Mary Beard is marvellous

[TheYuleLogLady]

i love her. i want to go to pompeii and sare a botle of wine with hr.

Oh god what a tosser the man is. He's only just off the naughty step for the garbage he wrote about Clare Balding.

You looked fine. lovely. Not that it matters. The programme was everything it should be. It is depressing beyond belief to see woman after woman on telly with a plasticated, invisibilised, airbrushed appearance. TV sprints backwards in its attitude to women.

Mary, why did you raise the matter of A.A.'s review. You don't actually care what he thinks, do you?
If you want a laugh, trawl some old MN threads on him.

Takes more than that to put MB off, BitOfFun!

Really? Terry usually sends them running for the hills. Towards the molten lava if anything.

Brilliant quote:

"And frankly, the idea of dressing for the delectation of AA Gill gives me the dry heaves."

not to buy into the sexist thing at all, prof, but wilf and i were saying on here how pretty you are just a few days ago. and that pompeiian jewellery... yowza. such a great programme, delighted that it's a series.

i am also enjoying Amanda Vickery and those Georgians, btw. although a little less of the ipad would be noice.

Saw a bit of that too. She's very proud of her iPad isn't she. I did think of her a bit in relation to non-plasticated women. She is a bit glam but certainly not an A. A. Gill ideal.

Oh I love Amanda too. But she is showing off with the IPad. Just to make us jealous.

I love being around clever women, that is the appeal of Mumsnet for me. They are bloody fab. Better company than cock-waving dilettantes any day of the week.

Here's another household who loved the Pompeii programme! We went to Pompeii last year and despite various frustrations with getting there we were enthralled by the place itself, so it was lovely to see an in depth program about it - and full of earthy detail to boot...

marybeard, I loved what you were wearing - the red coat & shoes, and that beautiful gold jewellery (I mean your own rather than the Roman pieces!).

lol yes i liked that gold necklace thing you were wearing as well, where did you get it? [fashion tips]

Those Roman emeralds were gorgeous. Not very intellectual to be discussing them I suppose, but they really were fab, and I liked the way you talked about the woman who wore them having a narrow neck, they must have been a choker - it really made you feel that you could have been wearing them, could have been there.

My gold necklace was a present from one of my ex-graduate students.. she's French (ah ha)

Think we should move away from discussing Mar's accessorising and concentrate on the proximity and intimacy between slaves and wealthy in Pompeii contrasting with the distance between servants and bigwigs in Amanda Thingy's Georgian households

those frenchies have all zee best stuff...

i remember going to Herculaneum when i was a kid and the tour guide kept pinching my mum's backside and pointing suggestively at the carbonised beds. my dad found it all v hilarious.

ah. i imagine that wasn't the sort of insight you were looking for, eleison.

Whoops, x-post. And typo: I didn't mean to reference (Andrew) Marr's accessorising (which is always flawless.)

Marr has a mean tie.

can i say something re Gill? i have dealt with him a few times and i have always found him terribly nice. like, really. very helpful and kind.

however, the job he is paid to do at the ST is to be a controversialist. particularly now, i suspect, with the firewall. he will say something naff and the readers will write in in their droves to defend you (trust me on this) and they will be in the paper later. not immediately, because those sections have gone off in advance of Christmas, but further through the series. so, Gill writes and the ST forges closer links with its readers... it's all part of the master plan.

(i worry for papers, really i do. but that is another matter.)

Clearly the social mobility of slaves in Pompeii was more fluid than in Georgian times

sorry, to expand. they will be in the paper as part of the 'You Say' element of the Culture. The readers love to hate Gill.

I'm sure that is right about Gill. But it is possibly even worse to spurt out that garbage cynically than actually to believe it.

Yes I see the logic of the Gill position.. it's just that it/he plays to exactly the stereotypes we are trying to get over; indeed it reinforces them putting you/us/me on the back foot...

let's file that under 'i worry about newspapers, i really do'.

Sorry, I'll leave now.

This thread is going to become like one of my anecdotes about Jason Manford. I am getting over-involved.

yes, ghastly of course. but you must not be personally hurt by it. be outraged because it is bollocks, of course, but so long as your heart didn't sink. because it's not true, what he says. you looked lovely.

and aside from that, looking lovely wasn't your job. being a great presenter, teaching willing and unwilling viewers to feel as the ancients felt, and shutting down common misconceptions about the period, that's your job, and you did it awfully well. but then you don't need to be told that you are a great teacher, i imagine.

i assume the rest of the review was glowing? this is par for the course. see clare balding.