Rome, BBC2, 9pm
Taggart, ITV1, 9pm
YOU get a more learned class of reader here at The Herald. My recent review of Rome inspired someone styling himself Romulus (he claims to reside in Rome - where else?) to e-mail a Latin inscription: "Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimus exponebantur ad necem."
Subsequent inquiries - which are naturally open to challenge and correction from Romulus's brother, Remus - have established that this translates as: "In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags."
Was Romulus addressing himself directly to me, expressing a wish that I be extinguished for some unspecified transgression? Or was he seizing an unexpected chance to show off his mastery of Latin quotations? I may never know.
I do know, however, that Rome is becoming an ever-more silly historical toga-shredder. In particular, hunky Ray Stevenson should be having a word with his agent, pronto.
Here's a delighted Ray being told he's landed a prestigious role in an BBC-HBO transatlantic epic, when what he's actually got is a job as tightly-pullovered Titus Pullo, a hunky second banana who speaks almost exclusively in stand-up comedy punchlines and impressions.
One of Ray's lines constituted an impersonation of Vic Reeves ("I couldn't let it lie"). At different junctures, Ray also had to walk into camera-shot chortling "I swear to you four nipples!" and "A cow can't have three balls!"
These curious pay-offs surely derived from foul jokes delivered by the late Bernard Manning (all Ray needed for the full set, incidentally, was "He fell out o' one o' them gun-towers!" and "No, use yer finger like everybody else!").
But I digress. In addition, Ray was required to evoke Little Britain's Vicky Pollard or Catherine Tate's unbovvered Lauren Cooper by declaiming: "Well, there's lies and there's lies - innit?" in the manner of a truculent modern London teenage miss. Ray's face should be wearing its most bovvered look: in career terms, he's been sold a pup.
More ridiculously still, Rome lacked everything we've come to value about Rome: unfettered nudey roistering and blood-soaked scenes of senseless slaughter.
Twenty minutes elapsed before we got any gore, and even then it was just a ritual thanksgiving chicken-slaying, followed by a mild facial entrails-daubing.
A promising-looking orgy was then ended in its early stages. Thankfully, though, the little bit we saw was educational. Thanks to Rome, I now know how to recognise the early stages of an orgy - it is marked by close-quarters topless Sapphic prancing and free-form flute-playing - and I will be able to make my escape before the goers really get going.
Poor DC Jackie Reid went with her womanly intuition, only for it to be it abused in Taggart. First, she made the mistake of falling for a lie spun by the murder victim's husband about his own state of health.
Should Jackie have known not to believe him as soon as she discovered he was a 4x4 SUV-driving eco-criminal?
If her mission had been to save the planet, perhaps.
Jackie was right about him not being the murderer, mind - but she really should have been quicker to sus the youth who was eventually revealed as the culprit.
For he who done it, bloodily erasing a female fiscal finagler, was a Clydeside rent boy who called himself Smike (presumably in honour of Charles Dickens's battered inmate of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby).
The oddest thing about Smike was that he seemed to spend most of his time lurking on Glasgow's gloomier city-centre riverbanks philosophising to the police about the workings of the human heart, rather than attending to his clients. Still, at least he didn't feel the urge to start quoting bits of Latin.
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