What would Roman or Greek TV have looked like?

Trying to portray ancient, non-Christian cultures on screen in this far more tight-laced (despite all the rantings about too much sex and violence) cultural environment of contemporary television is fraught with difficulties for producers aiming for accuracy rather than pandering towards modern prejudices. Let's look at two offerings currently on a TV screen near you.

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena is the prequel to Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which screened last year. Much has been made - nay, it is even the crux of its marketing appeal - about the amount of blood-soaked violence and sweaty sex featured. And it is true that the portrayal of blood, in all that slow motioned slicing, stabbing, carving and flaying of the unfortunate humans on the receiving end, is high on the fetish scale. To defend yourself or kill your opponent in Roman times you needed to be prepared to get your hands bloody (and it teaches all those modern gun-nuts how real men used to do it without access to 2nd Amendment firearms), have enough strength, moral inclination and willpower to drive that steel into another human body, and be ready to deal with the splattering and gurgling consequences. And that's what we viewers have to deal with too: the sight and sounds of an arc of blood flying slo-mo through the air, a standard image sequence in each episode, has all the qualities of a moneyshot. And that is my main criticism with Spartacus: I wish there be as much attention paid to visual and aural detail in the sex scenes as there is in the gore. The sex is portrayed as coy: genitals are barely glimpsed (certainly no hard-ons), the writhing only worthy of a standard soft porn movie, the throes of passion look choreographed and determined by lighting directors and makeup artists - you need to almost put it on fast forward to get some earthy grunt and sweaty action.
In all, if you're going to make a bodily fluid film can we please have less blood and more semen?

Even in a non-fictional portrayal of classical culture, like the documentary series The Ancient Greek Olympics, currently on The History Channel, the narrator had to 'apologise' the production was unable to actually show historical reality (i.e. male athletes always exercised and competed nude) due to our 'Christian' (un-modern) sensibilities about the naked body on screen. Even in our so-called secular times it is still not permitted to show the ancient (and irrepressible) glorification of the nude male body on television and it proves that we are still living in a form of dark ages and have a long road ahead toward enlightenment. It was no surprise the church fathers banned the Olympics - still, it took them four centuries into the Christian era before they succeeded - but we will never be a true post-religious society unless the ancient Olympics can be restored, and, in the meantime, portrayed accurately on TV.

What's the problem with nudity?

The Documentary Channel screened this BBC Horizon programme called "What's the problem with Nudity" the other night.
It tried to figure out why nudity is such a social problem for our species by asking 8 total strangers who have never stripped or been nude in front of other people (and a battery of TV cameras) to do exactly that. Coupled with a potted history of homo sapiens and more ancient forebears, it tried to figure out at what stage in our genetic and cultural history we decided that it was not OK to be around others without "clothes" on.
As this kind of cod TV science goes, it was rather un-illuminating on practically all questions it set out to answer. On the contrary, it left me with a great deal of other queries about aspects that never got touched on.
The obvious clanger was asking 21st Century males and females to rate male chests' sexual attractiveness based on hirsuteness or baldness of said chests. This was supposed to give a clue that evolutionary we have lost our body hair because females preferred to mate with hairless men. But what this really showed was the scientific incompetence of the sex researchers setting up such a thoughtless, biased and uncontrolled experiment: even intuitively (if I may) I would have shown the subjects a range of hairy and hairless women to rate, and I bet the outcome would have been far more pronounced in favour of hairless-ness than the male-only version. Hairy females did far worse evolutionary speaking than hairy males, just look at the number of hairy men still with us compared to the amount of hairy females (ladies with moustaches notwithstanding) and the relentless marketing of lady-shaves, depilatory products and the opprobrium heaped on unshaven continental women.
And we all know that when woman are at their most fertile era in their cycle, they prefer hairy bad boys as bed mates over plucked metrosexuals - and this has a long history too: interbreeding with hairy Neanderthal men apparently was far more common than many of us would like to remember.