The Celts

OK, I'm a big Enya fan, but a wonderful soundtrack won't carry a mediocre documentary, and The Celts (yes, more Irish nostalgia) is one rather dull pup (wacky BBC touches notwithstanding). We watched the opening volume, which traced the early culture, migrations, and battles of the scattered bands of European tribes who would later more or less coalesce into the social group history calls the Celts or The People Who Got Their Butts Kicked Off the Continent onto the British Isles. Unfortunately, writer/presenter Frank Delaney verbally and physically bounces like a ping pong ball through the program dropping names, dates, and places in maddeningly arbitrary fashion and often absurd settings (at one point he's nattering on about the Jutes and Angles while playing cricket--literally talking, swinging the bat and running, talking, running again, talking...it's like a Monty Python sequence only without the humor). And what are we to make of the re-enactments in which Celt family members clash swords with one another while bare-breasted babes apply each other's make-up in the background? Or how about the digging up of the 2,000-year-old codger whose graphically autopsied stomach is dangled in front of our eyes? As exciting as all this sounds, however, The Celts is at its most accurate when it humorously (remember this is British humor) shows a bored classroom of boys listening to a windbag recount Celtic history. Of course, there is the Irish tie-in, and the Irish--in case you've missed it--are currently the cultural hit du jour.