Up Pompeii!

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Up Pompeii!

Up Pompeii! opening title.
Format Comedy
Starring Frankie Howerd
Country of origin Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom
No. of episodes 16 (including Further Up Pompeii)
Production
Running time 30-45 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel BBC One, ITV (1991)
Original run 1969 – 1975
1991

Up Pompeii! was a British television comedy series of the 1970s, starring Frankie Howerd. The first series was written by Talbot Rothwell, of the Carry On films fame, and the second series by Rothwell and Sid Colin.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Set in ancient Pompeii (pre-eruption) Howerd played a slave, Lurcio (pronounced Lurk-io). The other main characters were Lurcio's bumbling old master, Senator Ludicrus Sextus (initially Max Adrian and then Wallas Eaton), the senator's promiscuous wife Ammonia (Elizabeth Larner), his daughter Erotica (Georgina Moon) and his eternally virginal son Nausius (Kerry Gardner) (who wrote not very rude odes), along with the Cassandra-esque Senna the Soothsayer (Jeanne Mockford) and Plautus (Willie Rushton). Guest stars included a number of "Carry On" girls with Barbara Windsor, Wendy Richard and Valerie Leon all having parts.

The set-up was little more than a backdrop for an endless series of double entendres and risqué gags. Howerd was the key to most of the gags and he started each episode with a prologue — a "to camera" that would usually never get finished and rarely had anything to do with the episode plot.

Bill Cotton in an interview with author Graham McCann on 6th June 2000 said that the then director of the BBC Comedy, Michael Mills, prompted by the plays of Plautus came up with the idea for the show for Frankie Howerd. The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, set in ancient Rome was also said to be an influence. Howerd had recently played the similar role of the slave Pseudolus in the original London stage run of the musical, and there were parallels between some other characters.

There were 13 30-minute episodes in two series (March – May and September – October 1970). In addition there was a pilot episode (1969) and two special episodes entitled Further Up Pompeii, one in 1975 and the other in 1991. The latter sparked speculation that there could be a new series, before Howerd's death in 1992 put an end to any such prospect.

Apart from the change in the actor playing Ludicrus Sextus, there are some differences between the two series of Up Pompeii, with the second series using noticeably fewer sets than the original. This may have been due to the second series being commissioned, filmed and broadcast within 4 months from the end of the first. In addition Willie Rushton did not appear in the second series.

The series was filmed in front of a live audience, with which the actors interacted. This is highlighted by the relatively long duration between cuts, and the timing of the jokes and dialogue is obviously dictated by the audience reaction. Also, Howerd made anachronistic comments like "I don't use that glycerine rubbish" or "The BBC told me..." when such things didn't exist. Howerd addresses the audience using asides that the other characters can't hear (a device that harks back to classical theatre). With all the leads being predominantly stage actors, this worked well. The second series is characterised with having more edits and close ups than the previous one, but not to the extent that it detracted from the intimate feel to the production.

[edit] Films and sequels

The show "inspired" three films. The first was also called Up Pompeii (1971) and added such characters as Bilius, Voluptua, Scrubba and Villanus. The film ended with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, anachronistically (for AD79) included Nero (who added, "Wait till you see what I've got planned for Rome!"), and had a brief epilogue in which Howerd played a modern-day museum guide showing the petrified remains of the Pompeiian characters. It was produced by Ned Sherrin and retained only Frankie Howerd from the cast of the original series (Ludicrus, for example, was played by Michael Hordern in the film adaptation, and Erotica by Madeline Smith). However, Aubrey Woods appeared in both the series and the film, playing different roles.

The two sequels were Up the Chastity Belt (1971) and Up the Front (1972), which transported Howerd's servile, cowardly character to Medieval times (as Lurkalot) and the First World War (as Private Lurk), respectively, in a similar way to the later Blackadder series starring Rowan Atkinson.

The show also inspired a similar TV series, Whoops Baghdad, also starring Frankie Howerd. A quasi-follow up, Then Churchill Said to Me, in which Howerd played Winston Churchill's office cleaner during the Second World War, was produced in 1982 but not broadcast at the time due to BBC concerns about offending the public in view of the Falklands War. It was eventually broadcast on satellite channel UK Gold in 1993, after Howerd's death.

In 1988, Howerd asked one of his writers, Miles Tredinnick, to work on an updated stage version of Up Pompeii! for a proposed national UK tour. However, the play was put on the shelf when Howerd was offered a chance by Larry Gelbart to reprise his role as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum at the Piccadilly Theatre in London's West End.

[edit] DVD release

Until recently, no complete home video release has been undertaken due to the nature of the videotape master materials. Like many television series made before the advent of VHS, master tapes of British television productions were often thought to be worthless and so erased to be reused (for such reasons as copyright restrictions allowing only one repeat, black & white series being determined as unrepeatable with the advent of colour, and even a physical lack of the necessary archival storage space). In the case of Up Pompeii! (and many others, including most notably Doctor Who), copies sold internationally were, once their broadcasts had occurred, contractually obliged to be returned to the BBC or destroyed.

In the late 1970s, following a change in the BBC's archival policy and a general search for old BBC material, missing episodes of Up Pompeii! were found in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) archive. Due to the differences in international broadcasting, these copies had been converted to the North American NTSC television videotape standard, and so one chunk of the series remained in its native PAL format, but the majority were found in a poorly-converted (dating long before digital conversion methods) NTSC state. The picture quality of some of the Canadian finds was not up to the exacting standards of the BBC, and so their marketablilty was severely limited. However, six episodes were released on VHS in 1991 by BBC Video. (These tapes were re-released by Second Sight in 1999, with a small music edit made to the episode featuring Jamus Bondus.)

In 2004—2005, through the success of a group of BBC employees' restoration work on similar NTSC-only episodes of Doctor Who (specifically the Jon Pertwee adventure The Claws of Axos), the BBC decided to convert all their NTSC-only productions (as reclaimed from various international stations) back to their original PAL format using a new computer-controlled process, Reverse Standards Conversion. A PAL-like, higher-quality image resulted in a more stable picture and more enjoyable viewing experience. The new restored masters made their debut on BBC4 in August 2006, and the BBC's DVD distribution arm 2entertain announced a brand new Frankie Howerd Collection in mid-September 2006.

The collection includes not only both original series of Up Pompeii!, but also the 1975 BBC special Further Up Pompeii! (not to be confused with the 1991 ITV special Further Up Pompeii), the already-released Comedy Greats: Frankie Howerd DVD, and another Howerd series along a similar vein, Then Churchill Said To Me.

[edit] List of episodes

Pilot (BBC1) 35 minutes

Series 1 (BBC1) 35 minutes

Series 2 (BBC1) 30 minutes

Special (BBC1) 45 minutes

Special (ITV/LWT)

[edit] Catchphrases

  • Titter ye not!
  • Woe, woe and thrice woe!
  • Get your titters out Missus!
  • The Prologue.
  • Oooh no Missus!
  • I couldn't think of a rhyme there.
  • Lyrics to theme tune (film version)
A-a-a-a Up Pompeii. Up Pompeii. I never seem to get it a-a-a-all Up Pompeii.
Pompeii. Salute (pronounced "Salut-ay"). Naughty naugh-tay. Up. Pom-peii.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links