Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 3/10

Cast: Jack Donnelly, Mark Addy, Robert Emms, Jemima Rooper, Sarah Parish, Juliet Stevenson, Aiysha Hart, Alexander Siddig, John Hannah, Oliver Walker, Hannah Arterton, Ken Bones, Joe Dixon.

There is something magical about Greek and Roman mythology; it has consistently been a source of epic tales and for the vast majority of the stories that have survived the spectre of time, they are thrilling, exciting and serve to be poignant many millennia after they first appeared.

That is what makes the Saturday evening offering by the B.B.C., Atlantis, over the last couple of months feel as though the viewer, a respectable and intelligent animal, feeling more than short changed and wondering just exactly where the dividing line between epic and uninspired was drawn when the license to create the series was given.

It may be that viewers still have the idea of some of the great pieces of work that have come from cinema over the last 40 years, even perhaps Patrick Duffy’s short lived but compelling Man from Atlantis at the back of their minds when viewing the programme. However much though you wrap up a tale for family viewing, you have to have characters that even if you can’t admire, you can empathise with, you certainly have to have a hero that is believable, rather than the feeling of blandness that comes from poor Jack Donnelly. In a programme that is reliant of continuing viewing figures, the hero needs to stand out. He or she needs to have presence, a magnificence that can be seen. Unfortunately Jack Donnelly has not given that type of performance.

Mr. Donnelly is not the only one as many of the actors in the programme were underserved by the script and were made to feel rushed and badly developed. There can’t have been many programmes over the years that have made great actors such as the usually unruffled Alexander Siddig, the gravitas of John Hannah and serene Sarah Parish look as if they have just stepped out of drama school, a complete waste of the immense talent that these two stunning actors possess.

The saving grace, perhaps unsurprisingly, came in the form of Mark Addy as Hercules, who managed to shower himself in enough credit to make the show at least watchable whilst waiting for your evening meal to go down. The fact that he pulled fellow actor Robert Emms along with him as his house sharing mathematician friend Pythagoras speak volumes for the man’s immense talent.

Every series takes time to bed in, not everything can be a success from the very start and yet you can only wonder how something as beige as Atlantis, a programme that could have had so much richness of story writing attached to it, has been able to have a second series green lighted. In all respects Atlantis has been arguably the greatest disappointment of early evening viewing on a Saturday for many years.

Ian D. Hall