which Rome leads is sex: but although the world will doubtless pay good money to see Polly Walker bouncing about naked as Caesar's niece Atia, I wonder if it might not consider $100m an excessive charge.
The story begins with Julius Caesar, who has spent eight years conquering Gaul, returning to Rome with his 13th division expecting and finding trouble. His old friend Pompey has grown fat and complacent, used to ruling alone. The politicians are at one another's throats and the plebs are restless. The subsequent 11 weeks will lead us through Caesar's return to power to his assassination. Ciaran Hinds has the right dark authority as Caesar. Kenneth Cranham's Pompey lolls around, sluglike in a shroud. It is good to see Mark Antony played by a younger man, although James Purefoy has not yet had much to do in the role. Among the aristocrats, however, the show has so far been stolen by Walker as Atia, who in or out of her dress is the biggest bitch since Joan Collins's Alexis.
It is not all about the nobs. Bruno Heller, the lead writer, has taken two ordinary soldiers from Caesar's The Gallic Wars - in fact the only two that get a mention - and fleshed them out. Lucius Vorenus is a brave centurion with a wife he is a little scared of back home and Titus Pullo is a redneck legionnaire who is in the army for the raping and pillaging (mostly the raping). Their scenes together are about the only touching part of the story so far. Vorenus, played by Kevin McKidd, literally does not know much about women and has to have it explained to him that his wife has a little spot that, once attended to, will make her open up like a flower. How does he know, Vorenus asks suspiciously. "Every woman has one," Pullo replies.
This dialogue, however, is about as good as it has got. The writing is flat, although lines such as "What a dreadful noise the plebs make when they're happy" and "There will be no raping, pillaging or burning" sound a bit Monty Python to my ear. Caesar sends the decapitated head of one of Pompey's men back to him with a note that reads: "Dear Pompey, I believe the enclosed man belongs to you." It is a grave thing when the surrounding dialogue is so uneven that you wonder if a joke is deliberate or not. David Milch with his "cocksucker" dialogue in Deadwood found an idiolect for frontier America. Heller has not found one for Ancient Rome. I am not surprised the BBC has yet to decide whether to help HBO out in financing the next season.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
