Up Pompeii
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Template:Infobox television Up Pompeii! was a British television comedy series of the 1970s. It was written by, among others, the Carry On films' stalwart Talbot Rothwell and starred Frankie Howerd.
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Plot
Set in ancient Pompeii (pre-eruption) Howerd played a slave, Lurcio (pronounced Lurk-io). The other main characters were Lurcio's bumbling old master, senator Ludicrus Sextus (initially Max Adrian and then Wallas Eaton), the senator's promiscuous wife Ammonia (Elizabeth Larner), his daughter Erotica (Georgina Moon) and his eternally-virginal son Nausius (Kerry Gardner) (who wrote, surprisingly, not very rude odes), along with the Cassandra-esque Senna the Soothsayer (Jeanne Mockford) and Plautus (Willie Rushton). Guest stars included a number of "Carry on Girls" with Barbara Windsor, Wendy Richard and Valerie Leon all having parts.
The set-up was little more than a backdrop for an endless series of double entendres and risqué gags. Howerd was the key to most of the gags and he started each episode with a prologue - a "to camera" that would usually never get finished and rarely had anything at all to do with the actual episode plot.
Although not officially acknowledged as such, the programme was clearly inspired by the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, set in ancient Rome. Howerd had recently played the similar role of the slave Pseudolus in a London stage run of the musical, and there were parallels between some other characters.
There were thirteen 30-minute episodes in two series (March – May and September – October 1970). In addition there were a pilot episode (1969) and two special episodes entitled Further Up Pompeii, one in 1975 and the other in 1991. The latter sparked speculation that there could be a new series, before Howerd's death in 1992 put an end to any such prospect.
Films and sequels
The show "inspired" three films. The first was also called Up Pompeii (1971) and added such characters as Bilius, Voluptua, Scrubba and Villanus. The film ended with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and had a brief epilogue in which Howerd played a modern-day museum guide showing off the petrified remains of the Pompeiian characters. It was produced by Ned Sherrin.
The two sequels were Up the Chastity Belt (1971) and Up the Front (1972), which transported Howerd's servile, cowardly character to Medieval times and World War I, respectively, in a similar way to the later Blackadder shows starring Rowan Atkinson.
The show also inspired a similar TV series, Whoops Baghdad, also starring Frankie Howerd. A quasi-follow up, Then Churchill Said To Me, in which Howerd played Winston Churchill's office cleaner during World War II, was produced in 1982 but not broadcast until after Howerd's death (on satellite channel UK Gold) due to BBC concerns about offending the public in view of the then Falklands War.
In 1988, Howerd asked one of his writers, Miles Tredinnick, to work on an updated stage version of Up Pompeii! for a proposed national UK tour. However, the play was put on the shelf when Howerd was offered a chance by Larry Gelbart to reprise his role as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum at the Piccadilly Theatre in London's West End.
DVD release?
A complete release of the series on DVD may soon come to pass. No complete home video release has yet been undertaken due to the nature of the videotape master materials. Like many television series made before the advent of the collectable VHS, master tapes of British television productions were often thought to be worthless and erased to be reused (for such reasons as copyright restrictions allowing only one repeat, black & white series being determined as unrepeatable with the advent of colour, and even a physical lack of the necessary archival storage space). In the case of Up Pompeii! (and many others, including most notably Doctor Who), copies sold internationally were, once their broadcasts had occurred, contractually obliged to be returned to the BBC or destroyed.
In the late 1970s, following a change in the BBC's archival policy and a general search for old BBC material, missing episodes of Up Pompeii! were located in the Canadian CBC archive. Due to the differences in international broadcasting, these copies had been converted to the North American NTSC television videotape standard. Thus, one chunk of the series remained in their native PAL format, and another was found in a poorly-converted (dating long before digital conversion methods) NTSC state. The picture quality of some of the Canadian finds was not up to the exacting standards of the BBC, and so their marketablilty was severely limited. A VHS release was therefore considered to be out of the question.
In 2004/2005, through the success of a group of BBC employees' restoration work on similar NTSC-only productions of Doctor Who (specifically the Jon Pertwee adventure The Claws of Axos), the BBC decided to convert all their NTSC-only productions (as reclaimed from various international stations) back to their original PAL format using a new computer-controlled process, Reverse Standards Conversion. A PAL-like, higher-quality image resulted in a more stable picture and more enjoyable viewing experience for an audience. And so, after 35 years, a complete and restored Up Pompeii! may once again be available.
List of episodes
Pilot (BBC2)
- Comedy Playhouse: "Up Pompeii!" (17 September 1969)
Series 1 (BBC2)
- "Vestal Virgins" (30 March 1970)
- "The Ides Of March" (6 April 1970)
- "The Senator And The Asp" (13 April 1970)
- "Britaniccus" (20 April 1970)
- "The Actors" (27 April 1970)
- "Spartacus" (4 May 1970)
- "The Love Potion" (11 May 1970)
Series 2 (BBC2)
- "The Legacy" (14 September 1970)
- "Roman Holiday" (21 September 1970)
- "James Bondus" (28 September 1970)
- "The Peace Treaty" (5 October 1970)
- "Nymphia" (12 October 1970)
- "Exodus" (19 October 1970)
Special (BBC2)
Special (ITV/LWT)
- "Further Up Pompeii" (14 December 1991)