10-22-18
Mary Beard: I refuse shows that feature B-list actors in costume
Historians in the Newstags: mary beard
Prof Mary Beard says historical reconstructions are “excruciating” and she agrees to front TV documentaries only if there is a ban on anyone appearing in period costume.
The TV presenter and historian said she would tell producers there must be “no drama reconstructions in any programme made by me; no B-list actors dressed up in sheets, saying ‘Do pass the grapes, Marcus.’
“I insisted … there should be none of those awful scenes where some none-too-good actors pretend to be Romans at a banquet or recreate the scene of the death of Socrates or whatever,” Beard will say in a speech to the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, a consumer group that champions public service broadcasting.
“I’m not talking about the excellent [broadcaster] Lucy Worsley here; Lucy trying clothes on is rather different.”
Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, will say she finds drama reconstruction “excruciating to watch”, adding that there is a “bigger historical issue at stake”. ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History