18 Apr '12

“I love Professor Beard very deeply, as I love anyone and everyone … who is so clearly, so comfortably and so thoroughly in command of their subject or specialism that they have nothing left to prove.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Of all the reasons to love Beard, her gory locks, her little red raincoat, her abiding interest in sex , it is her translations I fall for every time. Even if her point about Rome’s mix of cultures was slightly hard to grasp…this was such an original, vivid, citizen-level tour, you could practically hear the guys and puellae getting it together behind the pillars.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“It exemplifies two current BBC vices. There’s the clumsily over-extended title, which insists on shoehorning in the talent, just in case we worry that we might be going to meet the Romans with someone we haven’t heard of. And then there’s the tediously repetitive teaser intro, which offers a Russian salad of “coming attractions”, all chopped to buggery so that none of them make any sense anymore… Note to the executive producer: why not just let her tell the story from the beginning? She’s really good at it. And you’re not.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“Unfortunately reading between the lines is all we can do in a lot of instances and Professor Beard is forced to do rather too much of it to bring her sparse material to life. It must have looked great on the drawing board…However it’s very hard to do from what amounts to a skip-full of names. Professor Beard is an absolute treat of a presenter, a woman over the age of 35, picked not just because she has a lively style but because she’s an expert in her subject.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“The problems that bedevilled Stephenson’s original psychotherapeutic foray into television – Shrink Rap – were still present. The wit and articulacy of many of the interviewees…leave her too frequently looking redundant rather than simply self-effacing, as is a therapist’s lot.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian