Gladiators: Back from the Dead wouldn’t be your average point-and-stare archaeological fact fest. “Brutal…bloody…spectacular!” cries our narrator in the opening scene, as we watch two tooled-up gladiators going for it in a kind of 300-esque arena (complete with obligatory heavy-metal undertones). By the first 30 seconds it’s already clear you’re not watching an episode of Time Team. Read more on next page.

Aiming to catch as wide an audience as possible by combining blood, guts and drama with some genuinely groundbreaking archaeology. It sounds like a formula that could go horribly wrong, but somehow the balance is right.

Drawing on sensational new archaeological discoveries, this programme recreates the world of the Roman arena through the lives and violent deaths of six British gladiators.

The show essentially follows a the discovery in York, reported in Heritage Key last week, of a giant gladiator cemetery. Among the 80-or-so skeletons found at the site were six particularly poignant chaps, whose injuries and provenance have allowed experts to join the dots between various gladiatorial myths and legends. One man, for example, has tooth-marks in his shoulder, “a fatal blow,” we’re dramatically told. Automatically this must have been a tiger, so cue mock-gore and combat as we see our first promethean fall of the night. Hold tight though, there’s plenty more death on the cards.

The story works its way through each of the six ‘types’ of gladiator and their horrific afflictions. From knee-tears to snapped limbs, each feature is picked apart excellently by Dr Michael Wysocki, a forensic anthropologist with more than a touch of the manic in his delivery. Yet for all the hurrah and OTT re-enactments, the split between science and entertainment is just about perfect, and come the end of the show there’s a hell of a lot to have been learnt.

Everything from the societal structure of the gladiator, his equipment, where he came from and the training he undertook is examined in a very traditional way, while making use of some great CGI and modern technology. Today we can see how sword training affected a gladiator’s arm strength, for example, by looking at the forces exerted on professional tennis players.
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