Up Pompeii
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Up Pompeii was a British television comedy series of 1970. Written by the Carry On films' Talbot Rothwell, it starred Frankie Howerd.
Set in ancient Pompeii (pre-eruption) Howerd played a slave, Lurcio (pronounced Lurk-io). The other main characters were Lurcio's master the senator Ludicrus Sextus (initially Max Adrian and then Wallas Eaton), the senator's wife Ammonia (Elizabeth Larner), his daughter Erotica (Georgina Moon) and his son Nausius (Kerry Gardner) (who wrote, surprisingly, not very rude odes), along with Senna the Soothsayer (Jeanne Mockford) and Plautus (Willie Rushton).
The set-up was little more than a backdrop for an endless series of double entendres and risqué gags. Howerd was the key to most of the gags and he started each episode with a prologue - a 'to camera' that would usually never get finished and rarely had anything at all to do with the actual episode plot.
Although not officially acknowledged as such, the programme was clearly inspired by the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, also set in Ancient Rome. Howerd had recently played the similar role of the slave Pseudolus in a London stage run of the musical, and there were parallels between some other characters.
There were thirteen 30-minute episodes in two series (March - May and September - October 1970). In addition there were the pilot episode (1969) and two special episodes entitled Further Up Pompeii, one in 1975 and the other in 1991.
The show 'inspired' three films. The first was also called Up Pompeii (1971) and added such characters as Bilius, Voluptua, Scrubba and Villanus. The film ended with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and had a brief epilogue in which Howerd played a modern-day museum guide showing off the petrified remains of the Pompeiian characters.
The two sequels were Up the Chastity Belt (1971) and Up the Front (1972) which transferred the Lurcio character to Medieval times and World War I respectively.
The show also inspired a similar TV series, Whoops, Baghdad, also starring Frankie Howerd, which sank without trace. The original proposed title, Up Baghdad, was rejected because it was felt that it might have been seen as supportive of the then-current Iraqi regime.