Those About to Die review: 'Swords-and-sandals Succession without a decent script'

Anthony Hopkins as the Emperor in Those About to die with Tom Hughes (left) and Jojo Macari as his sons. Picture: Amazon/Peacock

Those About to Die Prime Video ***

Daley: Olympic Superstar BBC2 ****

Lady in the Lake Apple TV+ ****

Singular in every sense, Olympic immortal Daley Thompson. Picture: Steve Powell/BBC/Getty Images

Every time I’m confronted by men in togas my mind drifts back to a furtive, formative night at the cinema marked by much giggling and gynaecological revelation. The movie was Caligula, Ancient Rome as reimagined by a porn baron. Oddly, the Penthouse name wasn’t a red flag for the cast of top Rada alumni, although when the film was universally panned the actors raced each other round the chariot track to disown it.

Okay, I should be thinking of the far more cerebral and much less orgiastic I, Claudius, for I was around for the solid-gold TV classic as well, but being young and foolish and horny, that felt like history homework. So what about Those About to Die? Does it want to stimulate the mind – or stir the loins?

Well, the bombastic theme threatens to blow my speakers. In the titles a trickle of blood turns into a tsunami, the streets raging red rivers. Then there’s the voiceover: “Rome, once a beacon of civilization, is now a cesspool of decay … ”

This is Tenax who goes on to explain: “The citizens are only interested in two things – bread and games.” As the owner of the biggest betting tavern in the land he benefits hugely from the latter, and will order throats to be slit for overdue debts. Considering that in AD79 you could place a wager on any aspect of a chariot race - much like today with football, eg if such-and-such a player will pick his nose just before his fifth throw-in – the drama’s producers might have been tempted to cast Ray Winstone from those interminable betting ads as their narrator. Thankfully they didn’t and Tenax is played by Iwan Rheon, last seen as a wilting Welshman in the Viagra tests drama Men Up and a more virile character here.

Natalie Portman as Maddie Schwartz in Lady in The Lake. Picture: Apple TV+

Not as virile, though, as Scorpus, the swaggering Cristiano Ronaldo of charioteering who has to be dragged, hungover and spent from his married lover’s bed for an impromptu race - organised to quell riots when grain delivery is late – but still manages to contrive victory with the help of dirty tricks. “Disqualify the w****r!” shouts a disgruntled spectator, more than 2,000 years before the term originated.

Not everyone is feeling quite so perky, so priapic. The emperor, Vespasian, is ailing. Almost Bidenesque, he’s played by Anthony Hopkins, an actor in search of decent dialogue – “I feel like horse dung!” being the only line I’ve jotted down from the opener. Vespasian’s squabbling sons are manoeuvring for position – one a soldier, the other a fey fellow with a lisp – so in these moments Those About to Die can resemble a swords-and-sandals Succession, though sadly without the script.

The best moments come on the track. The CGI evokes CBD – Cecil B. DeMille, emperor of Epic Hollywood. And the amphitheatre, the Circus Maximus, is definitely grander than Livingston FC’s Tony Macaroni Arena.

The shots of packed grandstands rising right up to the clouds are repeated in Daley: Olympic Superstar when this profile of the great decathlete reaches 1984 and the Los Angeles Games. Daley Thompson was “by a country mile, the best Olympian we’ve ever had”. So says Sebastian Coe, no slouch he.

What an enrapturing era that was for athletics, before England’s Premier League when football began to swallow up all the airtime, everything. There was Coe vs Steve Ovett, the latter not featured in the doc, being even more media-averse than Thompson, who’d only agree to an interview if the journalist could list all the decathlon disciplines, and in the correct order.

It’s fantastic to hear the stirring voices of track and field again – David Coleman, Ron Pickering, Harry Carpenter – and here I’m reminded of my favourite funny from Clive James’ TV criticism: “Now over to Harry Commentator in the carpentry-box … ” But I wonder how Thompson feels about sharing this programme and maybe even this paragraph with others. He seemed to take the ruthless, selfish, monomania required of his sport to, well, Olympian levels. Coe relates how, after they’d both retained their titles in LA, Thompson confessed he’d hoped his friend had failed, so his gold medal would have more lustre.

You’re on your own in the decathlon and Thompson in life was on his own from the age of seven, a boarding-school scamp whose father was shot dead by a wronged husband and whose mother never once came to see him compete. Undeterred, he’d bash out new records and crash through situations requiring politesse, accepting the Beeb’s SPOTY award with the words “I feel like s***”, whistling the national anthem on the podium, uttering a suggestive remark to Princess Anne and goading Carl Lewis with the “Gay?” t-shirt.

He regrets most of this. Also his divorce and not being the best dad to his oldest kids while relentlessly pursuing glory. But there are touching reunions with his Scottish coach Frank Dick and his towering German rival. Jurgen Hingsen was nude on the cover of Stern – or was it stern on the cover of Nude? – and the world record-holder going into LA. But, says Coe, it wasn’t enough for Thompson simply to win, “he had to destroy his opponent as well”. The supermen hug outside the Memorial Coliseum. “I feel happy when I see him now,” says Hingsen, Thompson’s persistent wind-ups an amusing memory. “He’s my almost-best friend!”

How many dramas glory in 1960s Americana, the sleek pony cars, the all-mod-cons kitchens, the compliant wives in primary-colour hairbands? Call it the Mad Men Effect, which is still a thing, nine years after that show ended, for here’s another: Lady in the Lake, adapted from the Laura Lippman thriller.

Natalie Portman is Maddie Schwartz, the Jewish housewife in Baltimore reprimanded by her husband for bringing out the wrong plates for Thanksgiving, 1965 who explodes: “Milton, I’ve served you for 20 years and you think I’m only good for that!” He says: “But you never wanted to do anything else.” She explodes again: “I never tried!”

From here on she does, storming out, pawning her wedding ring, renting a seedy downtown room, solving a missing person case, writing about it. Alongside Maddie and Portman’s zestful performance there’s Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram), equally unfulfilled as a harassed model and bar worker, and their stories collide. The soundtrack features the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers” which wouldn’t be released for seven years but it’s a terrific song so I’ll forgive the incongruity in the way I wouldn’t for “w****r”.