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whiskyinmind
whiskyinmind
04 December 2005 @ 10:07 pm
 
The BBC have been running an odd kinda docudrama type thing over the last few weeks on Sunday nights. Egypt. It won't be a surprise that I've been pretty interested in this programme and had been quite excited about it.

The premise - dramtisations of the lives of some of the most prominent recent Egyptologists and how that relates to their discoveries. (For example, the first two-parter was a dramatisation of Howard Carter's time in Egypt and threw in some snippets about the life of Tutankhamun)

This week (and last) was about Jean Francois Champolion. The French linguist who cracked the hieroglyph code and as a result is the source of everything we know about Ancient Egypt.

I'm a linguist, I kinda am the she-Giles in that I work in a library and I speak (or read) a scary amount of languages. Expose me to a language and within a couple of weeks I can get by in it, give me a couple of months and I could be damn near fluent. (Hell I was even reading a Polish newspaper the other day at work!) I was really looking forward to the second part of this story.

It sucked.

It was extremely badly written, it raised many points of interest and then never concluded them, it spent the last five minutes of the show talking about Tutankhamun. I guess the programme makers were expecting people to be bored of the shots of papyrii and in need of some 'ooo! Gold! Pretty!' moments.

I was really disappointed in the programme. It could have been great, it wasn't.

Still, the guy they hired to play Champolion was pretty good for eye candy purposes... (just in case you were under the impression I'd gone all deep there, see? I'm still shallow!)
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[identity profile] velvetwhip.livejournal.com on December 4th, 2005 02:25 pm (UTC)
I a so sorry about that! That's just terrible!

BTW, one of my teachers at school was rather like you. He spoke 15 languages fluently!


Gabrielle
[identity profile] whiskyinmind.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 12:33 am (UTC)
15 languages? That's impressive!

I should be used to the BBC by now, they have this knack of suckering me into something which starts off really well then ends up being lacklustre. I know that most people have never heard of Champolion, I know that the story of Carter and the discovery of Tut's tomb is the one thing most people are interested in, but if they'd just done a little more work they could have used that interest and brought people into the world of Egyptology.
[identity profile] velvetwhip.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 10:22 am (UTC)
He was learning Hungarian last time I saw him...


I hate it when shows only focus on the most well-known people...how can you ever learn anything if they only tell you what you already know?


Gabrielle
[identity profile] smhwpf.livejournal.com on December 4th, 2005 03:58 pm (UTC)
Why am I not surprised?

Impression I get with most of these TV history programmes (especially the ones dealing with older/more obscure topics) is that they might be very interesting to someone who knows very little about the subject, but are generally going to be a severe disappointment to anyone with a significant amount of knowledge. And they are always heavily packaged for entertainment value, with lots of music and images and dramatic tones and talking heads adding up to a lot of time to convey very little actual information.

Expose me to a language and within a couple of weeks I can get by in it, give me a couple of months and I could be damn near fluent.

That is a serious talent. And Polish? That is a gorram impenetrable-looking language!
[identity profile] whiskyinmind.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 12:43 am (UTC)
The format of the show worked really well for the first part - the Carter story - and I guess that's the one story most people will have at least have heard of so I understand them spending the longest developing that one, although I was arguing with the TV about some of the things they implied about Tut (wouldn't have been me if I hadn't found flaws in it somewhere...) but I still think they could have used that interest - the 'ooo! Gold! Pretty!' interest - and made it a launchpad into the other tales.

It just felt as if they'd been given a remit to tell three stories (or maybe more, I haven't checked if it's on next week or not but I doubt it) and got bored after the first.

And Polish isn't that bad once you get the hang of it - I've never read it before, but one of the newspapers - Rzeczpospolita - came in last week with huge sections of the front page blacked out - as if a censor had taken a black marker to it. The girl who opened it up had no clue what had happened so she gave it to me. It was an Amnesty International campaign saying "if you lived in Bielorus this is what you'd be reading" - very cleverly done. Polish could be fun though, it seems to be mostly germanic but with heavy romantic influences in it - I got the hang of it within about 200 words, there's no way I could write anything and I'd need a dictionary handy for a while, but right now I think I could at least get the gist of it.
[identity profile] thedothatgirl.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 02:14 am (UTC)
Ok, Polish - now you are just showing off ;)

I'm with you on the Egypt thing, obviously the Carter episodes were supported by actual documentation and footage, so I guess the BBC had less scope for huge leaps of imagination etc.

The others Belzoni (sp?) and Champolion they had to pad it out and make all those assumptions. The last scene had me yelling at the TV when they suggested that Champolion died not from the Stroke (or drinking that Nile water with all the crud floating in it) but from some romantic idea that it was all too much for him - pfft.

I have been watching the Dan Cruikshank short programs on BBC2 that run after - much more enjoyable. He has also been visiting the Temples we saw when we were there and it was great to hear his intepretation of the images & hieroglyphs.

[identity profile] whiskyinmind.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 02:51 am (UTC)
I watched the Dan Cruikshank thing last week and found him a little too much to take at that time of night. He seemed a little obsessed by phallic symbols "Oh look! Here's the hieroglyph for penis!" (Plus, he missed out a lot of factual information from the Harem Conspiracy to murder Remeses III in that episode) If it's still on next week I'll give it another go though!

The water thing bugged me a lot - that was one of the 'plot points' (for wont of a better term) which seemed to be set up and abandoned. Yes the actual events took place too long ago to actually have solid information about, but that didn't stop the conjecture about Belzoni or Carter so... *g*
[identity profile] thedothatgirl.livejournal.com on December 5th, 2005 04:54 am (UTC)
Phallic symbols huh? I dropped off to sleep in at the end of last weeks ep - knew I would miss something though....

I wish the Beeb would either do a drama or a proper documentary I hate these combination things - but I guess that isn't going to happen. Yeah the water thing was annoying - even if you drink their 'normal' water you end up with the 'gyppie' tummy . Not nice at all, almost the curse of the pharoahs. *g*