POMPEII LIVE

On Tuesday, June the 18th, I was fortunate enough to attend the first of the British Museum's "Live" events which were being beamed to various cinemas around the country in much the same way as certain theatrical events I have attended recently have also been.

A few weeks earlier, when we had first seen the advertisements for this event, I had, of course, got completely the wrong end of the stick about what sort of event it was going to be. I had visions of a camera crew walking around the Pompeii site and showing us around as if we were on a tourist visit which, of course, might be a very interesting thing to do one day, but sadly, for now it was not to be, even though that's how I described it to a few people before we got our tickets.

I became far wiser when it got mentioned on the BBC Website on the Thursday before the event and, having assumed that it would have sold out long ago, we found that "70%" of the tickets had been sold which rather implied that 30% would still be available and one swift kick-up of the laptop later and the deal was done and Tuesday evening would be spent in consideration of life and death in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum on that fateful day in AD49.

The British Museum are terribly good at this sort of thing, and the exhibition in London itself is a sure-fire hit, so this event, bringing the exhibition to a far wider audience than was previously thought possible, does seem like it might turn out to be another winner, and it is a good thing that these old institutions are embracing new forms of communication to get out into the big wide world and pique our interest. The museum staff even put out Tweets throughout the day adding links to help tell the story and build up the anticipation for the evening, which all helped to make it seem like an "event" in itself.

So, when the allotted hour came around, we shuffled into our seats punctually for a prompt seven o'clock start, noting with some trepidation that the front two rows were reserved for Manchester Grammar School and there was the prospect of a load of schoolkids turning up to spoil our fun, not that we needed to have worried, as not all that many of them actually showed up, perhaps preferring the "schools version" of the show which was planned for the following morning.

Still, as soon as Peter Snow bounded across the courtyard we knew that we were in pretty safe hands and, whilst it would never be quite the same as actually being in the building itself and looking at the artefacts "in the charcoal" as it were, I don't imagine that I would get personal tours from expert historians like Bettany Hughes and Mary Beard if I did that either.

The exhibition itself seems to be based around a set up in the form of a house, so that each room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the sewers, the courtyards, the gardens and so on are allowed to tell the story of what day-to-day life was like in a society that was so instantly smothered upon that fateful day that ironically it can tell us more about what living there was really like, from the loaves of bread to the linen cabinets once tragically transformed instantly into charcoal, than a couple of towns which would probably have been otherwise almost completely forgotten by the march of time might have done.

Several uncomfortable topics were touched upon, from the mostly brutal lives of the slaves, and about how some of the freed slaves were able to rise to the top of society, to the rather frank representations of sex in Pompeii, which seemed to be everywhere, but which were most startlingly displayed by a statue of the god Pan in flagrante delicto with a live goat...

In the beautiful garden room some rather beautiful garden frescoes were discussed with Rachel de Thame as our guide to the birds and the flowers painted upon the walls. I was initially wary of having this kind of "celebrity opinion" piece, but it worked really well and you do have to accept that having recognised experts in their fields chatting about such things does make the whole thing rather more accessible to the general public.

After all, it was a baker who was able to show us all what the ridge around the instantaneously carbonised loaf of bread most probably meant; A piece of string with a built-in carrying handle, which few of the rest of us might have thought of.

Obviously the most moving aspect was perhaps, of the people. The things that they grabbed as they fled, only to die on the beach. The family baked alive whilst hiding under the stairs, so that the imprints of their bodies could be preserved in the ash and reconstructed by pouring in plaster to fill the voids left behind by their bodies. The fact that someone wealthy enough to have a gold bracelet that weighs half a kilogram could do nothing to save themselves or their children.

An hour and a half passed incredibly swiftly and whilst, at times, I felt initially slightly disappointed by lack of sense of where I was within the museum, and got the nagging feeling that if I was actually there I might be stopping and looking just a little bit longer at each of the pieces, when I thought about it afterwards, I realised that it was actually very well done and, even if I didn't get to virtually walk the streets of Pompeii, this was probably about as close as I was likely to get without leaving the Manchester area.

That sense of the timeline to imminent destruction, and the "room by room" structure works very well at getting the story across and relating it to us in our modern lives, which is, I suppose, what history needs to do if it is to engage us. Later on, the debates and arguments for and against further excavation of the sites also proved very interesting and show that some things are not as simple as they might at first appear, although you can sense the craving to know what else there is to find out there.

On occasions, the whole event felt a little bit like a TV show that hadn't yet found a broadcaster, but I suppose that they could only do it this way otherwise they'd have had to close the place to the public for weeks. But then again, this was the first time that they had attempted to do anything like this, so there may very well maybe be a few tweaks to the format next time...

But, as an experiment in opening things up to new audiences, it was something of a minor triumph and I'm very glad we went...