Monster Moves: Rescuing Ramesses was shown on Tuesday night (March 4th 2008) on channel Five in the UK. I was a bit apprehensive at first but the show turned out far better than I expected.

The show told the story of the UNESCO rescue operation to save the Egyptian monuments from the rising flood waters caused by the building of the Aswan Dam and focuses specifically on the temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel but also visits Philae, Amada, and Kalabsha. The story of the rescue operation is told to accompanying colour archive footage which is very good. The narration is well paced and well explained and the old footage is very good. Interspersed with these scenes is a modern recreation of cutting and moving a giant replica stone head of Ramesses II from one of the four statues that adorns the front portico of Abu Simbel. I'm not entirely sure what the point of these segments was though. How its was done is well documented and it was only forty-years ago. It is not as if they were re-creating how Ramesses' builders built it over 3,000-years ago. Are we supposed to be surprised that sixties-man was capable of this? Don't get me wrong, moving it was a stunning achievement, just as is building the Channel Tunnel or the Milau Viaduct but in a film about the latter two you wouldn't expect the film makers to go to the trouble of building a miniature one just to show you how difficult it was.

The computer graphics along with the narration served to explain the problems encountered, and overcome, quite well with graphics of the disastrous consequences of drilling to the wrong depth when mounting lifting rods in the head, for example. I guess the modern re-creation was a requirement of the series format — this is actually series three, episode one — where other 'monster' moves are actually followed and documented whereas this episode is documenting a past move.

The move of Kalabsha was shown and was used by the UNESCO team as a 'test' to see how easy it was to take a temple apart block by block and then put it back together again afterwards. Kalabsha was chosen as it is built out of blocks rather than carved out of stone like Abu Simbel. The rock cut temple of Abu Simbel itself was cut up into over a thousand blocks using giant hand saws by teams of workmen for transportation and then re-housed inside an artificial mountain. Amada temple was lifted whole onto rails to be move 2.5 kilometres away at a rate of 30 metres per day - they only had 150m of track to play with so they had to move the track as well. And Philae's move was shown with the whole temple being surrounded by a cofferdam whilst the workmen dismantled it. One structure, though, was outside of the dam and already underwater — a Roman portico gateway built by Diocletian — and a team of British Royal Navy divers, led by Ed Thompson, actually dismantled it underwater!

A couple of minor quibbles though. The use of dramatic background music was unnecessary but seems to be endemic in new productions. And the repeated graphic of a truck driving across the screen — complete with engine and horn sounds — grated very quickly but is probably a trademark graphic of the series as a whole (I've only seen this episode so I cannot be sure).

This series also appears as Mega Moves on Discovery Channel & TLC, Impossible Moves on National Geographic US and Huge Moves on National Geographic International.

cf. Monster Moves: Rescuing Ramesses, Series 3, Episode 1, Windfall Films, UK, 2008.