Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston – The story of the desperate heroism of ordinary Romans is tear-jerking television | TV and radio

IIt’s always funny when documentaries strategically pair a boring subject with a famous face, just to impress. A History of NCP Parking by Tinie Tempah, for example, or The World’s Deadliest Sleep Disorders with Anna Maxwell Martin. So when I saw that Tom Hiddleston was hosting a National Geographic investigation into the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 (Disney+, as of Thursday), there was no way I was going to watch it.

The actor is best known for his wanderings through life’s most vaunted way stations: Eton, Cambridge, Rada, Kong: Skull Island. Privilege and arrogance have long been sticks to overcome. It’s hard to say he’s not qualified for the job, having finished first in the Classics. Here he slips into the role of university investigator. A real-life researcher is forced to dress like his boss during an interview, addresses Hiddleston by his nickname, and issues a mild reprimand. Hiddleston even translated the Latin tombstones in the first episode. I don’t know what the ancient Roman word for “fuck, I’m leaning over” is, but I think that’s what it means.

Accusations of arrogance are difficult to overcome. While interviewing the founder of the Pompeii Survivors Project, Hiddleston decided that the spreadsheet wasn’t visually pleasing enough. It “throws” data into the air, where it hovers in transparent panels. “I’ve seen some of the Avengers movies,” he said with a smile. The scripted banter between Hiddleston and the specialists veers into the divine. I understand why an actor might want to indulge in being an archaeologist; It rarely works when academics are forced to play actors.

Still: it’s not boring. At a crucial point in the interview, Hiddleston will interrupt and freeze the frame, raising his fingers in a capital L shape. He curls his fingers, and the movement returns to a previous point, playing out differently in light of the new information. Kinda like Wayne’s World. This is a revisionist history lesson, you see. In the collective imagination, the eruption of Vesuvius was instantaneous. “The story of Pompeii is the story of death.” In fact, it took a day to bury the city, he says, enough time for the humans there to make some choices. I can imagine him sitting back in a chair saying this.

I always wonder what academics make of popular educational programs. Is it painful for them to see their favorite topics flattened into digestible narratives, or pumped up by appeals to emotion? Certainly for an actor-led project, “Pompeii: Out of Time” is heavier on reconstruction than most documentaries. In fact, it prides itself on its creative licence, aiming to tell plausible, evidence-based stories of three Romans of that day. “There’s only one hour left until Vesuvius erupts,” warns our present-day host, setting a countdown on his smartwatch. The college student was replaced by Jonathan Payne from The Night Manager.

It’s probably for the best that Hiddleston doesn’t appear in this recreation but he remains in the present day. As the other actors take over, the documentary slowly but surely turns into a disaster movie. I’m not an academic, I love disaster movies. These fly-or-freeze sequences, written by Jessica Ruston with playwright Mark Ravenhill, are the best in the show, elegiac and poignant. The writing and effects take us into what feels like a war zone. As for the eruption itself, which we witnessed on screen, it is shocking, majestic and brutal. unexpected.

In the midst of the pandemic, and with a lot of time on my hands, I rewatched Titanic. For most of my life, the sinking of that ship was the reality of a pub quiz. Having seen the film as a child, there were corny gags about drawing French girls and the fact that there was definitely room at the door. It was different watching it alone in my apartment, facing an uncertain future. I understood the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in a way I had never understood before. All those lives. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

Something similar drove Hiddleston here. This exciting and intelligently directed documentary manages to make us feel as he did, when he visited Pompeii for the first time as a young man. Empathize with the desperate heroism of ordinary people on a disastrous day. It’s a low-key tearjerker. What’s harder is feeling sympathy for the Cambridge-educated Golden Globe winner — but thanks to this surprising effort, I might just get there.