Luxor4u

Tonight on Channel 5, 9pm UK time, is the first of a 3-part series on Tutankhamun with Dan Snow.

The following parts are on Wed & Thurs , also at 9pm (UK).

The programme is heralded as “new”...although I suspect the contents will be anything but.

Dan Snow is not to everyone’s (mine included) taste as a historian! I keep picturing his father Peter wielding the Swing-o-meter at election time.

Well....if you didn’t see it, you didn’t miss much.

It was new stuff in the sense it wasn’t clips of old stuff..... but nothing really new.

It starts with Dan Snow wandering about a colourful tomb which he labels as Ramesses IV. It’s very obviously Ramesses V/VI. Not a promising start.

No documentary on Egypt is complete without the novice ooohing and aaahing at each revelation . And this was no different with a white- clad lady who asked what life was like for a pharaoh such as Tutankhamen. The Egyptian guide elaborated.....with Tut eating all sorts of delicacies, his every move - waking, dressing, etc - - watched by adoring courtiers.

More Louis XIV than Tutankhamen methinks!

Our intrepid novice was bowled over with her tour of Deir el Medina. A tomb with real mummies! Alas, not one of the spectacularly decorated ones. Perhaps the director thought that might be too much for her heart.

A visit to an active dig was next...the ongoing clearance of KV 10 - Amenmesse. Not much to see there...apart from Salina Ikram without whom no Egyptology programme is complete She piecing together the bits of a sarcophagus and thinks it belongs to Amenmesse’s motherTakhat for whom the tomb may have been intended. Some new stuff then.

Can’t wait for 2nd episode tonight....if I’m not washing my hair.