Grant's Very Modern Odyssey Travelogue Reviewed
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Richard E Grant's Very Modern Odyssey is a four-part travelogue tracing Odysseus's journey, opening in Malta's Grand Harbour and Valletta and explicitly positioning itself outside the 'interminable Odyssey discourse' around Nolan's blockbuster
- St John's Co-Cathedral features prominently in Valletta — a 16th-century baroque church built by the Order of St John, whose ornate marble floor houses the tombs of 400 'warrior knights'
- Grant visits a cave on the Maltese island of Gozo possibly linked to the nymph Calypso's mythological home, and the opening episode concludes at the bronze age ruins of Troy
- A local historian interviewed in the show links Homer's themes — refugees, climate change, political crisis — to contemporary relevance
- Grant reads extracts from Homer in an amphitheatre and acknowledges the poet's 2,500-year-old tale 'blurred fact and fiction into a story that has lasted'
- The reviewer praises Grant as 'a one-man brass section of patrician glee,' contrasting his loose-limbed approach with the scholarly scrutiny the Nolan film has drawn
Why it matters: The show launches as a personality-driven counterweight to the Nolan blockbuster conversation, trading cinematic spectacle for Mediterranean travelogue and Homeric enthusiasm. For audiences fatigued by the 'interminable' Odyssey discourse, Grant's relaxed, self-aware approach offers a more accessible entry point to Homer's 2,500-year-old themes of displacement and crisis.
