The Victorians with Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman (Channel 5)
Rating: Two stars out of five
Silicon Valley might as well give up now. After throwing millions of computers, billions of dollars and trillions of kilowatts at AI animation, the results still look utterly unconvincing.
Trying to bring history to life, on The Victorians, presenters Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman used Artificial Intelligence to conjure pictures of our ancestors at work and play.
One shot showed a railway line under construction in a Yorkshire valley, with hundreds of pickaxe-wielding navvies scurrying like ants.
Another depicted the beach at Scarborough, thronging with daytrippers who came by train.
Both images looked no more like reality than a toy kaleidoscope pattern looks like a stained glass window. The eye can instantly tell they are fake, even before the brain can work out why.
Far from showing us a forgotten world, the clips served simply as distractions. I couldn’t concentrate on what the historians were saying, because the false footage was so mesmerisingly bad.
It got worse when the computer zoomed in on faces. Everything is slightly off — the lighting, the focus, the movement, and most of all the absence of life behind the eyes.
If this is the best AI can do, we don’t have to worry about this slop taking over the world. The most it can achieve is to make television a little bit worse.
Trying to bring history to life, on The Victorians, presenters Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman used Artificial Intelligence to conjure pictures of our ancestors at work and play, writes Christopher Stevens
Far from showing us a forgotten world, the clips served simply as distractions, writes Mr Stevens
Ruth and Rob were far more entertaining when they relied on old-fashioned methods, digging into 180-year-old documents to tell the story of the railway boom in the 1840s and the stock market crash that bankrupted many of its investors — including financier George Hudson.
He was so celebrated for raising capital to build Britain’s first railway network that Madame Tussauds made a waxwork of him — and melted it down when everyone lost their money.
Rob goggled over the itinerary for one of Hudson’s nouveau riche parties: punch for the early arrivals at 10pm, waltzing at 11, and at 1am a feast that began with lobster vol-au-vents and turtle soup, and ended with raspberry cream, with champagne till dawn.
‘I think I’d have been mates with the Hudsons,’ Rob announced. He winced at the sight of a billowing dress with sleeves like legs of mutton, worn by George’s gauche wife, Elizabeth.
Fashion was not Mrs Hudson’s forte. One catty guest described her as, ‘a fat woman in a yellow gown and an amber cap with red flowers’.
This episode is part of Channel 5’s Rich Lives, Poor Lives strand, which meant Ruth lectured us endlessly on how tough it was for the Victorian working classes, how the nation’s wealth was built on the backs of their labour, and other GCSE platitudes.
The only way for navvies building the railway tunnels to keep themselves going was to drink beer — eight pints a day on average, though some were reported to knock back more than 30 pints.
Thirty pints . . . they must have been steaming.
