Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston – the tale of ordinary Romans’ hopeless heroism is tearjerking television

The Avengers star teams up with real-life scholars for a look at the eruption of Vesuvius. At points it’s elegiac and moving, at others it’s majestic and brutal It’s always funny when documentaries strategically pair a possibly boring topic with a famous face, just to sex them up. A History of NCP Car Parks By Tinie Tempah, say, or World’s Deadliest Sleep Disorders With Anna Maxwell Martin. So when I saw that Tom Hiddleston was hosting a National Geographic investigation into the destruction ...

By Rhik Samadder