TV review

THERE was a startling twist in the tale of the legendary underwater city. Having spent the best part of an hour investigating the mythical sunken empire, believed to have been lost 12,000 years ago, the makers suggested it never existed at all.

Everyone from Christopher Columbus to Adolf Hitler has been fascinated by the idyllic civilisation, first written about by Plato in the fourth century BC.

As a boy, he'd heard about Atlantis at a dinner party. His account was very specific about its location (outside the Pillars of Hercules, putting it in the Atlantic Ocean) and size (bigger than Africa and Asia put together).

It was a land of rare plants and exotic animals, portrayed as a sacred paradise. This heaven on earth was lost in a natural disaster. After earthquakes and floods, it disappeared into the depths of the sea.

But perhaps everyone has taken Plato's story too literally. Richard Ellis, author of Imagining Atlantis, thinks Plato's account is more fiction than fact. "I don't believe Plato believed a word of it," he said.

It was suggested he'd made it up to compensate for the loss of his mentor Socrates. The makers didn't let that get in the way of a good story, as they produced one fascinating fact after another about the search for Atlantis.

Part of explorer Columbus's motivation was to look for the lost paradise of Antilia in the Atlantic. He found America instead.

Then, 150 years later, another explorer declared that ruins in Mexico were the remains of Atlantis. His maths weren't very good, as those constructions were built after the date of the city's destruction.

Jules Verne's book 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea described an underwater city of great temples. Failed politician Ignatius Donnelly jumped on the Atlantis bandwagon in the 1880s, publishing a bestselling book on the subject. As a result, Atlantis fever "swept the nation", declared the programme's excited narrator. In 1883, the New Orleans Mardi Gras adopted it as its theme.

The subject caught the eye of Hitler and the Third Reich, which latched on to the theory of a pure Atlantian race. They searched for evidence of the lost city in the same way they sought the Holy Grail and Lost Ark of the Covenant.

As the Second World War progressed, the racially-pure homeland of Atlantis became the model for the new Nazi Germany. What was an earthly paradise became a genocidal nightmare.

Later, films like Atlantis The Lost Continent and the Patrick Duffy TV series The Man From Atlantis took the subject back into the realms of the imagination.

The search for Atlantis continues. Advances in technology mean that aerial photography analysts may be able to pinpoint its location. One theory puts it under the South Pole in Antarctica. Little did Plato know what he was starting when he began telling tales.