I’ve just been watching Pompeii Live! on Channel 5. The Radio Times describes it as “a two-hour visit to the preserved city, wandering into bits never seen before by the public. Should be gripping.”.

‘Should’ being the operative word.

What a complete waste of an opportunity. Pompeii and Herculaneum are somewhere that I’d really love to go some time. So Pompeii Live! sounded worth watching…though I was a bit dubious about the title…

For a start, why does a programme about Pompeii need to be live? It’s been there nearly 2000 years – what’s going to happen in a couple of hours this evening that can’t be pre-recorded? Short of Vesuvius going off behind Peter Snow’s head while he’s on air. And I don’t think they can count on that.

Peter Snow isn’t too bad, though he doesn’t look very comfortable. Edwina Silver is irritating and patronising; she keeps ‘summarising’ what the experts say (for us dumb viewers) but what she comes out with is less coherent, and her ad libbing is pretty poor. Both of them are overdoing the excitment.

What they’re seeing is exciting, but we don’t need breathless, sweaty, live presenters to get that point across.