Legend of the crystal skulls: Revealed Five, 8pm Supersizers go... regency BBC2, 9pm IF, like me, you've recently been to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you'll have come away with mixed feelings.
Legend of the crystal skulls: Revealed
Five, 8pm
Supersizers go... regency
BBC2, 9pm
IF, like me, you've recently been to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you'll have come away with mixed feelings.
Sure, the film's retro-styled action was as entertaining as ever, plus it was good to see that ol' Indy - Harrison Ford, 66 next month - ain't quite ready for his bath-chair.
On the downside, Steven Spielberg's latest archaeology-based blockbuster did contain too much dull yacking and a slightly baffling premise: what in heck was this crystal skull thing, anyway?
The full historical back-story, such as it was, slowly but intriguingly emerged in Legend of the Crystal Skulls: Revealed. Once upon a time, from the 1880s onwards, a small number of highly-polished Aztec crystal skulls, fashioned from quartz and alleged to be 3500 years old, began cropping up - one in Paris, one in the British Museum in London, another in Washington DC's Smithsonian.
And yet another skull, an impressively large and transparent effort, turned up in the possession of Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of swashbuckling 1920s explorer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges.
In reality, Mitchell-Hedges was more of a looter of ancient south American burial grounds - from one of which, so Anna repeatedly told the media for the 40-odd years following papa's death, had sprung her see-through crystal cracker: the fabled Skull of Doom.
Why was the Skull of Doom so named, rather than being called the Skull of Turned Out Nice Again? Because it's a memento mori, and thus automatically sinister. But also because the thing sometimes sweated, thereby predicting major disasters, or so Anna insisted.
Looking like an especially big Fox's Glacier Mint with teeth and eye-sockets cut into it, the Skull of Doom remains a big hit with America's New Age crystal-therapy doofuses. These blissed-out twerps believe the skulls to be Mayan computers fashioned by lasers on the long-lost continent of Atlantis (I kid you not). Or perhaps they don't now.
Because hey, whaddayaknow!
Modern technology has established that all the crystal skulls were latterday knock-offs cranked out on workshop machines for the tourist market. Indeed, the Skull of Doom was fashioned by a dentist's rotary cutter around about 1930.
The Skull of Doom's current curator, a former companion of Mitchell-Hedges who hawks its round the US New Age crystal therapy circuit, took the news of his money-spinner's 100% fake status remarkably well. If only the makers of Legend of the Crystal Skulls: Revealed had probed him more deeply.
And if only they'd done the same to a Canadian medium called Carol Wilson, who we'd earlier seen fondling the Skull of Doom, crystal ball-style, while spouting prophetic tosh in the singular speaking manner of Mark E Smith. Missus-uh: you speak-uh a load of tosh-uh!
In accordance with my open-minded policy of giving negatively-reviewed progs a second chance (but only after getting threatening e-mails from readers - hi Mad Boab fae Lumphinans, Roger Thoroughly and Angry Bearsden Yummymummy!), I re-scanned Sue Perkins and Giles Coren.
As Supersizers Go ... Regency revealed, Ms P and Mr C are jolly prankmongers. However, what their jokey troll through British culinary history taught me was almost zip, aside from the fact that Giles likes to burp. They make the past likewise indigestible.
