That's What I Call History

 "Daddy, daddy, today in school we learned all about Queen Victoria"

"And what did you learn, my dear?"

"She was played by Judy Dench in a film called Mrs Brown or something, showing her joyfully regaining her humanity after her husband died, and also by Anna Neagle in 1937 in a little known film called Victoria the Great. And there was a depiction of her as a young woman by Emily Blunt, which was jolly good"

"Very good. That new history teacher certainly knows her stuff".

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Well, what else are we to make of this ludicrous story featuring a man, the delightfully-named Barton Bendish, who unearthed some Roman silver coins recently.

source: BBC

 

Actually the story is not at all ludicrous. It is the strapline to the picture that commands our attention and deserves all the derision that we may summon up this chilly night in March.  For someone, hopefully for the sake of her career not the reporter Ms Katy Prickett of BBC Norfolk, but an anonymous droid deep in the bowels of Broadcasting House, has determined that nobody looking at the picture could possibly have a clue who Marcus Aurelius was unless he had been depicted in a film by an actor sufficiently well-known that no further bio details were needed. We learn that Richard Harris (Camelot, A Man Called Horse, Harry Potter) played Marcus in Gladiator and now we know all we need to know.

Had a bit-part extra taken the role in some obscure film, then the strapline would perhaps have been something like this:

Four of the coins date to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who was played by Carrington Crankshaft in the long-forgotten 1953 Ealing comedy "Gor Blimey, Mr Caesar", starring Sid James, Margaret Lockwood, Bob Monkhouse and AE Matthews, with Sam Kydd as Cassius; Crankshaft also featured as First Corpse in Murder in Mayfair (1959), man in bus queue in Any More Fares, Please (1961) and man in football crowd in Everton vs West Ham, Match of the Day (1967), with the earliest dating from AD166.

 I have not seen Gladiator, apart from the "Are you not entertained?" clip and I have never been sure if Marcus, played by Harris, was or not. Perhaps the link is that he threw Spartacus or whoever he was [played by Mel Gibson: Ed] a bag of silver denarii and it was those very coins that were safely squirreled away in far-away Britannia. Could he ever have imagined that Barton Bendish (played by unknown child-star B. Bendish in A Xmas Video for Grandma, 1995, private distribution only) would unearth them nearly 2,000 years later. I imagine not.