Whodunit Solved: Emperor’s Wife Did It

To update. . . .

When you last saw this column on June 5, yours truly was embroiled in a cheap, manipulative, outrageously exploitative cliffhanger, a self-serving device to keep you in suspense until my return from vacation.

As you recall, I was just wrapping up the column when there was an interruption, and I reacted:

“Oh, it’s you! I thought I told . . . . Wait . . . . What’s that in your hand? . . . What are you doing? . . . No . . . I can explain . . . . No . . . Don’t!”

Bang!

Naturally, this shocking, mysterious development precipitated nationwide hysteria over my fate. In the last few weeks, everyone has been asking: Who shot H.R.?

Yes, well, uh, no one.

Uh . . . it was a dream. Yes, that’s it. It was a dream. No one shot me in the column because there was no column, and hence no cliffhanger. You . . . me . . . we all dreamed it.

Yes, a shameful, shabby resolution of convenience, and a bit phony, but I haven’t been watching television cliffhangers all these years for nothing.

Meanwhile, I would have gotten around to settling this sooner if not unavoidably detained while traveling in Italy, mostly in places where TV was inaccessible.

I missed it, not specific programs but the comforting, tranquilizing background buzz of TV.

Speaking of Italy, we should speak also of “I, Claudius,” the ever-rewarding BBC miniseries drawn from Robert Graves’ daring novels about the first four emperors of Rome. It first lit up TV as a “Masterpiece Theatre” production in the 1977-78 season, and is now being rerun on PBS this summer (at 10 p.m. Sundays on Channel 28).

Delicious Part 5 (of 12) awaits this weekend.

Irresistible, witty “I, Claudius” is no stranger to the rerun arena. Yet it’s one of those magical rare TV classics that is forever-fresh no matter how many times you’ve seen its often fanciful depiction of the lust and brutality of ancient Rome.

One cannot say too much about the work here of adapter Jack Pulman and director Herbert Wise. Yet the production’s soul is Derek Jacobi’s scintillating Claudius, a charming character whose bumbling ways obscure a shrewdness and intelligence that enable him to somehow survive infinite perils and become emperor. To the plotters around him, he appears too inconsequential to bother with. Claudius will be a reformer. But above all he is a survivor.

There are a Roman Legion of fine supporting performances. Sian Phillips’ poison-dispensing Livia (Claudius’ grandmother)--who has just finished icing her husband, Augustus--is just exquisitely wicked. She’s surpassed in evil only by John Hurt’s mad, monstrous Caligula, whose sins range from arson as a child to cutting open his pregnant sister’s belly.

He’ll be arriving soon, and when he is on center stage, imagining himself to be Zeus, “I, Claudius” is never funnier or bloodier.

“I, Claudius” ranks near the top of TV’s hierarchy of miniseries. Scenes not easily forgotten include Caligula softly but coldly taunting his great-grandmother, Livia, on her deathbed and, in the final episode, Claudius himself willingly eating poisoned mushrooms and then, in death, speaking to the legendary prophetess Sibyl.

As history, Graves’ supposed inside scoop on the Roman imperial family is judged by most authorities to be considerably less than perfect. As entertainment, however, it’s just about peerless.

American TV reprised one of its own large-canvas historical miniseries this week. It centered on a famous emperor, too.

But ABC’s three-part “Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story” was a crayon rendering from 1987, an utterly inane and incomprehensible treatment with Armand Assante playing the French dictator as a sort of animalistic Stanley Kowalski and Jacqueline Bisset as his Stella.

It’s one thing to interpret and speculate about history in a bold, fascinating way as “I, Claudius” has done, much worse to rewrite it foolishly as “Napoleon and Josephine” has done.

American TV does not always perform sloppily in its role as the nation’s pop historian. Yet Americans just about always gets clobbered by British TV when it comes to costume drama. Just why remains a mystery, unless it’s that the British have a better sense of history and more appreciation of antiquity than we do.

We have a better appreciation of cliffhangers.