The nudity of I, Claudius

I have recently been trying to binge-watch the best TV shows of all time.

In comedies, I’m working on Blackadder, Seinfeld and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. I didn’t bother with Monty Python and SCTV because I know those by heart.

In documentaries, I’m revisiting The Civil War, and still seem to be finding a lot of dust in the room when I watch it.

In drama, I’m reviewing The Sopranos, Harry O, The Prisoner and I, Claudius. I have not yet started on Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul.

I have not found any of them disappointing. They have all held up well, but the one that is remarkably fresh is The Prisoner, which is now more than 50 years old, but looks and feels almost like a new show. The only thing that dates it is that the technology now appears a little cheesy. That show was decades ahead of its time. The sets and photography are gorgeous, while the concept and plotting still mark it as perhaps the most innovative and ingenious show in history. (Although, to be honest, the ending was too far “out there” for me. The show always had an allegorical subtext running parallel to its “real” world, but the final episode had no ground in reality. It was purely a surrealistic allegory, part Kafka, part Salvador Dali, part Groucho, which was heavy-handed for my taste.)

Anyway, that project has nothing to do with the Fun House or Other Crap, but since I, Claudius had quite a bit of nudity, I figured that I may as well capture it, even though Aesthete and Oz have already done it better:

Episode 1

In the very first scene of Claudius’s reminiscences, the show gives notice that it will be R-rated. His tale begins with some sexy, topless African dancers performing for Augustus.


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Episode 2

Just a random extra


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Episode 3

Patricia Quinn


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Episode 6

Patricia Quinn again


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Episode 8

Beth Morris


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Episode 9

Random revelers


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Episode 11

A random party-goer


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And Sheila White. The series saved the best for last. Sheila had three nude scenes in this episode.


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Patricia Quinn did some other nudity now and then in her career, but all the others seemed to give it up for this show only.

23 thoughts on “The nudity of I, Claudius

  1. It doesn’t look as if it was filmed, but if it was, I’d *love* to see an HD remaster if I, Claudius. The one downside might be that given how the BBC usually has to do these things a bit on the cheap, the sets would probably suffer from the increased resolution.

    Also: Seinfeld is the GOAT of TV comedies.

    1. True, PBS didn’t shy away from nudity in some shows. I recall Valerie Perrine, Kate Nelligan, and especially Diane Lane’s first screen nudity.

    1. Yeah, if we’re going to discuss what should be on the list of “best TV shows of all time”, The Wire is there.

  2. Saints alive! I haven’t thought of The Adventures of Pete & Pete in YEARS! That show was really ahead of its time on Nickelodeon.

    1. Brilliant show. So many layers of sentiment, wit, humanity, absurdity. Such a wonderful capsule of the way pre-adults view the world. An absolute masterpiece – wise, touching, hilarious, nonsensical, poetic – and Steve Buscemi.

  3. I read that McGoohan wasn’t sure how to close The Prisoner, and was working on the script of the final episode all the way up to filming, writing a lot of it the night before, which might explain why he has almost no dialogue in it. It’s one of the most disappointing endings to a great show ever, along with Seinfeld. However, McGoohan said he was “delighted” with the angry reaction to the incomprehensible final show, despite that he had to leave the country and go into hiding for a few days as dissatisfied viewers stormed his house.

    1. Patrick McGoohan was one of those people who heard a different drummer from the rest of us.

      I award him my highest honor: I didn’t always like him, but he was never boring.

      1. I always looked for him to have an amazing career after that, but he never did. His most prominent role was maybe Escape From Alcatraz, but he was a little over the top in that and it was only a supporting role. Whatever else he was in didn’t make much of an impression on me if I saw it. I think you summed it up well: marched to the beat of a different drummer, didn’t really do much work, but was always interesting at the least. It might’ve gone a different way for his legacy if he’d replaced Connery as Bond. He would’ve been fantastic.

        1. McGoohan made several appearances in the Seventies in a show I binge-watched recently, Columbo, and directed a couple more episodes besides. Took home a couple of Emmys.

        2. McGoohan was in several episodes of Columbo and directed at least one of them, although he ruined the episode. It seems that his demential was advancing and he left out a crucial scene so the episode didn’t end up making any sense, but nobody had the heart to tell him. Apparently the writer of the episode was furious.

          Of course, that was one of the later episodes of Columbo when it came back in the late 1980s.

          His two ‘first run’ Columbo episodes are regarded as two of the best, especially the one where he is the commander of a military training college.

      2. I’ve been watching The Prisoner for the last couple weeks, I’m up to episode 11. There are high quality recordings available on Youtube.

        Episode 10, Hammer Into Anvil, was very enjoyable especially (no spoilers.) This was the first episode after the co-creater of the series left citing disagreements with McGoohan on the show’s direction.

        The new t.v series Severance has a lot in common with The Prisoner if you haven’t seen it, but, if you get into it, be aware that it ends on a cliffhanger and I suspect that there will never be a second season. It’s been picked up for a second season, but, even leaving out Covid, the first season took several years to make and I don’t think they’ll all get together again to make the second season.

        1. It disappoints a little in three of the last four episodes, but the best episodes are absolutely marvelous – Hammer Into Anvil is one of those.

          My favorite was A, B and C. I also loved Many Happy Returns, The Chimes of Big Ben, The Schizoid Man and Checkmate. It’s always fun to guess who is conning whom, and how.

          1. Many Happy Returns is a very odd show. I know the show is fiction and all that, but there are, based on the youtube comments, many who believe that episode was just his dream.

            The leaders of the village put in an awful lot of work all for nothing, he was never even asked while in London why he left his job, and they gave him the location of the village.

            One thing that made The Prisoner unique was that it had no subplots, every episode was solely about the one person and nearly every character other than him changed in every episode.

          2. I love that episode, but the dream explanation makes more sense than anything else. How else could the village suddenly and instantaneously spring back to life, with all the people back in place and everyone engaged in a “normal” day, all in the blink of an eye, as if nothing had happened. If the episode took place in reality, the sudden appearance of all those people could not be explained.

            Here is how I interpret it. He was under yet another of those mind drugs, as in A, B or C, and was led to believe he had escaped in the hope that he would reveal why he had quit. Nobody in the dream ever asked him that question, as that would immediately have made him suspicious that he was just in a simulated reality back in the village.

            To support this theory, I’d note that the supposed location of the village in that episode did not conform to where it finally turned out to be – close to main roads, not too far from London, accessible by lorry. If he really had escaped, the two locations would have matched, but if he was in a reality simulated by the masters, they would not have revealed the true location to him.

            The writers could have explicitly stated or shown that he had been dreaming all along, but there seemed to be no need, given that the village masters had tried similar tricks in the past.

            Like you, I found the logic gaps puzzling and annoying, but I just went with it. The show had a habit of not acknowledging things that had happened in earlier episodes, and that too was annoying at first, but I just went with it. The show also made no attempt to reconcile its frequent jumps in and out of reality. When you get to The Girl Who Was Death, you’ll be scratching your head over that one as well. (And I did not like that cowboy episode at all.)

            As for the cast of characters, The Supervisor seemed to be there for most episodes – even after one of the number twos seemed to have fired him. (Was that in Hammer/Anvil, when Six was driving Two into paranoid delusions?)

  4. I don’t know what category it falls in, but the two Diana Rigg seasons of the Avengers have to be there.
    Claudius was water-cooler stuff every Monday. One of the women could do a chillingly good Livia. My bud the Mad Dog could do a decent Caligula. Me? I topped out at Drusilla.

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