Channel 5's new history series The Victorians, presented by barrister-turned-broadcaster Rob Rinder and historian Ruth Goodman, has been given two stars out of five by television critic Christopher Stevens, who said the programme's use of artificial intelligence to recreate scenes from the 19th century looked "utterly unconvincing."
Stevens singled out two AI-generated sequences used to bring history to life: one showing a railway line under construction in a Yorkshire valley, with hundreds of pickaxe-wielding navvies "scurrying like ants," and another depicting the beach at Scarborough thronging with day-trippers who had arrived by train.
"Both images looked no more like reality than a toy kaleidoscope pattern looks like a stained glass window," Stevens wrote. "The eye can instantly tell they are fake, even before the brain can work out why."
He said the effect worsened whenever the footage zoomed in on faces, with the lighting, focus and movement all "slightly off," and "most of all the absence of life behind the eyes."
Stevens argued the false footage distracted from what the historians were actually saying, and concluded that if AI recreation is the best the technology can currently do, it is unlikely to "take over the world" beyond making television "a little bit worse."
George Hudson and the railway boom
Stevens found Rinder and Goodman far more engaging when they relied on traditional research, digging into 180-year-old documents to tell the story of the 1840s railway boom and the stock market crash that bankrupted many of its investors, including the financier George Hudson.
Hudson was celebrated for raising the capital that built Britain's first railway network, so much so that Madame Tussauds made a waxwork of him. The waxwork was later melted down after the crash left many of his backers financially ruined.
Rinder marvelled at the itinerary for one of Hudson's lavish parties, which offered punch for early arrivals at 10pm, waltzing from 11pm, and a 1am feast that opened with lobster vol-au-vents and turtle soup before finishing with raspberry cream and champagne served until dawn. "I think I'd have been mates with the Hudsons," Rinder said.
He reportedly winced at a billowing dress with sleeves "like legs of mutton" worn by Hudson's wife, Elizabeth, whose fashion sense drew scorn from contemporaries. One catty guest at the time described her as "a fat woman in a yellow gown and an amber cap with red flowers."
Criticism of the show's tone
The episode forms part of Channel 5's Rich Lives, Poor Lives strand, and Stevens criticised Goodman for what he called endless lecturing on how tough life was for the Victorian working classes and how the nation's wealth was built on their labour, dismissing the commentary as "GCSE platitudes."
According to the programme, navvies building the railway tunnels kept themselves going largely by drinking beer, averaging eight pints a day, with some reportedly drinking more than 30 pints.
Elsewhere on TV this week
Stevens also noted the Neapolitan crime drama Gomorrah: The Origins, showing on Sky Atlantic, is Italy's most popular show of the year, though many Italians reportedly need subtitles to follow it because the Neapolitan dialect spoken in the series differs so sharply from standard Italian that other native speakers struggle to understand it.
