Just drawing British members' attention to Timewatch this coming Friday (5th November) on BBC2 at 9.00pm. All about Alesia and Caesar's campaigns against Vercingetorix. It looks like the legionaries may actually be accurate. <p>Homo Homini Lupus Every Man is a Wolf to Another Man</p><i></i>
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Everything good is on BBC. Come on history channel pick it up. <p></p><i></i>
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I saw Timewatch and was a little disappointed. It never reached far enough into the tactics of Caesar (e.g. the use of allied Gaulish forces) and Vercingetorix (e.g. the fragility of the Gaulish alliance).<br>
What also struck me: the helmets of the Roman legionaries were way to big. Some of them couldn't see a thing before their eyes. Cheek pieces were dangling freely, striking into the face frequently. As if Deepeeka had had a bulk-sale of their huge helmets.<br>
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Anyone else saw it?<br>
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Hans <p></p><i></i>
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Hmmm, I was at least struck by Neil Faulkner's Big-Haired and too-stern-faced support for somebody called VerSINgetorix. Who he? A mad major figure supporting Seezar (what's wrong? Are the Great Unwashed deemed by broadcasters incapable of facing the horrible truth of how these people were really known?) gamely attempted to fill as many meeja-folk stereotype quotas as possible, the sports cars on either side of the river being the biggest laugh. I may have dozed off (who could blame me?) but did nobody mention Reddé's recent excavations at Alesia? If it was dumbed down any further I'd have had to lie on the floor to watch it. Give me CSI any day; at least it's <em>stylish</em> rubbish...<br>
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I didn't think much of it but at least it had some reasonable aerial computer reconstructions of Gergovia and Alesia. The identical Dipeeka(?) Coolus type 'D' helmets and galvinised mail shirts weren't as good as they could have been, and the centurio with the trooper helmet and 'Caesar' in the Hollywood helmet certainly weren't, but at least, for the first time (as far as I know) on television they actually put Caesar's soldiers in mail with oval scuta, and the Coolus type 'D' could concievably have been around as early as the 50sBC. The centurio, for all his inaccuracy, at least wore a crista traversa and led from the front. The Gauls' helmets only came in two varieties (also Dipeeka?) but at least they were based on Celtic helmets for once, and Vercingetorix was kitted out in a mail shirt with 'cape' shoulder doubling and a torq. Not good then, but at least the costume department did a little reading for once and tried to produce something accurate, even if they did not succeed completely (they may have come up against a director with fixed ideas, as we did when we did filming for 'The Real Sparticus' a few years ago and were made to put down our own (hopefully) accurate standards and carry the most excreble 'Hollywoodish' reconstructions I have yet seen of Roman standards, along with a bundle of bamboo poles to represent fasces). Perhaps the director this time had the Hollywood helmet from the props department in the van and insisted it be used.<br>
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Crispvs <p></p><i></i>
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Can you explain, for your trans Atlantic cousins, what was this BBC program? <p></p><i></i>
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