Up Pompeii!
Up Pompeii! is a British television comedy series broadcast between 1969 and 1970, starring Frankie Howerd. The first series was written by Talbot Rothwell, a scriptwriter for the Carry On films, and the second series by Rothwell and Sid Colin. Two later specials were transmitted in 1975 and 1991.
Background
Up Pompeii! first appeared in the Comedy Playhouse series, after Michael Mills and Tom Sloan from BBC Comedy and Light Entertainment visited the ruins of Pompeii. Since Mills had recently seen Frankie Howerd in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum he casually remarked to Sloan that he half expected Frankie Howerd to suddenly appear round the corner. Sloan had replied 'Why not?', and the idea took root. Talbot Rothwell was invited to write a script and the designer Sally Hulke visited Pompeii with a sketch book and camera to ensure realism and authenticity.A slight variation of this is related by Bill Cotton who, in a June 2000 interview with author Graham McCann, said the idea originated with Mills, then the BBC's Head of Comedy, after seeing Frankie Howerd in that same play.
There were concerns in the Corporation's copyright department that the parallels between the musical and the comedy series might lead to litigation over possible plagiarism, but Rothwell told the BBC that he had seen neither the stage musical nor its film adaptation.
Plot
The series is set in ancient, pre-eruption Pompeii, with the players bearing Latinised names suggestive of their character. Howerd is the slave Lurcio ; his bumbling old master Ludicrus Sextus, the promiscuous wife is Ammonia, their daughter Erotica and their virginal son Nausius. Other regulars are Senna the Soothsayer who constantly warns of impending death and destruction and, in series one, Plautus a semi-godlike figure, making pithy comments from a location somewhere between the clouds and Mount Olympus. Guest stars included several actresses from the Carry On film series, including Barbara Windsor, Wendy Richard and Valerie Leon.The format was an exotic backdrop for an endless series of double entendres and risqué gags from Howerd, constantly breaking the fourth wall with asides to the live studio audience which go unheard by the other characters. He also bemoans the quality of his script, complaining the other players have the best lines. Each episode starts with a prologue from Howerd – which is invariably interrupted by the doom-laden warnings of Senna, or the demands of his master or mistress.
Thirteen 30-minute episodes were made, in two series. In between there also was a 13 minute Up Pompeii segment in the 1970 Royal Television Gala Performance.
In addition there had been a pilot episode as part of Comedy Playhouse, and two later special episodes both called Further Up Pompeii, one in 1975 and the other, written by Brian Leveson and Paul Minett, in 1991. The latter sparked speculation that there could be a new series, but Howerd's death in 1992 put an end to any such prospect.
Apart from the change to the actor playing Ludicrus Sextus, there are some differences between the two series of Up Pompeii, the second series using noticeably fewer sets than the previous. This may have been due to the second series being commissioned, filmed and broadcast within four months from the end of the first.
Films and sequels
The show inspired three films. The first was also called Up Pompeii and added such characters as Bilius, Voluptua, Scrubba and Villanus. It ended with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which anachronistically included Nero, and had a brief epilogue in which Howerd played a modern-day museum guide showing the petrified remains of the Pompeiian characters. It was produced by Ned Sherrin and retained only Frankie Howerd from the cast of the original series. However, Aubrey Woods appeared in the TV series and the film, playing different roles.The two sequels were Up the Chastity Belt and Up the Front, which transported Howerd's servile, cowardly character to Medieval times and World War I.
The format of Up Pompeii inspired two later TV series, Whoops Baghdad and Then Churchill Said to Me, both starring Howerd. The later series was shelved due to the outbreak of the Falklands War and – thought politically insensitive – the series was aired after Howerd's death in 1993.
A pilot for a US version of Up Pompeii for ABC, called The Pompeii Way, still starring Frankie Howerd and co-starring Foster Brooks, was recorded in 1971, but it did not proceed to a full series and was never shown.
Stage play
In 1988, Howerd asked one of his writers, Miles Tredinnick, to work on an updated stage version of Up Pompeii! for a proposed national UK tour, but the play was shelved when Howerd was offered a chance by Larry Gelbart to reprise his role as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Piccadilly Theatre in London's West End. The play was eventually revised and updated and had its premiere in Chesterfield in January 2011 and then embarked on a UK tour. Produced and directed by Bruce James, it starred Damian Williams, host of Sky One's Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old?, as Lurcio the slave. An acting edition of the play was published by Josef Weinberger Ltd in 2012.Audio revival
In 2019, it was announced that British production company Spiteful Puppet would celebrate the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the "Comedy Playhouse" pilot by releasing an audio adaptation based on the stage play by Miles Tredinnick. The script was adapted by Barnaby Eaton-Jones, Daniel McGachey and Iain McLaughlin, with Eaton-Jones serving as producer and director of the live recording sessions at London's Shaw Theatre on 12 October 2019. The two staged performances starred Madeline Smith as Ammonia, Frazer Hines as Ludicrus, Rosa Coduri as Erotica, Jack Lane as Nausius, Jilly Breeze as Senna, Ben Perkins as Corneus and Barnaby Eaton-Jones as Kretinus, with guest stars Cleo Rocos as Suspenda, Camille Coduri as Voluptua, and Tim Brooke-Taylor as Trecherus. The lead role of Lurcio was played in the manner of Frankie Howerd by David Benson, who had previously played Howerd on stage and radio. A double CD release was announced for release on 29 November 2019.DVD release
For many years, no complete home video release had been undertaken due to the nature of the videotape master materials. Like many television series of this era, most of the original videotapes were wiped.In the late 1970s, missing episodes of Up Pompeii! were found in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation archive. Because of the differences in international broadcasting, these copies had been converted to the North American NTSC television standard, and so one chunk of the series remained in its native PAL format, but the majority were found in a poorly-converted NTSC state. The picture quality of some of the Canadian finds was not high, and so their marketability was severely limited. However, six episodes were released on VHS in 1991 by BBC Video.
In 2004–2005, through the success of a group of BBC employees' restoration work on similar NTSC-only episodes of Doctor Who, the BBC decided to convert all their NTSC-only productions back to their original PAL format using a new computer-controlled process, Reverse Standards Conversion. A PAL-like, higher-quality image resulted in a more stable picture. The new restored masters made their debut on BBC4 in August 2006, and the BBC's DVD distribution arm 2entertain announced a brand new Frankie Howerd Collection in mid-September 2006.
The collection includes not only both original series of Up Pompeii!, but also the 1975 BBC special Further Up Pompeii!, the already-released Comedy Greats: Frankie Howerd DVD, and another Howerd series along a similar vein, Then Churchill Said to Me.
List of episodes
Pilot
''Series 1''
| Episode Title | Original Channel | Duration | Airdate |
| "Vestal Virgins" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 30 March 1970 |
| "The Ides of March" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 6 April 1970 |
| "The Senator and the Asp" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 13 April 1970 |
| "Britannicus" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 20 April 1970 |
| "The Actors" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 27 April 1970 |
| "Spartacus" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 4 May 1970 |
| "The Love Potion" | BBC1 | 35 minutes | 11 May 1970 |