The Valley of the Kings, Egypt, and a British archaeologist has a team of turbaned locals scratching and brushing away underground for him. “Mr Carter, sir!” one of them suddenly shouts excitedly. “There is a door!”
Mr Carter – Howard Carter – follows him back into the entrance, sets to work enthusiastically with his crowbar to make an opening, holding up his oil lamp. Can he see anything? I think I know this …
Hold the bus, though. It’s only 1905. There are 17 years, a world war, and four episodes of Tutankhamun (ITV, Sunday) to get through before any “wonderful things”. So this time there’s nothing, another empty chamber, looted centuries earlier.
Carter is played by Max Irons, whose father (Jeremy) made his name being tweeded, side-parted and oiled in an ITV (people forget that about Brideshead) costume drama 35 years ago. You can certainly see it, the family resemblance. Sam Neill plays Carter’s backer, Lord Carnarvon, whose home back in Blighty was Highclere Castle, which would later become the most famous ITV costume drama home of all: Downton Abbey.
Anyway, how to fill in those 17 years? Well, more digging of course. But it can’t just be Time Team with side-partings and turbans. This is Sunday-evening costume drama: where’s the love interest, where are the pretty ladies in period frocks? Here’s one. Maggie Lewis (Catherine Steadman, who was in Downton), from the Met. As in the New York museum, not the London feds. She’s a hot Egyptologist, and she digs Howard, in that way, but he’s more interested in Nefertiti than Maggie. In the end, it takes the assassination of an Austrian archduke, Maggie’s impending departure and a couple of large whiskies for her to strike lucky. “Heaven forfend that you’d miss your chance,” she says, taking his glass, and kissing him. Before leading him to her own oil-lit chamber to show him wonderful things, presumably. Tut tut.
Oh, and there’s Evelyn too, the female variety (unlike Waugh), Carnarvon’s flame-haired daughter, who clearly carries a torch for Howard too. Perhaps there’ll be love rivalry, a love triangle (pyramid?) in the coming episodes. For now she can admire him from the back seat of daddy’s splendid silver Rolls, toot toot, on a trip to Amarna, with the actual pyramids receding in the oval rear window. It’s a journey a young pharaoh made in the opposite direction over 3,000 years earlier.
Tutankhamun doesn’t require an awful lot of thought; more Downton than Brideshead, if we’re going to get snooty about our costume drama – Down-tomb Abbey … you can do better than that, please. Plus, if you haven’t had your head in a sand dune your entire life, then you’ll know exactly where it’s going. With a few extra jollities thrown in along the way, and if they’re not 100% historically accurate, then so what? It’s just a bit of fun. And it is fun.
It’s an archeology special today, because here’s The Greatest Tomb on Earth: Secrets of Ancient China (BBC2, Sunday). Quite a claim, the title, given what came out of the Valley of the Kings almost a century ago. But then this site – the tomb of China’s first emperor in Xian – is 200 times bigger. Great in that sense, certainly. And 8,000 soldiers, a terracotta army, came out of it, in 1974. They’re pretty bloody great.
And, unlike the Valley of the Kings, which really must be dug out by now, this one is still giving up secrets. Historian Dan Snow, anthropologist Alice Roberts and explorer/engineer (basically he’s good at finding ancient buried roads with a drone) Albert Lin are especially interested in the idea that China may not have been as cut off from the rest of the world (the west, specifically) as was thought.
Dan, tall everywhere, is especially tall in China, pretty much a terracotta warrior himself. Or Howard Carter, and Dr Alice would clearly like to measure some of his bone structure, after a couple of whiskies on their last night there. Trouble is Albert – Dr Drone – is in love with her ... all made up, I’m afraid. It doesn’t happen in real life, or if it does, it doesn’t make it into the documentary.
It’s still fascinating. And their conclusion, backed up with DNA evidence, is a bombshell: that there were Europeans around these parts way before Marco Polo showed up. Meaning the terracotta army might have been made by… ancient Greeks! That’s a massive dis to the Chinese isn’t it? But it does go some way to explaining how their ceramic work improved so dramatically and so quickly – from doing Morphs to life-size Dan Snows, almost overnight.
