The Caesars

Having seen "The Caesars" when I was at school, I could not understand the swooning praise heaped on "I Claudius" which is comparatively superficial, inaccurate and a travesty.

To take just one example, the real Augustus was physically slight, intellectually subtle and personally formidable so casting Brian Blessed as Augustus in "I Claudius" was grotesquely wrong. Roland Culver was an infinitely better choice.

This was a series about the realities of power in any period - and rather closely followed the surviving record of the sophisticated and lurid Roman historian Suetonius.

The DVD was released in April 2006 - PAL/Region 2 - and is available from Amazon in the UK - but IMDb does not seem to have heard of this yet. The picture is sometimes rather dodgy but it is probably as good as we will get - and TV production was pretty rough in 1968 (compared to today's digitalised everything).

The writing and acting are still superb.