Pompeii: The Last Day (BBC1): POMPEII without Up in the title and Frankie Howerd telling us, "Titter ye not" isn't the same.

Not that this historical spectacular didn't have moments of amusement. But that wasn't how it should have been when recounting such a serious, tragic even, story of the wide scale death and disruption caused by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

The film was fine when explaining and illustrating in great detail what happened in the worst natural disaster to strike the ancient world. The problem came when people opened their mouths. This was acceptable when they stared, gobs wide open, at clouds of toxic fumes or rivers of molten lava heading towards them. It was the words they uttered that dragged us back to the 21st century, just as Howerd's anachronistic jokes did in Up Pompeii.

To give the reconstruction human interest, the makers created stories for their characters - based on skeletons, charred bodies and artefacts unearthed in the city that had lain buried and forgotten for more than 1,500 years.

Decent actors, including Tim Piggott-Smith and Jim Carter, were hired to put on togas and mouth B-movie dialogue along the lines of "If I'd been elected last time around, none of this would have happened" and "we didn't have a very good night last night".

Part of the dilemma for the people of Pompeii was that they'd never seen anything like it. There wasn't even a Latin word for volcano. Admiral Pliny (Piggott-Smith) recognised it as a "fire mountain like Etna", then foolishly went to get a closer look.

Jonathan Firth's Stephanus was with his mistress in a cheap hotel when the earth moved. He hot footed it back to his fullery - a launderette where urine was used to wash clothes (this natural liquid removes grease stains, though I can't see Persil saying that pee washes whiter). He wanted to rescue his money, not his wife Fortunata, who was fortunate to find herself in the gladiators' barracks.

Jim Carter's Polybius thought he could save his family by barricading them inside their home, reckoning without toxic fumes seeping in and the ceiling collapsing under the weight of volcanic debris. "And after all I've spent on the election," he wailed.

When the drama concentrated on using computer-generated special effects and historical research to piece together the terrible events that unfolded over 18 hours, the result was splendid in a classroom lecture sort of way. Who'd have thought that clouds of curling black smoke and pyroclastic surges could be so interesting?

The doom-and-gloom narration ("trouble is brewing in paradise...") spared us nothing of brains boiling and exploding or of people asphyxiating from the acrid smoke or being turned to charcoal by clouds of gas and ash five times hotter than boiling water.

We must thank eyewitness Pliny the Younger for leaving us detailed descriptions of the disaster. Not that anyone believed him. It's taken recent scientific research to prove his account was accurate. "Oooo, errrr, missus," as dear Frankie would have said.