Diagonaldi Very well executed

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

bootlebarth Do people of tenderer years than me know about the curate's egg? A polite young clergyman, entertained at breakfast by his bishop, was asked about his stale egg. It was 'good in parts', said the curate, remembering the shell.Around the World in 80 Treasures is 'good in parts'. How could it be otherwise? A crew spends months travelling the world to present wonderful things made by man, ancient and modern. Of course there has to be a mix. Some treasures are new, others are old. Some are enormous, others are tiny. Think of a contrast and you'll find it.The bad parts are when presenter/writer Dan Cruickshank appears, speaks and gesticulates. He is an embarrassment of the highest order. Can't he voice words except in a breathless whisper? Why does every sentence have to be punctuated by unnecessary pauses? Is he incapable of speaking without making irritating hand gestures every few seconds? Why choose a presenter who can't even pronounce 'treasure' properly?The choice of treasures hardly matters. The series includes things and places that everyone has heard of (Angkor Wat, Petra, Granada...) and a smattering of oddities (VW beetle, modern chair...). Many of them are astounding, but as soon as the the viewer begins to marvel the idiotic presenter intrudes.When Cruickshank is absent his series provides wonderful images. As soon as he appears, any magic vanishes. My rating is an average of at least 9/10 for the choice of treasures, and at most 1/10 for the execrable way in which they're presented.

jonrichco Watched "Around the World in 80 Treasures" for the first time tonight - as I am just back from Cambodia, and heading for Tajikistan. Dan Cruikshank seems to me to be a complete charlatan. While he picks some interesting places for his 80 treasures (eg, this evening Samarkand and Bukhara), I was appalled at his treatment of the scripts and artifacts of the sites he visited in Iran. Hasn't anyone told him that it is totally unacceptable for him to rub his greasy fingers over the 2000 year-old scripts? What sort of model is this for the rest of us? In Cambodia, the restoration of Angkor Wat is proceeding well. They now have rope barriers to keep people half a metre back from the hieroglyphs etc. In the main Angkor, I saw not one person reach over to touch the carvings. How come 10,000 tourists at Angkor Wat are more culturally aware than Mr Criukshank?

drslop Is this some kind of surreal joke? A clueless, maladroit windbag tours "his" selection of world "treasures" and is locked out, finds the treasure invisible in mist or bestows such comments as "absolutely stunning" (on the Easter Island statues!) while endlessly complaining about scheduling problems. World civilisation is here made stupendously dull presented by someone who achieves the difficult feat of being extremely superficial and tediously rambling at the same time while being apparently unable to get off-screen long enough for viewers actually to see or appreciate the "treasures" he is so earnestly and witlessly wheezing about. So shallow and brief is the treatment of each treasure here that if you blink, you will miss one or two -- but, sadly, you will not escape the whittering of the truly appalling Dan Cruikshank whose confidence in his own narrow and banal "Little England" aesthetic judgements is such that he needs no actual expertise in casting his pearls before us. This seems to be the same absurd Cruikshank who had a tiny flash of fame with his extravagant, apparently unsubstantiated claims downplaying the scale of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, asserting that the Museum was a legitimate military target and charging that the looting was "an inside job". (Not very surprisingly, Iraq does not figure as a location for any of these treasures.) In short, this bloke seems to be a rather irritating idiot and, putting it kindly, not exactly authentic in his excessively self-conscious eccentricity. Watch this at your own risk -- good earplugs or "MUTE" would certainly help. Highly recommended for gullible people with absolutely no prior knowledge of history or culture or anyone who is interested in seeing how very low the BBC documentary has now fallen.

LFTSmith Visually, the series was very impressive. But sadly, it was let down by the choice of presenter, whose over-affable, opinionated and affected style (reminiscent of Peter Snow) seems a good example of the BBC's dumbing down of otherwise interesting programmes.given the limited time devoted to the subject matter, there was a little too much padding in the form of self-praise for embarking om such an enterprise. Constant stressing of time constraints seemed to ignore the fact that these were largely self-imposed. Better preparation by the BBC's own staff on the spot might haver avoided embarrassing gaps like the treasures of the Forbidden Palace. But turn the sound down and you have a visual feast.