HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T09:55:04.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/author/kevlochun/feed/atom Kev Lochun <![CDATA[Pompeii wasn’t destroyed when you think it was]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pompeii-wasnt-destroyed-when-you-think-it-was-video/ 2026-10-23T09:55:04.000Z 2026-10-23T09:54:32.000Z How do pomegranates help to unlock a 2,000-year-old mystery? Here's how they illuminate whether we've got one of the most basic facts about the destruction of Pompeii wrong.

For centuries, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii has most regularly been dated to 24 August AD 79. But a growing collection of archaeological clues – from mysterious graffiti and Roman coins to woollen clothing, grapes and even pomegranates – suggests the disaster may actually have struck months later.

So when did Vesuvius really erupt? *HistoryExtra'*s Kev Lochun, with expertise from Dr Jess Venner, investigates the evidence behind one of ancient Rome’s most enduring mysteries – and asks whether a 2,000-year-old assumption needs to be rewritten.

You can watch Kev's full podcast series, four episodes on the mysteries of Pompeii with Dr Jess Venner.

View Green Video on the source website]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[“I wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt Everest”: Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom on Everest queues, reclaiming lost narratives and dropping Loki into a crevasse]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/tenzing-movie-everest-jennifer-peeden-interview/ 2026-10-17T15:47:56.000Z 2026-10-16T23:01:09.000Z Tenzing Norgay was half of the duo who made it to ‘the roof of the world’ when he completed a historic first ascent of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 – and by all accounts when they stepped onto the summit, they did so together. But when the accolades were handed out, you might think he was the lesser party.

New Zealander Hillary received a knighthood; so too did the expedition’s leader, British Army officer John Hunt. But Tenzing, a man who not only made it to the summit but was the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa) – responsible for all the logistics on the mountain that made the ascent possible – was only offered the George Medal, a civilian honour conceived to mark acts of heroism during the Blitz.

The popular narrative that followed in the ensuing decades was that Hillary had summited Everest (referred to increasingly by one of its original names, Chomolungma) and that Tenzing was there. It’s one of the many misconceptions surrounding the man that director Jennifer Peedom seems to hope to dispel in her first dramatic feature Tenzing.

Peedom is no stranger to the Himalayas, having started as a camera operator on Himalayan expeditions before making films of her own – fans of mountain movies may well remember her 2015 film Sherpa, which documented the real stories from the Sherpa community in the aftermath of a 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall that caused a number of fatalities. Just as Sherpa was, Tenzing is thoughtful and reflective, aiming to foreground Norgay in his own story for the first time.

Four actors in heavy expedition clothing stand together on a snowy mountainside; Willem Dafoe is second from the right. He plays John Hunt, leader of the 1953 British Everest expedition.

Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are the biggest names in the cast, taking on the roles of Hillary and Hunt, but its star is undoubtedly Genden Phuntsok – a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent – as Norgay.

His casting reflects another lesser-known fact – the most famous sherpa in the world was not an ethnic Sherpa, but the son of a Tibetan yak herder who came to Nepal and later moved to Darjeeling seeking work among the expeditions. ‘Tenzing Norgay’ wasn’t even the name he was born with; that was the one given to him later.

Peedom’s Tenzing is the story of how a young boy looked up at the mountain revered as Chomolungma – the mother goddess – and dreamed of what it would mean to stand on what is quite literally hallowed ground.

We caught up with the director for an exclusive interview after the film’s London premiere to find out more.

The 1953 ascent of Everest is such a well-known narrative, but often one dominated by the idea of heroic European conquest, and I wondered what you want to reveal about this story by focusing it through Tenzing’s perspective?

Jennifer Peedom: I spent a lot of my early career working as a camera operator and a documentary filmmaker in the Himalayas, and for me what was always interesting and part of the attraction of the place was the culture and the Sherpa people.

One of my earliest films about the Sherpas [Sherpa, 2015] was because I was really interested in this idea that mountaineering for them is a job, but Chomolungma is a deity that they worship, and that the landscape means something spiritual and very different to what it means to western climbers who come and climb the mountain. I wanted audiences to see that point of view.

Director Jennifer Peedom stands outdoors on a green mountainside, wearing a cap and headset, with other people visible behind her. She is on location during the filming of Tenzing.

I’ve heard you say of Sherpa that you “weren’t making a climbing film, you were making a story about a people”. Tenzing feels like it’s doing a bit of both?

JP: The reason I wanted to make this film about Tenzing was first to redress that historical balance, because he’d never really been at the centre. He was more of a supporting character in the story.

But it was also [about] everything that Tenzing had been through in his life just to get to the starting line of Everest, let alone ascend the mountain. That story to me was fascinating – the sheer number of obstacles he had to overcome just to get to that place.

He’d been through so much in his life. He’d been exiled from Tibet to Nepal as a young boy. His family had had to leave [him] while they were looking for work just to survive. He was an outsider in that community – the classic underdog in many ways. He was underestimated his entire life.

It was about that as much as anything else, about showing the family the cultural sacrifices that he had to make along the way to fulfil this childhood dream.

I was really taken with the character that Caitríona Balfe plays, Jill Henderson. She is such a big part of the British mountaineering story overall in Nepal, but also a big part of Tenzing’s story as well.

JP: It was really she that convinced him to take on the [British 1953] expedition. He genuinely had hesitations. He had an extreme loyalty to the Swiss, who he’d climbed with the year before, and they had tried and failed. He was depleted. He was exhausted. He’d promised his family he wasn’t going to go back again, and then this invitation came.

Caitríona Balfe stands in a warmly lit, period-furnished office, wearing a striped blouse and high-waisted trousers. She plays Jill Henderson, who helped persuade Norgay to join the 1953 expedition.

It was Henderson and Raymond Lambert [the Swiss mountaineer with whom Tenzing had climbed to within 237 metres of the summit in 1952] who colluded to convince Tenzing to go, because they knew that this was probably going to be the one. They knew that this was his moment and that he deserved it more than anyone else.

Lambert wrote him a letter. Henderson campaigned to him endlessly until he eventually agreed to go. And I just felt like, what an amazing woman, who had such a remarkable part in history that had also never been talked about in the traditional narratives of the telling of Everest, yet she played such a significant role.

There’s an ongoing conversation right now as to the state of climbing on Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen these mind-boggling photos of the queues. What are your thoughts on the responsibilities we have as storytellers when we’re discussing a mountain that represents a peak of human endeavour, but also is a place of spirituality?

JP: For whatever reason, Everest has become this symbol of human achievement, and it’s become a bucket list ambition. It attracts people, and no matter what happens on Everest, the worse the disasters, the more people seem to come the next year to test themselves. And I think that says something about western culture in some ways, and I find it interesting, though I don’t really understand it myself.

It’s like a proving ground. And I would suggest that there are other ways to do that than to come to Everest and add to the traffic jam that is that mountain these days. I would not recommend anyone attempt to go there and climb, really, because it is dangerous due to the crowds. There are better ways to achieve a dream than standing in a line to put your foot on the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

That difficulty of climbing a mountain like Everest was really evident in Tenzing: the laboured breathing and heavy steps were so evocative. How important was it to give a sense that this isn’t a walk in the park?

JP: Really important, and it’s a very difficult thing to portray in cinema because it’s a feeling. Someone described it to me once as running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. You just can’t get enough oxygen into your lungs, and so your legs are burning. You’re sort of taking a step and then having about three breaths and then finding the strength to take another step.

It’s enormously challenging and the higher you get, the worse that gets. Trying to portray that is difficult, but I’m glad you picked up on the breath. We spent a lot of time with sound design working with breath because that’s the thing keeping you alive.

A still from Tenzing. The technical climbing scenes were filmed on real crevasses, icefalls and ridges in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, giving the actors a direct experience of the demanding terrain | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

On the spirituality point, there was one scene I wanted to ask you about: at one of the high camps there’s a mutiny among the Sherpas that Tenzing resolves, and it concludes with a blessing using rice. I wonder if you can tell us what we’re seeing there, and more broadly how you brought the authenticity of Sherpa culture into the movie?

JP: That really came from my own experiences with Sherpas on mountains and hearing their stories. That scene where they say [of Chomolungma] that they’re too frightened to go further because now that we’re up at the South Col, we’re literally stabbing our spikes into her shoulders? They were conversations that I’d heard in camps on Everest.

And one of the Sherpas in that scene – his name is Balu – was actually our expedition doctor who played that role. He also said, “Jen, these are conversations I had with Sherpas like one year ago on Everest”. So it was about bringing all of those experiences that I’d had in conversations with Sherpas over many years about what the mountain means to them, and trying to help a broader audience understand that, to them, it is a living embodiment of a deity, of a goddess.

Genden Phuntsok wears a yellow down jacket, wool cap and climbing goggles, with a rope over his shoulder and a snowy mountainside behind him. He portrays Tenzing Norgay.

For them, there is a quite literal feeling that the landscape is inseparable from the spirituality within it. It was really important to me to portray that perspective because the film is really from Tenzing’s point of view. I know he had a conversation like that with the Sherpas on that Everest expedition.

He had the challenge of not only climbing the mountain himself, but he was leading the Sherpa team and was responsible for getting all of the supplies. So he had this kind of double job that he had to do, and he was under enormous pressure. And he was juggling the demands of two very different competing groups. And the Sherpas did fear the unknown. Tenzing was unique in the sense that he wanted to climb, but he also chose to see the goddess not as something to be feared, but to be revered, and he was unusual in that, and he was a pioneer in that way.

There is another way to see this. We don’t need to fear her. If we ask for her permission, ask for her blessing, she will grant us passage, she will keep us safe. And that’s what that scene is about. They’re throwing rice, which is an offering to Chomolungma. And I think as you see in the film, it gave the Sherpas a sense of peace that it was okay, and of course it was. There were no accidents on that expedition. There were no deaths. It was remarkable.

It’s a very beautiful scene. I know you know Sherpa culture well from your previous works, including your 2015 documentary Sherpa. How much did your documentarian background inform how you approached Tenzing?

JP: You probably can tell from the film that we were shooting on real mountains in real landscapes. And I guess for me, that was what I knew. It seemed insane to do it any other way because part of the story is the landscape, and so to fake that didn’t make any sense to me.

I wanted the audience, but also the actors, to experience those landscapes and those cultures, and I wanted to show that when you shoot in those communities, you’re shooting with people who live in those communities, and that brings this beautiful level of authenticity.

And then the actors themselves cannot help but be affected by that. You know, many of them have talked about the fact that they didn’t really need to do a lot of acting in these scenes because when Tom Hiddleston is down that crevasse climbing out of it, he’s really down a crevasse climbing out of it. It was like, “Okay, Tom, start climbing.” He’s really doing it. That was the point.

I wanted to ask you about that specific moment, where Tom falls into that crevasse. How does that actually happen?

JP: It was a trapdoor that we had set up, so when he landed in that spot, the trapdoor got pulled and he had the safety rope. When he’s hanging in the crevasse, that is just the main safety rope – so the picture rope became the safety rope, and we did a lot of work to make sure that we could make the ropes look period appropriate, but they’re also proper safety ropes. That’s how we did it. He just did it for real.

Tom Hiddleston sits on the ground outdoors, one knee raised, with a bag beside him. He plays Edmund Hillary.

But you built a trapdoor on a Nepalese mountain?

JP: That’s in New Zealand. All of the technical climbing with the actors from Everest Base Camp up was in New Zealand [Ed’s note: everything below Base Camp was filmed in Nepal]. And those mountains really are as big from bottom to top as the Himalayas. They just start at almost sea level in the Southern Alps.

All of the actual aerials of Everest itself, [they’re] the real mountain, the real [Khumbu] icefall. But then we would shoot the specific scenes, in real crevasses and icefalls and ridges and faces in New Zealand. And the summit of Everest, we shot on the summit of one of the highest mountains in New Zealand. And you can see the awe and the emotion on the actors’ faces, because they’re standing on one of the highest mountains in New Zealand looking down at the world below them.

Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV from 16 October and is being shown in select cinemas now

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[The Odyssey’s forgotten epilogue]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/odyssey-podcast-series-episode-4/ 2026-09-04T09:00:09.000Z 2026-09-04T09:00:09.000Z Why did Alexander the Great sleep with a copy of the Odyssey under his pillow? In this final episode of our four-part series, Kev Lochun and classicist Daisy Dunn explore the astonishing cultural legacy of a poem that has been shaping how we think about home, heroism and hospitality for nearly 3,000 years. Plus, they consider what its portrayal of women reveals about power in the ancient world.

Watch now, or listen ad-free below:

View Green Video on the source website

Go beyond the podcast

Want to know more about ancient Greece? Kev Lochun has curated a collection of essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra vaults to help you explore life in ancient Greece.

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories: Season 3]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historys-greatest-conspiracy-theories-season-3/ 2026-09-04T11:54:03.000Z 2026-09-01T12:45:21.000Z Kev Lochun <![CDATA[How much of the Odyssey was actually real?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/odyssey-podcast-series-episode-3/ 2026-08-28T12:32:56.000Z 2026-08-27T23:00:09.000Z The Odyssey is a tale of impossible monsters, angsty gods and the unquiet dead – but does that mean it holds no truth?

In this third episode of our four-part series, Kev Lochun and classicist Daisy Dunn turn archaeologist, tracing the real Bronze Age world of feasting kings and heroic warriors that inspired Homer's epic poem. What secrets can we glean from the layers of ancient Troy? What happened to the grand palace complexes of ancient Mycenae that caused them to vanish almost overnight? And why is a 3,000-year-old bathtub so exciting?

Watch now, or listen ad-free below:

View Green Video on the source website

Go beyond the podcast

Want to know more about ancient Greece? Kev Lochun has curated a collection of essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra vaults to help you explore life in ancient Greece.

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[Gods and monsters: the hidden stories of the Odyssey]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/odyssey-podcast-series-episode-2/ 2026-08-21T09:00:15.000Z 2026-08-21T09:00:15.000Z Twenty years away from home: 10 of them spent fighting a war, and 10 more spent battling monsters, gods and his own worst instincts.

In the second episode of our four-part series on the Odyssey, Kev Lochun and classicist Daisy Dunn explore Odysseus's greatest adventures – from encounters with the one-eyed Cyclops to brushes with the so-called witch Circe – and consider what they say about Greek views of civilisation, gender and divine power.

Watch now or listen below, ad-free:

View Green Video on the source website

Go beyond the podcast

Want to know more about ancient Greece? Kev Lochun has curated a collection of essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra vaults to help you explore life in ancient Greece.

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[Who wrote the Odyssey?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/odyssey-podcast-series-episode-1/ 2026-08-17T13:42:23.000Z 2026-08-14T09:28:32.000Z The Odyssey is one of the most celebrated stories ever told, recounting the tale of Greek hero Odysseus’s 10-year journey home from the Trojan War. It is one of just two ancient Greek epic poems said to be the work of ‘Homer’.

But who was Homer? And why, today, do we ask ourselves: ‘Did Homer even exist?’

In this first episode of our four-part series on the Odyssey, Kev Lochun sits down with classicist Daisy Dunn to unpack the origins of the epic poem – and the enduring mystery around the identity of the man who ‘wrote’ it.

Watch now or listen ad-free below:

View Green Video on the source website

Go beyond the podcast

Want to know more about ancient Greece? Kev Lochun has curated a collection of essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra vaults to help you explore life in ancient Greece.

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[Inside Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston: the hidden detail that most people miss]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-pompeii-tom-hiddleston-video/ 2026-08-05T15:16:53.000Z 2026-08-05T15:16:53.000Z Tom Hiddleston, star of Loki and The Night Manager, wants to challenge what you think you know about Pompeii.

His National Geographic docudrama follows three real Romans from the historical record through the disaster to ask: could anyone survive?

Ahead of the launch, HistoryExtra’s Kev Lochun sat down with the Hollywood actor to find out how ancient history reaches through time, how we tell stories of the past without making them about ourselves, and how he would have reacted if he’d been in the Forum in AD 79 when Vesuvius erupted.

National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time premiered in July and is available to stream on Disney+ now.

View Green Video on the source website

For more on ancient Pompeii, don't miss Kev's four-part podcast series with Dr Jess Venner, all episodes available now

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[The Odyssey | Podcast series]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-greece/the-odyssey-podcast-series/ 2026-07-24T15:20:49.000Z 2026-07-24T15:20:49.000Z The Odyssey is one of the most celebrated stories ever told, recounting the tale Greek hero Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War. It should have taken him weeks – and it would have done, had he not angered Poseidon. Instead it took him 10 years, an adventure spanning impossible monsters, angsty gods and the unquiet dead.

In this podcast series, Kev Lochun and classicist Daisy Dunn explore the background, hidden meanings and real history within the Odyssey. Over the course of four episodes, discover why we can't say for sure who wrote the poem, his encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops and the so-called witch Circe, and the real Bronze Age world of feasting kings and heroic warriors that inspired Homer's epic poem.

]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA["Just like us and not at all" – what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/pompeii-out-of-time-with-tom-hiddleston-preview/ 2026-07-20T17:35:02.000Z 2026-07-20T17:35:02.000Z Tom Hiddleston wants to challenge what you think you know about Pompeii.

The star of Loki and The Night Manager is in Pompeii ahead of the release of his new National Geographic show on the city’s final 24 hours, which culminated in it being buried under metres upon metres of volcanic debris following the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It’s a story that many will know – and is perhaps one of the best-known episodes in Roman history. Yet Pompeii: Out of Time gives the tale a slant that, I was surprised to discover, feels fresh in the telling.

Historical documentaries with big names attached can have an aura of the performative about them, the talent appearing as a bolt-on to give a popular face to the #SeriousHistory. Not so here. Hiddleston first visited the ruins of Pompeii when he was 17, the culmination of his very first trip abroad; he would go on to gain a double first in classics at the University of Cambridge before being “diverted” (his word) by acting. Returning to those roots, here he picks up the mantle not of presenter but detective (complete with evidence board); the ‘amateur classicist’ trying to piece together a new story with the help of archaeologists, volcanologists and psychologists.

“I was taught at university by the great Mary Beard,” Hiddleston told me in an exclusive interview – watch out for the whole thing soon on the HistoryExtra YouTube channel. “And one of the things I remember her saying is, the richness of studying the deep past is that you learn very immediately they were just like us, and in the same breath, they were not like us at all.”

This dichotomy stretches through Pompeii: Out of Time.

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“The story of Pompeii,” a solemn Hiddleston intones in the show’s opener, “is the story of death.” That is the story we know, at least in outline. The eruption. The ash. Day turning to night. The casts of the victims.

The statistics bounced around are stark. Some 600 million tonnes of superheated rock and magma spewed forth by Vesuvius. An eruption column that reached 20 miles up into the sky. More thermal energy unleashed than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, with temperatures hot enough to fuse metal to bone.

How could anyone survive this? This brings us to one of the great misconceptions of Pompeii: that life here was snuffed out in an instant and the city was ‘frozen in time’, when in fact the cataclysm unfolded over 24 hours. At Herculaneum, some 300 skeletons were found in boatsheds, when the city had an estimated population of 5,000. Likewise, we have around a thousand casts of human remains from Pompeii, a city of at least 10,000. There’s a discrepancy there.

Tom Hiddleston walks through the streets of Pompeii. (National Geographic/Paolo Verzone)

“But that isn’t exactly true,” Hiddleston quickly retcons. This is the thread that Pompeii: Out of Time pulls – if there were 24 hours between the start of Vesuvius’s eruption and Pompeii’s entombment, people must have escaped. And Hiddleston hopes to find someone who made it through that awful day.

“If you were on the Titanic, you don't know how the story ends, and you're having to make choices,” Hiddleston said at a Q&A following the show’s world premiere in Pompeii. “It’s the same thing if you were in Pompeii in AD 79 – you don't know how the story ends. People do different things, and it seemed to be just so human, so stimulating to think about it.”

Thinking about it is what Hiddleston brings to this – he is an actor after all. Most docudramas meld historical fact with reconstructions of things we almost certainly know; Pompeii: Out of Time exists more in the liminal space between evidence and full-on fiction. “Blur the lines a bit, break a few rules, play in the middle” – that was the intent, director Tom Barbor-Might told us in the same Q&A.

Certainly, the dramatised sequences are as heartfelt as they are horrifying and harrowing, the disaster feeling as if it might rush out of the screen and envelop you. But the reason they work is that the three figures who these segments centre on were real Romans whom Hiddleston and co have traced in the historical record. In Pompeii, we follow Avianius, a boy apprenticed to a bronzesmith couple, and Julia Felix, a rare example of a Roman businesswoman. And along the coast, giving our point of view for happenings in Herculaneum, an unnamed soldier, possibly a Praetorian guard.

Inevitably, imagining what might have happened to real people who can’t speak for themselves results in missteps, and herein the series’ gimmick comes in. From the present, Hiddleston controls the historical timeline, rewinding to an earlier point to allow the scenario to play out differently. If you’ve watched Hiddleston’s time-twisting turn in the Marvel series Loki, this will all feel a bit familiar.

You might wonder how dealing in conjecture might go down among those who have spent years painstakingly excavating, cataloguing and interpreting Pompeii. Yet as Darius Arya, one of the archaeologists on the series, told us, the programme captures the reality of archaeology. “There's a lot of fantasy, there's a lot of imagination, and there's a lot of testing of hypotheses, and a lot of it just ends up in the rubbish heap because you realise that that's just the wrong path,” he says. “But that's just the element of the game, and that's what makes it exciting.”

Dr Darius Arya and Tom Hiddleston walk through the streets of Herculaneum. (National Geographic/Paolo Verzone)

What I loved was the series acknowledged one of the lesser-known elements of the Pompeii story – that this day of infamy was followed by a full-blown refugee crisis, something I spoke about with Dr Jess Venner as part of our podcast series on the city of Pompeii (that’s in episode three, but do give the whole series a listen). Such was the scale of the crisis that it drew the attention of Rome, prompting emperor Titus – who had only come to power in June AD 79 – to appoint ex-consuls to coordinate a relief effort, and even send the victims his own money.

“What the inhabitants of Pompeii experienced is no different from the many natural disasters people are going through all over the world now,” said Hiddleston. “People encounter extraordinary, immediate difficulty all the time and in different parts of the world. And what moves me is how quickly human beings organise and band together to help each other. And you realise that's exactly what [the people of Pompeii] would have done.”

A lot of this comes through anticipating how people might have reacted. Hiddleston likens it to the actor's cliché: “What's my motivation? Why do you make the choices you make?” he asks. “[They were] ordinary people who would never have expected to be studied 2,000 years later. They didn't live their lives like emperors or generals or consuls or writers. They were ordinary people who happened to be caught in an extraordinary moment.”

These are lives he is trying to capture. Of real people pitted against unimaginable circumstances. It feels appropriate; he is also the God of Stories, after all.

Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston premieres on National Geographic on 22 July and begins streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on 23 July

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