prologue © Canal+

feature item © Canal+

epilogue © Canal+

The Grandeur That Was Rome

by Rex Edwards
Designed by Stan Woodward
Directed by Kim Mills

Production Schedule

Episode 60
Production Number : 3607
VTR/ABC/2869
Teddington Studio 1

Thursday 18th July 1963

Friday 19th July 1963

Running time

Expected: 51'25"
Actual running time with bumpers: 51'46"

The bumpers between the acts are generally 10 seconds from fade in to the "End of Act" bumper to the end of audio before the commercial, a 10 second still without audio, then cut to the next act bumper. This would play with the theme for around 10 seconds. Accordingly, with the episodes being in 3 acts, the running time of the action is approximately a minute less than listed above, minus the opening and closing credits (normally 0'16", with a 2" fade, and anywhere from 0'41" to 1'20", hard cut or 1" fade or mix, respectively).

Transmission

Equipment

Murders

Victim	Killer	Method
Lucius	John Steed	sword (per synopsis, off camera)
Sir Bruno Luker	Marcus Dodds	stabbed
click a name to see the face

Minutiæ

Time codes here include the Studio Canal logo from the remastered 2010 set, which takes 0:18 seconds.

1. The episode takes its title from a quotation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "To Helen" - "To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome".
2. 2:15 - Bruno decides the new senator for singapore, Sears, will be known as Spartacus, gladiator of Rome.
3. 2:30 - Bruno and Marcus toast each other with the words "Audentes fortuna juvat" (Fortune favours the bold - a quote from Vergil's Aeneid, 10, 284. Bruno later repeats the toast with Steed, who looks blankly at him unti lBruno provides the translation.
4. 2:40 - Marcus reports that the files are warbling in the Caucasus, the peasants itch and go deaf in Provence and Madrid ("Some will die", comments Bruno), and the pigs are walking backwards.
5. 6:00-6:18 - long smear, maybe an out of focus hair at top of picture and a small spot at top left. They reappear at 8:45-9:10 (Bruno CU) and 13:20 (Eastow CU)
6. 9:11 - A first? Steed pours Cathy and himself a glass of Veuve Cliquot.
7. 9:27 - Cathy's view through the microscope is clearly not slides at all, but vignetted pictures of cell structures from a science book.
8. 11:13 - the "infected grain" is clearly the same picture as pointed to by Cathy in the book moments earlier.
9. 12:39 - the vision is out of focus on the change of shot.
10. 13:07- Appleton struggles with the word "necessity"
11. 18:45 - Eastow refers to "Mrs Dale" then corrects himself
12. 27:30 and 48:30 - Sir Bruno pronounces "grandeur" as "grander"
13. 30:30 - there's a small spot at the top right of the screen.
14. 31:39 - the cameraman fluffs the CU of Cathy, first she's out of focus and he pans sharply to the right, then the camera collides with something (with a dull thud) and the vision leaps as the camera shakes
15. 41:44 - Just before Steed's capture at the bacchanal, Sir Bruno, leaving Octavia back stage goes to stage right, pats a girl, then proceed to stage centre, the camera drawing out before him. As the camera pulls back, it promptly crashes into the couch upon which Lucius, Marcus and one of the other girls are locked in a carnal embrace, making the picture shake - the extras in the background look perturbed, but Hugh Burden carries on without more than raising an eyebrow.
16. 45:12 - Lucius raps his sword on the tomb as a threat to the hidden Steed, but it sounds like a bit of wood...
17. 47:29 - Steed's umbrella has a sword inside it
18. 49:42 - Bruno leads a cheer : "Pax, Imperium et Res Secundae." - "Peace, the Empire and prosperity!"
19. 50:57 - Public school humour in the closing scene -
    Cathy, musing over Bruno's death, says, "Ambition's debt is paid". Steed makes up some pseudo-Latin "Alius romedea segovia sunt aliis" (Macnee gets it wrong, the script reads: "Alia remedia graviora sunt aliis" - "Some medicines are worse than others"). When Cathy replies "Faber est quisque fortunae suae" (a Latin proverb, quoted by both Sallust and Appius Claudius Caecus, which means "Everyone is the architect of their own fortune." or in a more modern parlance "You dig your own hole."), Macnee squints at her in disbelief then laughs out loud and says, "You must be mad!"
20. This episode has a similar, if more outré, plot to the Emma Peel episode Silent Dust.