James Delingpole James Delingpole

Fascinating, plausible ideas undermined by Netflix: Ancient Apocalypse reviewed

Plus: Apple TV+'s Slow Horses – Smiley’s People with more booze, squalor and jokes – is back

The Gunung Padang megalithic site in West Java, Indonesia, dating to at least 5,000 BC. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen / Fairfax Media / Getty Images  
issue 10 December 2022

Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous than the undigested, neo-Malthusian eco-propaganda that it serves up in its collaborations with Sir David Attenborough? More dangerous than its notorious movie Cuties, whose portrayal of hypersexualised children prompted a worldwide ‘Cancel Netflix’ campaign?

The Guardian’s main beef is that by flirting with speculations outside mainstream archaeology – Atlantis, giants, the survivors of the great flood and so on – the show ‘whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us’.

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