How to put the Romans on television

I am rather out of my usual habitat at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers in Vienna a big media event, with all kinds of panels on such topics as "The 11 Commandments for Success with Online Content" and "The Rise of Multi-Platforms". It's all a bit different from "New Approaches to the Reign of Nero" or "Silius Italicus: texts and intertexts" that are the staples of my usual kind of conference. And the appearance of trays of wine after the sessions ending at 4 o' clock (yes, 4 o' clock) is not something you find at classical gathering; classical organisers take note. And instead of nervous post-docs trying to impress the professorial barons and get a leg up in the job market, it's nervous producers trying to pitch to the commissioning barons from the big tv channels.

I am here to be part of a panel on "More Bloody Romans" -- discussing all kinds of varieties of screen Romans with Thomas Viner from Arrow TV, Caterina Turroni, my producer from Lion TV, Martin Davidson of the BBC, and Heinrich Mayer-Moroni of Interspot Film, who has just made a documentary called "Lost City of Gladiators" (about the Roman town of Carnuntum) and was very nice to me when I was less than complimentary about some of his "recons".

 The fact is, of course, as Martin Davidson underlined, there is no one way to put Romans on television: drama doc, recon, cgi, and yours truly spouting about  a surviving Roman sandal, all have their place. But, in order to get a bit of fully frontal debate going, I decided to have a go at "recon" (you know the kind of stuff -- it's when the programme includes little dramatic features where you see Socrates die on screen surrounded by his disciples, or a pair of sleek bronzed gladiators fight to the death, or (if more extras are avaliable) hordes of poor barbarians making a bloody, brutal and ultimately doomed assault on the Roman legions.

One problem with this is that the actors aren't usually much good (I've never seen a convincing Socrates) and it is all a bit low budget (a handful of people wrapped in sheets, toga party style). If you want good recon, feature films have better actors and a bigger budget to do it properly, Gladiator being a classic example. But it's more the certainty it suggests and the sanitisation that annoy me.We don't actually know what an ancient battle looked like (and if we wanted a recon of a gladiatorial contest, wouldn't it be better to go to one of the hundreds of images the Romans themselves have left us?). And its always going to be a bit cleaned up for our screens. People died in real, they didn't just pretend to, slugging it out with rubber swords.

There was some feisty debate on all this (would anyone watch if there wasn't recon, would any TV company in Germany even commission a programme without it?), which continued afterwards. And I got quite interested in different ways of bringing the ancient world to life without the B list actors. How far could you use animation, for example? Or silhouettes which didn't actually talk (it's at "pass the grapes, Marcus", that things usually hit rock bottom for me).

Anyway that was yesterday. Today I'm sloping off to search out Roman emperors in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.