In the first 20 minutes of Rome (BBC Two), the much-trailed 11-part swords-and-sandals melodrama by the BBC and the American cable channel HBO, we had a close-quarters hackfest in Gaul, scourgings, crucifixions and buttock-heaving sex. No wonder the Republic’s capital wasn’t built in a day — everyone was too busy fighting, on their backs, face-down drunk or fretting about real or imagined enemies.

But let’s be honest, this is the way we like to remember the Romans. They may have given us the foundation for our legal system and the building blocks of our language, but they remain icons after 2,000 years because they keep us entertained; Gladiator, after all, is not a film that thrills to the flush of freshly invented plumbing.

Rome plonks us in 52BC and the power struggle between Julius Caesar (Ciarán Hinds), eager to return home after eight years of war in Gaul, and his rival Pompey (Kenneth Cranham) back in Italy, fearful of Caesar’s growing popularity with the masses. The conflict embroils many characters chasing each other up and down the seven hills. They include Caesar’s scheming niece, Atia (Polly Walker), and two soldiers — a priggish centurion and struggling family man (Kevin McKidd) and a brawny, boozing fellow soldier (Ray Stevenson).

Despite the involvement of the BBC, the British director Michael Apted and so many members of British Equity that you feel cheated that Derek Jacobi isn’t in the cast (it’s not as if he doesn’t have his own toga after I, Claudius and Gladiator), Rome has all the sensibilities of an HBO drama. Whether it’s the muddy Old West of Deadwood, Mafia hoods exhuming an incriminating body in The Sopranos, or the Fishers shovelling dirt into the grave of a lead character in Six Feet Under, the channel loves to dirty up its subjects.

So, from the animated graffiti in Rome’s opening credits, we’re plunged into a city at odds with the usual pristine, white-marble image. Despite the CGI and extras-laden hustle and bustle that a $100 million budget can muster, the metropolis is grubby with backstreet brothels and gambling dens, candle-strewn street shrines and grass growing between the cobblestones.

Like most HBO dramas, the series also has a Bacchanalian vibe. Yet HBO scripts are usually sufficiently strong to adopt the Playboy defence: there is enough good writing to let subscribers claim that they get it for the articles rather than the bare flesh. But so far the nudity and blood seem like superfluous sops to an audience that the producers fear will become bored by Senate matters while the script remains depressingly functional — Caesar’s young nephew Octavian even gives a mini lecture in Roman realpolitik.

When Gore Vidal was hired in 1958 to fix the screenplay for Ben-Hur, its director William Wyler asked: “These Romans, do you know anything about them? I mean, when a Roman sits down and relaxes, what does he unbuckle?” It’s a pertinent question. Imagining the everyday in a world routinely conceived on a grand scale can easily turn into Python territory but such lines as “Brutus, me old cock!” doesn’t pull it off here.

I, Claudius (1976) may now look like a series of studio-bound playlets with flashes of Up Pompeii campness but it is still buoyed by a great script and cast. The performances in Rome are mostly dour — the women are as dull as they are beautiful — thanks to writing that has everyone simply speaking exactly what they’re thinking. Come on, even Caesar managed such catchy phrases as “Veni, vidi, vici” and “Et tu, Brute”. Only Walker’s Atia, happy to be drenched in bull’s blood or sweetly offering dormouse appetisers if it advances her plans, and Stevenson’s brawling soldier are allowed any vim and vigour.

The series bears another HBO trait. Without the instant sink-or-swim pressures of US network television, it makes little effort to draw an audience into its sprawling story. It’s too early to see if it will adopt the current trend to equate the Roman Empire with American imperialism. For now, though, the protagonists are about as involving as marble busts.

Rome wasn’t the only BBC Two programme to feature battles, betrayals, sacrifices and English thesps. Ian Holm narrated Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone’s remarkable film for Natural World. It revealed in breathtaking detail the complex ecosystem surrounding a sycamore fig tree in Africa, from microscopic fig wasps and nesting hornbills to elephants and the Masai. To see how this society meshed together was wondrous. The producers of Rome should take a look before embarking on the next series.

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