If the BBC made a series out of Bob Guccione’s Caligula, it might be something like this. Room with a View of Poison. Staircase of Scheming. Pond of Sex. And not good sex, either. British nighttime telly sex. The decadence and depravity of ancient Rome ends up liberally mixed with Masterpiece Theater boring.
Oddly enough, the series is a lot better than the simple description makes it sound. What looks at first like a wallow in Roman sleaze turns out to be a halfway effective way to learn some warts-and-all history. And though the slow spots are plenty dull, their dullness makes them all the more chilling because the characters discuss the murdering fates of an empire in what-is-it-Sebastian-I’m-arranging-matches tones.
Almost every episode begins with an aged Emperor Claudius (Derek Jacobi) at the end of his reign, striving to complete his memoirs. This provides the structure for the series, which is a fictional autobiography from Claudius’s perspective. The convention gets tedious after a couple of episodes, but fortunately it never drones on for too long.
The story proper begins before Claudius is even born. His grandmother Livia Drusilla (Sian Phillips) has connived to marry the emperor, Augustus Caesar (Brian Blessed) and will now stop at nothing to cement the claim of her son Tiberius (George Baker) upon the throne. Unfortunately for the rest of the royal family, “stop at nothing” includes everything from petty intrigue to cold-blooded murder.
Into this messy, dangerous world comes young Claudius, a stuttering, limping boy widely assumed to be an idiot. The lad is smart, but he’s good at hiding it. The subterfuge of feigned harmlessness ends up saving him more than once.
As our hero grows old enough to be played by Jacobi, Livia’s intrigue extends to assassinating Augustus himself. The poor ol’ guy is so fearful of being poisoned that he’ll only eat figs straight off the tree. So of course his crafty wife puts the poison straight on the unpicked fruit. A fake will is read, and Tiberius is emperor.
And here’s where the series starts to get good. The new Caesar slips rapidly into paranoia, egged on by his vicious grandnephew Caligula (John Hurt). Convinced that everyone is out to get him, the emperor and his powerful right-hand-man Sejanus (Patrick Stewart) institute a reign of terror. But the old man is old and weak (consumed by a “disease of Venus,” though the show doesn’t say as much), and as a last spot of foolishness he makes Caligula his heir. Stupid man. He lasts around half an episode after that.
The psychotic new emperor begins a tyranny of cruel stunts, not the least of which is proclaiming himself a living god. He’s particularly mean to poor Claudius. Our hero used to be able to protect himself by pretending to be mentally-differently-abled, but no longer. It isn’t that Caligula sees through the ruse. He just doesn’t care. He torments his old uncle not as a matter of political expedience but rather as a way of having a bit of fun.
Fortunately for Claudius, the reign of Little Boots is fairly brief. Unfortunately for him, after Caligula is assassinated, the Praetorian Guard – afraid that they’ll be out of a job if Rome reverts to a republic – seize on Claudius as next in line for the throne and swiftly move to install him as emperor.
From here on out the set settles back into the Masterpiece Theater groove. Claudius tries to establish himself as a wise and just ruler, but his efforts are undone by the usual scheming and by his intensely unfaithful wife Messalina (Sheila White). Despite efforts to spice things up with a lot of sexuality (and even a little nudity), the series sputters to an end with Claudius in a drunken rage ordering his wife’s execution and then in turn being poisoned by his new spouse in order to put her son Nero on the throne. And so it goes.
You can get the essence of the whole 12-episode set from what you just read (or from any other bargain basement history of the Julio-Claudian emperors, if somehow you managed to get here without reading any of the rest of this text). The real charm of the show, however, lies in the details. I was particularly fond of the performance turned in by Jacobi as our long-suffering narrator / hero and Hurt’s over-the-top turn as the over-the-top emperor Caligula.
To be sure, the series has some problems. Almost all the male characters are cowardly blowhards, and almost all the female characters are lascivious conspirators. The women push their menfolk into one plot or another, and it always turns out badly. Yes, it gets old after awhile.
But that’s more than compensated for by the fun of watching the former rulers of the earth deliver stuffy dialogue in accents that make them sound like they shit marble and yet behave like the lowest form of Springer guest. The contrast between the lofty look and feel on one hand and the petty evil of these people’s lives on the other is truly delightful.
I should close by confessing a strange sort of nostalgia for I, Claudius. When it first aired on PBS in 1976, I was only ten years old and still too young to watch such a show. My best friend Matt, however, was a year older – not to mention a member of a somewhat more free-wheeling family. Not only did he love it, but he also delighted in telling me all about how great it was. I think the idea that this must have been something good because I wasn’t allowed to watch it must have stuck with me even all these decades later.
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