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10 October 2013

BBC’s Atlantis: “family friendly” drama gone wrong

The trouble with Atlantis isn’t that the drama is so lame; it's that its jokes are.

By Rachel Cooke

Atlantis
BBC1

Splosh! And with that sound, a small submarine containing a dishy but slightly fey young man – think Benedict Cumberbatch in a luxuriantly curly wig – enters the murky water. Jason, for that is his name, is in search of his father, whose own submarine has long lain at the bottom of the seabed somewhere nearby. As this series is called Atlantis (Saturdays, 8.25pm), however, we know exactly what will happen next.

Boom! Jason’s vessel is soon in a calamitous accident. He blacks out and when he wakes up he is lying on a warm beach, stark naked. A pile of (admittedly somewhat oldfashioned) clothes has been left on the sand, so he pulls them on and, to the sound of various Enya-like warblings (the sort of stuff that gets played on a British Airways plane as you taxi to the stand), he walks across the dunes until he sees . . . But, lo! What is this glorious sight up ahead? Is it Mykonos? Carcassonne? Euro Disney?

Welcome, then, to the BBC’s new Saturday night drama, which is basically Merlin with added sunshine and sand. It stars Jack Donnelly as Jason of golden fleece fame, Mark Addy as Hercules the demi-god and Robert Emms as Pythagoras, “the triangle guy”.

Indeed. Well spotted. This is something of a mash-up, historically speaking, its writer, Howard Overman (Hotel Babylon, New Tricks, Dirk Gently), apparently having leafed through a children’s treasury of myth and fable, picked out a few favourites, and then thrown in a real-life maths geek for good measure. Medusa, too, will shortly appear, in the form of the pouting Jemima Rooper, while the ruler of this version of Atlantis is King Minos of Crete (Alexander Siddig).

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But why worry? Atlantis isn’t, you understand, intended to be high art. It’s not even intended to be competition for Game of Thrones. This is – dread phrase – a family friendly drama, with a CGI dragon for the children and Sarah Parish channelling Joan Collins as Alexis Colby for the adults. Parish, her earrings jangling, her kaftan wafting and her upper lip trembling like a whippet in a breeze, plays Queen Pasiphaë.

If only they’d made it a little sillier! I kept thinking, longingly, of Patrick Duffy in the 1970s show Man from Atlantis, in which his character, the sole survivor of the “lost” city, had webbed hands and feet and did top-secret research for the US government. More weirdly still, I also recalled Manimal, the 1980s series in which Simon MacCorkindale played a guy who could turn himself into any animal, a skill that proved highly useful when it came to helping the police solve difficult crimes.

The trouble with Atlantis isn’t that the drama is so lame (in the first episode, to no one’s very great surprise, Jason killed the Minotaur and thus saved the people from having to make any more human sacrifices to it); it’s that its jokes are. Pythagoras, for instance, is a drip who wants only to talk about the hypotenuse and Hercules is a podgy coward who longs to run away to Patmos, where there are lots of lovely women to be found.

Naturally, when Hercules mentioned Patmos, I was waiting for Jason to say: “I’ll come with you! I can get the ferry to Rhodes from there and thence an easyJet flight to Luton.” But no dice. It isn’t that kind of show at all. Xylophones play in comedy moments but that’s almost the only way to tell that one is supposed to be rolling in the aisles. After just 24 hours, Jason has decided that he really likes Atlantis – especially King Minos’s foxy daughter, Ariadne (Aiysha Hart) – and that he misses his TV, computer and toothbrush not one bit. Perhaps it’s because the necklace his sainted father left him – a Bonnie Tyler-style leather thong that might have come straight from Camden Market – finally looks vaguely fashionable among all the togas and sandals.

The only person who seems not to be taking Atlantis entirely seriously is Juliet Stevenson, who plays the Oracle and looks to me as though she might corpse at any moment. And no wonder. It’s a long way from Rada and the RSC to speaking gobbledegook in a former Tesco cold store in Chepstow (which is where, or so I read, much of Atlantis was filmed). “Ooh jah minj ja voo leee boo boo,” she burbles as she wanders the temple, wide of eye and wild of hair.

The Oracle is, I’m afraid, more like the batty old woman you avoid sitting next to on the number 38 bus than the fount of all wisdom, although she does a nice line in scented candles. In spite of this, Jason appears to buy every word. Like lots of people who shop at Camden Market, he is a sucker for incense and fortune-telling. If she offers to pierce his eyebrow, he’ll be her slave for life.

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