Back in August, 2009, I said of the trailer for Spartacus: Blood and Sand that it looked a bit like a cross between 300 and Gladiator but with more sex, violence and Lucy Lawless, a formula that I think is hard to go wrong with. The first season has now finished, 13 episodes strong and complete with clunky, leaden dialogue, pornographic levels of sex and nudity, heavily-stylised violence and gore and some appalling acting from a cast mostly chosen for their ability to look good oiled up than for their theatrical credentials. It was the trashiest thing I’d seen for a long time, a show not just with a target audience of 14 year old boys but apparently a production and writing crew of a similar age. I watched the whole thing from start to finish and loved it to bits, and not even ironically.

It took me a few episodes to really get into it, and my first impressions were as above: this was terrible television that was going to hold people’s attention by offering up a topless Lucy Lawless every other episode and buckets of claret splashing about the place, delivered with gusto from a bland cast of muscles with an eclectic mixture of regional accents, but underneath all of that turned out to be a decent drama, more sophisticated than appeared at first glance.

The cast is surprisingly strong once things get going: established thesp John Hannah works wonders with the power-hungry character of Batiatus, owner of the gladiatorial ludus, Lucy Lawless as his wife, Lucretia, is as dependable here as she was in Battlestar and Nick Tarabay as the scheming former gladiator Ashur lights up every scene he’s in. They all struggle with some of the more embarrassing dialogue, particularly the swearing (“Jupiter’s cock!”) which has a tendency to sound like an Asterix comic read out by someone with Tourette’s, but by and large they hold things together. In the end I just decided that the acting was as stylised as the violence and that made me feel a bit better about watching it.

The story itself, an arc that spreads across the whole series, is deeper than you might imagine, with the usual range of intrigues, betrayals, blackmails and murders you might expect from a Roman drama. The season finale ties things up in a meaty, satisfying way and even goes to the effort of paralleling events from the start of the season, like a proper, grown-up storyline, though that was lost on me as I was too busy bouncing up and down on the sofa in excitement as swords plunged through people’s faces.

I like to think of myself as an enlightened, Guardian-reading, organic tomato-eating liberal who only finds true cultural merit in, say, a Michael Haneke film but, seriously, there’s some cool shit going on here and it’s worth watching.