Besides, no one is going to mistake this for a documentary. They use strigils in episode one so that's authentic enough for me. Pretty much all I can recall from O Level Latin is that Romans used strigils in their bathhouses. Characters may appear one-dimensional, but if you've followed Spartacus' nemesis Crixus or his trainer Doctore, it's clear there is far more to them than meets the eye. Besides, Shakespearean dialogue wouldn't sit right. There's a lot of corny tough talk among the gladiators but for me it rings true: these were not the brightest bunch and, as they are often seen with no other possessions than a loincloth, tough talk is all they have. There is no room for ambiguity here: this is blood (and other bodily fluids) and sand, not oysters and snails.īritish-born Andy Whitfield makes for a great, stoic Spartacus (the actor has recently been given the all-clear on his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma so now hopefully he can enjoy a long career and we can expect more Spartacus). Here it fills the entire season – and without the coy subversion of the famous speech Laurence Olivier gives to Tony Curtis. In Stanley Kubrick's comparatively anaemic 1960 film version, Spartacus' time as a gladiator takes up around 40 minutes of the three-hour-plus running time. But you have to watch what they do next, even if you don't like them. Yes it's brutally violent with loads of sex and swearing, and full of characters with few, if any, redeeming features. Besides, what good is a plasma screen if you're not going to see plasma on it? I wasn't expecting what came next: Spartacus: Blood & Sand is a terrific show – compelling, smart, intentionally funny. So, I thought, as this is clearly the goriest thing ever on TV (and only 13 episodes long), I'll watch it: it'll be a low-rent landmark in telly history. If a contemporary cop show painted the screen red with such wild abandon as Spartacus, it'd be dragged kicking and screaming off the air. I've always liked the inventive ways TV shows have gone about showing explicit bloodshed, be it in microscopic detail in CSI or the bottled grue of True Blood. Even in context it's often ludicrously OTT. Out of context the copious bloodshed looked ridiculous. What first got me interested in Spartacus was the gore, lovingly displayed and mocked on Charlie Brooker's show ( here's his review for the Guardian). Even the company responsible, Starz, sounds like a strip club, further underselling this show – although keen TV followers will know Starz is also responsible for Party Down, one of the finest comedies of recent years. A 300-style take on the Spartacus story wasn't really going to head straight to the top of many viewers' 'must see' list. Sometimes low expectations can be a wonderful thing.

Spartacus season 1