"I CLAUDIUS" was just a T.V. series, taken from the two books OF FICTION, written by a Brit, Robert Graves, in the 1930s! Neither the novels nor the T.V. series were EVER meant to be taken as "historical" nor "documentaries"! And IF the BBC were to do a remake, casting a black actor as Augustus ( or an Indian, Chinese, or any other race Brit actor, for that matter ), or in any other role would be CRIMINAL, OFF PUTTING, and completely RUIN it!
And as far as your twee "problem" with accents...1) the books were written in the King's English 2) if the actors spoke Latin, you wouldn't understand what they were saying.
I guess we need art for idiots so people like you can understand it. We dances already this week. I’m not in the mood.
I've had the box DVD set of "I, Claudius" for many years now, really enjoyed it then (most of it anyway) and still binge-watch it about once a year (did that in October this year, I think). I've never read those two novels (not much of a fiction fan, he said, to everyone's surprise) but years ago, before I had the DVDs, I checked them out of the Grand Rapids library, disk by disk. One day while I was switching disks (that's something Bill Clinton probably wishes he could do, wait, what?) the library employee intrusively noted that she liked the books better. I'd imagine that, even though it was a 13 hour miniseries, the script was drastically cut. Not sure if it's in the books originally, but not all of the characters found in the various 'noble' families in the series actually existed in Roman history, for example. The DVD uses some surviving footage of the abortive attempt at making it into a movie, which would have starred Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as Messalina, in the form of an early-1960s retrospective.