Beware the Hun

In the past, television battle scenes consisted of half a dozen men in armour knocking seven bells out of each other. Then the camera angle switched and the same six men were still bashing the others, but from below. Next one of them fell (‘Aaaargh!’) and the other five kept on. It was not altogether convincing. Now, thanks to computer-generated images — CGI — an entire army can be conjured up, literally on a screen in someone’s bedroom. So in Attila the Hun (BBC 1, Wednesday) the warlord could look over an entire Roman army, tens of thousands of men in ranks stretching across the whole horizon, smoke rising from distant fires. Suspend your disbelief a moment, forget you’re looking at pixels rather than people, and the sight is awesome. Then we cut to six actors hitting each other and going ‘Aaaargh!’

Disbelief was at first a little hard to suspend.