New Year TV films

St Stephen’s Day: Spartacus, 7.30am, RTE 1

Powerful story of the slave revolt that at one stage seemed a threat to Rome itself. Kirk Douglas, resplendent in a 1950s flattop, heads a cast dedicated to showing that a sword and sandals epic could be about more than, well, swords and sandals. Presumably this is the restored version, which has the celebrated scene in which the bisexual Crassus (Laurence Olivier) asks his body-slave Antoninus ...