Pick of the week
Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston
Tom Hiddleston is billed as an “amateur classicist” in this slightly cheesy but undeniably engaging documentary drama series, which unpacks and personalises the events surrounding the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. Hiddleston – who visited Pompeii as a teenager and has been fascinated ever since – enlists the help of historians, geoscientists and psychologists to explore every aspect of the disaster as it unfolded. It’s an effective way of taking those events out of the history books and relocating them in the realm of lived human experience. Using reconstructions, it follows three citizens of Pompeii as the ground shudders under their feet and the deadly volcanic ash starts to close in.
Disney+, from Thursday 23 July
