"IT WAS like the Space Race of the early 19th century," Paul Bradshaw says of the bitter and deadly Anglo-French rivalry over the territory and ancient secrets of Egypt.

"It was very deep. It had mainly petered out by the time of the First World War, but they were two very powerful, industrialised nations that were after the same thing, and they had some very powerful personalities, like Napoleon and Nelson, who fought over Egypt."

The desperate military, political and scholarly competition between the two European powers plays a large role in the six-part dramatized documentary series Egypt, which Bradshaw produced for the BBC.

The series devotes two episodes to each of three stories: Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen; Italian Giovanni Belzoni's explorations of southern Egypt on behalf of the British; and the race between the finest minds of Britain and France to unlock the secrets of the hieroglyphs.

"We tried to tell the story through dialogue rather than the voice of God saying, 'This is what happened,' though there is a bit of that," Bradshaw says. "What I really want people to take out of it is the feeling that they've taken part in it (the exploration) themselves."

Having followed in the explorers' footsteps himself - and with his huge cast and crew having struggled with temperatures pushing 50 degrees and Egypt's omnipresent wind-blown, equipment-destroying sand - Bradshaw says he has an enormous amount of respect for the men and women who spent years at a time traipsing through the arid, inhospitable landscape in search of things that might never have existed in the first place. (And often they did it in three-piece suits.)

"I've got a lot of admiration for them. I don't know that I would have liked all of them, especially Howard Carter - he was very irascible and dogmatic - but you've got to admire someone who sticks to what they believe and what their task is," he says.

Bradshaw, who also produced Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, What the Tudors Did for Us and parts of the BBC history series Timewatch, says he loves history, in part because the stories are so good.

Using the example of the Italian strongman known to English fairgoers as "The Great Belzoni", who went on to discover the spectacular temple of Abu Simbel and found the Egyptian collections of the British Museum and the Louvre, Bradshaw says: "You'd never make that sort of stuff up - it would be ridiculous."

BBC
By: Brad Newsome
November 16th 2006