The Times: TV Review - Time Commanders
A new show uses computer-gaming technology to allow players to re-enact great battles in a virtual world. The Times looked in. The trouble with history is that it does not always turn out as you would like. Wars might be won by the bad guys; misguided strategies can haunt the distant progeny of the defeated. So BBC Two has decided to give posterity another chance.
Any armchair tacticians who think they could have done a better job than some of history's great military minds now have a chance to prove it - taking on the most fearsome marauding armies from the comfort of a White City studio.
Time Commanders, which starts this Thursday (BBC Two, 8pm), claims to be a "revolutionary" type of history show. Using the latest computer-gaming technology, it allows ordinary citizens to re-enact one of the great battles in a graphically rich virtual world, so that contestants in the studio can command vast battalions and see the blood-spattered results in real time. If they are smart, they can, with a few well-planned mouse-clicks, re-shape the destinies of Boadicea or Alexander the Great; if they fail, their legions die with them. It may sound like a PlayStation game melded with a traditional low-budget BBC panel show, but Time Commanders wants to be seen as a seriously educational TV show.
Jobbing television extras have long been grateful for battlefield re-enactment scenes, but Time Commanders lets some clever 3-D computer-graphics software do all the work. For the player, the result is an unprecedented combination of realism and interactivity that puts them at the heart of the battle scene. The experience is rather less involving for the viewer, who remains entirely and frustratingly passive throughout the game. But so convinced is the BBC that audiences will find themselves caught up in the raw excitement of combat that it has already commissioned 16 hour-long episodes.
The Times went to watch an early episode being recorded in August at Television Centre, where a chilled studio had been stripped bare to turn it into central command to re-enact Hannibal's Battle of Trebia against the Romans. The year is 218BC, and the Roman commander, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, faces a Carthaginian assault by the Trebia river in northern Italy.
This, you may dimly recall, involves that most unforgiving weapon of mass destruction, the rampaging elephant. Can today's team of four amateur dramatics enthusiasts from Manchester measure up to 27-year-old Hannibal, who in victory here killed up to 20,000 Romans out of 45,000, before going on to ravage the Italian countryside?
Eddie Mair is oddly miscast as presenter - his deadpan wit certainly ought to move from radio to TV, but his mischievous charm is lost on the belligerent amateurs.
You can't help feeling he'd rather be teasing an MoD spokesman about Hannibal's readiness to attack at 45 minutes notice. Still, there are military historians on hand to ensure authenticity and provide commentary, and plenty of library books in the production room in case questions of detail arise.
Players plan their moves on a tabletop battlefield decked with models, perhaps borrowed from Peter Snow, but the real action starts when a couple of black-clad computer operators (officially "technicians", but looking more like burger flippers) translate their orders into computer animations on a giant monitor.
Contestants are offered similar choices to those facing Hannibal: how to position their Numidian troops (agile, but lacking armour), their Spanish heavy cavalry (disciplined, but poor against front-line infantry) and, of course, their elephants. Talk is of ambushes being sprung and concentrations of combat power. "I was very glad to see aggression all round," chips in one military historian, amid digressions to enlighten viewers as to the elephants' diets and other educational footnotes.
What Time Commanders really needs is an opportunity for viewers to interact with the game - something that the BBC is supposed to excel in, but which in this case no one seems to have mentioned. It's a brave strategy building a series around an audience watching other people play a computer game: but isn't that red handset button designed to let us play along too?
(The Times, August 30 2003)
Any armchair tacticians who think they could have done a better job than some of history's great military minds now have a chance to prove it - taking on the most fearsome marauding armies from the comfort of a White City studio.
Time Commanders, which starts this Thursday (BBC Two, 8pm), claims to be a "revolutionary" type of history show. Using the latest computer-gaming technology, it allows ordinary citizens to re-enact one of the great battles in a graphically rich virtual world, so that contestants in the studio can command vast battalions and see the blood-spattered results in real time. If they are smart, they can, with a few well-planned mouse-clicks, re-shape the destinies of Boadicea or Alexander the Great; if they fail, their legions die with them. It may sound like a PlayStation game melded with a traditional low-budget BBC panel show, but Time Commanders wants to be seen as a seriously educational TV show.
Jobbing television extras have long been grateful for battlefield re-enactment scenes, but Time Commanders lets some clever 3-D computer-graphics software do all the work. For the player, the result is an unprecedented combination of realism and interactivity that puts them at the heart of the battle scene. The experience is rather less involving for the viewer, who remains entirely and frustratingly passive throughout the game. But so convinced is the BBC that audiences will find themselves caught up in the raw excitement of combat that it has already commissioned 16 hour-long episodes.
The Times went to watch an early episode being recorded in August at Television Centre, where a chilled studio had been stripped bare to turn it into central command to re-enact Hannibal's Battle of Trebia against the Romans. The year is 218BC, and the Roman commander, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, faces a Carthaginian assault by the Trebia river in northern Italy.
This, you may dimly recall, involves that most unforgiving weapon of mass destruction, the rampaging elephant. Can today's team of four amateur dramatics enthusiasts from Manchester measure up to 27-year-old Hannibal, who in victory here killed up to 20,000 Romans out of 45,000, before going on to ravage the Italian countryside?
Eddie Mair is oddly miscast as presenter - his deadpan wit certainly ought to move from radio to TV, but his mischievous charm is lost on the belligerent amateurs.
You can't help feeling he'd rather be teasing an MoD spokesman about Hannibal's readiness to attack at 45 minutes notice. Still, there are military historians on hand to ensure authenticity and provide commentary, and plenty of library books in the production room in case questions of detail arise.
Players plan their moves on a tabletop battlefield decked with models, perhaps borrowed from Peter Snow, but the real action starts when a couple of black-clad computer operators (officially "technicians", but looking more like burger flippers) translate their orders into computer animations on a giant monitor.
Contestants are offered similar choices to those facing Hannibal: how to position their Numidian troops (agile, but lacking armour), their Spanish heavy cavalry (disciplined, but poor against front-line infantry) and, of course, their elephants. Talk is of ambushes being sprung and concentrations of combat power. "I was very glad to see aggression all round," chips in one military historian, amid digressions to enlighten viewers as to the elephants' diets and other educational footnotes.
What Time Commanders really needs is an opportunity for viewers to interact with the game - something that the BBC is supposed to excel in, but which in this case no one seems to have mentioned. It's a brave strategy building a series around an audience watching other people play a computer game: but isn't that red handset button designed to let us play along too?
(The Times, August 30 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, August 30, 2003
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