"Pompeii: The Last Day", AD 79, and you live near Mount Vesuvius. But not for long. It all lasted just 19 hours.

Then, there was only a long, deathly silence. Pompeii lay buried for nearly 1,700 years. It wasn't until 1748 that archaeologists began slowly uncovering the ancient city, preserved under 9 feet of volcanic ash and frozen in time by Pliny the Younger's vivid report, written just 18 years later.

About three-fifths of the city has been liberated from the solidified volcanic ash and pumice that engulfed it. But many questions remained unanswered for a long time.

What exactly did happen that summer day in A.D. 79? If you must miss the TV Presentation, you must check out The Discovery Channel Web Site.

The Site includes: What Happened Here; A Step Back in Time; Pompeii's EyeWitness Account; The Ongoing Excavations (Still uncovering relics today); Virtual Volcanoes;

RE-CREATION TREATMENT OF THE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII

The Discovery Channel's "Pompeii: The Last Day" takes us to AD 79, when Vesuvius blew its top, and is an historical re-creation that concern green and pleasant lands overtaken by an unstoppable force.

There are real people portrayed in "Pompeii: The Last Day", a 2003 BBC production imported to the Discovery Channel, but the filmmakers have the advantage of their subjects having been dead 2,000 years; no one's going to challenge their portrayal of Pliny the Elder. A kind of illustrated documentary or educational disaster movie, it tells the story of a very bad day on the Bay of Naples, when the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried in waves of gaseous volcanic sludge.

We see not quite enough of the bustling life of the town before the mountain goes volcanic, but then this isn't about the life of the town so much as its death. "The people don't even know it's a volcano," the narration tells us. (Having no word for "volcano," as we are later informed, they couldn't have.) The filmmakers focus on the lightly intertwined lives of several luckless citizens ? Altman does Pompeii ? in well-written, well-played scenes that do not tax our credulity. They play out their ends in noble gestures or acts of random greed, family feeling or domestic dispute, though not before such ironic last words as "The beams are solid, don't fuss."

Well, they hadn't counted on the pyroclastic surge (an avalanche of ash and gas) or the toxic fumes. The physics of their demise are spelled out in disturbing detail.

As to the villain of the piece, the CGI (Computer Generated Images) volcano that destroys the CGI Pompeii is a pale imitat! ion of what the real thing must have been, but there is no file footage available, and until Peter Jackson takes on a remake of 1935's "The Last Days of Pompeii," this version will do nicely.

'Pompeii: The Last Day'
Where: Discovery Channel
When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday
Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
Tim Pigott-Smith... Pliny the Elder
Jonathan Firth... Stephanus
Jim Carter... Julius Polybius
Executive producers Michael J. Mosley and Jack Smith.