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Here comes Richard E Grant, pounding towards us in his tiny leather jacket as he gesticulates wildly at his cobbled surrounds. “Wow,” he gasps. “Look at that.” We look at that. It’s Malta. Specifically, Malta’s Grand Harbour: a sobbingly beautiful gateway to the Mediterranean and the sun-blessed starting line for Richard E Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey, a four-part travelogue “inspired by Homer’s hero” in which the veteran actor traces Odysseus’s “incredible journey” while wearing a succession of increasingly voluminous linen trousers.
Said tracing is not, however, an exact science. This is not one of those awful celebrity things in which our noble hero arms himself with set squares and a scholastic scowl before setting sail on a “voyage” to uncover “the truth”.
Nor is it an attempt to contribute to the seemingly interminable Odyssey discourse – the ongoing hoo-ha over the historical accuracy of the Christopher Nolan blockbuster that already feels as if it’s lasted longer than the Trojan war.
Instead, it’s a loose-limbed, easygoing thing that attempts to separate Homeric myth from reality but appears equally “chill” with the fact that much of it remains fundamentally unknowable. “Essentially,” says Grant, grinning hugely, “we’re dealing with an act of the imagination.”
So here we are in the Maltese capital of Valletta, which doesn’t appear to have featured on Odysseus’s itinerary, but does have a Michelin-starred restaurant that serves butter-basted pigeon with sage and rosemary. Grant is cock-a-hoop. “Mmm,” he shouts while frantically licking his plate, much as the Greeks “licked” the Trojans after the siege of Troy.
This is followed by a brief stop at the luxurious Phoenecia hotel for a lime mocktail and some wistful reminiscing about Malta’s colonial past (“this was Queen Elizabeth’s favourite hangout!”), before it’s off for a gander at Valletta’s perfectly extraordinary St John’s Co-Cathedral.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” splutters our host, drifting through the nave open-mouthed as he takes in its baroque tumult of golden whorls and thunderstruck cherubim. “Honestly, it out-Sistines the Sistine Chapel.” And it does. Built by the Order of St John in the 16th century, it’s a frantic masterpiece of death and glory, its ornate marble floor housing the tombs of 400 “warrior knights”.
“In Homer’s world,” says Grant, “heroes make a sacrifice to the gods every time they sail into danger. Here, the ritual was different, but the idea was the same: ask for help before you do something terrifying.”
The actor is moved. “I’m not a religious man,” he tells us later, chin smushed into his enormous brown neckerchief. “But going inside that jewel of a church was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had.”
Here, there are epiphanies around every corner. Valletta’s Lurpak-coloured stonework is “a revelation”. The cave on the Maltese island of Gozo that may or may not have been the inspiration for the home of the saucy nymph Calypso leaves him “nearly in tears”.
“I’m utterly bewitched by every detail,” he roars at one point. He is a one-man brass section of patrician glee.
These days, we note, there is a slight fuzziness to Grant’s barrel-aged boom, as if his vowels had rolled under a chaise longue and been left to gather a fine layer of fluff. When he reads extracts from Homer’s poem in the ruins of an amphitheatre, he sounds both wearily thrilled and knackered, like a kindly oak tree completing a particularly taxing parkrun.
The opening episode concludes with a visit to the bronze age ruins of Troy. This was “almost certainly” the site of “a real, bloody war”.
More vagueness. But it’s all to the good. Homer’s gargantuan tale of Mediterranean aggro remains powerfully relevant, says a local historian. “Refugees, climate change, political crisis – all of these things you find in The Odyssey.”
Another huge grin from Grant. “It seems Homer blurred fact and fiction into a story that has lasted over two and a half thousand years,” he trumpets. “A success by any measure.” As, indeed, is Grant’s own Very Modern Odyssey.
Lime mocktails all round.
