Clive James: Was Cleopatra the film that ruined Hollywood? Nor is there any reason for today's viewers to believe that the movie's putative oodles of spectacle were ever impressive. The famous scene of Cleo's entry into Rome was a bad joke even at the time. Computer-generated imagery was not invented until much later, but no amount of digital trickery would have tempered the flaring vulgarity of the bikini-clad dancing girls. The documentary, as documentaries should be, was full of relevant information, but there was no room to expand on the theme of how the economic aspects of the disaster went on affecting the Hollywood business model all the way to now. Similar catastrophes had happened in the movie business from the beginning, but Cleopatra was the crack-up that confirmed the rule for modern times: if the studio gets into a state where its latest blockbuster has to be a hit, then all of its minor projects are bound to suffer. Imagine you are a serious film director who has just completed a small-budget movie that has every prospect of being an art house success or better, and then it turns out that the studio wants to save money by restricting its release. You might have spent years waiting to make the movie, and now hardly anyone will see it. The system is a killer. Francis Ford Coppola once tried to beat the system by starting his own studio, but really you would have to start your own country, like Pedro Almodóvar. The awful chanciness of the movie business has been working our way in recent years, because the attendant frustration helps motivate first-rate talent into making a television series instead. That's probably what's been happening to Jane Campion. Bright Star, her wonderful film about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, got little of the exposure appropriate to its quality. With Top of the Lake (BBC Two) she has a whole big television serial that will be visible everywhere, like The Wire or Breaking Bad. I just wish that I could like Top of the Lake better. I've been working on it, and I keep going back to it, but there is something ill-defined about the leading lady's role that can almost reduce me to watching an episode of Wallander that I've already seen. Isn't Elisabeth Moss too clear-cut an actress to be playing someone so diffident? Yes, I know she is shy and retiring in Mad Men, or anyway she started out that way; but in Top of the Lake she is so unable to command her destiny that she ends up in a pup tent with one of southern New Zealand's far too ample supply of men with bad shaves; and all this happens while the local chief cop, who shaves brilliantly, strives to choke back his love for her. Well, I feel the same. For God's sake, it's Elisabeth Moss we're talking about, not Elizabeth Taylor. We need to see her taken care of. Another Hollywood rule applies: the basis of any plot is a kiss delayed, but it can't be delayed forever. So I cut back to take another look, and I find that horrible bad-bearded biker-type guy behaving vilely to the woman he was boffing in the open air five minutes ago. At this rate I will have to buy the boxed set and find out how it all hangs together. In her role as top woman on the classical circuit, Mary Beard fronted Caligula (BBC Two), and incidentally demonstrated why she could never have been the historical advisor on Cleopatra. Instead of reinforcing myths, she dismantles them. Pursuing her laudable aim of demystification in a realm which is anyway almost all conjecture, she is essentially running a vacuum cleaner through sand dunes. One thing we all know about Caligula is that he made his horse a senator. But do we know it? Perhaps he was joking. Personally I would have been disappointed at the way so many good awful stories yielded to the pressure of clear argument, but luckily the narrator's gift for an aphorism was always there as a compensation. She got the constant scariness of Roman court culture in a single phrase: "the choreography of threat." But such conciseness is the enemy of a big juicy movie. Gore Vidal's Caligula had every single myth in it and lasted for hours. Mary Beard's Caligula would run for five minutes.