Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston – the tale of ordinary Romans’ hopeless heroism is tearjerking television
The Guardian's television critic reviews *Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston*, a National Geographic documentary launching on Disney+ this Thursday, which explores the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius and its destruction of Pompeii. Hiddleston, who holds a double first in classics, hosts the series alongside academic experts, blending investigative presenting with dramatised reconstructions to challenge the popular assumption that the disaster struck instantly, instead showing it unfolded over roughly a day, giving residents time to make fateful choices.
The review is mixed on tone: Hiddleston's on-screen scripted banter with specialists is described as occasionally cringeworthy and smug, including a gimmick where he "throws" data into the air like an Avengers film, and his freeze-frame "rewind" device for revisiting evidence. However, the dramatised segments depicting three ordinary Romans during the eruption, written by Jessica Ruston and Mark Ravenhill, are praised as the show's strongest element, described as elegiac, moving and evocative of a war-zone disaster film.
- Tom Hiddleston hosts new Pompeii documentary on Disney+ from Thursday.
- Show mixes reconstructions with Hiddleston's academic-style investigation.
- Critic praises dramatised segments but finds host's banter awkward.
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Pompeii was a thriving Roman town on the Bay of Naples until it was buried in AD79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a nearby volcano. The disaster is famous partly because ash and pumice preserved so much of the town, including, in some cases, the shapes of the people caught up in it, giving historians an unusually detailed window into ordinary Roman life and death.
This background is now the subject of a new documentary, Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston, made by National Geographic for Disney+. Hiddleston, an actor with an academic background in classics, presents the series alongside historians and archaeologists, using a mix of expert discussion and dramatised scenes to look again at how the eruption unfolded.
The programme matters because it revisits a widely held idea, that Pompeii's residents died instantly, and presents evidence suggesting the eruption actually played out over about a day, meaning people had time to make choices about whether to flee or stay.