Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: Octopussy

Having brought back SECTRE Number One for 1981's For Your Eyes Only, the makers of the expensive luxury James Bond films knew they had to go the extra mile for their next film, the sixth of Roger Moore's seven expensive luxury James Bond films, 1983's Octopussy.

Like with "Pussy Galore" before it, the name "Octopussy" immediately conjures up, in the mind of the viewer, the image of many cats. And, as we all know, the only thing that is better than one cat is lots of cats.

It starts with Bond already doing a mission. He disguises himself as a manny with a moustache, which succeeds in fooling the baddy soldiers right up until he meets the real manny with a moustache. Bond gets captured while he is planting a bomb, which means he can't blow up the place he was trying to blow up, but he very quickly gets rescued by his friend when the soldiers that captured Bond can't help perving over her - naughty baddys!

Bond escapes in a tiny plane and the baddys shoot a missile at him. The missile chases Bond for a bit until Bond flies his plane into the place he was trying to blow up earlier on, and the missile blows it up for him.

Bond's plane starts to run out of petrol, so he lands and drives it into a petrol station where he says

"Fill her up, please."

with a big Roger Moore grin on his face. This is a classic opening scene - a bit of action, a bit of naughtiness, and end on a lol. Cue titles.

The title sequence is a return to the classic nudey-ladies-and-aquariums after For Your Eyes Only's slight variation on the theme. The song promises us "an all-time high" though we will be the judges of that, thank you very much. I mean, For Your Eyes Only had a cat in its pre-titles sequence, while this one didn't, which means that so far this film is behind on points. But it is called Octopussy, so let's not write it off just yet.

After the title sequence it cuts to a circus. Presumably not the circus that Jaws fell on at the start of Moonraker, or did they get the pre-titles sequences for these two films mixed up? A clown runs away and gets chased by another manny with a knife. Wow, he must really have Coulrophobia. The clown keeps unintentionally giving himself away by leaving his hat for the pursuing manny to find, or his balloon bursting. Or perhaps the clown is just such a professional that he can't help it?

It turns out there are actually two mannys chasing the clown, and they are twins. They throw their knives at the clown, and one of them gets him, but he survives long enough to burst into the British Embassy and die dramatically.

The British Ambassador is played by Patrick "Hobson from The Moonbase" Barr, and he picks up a fancy egg that the clown drops.

In London, Bond tries to be smoove with both Miss Moneypenny and her new assistant Miss Smallbone. This is a gently comic scene where the joke is on Bond, as Miss Moneypenny is wise to his ways - she should be, after six thirteen films.

Bond meets the new M (Robert Brown) and the old Minister (Geoffrey Keen) for his briefing, along with art expert Jim Fanning (Douglas "Professor Van Dusen" Wilmer). M has the fancy egg from the previous scene, which is a fake of a real fancy egg that is about to be auctioned on behalf of a mysterious seller, and so M and the Minister want to know who the seller is in case it turns out to be the film's baddy.

General Gogol (still played by series regular Walter "Chief Constable Cullen" Gotell) is at a meeting with other senior Soviet mannys, including Brezhnev and General Orlov (played by Steven "Heavy Electricity" Berkoff). Orlov gives himself away as a baddy when he immediately starts overacting disgracefully, almost from his first line. He wants to invade Europe, but Gogol says 

"NATO will counterattack with nuclear weapons!"

showing that Gogol has been playing Civilization recently. Orlov argues that they will not risk using nuclear weapons in case the Russians use their own nuclear weapons, but Brezhnev sides with Gogol. This is a crucial establishing scene that shows us that, while some Russians are the baddys in this film, not all Russians are the baddys.

The next scene shows us Orlov is connected to the fancy egg plot when he meets with one of the knifemannys from earlier, and another henchmanny who has spotted that their fancy egg is missing. Orlov's cunning plan is to buy back the real fancy egg from the auction and use it in place of their fake fancy egg, since that will be quicker than making a new fake fancy egg.

As the auction of the fancy egg begins, Bond immediately suspects the most attractive and '80s-looking woman in the room, and so keeps his eye on her. Naughty Bond!

Bond is nearly right, because she sits next to the real baddy, Kamal Khan (played by Louis "Count Dracula" Jourdan). Bond starts bidding against Khan (not that one), which makes Fanning ask

"Have you gone mad?"

when Bond bids £425,000 for a fancy egg. But Bond is just forcing Khan to pay even more for the egg, and eventually Khan has to pay half a million pounds for it, which is about twice what Fanning told Bond it was worth. Expensive Luxury Cat would like me to point out that this makes the fancy egg both expensive and luxury.

Back in M's office Bond reveals that he swapped the fake fancy egg for the real fancy egg while nobody else was looking (you can actually see Roger Moore do this bit of sleight of paw if you know to watch out for it), so Khan has the fake egg not the real one - Orlov will be pleased! M sends Bond to follow Khan to Mexico India and find out what he wants with this fancy egg.

The sight of the Taj Mahal is as good as a shot of the Eiffel Tower for France or the Temple of Artemis for Ephesus for letting us know we are now in India.

Bond meets up with Vijay, who alerts Bond to his presence by playing the Bond theme music diegetically. Bond wastes no time in going to the casino where he sees Khan and the same henchwoman from earlier. Khan is busy cheating at Backgammon, so Bond approaches the woman to remind her that they already met before in London.

"You have a very good memory for faces."

"And figures."

Smoove.

Bond plays Backgammon against Khan for high stakes. When Khan asks if Bond has enough moneys, Bond produces the real fancy egg and says that it "should provide ample security". Bond needs "a double six" to win, which he has just seen Khan get twice with his own dice, so he knows Khan is using loaded dice to cheat. He takes Khan's dice and thus wins, beating Khan at his own game. This is a great scene and one of the film's highlights - even if it is only short - in particular the way Bond knows he has won even before he looks at the dice, letting Khan know that he knows Khan was cheating.

Bond acts smug, as well he might after such a good scene, until Khan's henchmanny takes the dice and crushes them in his bare paws - an obvious call back to when Oddjob crushed the golf ball in Goldfinger, but it doesn't feel crowbarred in just for the sake of a call back.

The henchmanny then chases after Bond and Vijay, with both chaser and chased driving small taxis. There are a number of gags in this chase - both visual and verbal - to do with tennis, such as Vijay fending off baddys with a tennis racquet and saying "Game set and match" when he wins, which only really make sense when you know that the actor who played Vijay used to be a famous tennis player.

Bond meets an unnecessarily browned-up Mark Heap who is juggling sticks that are on fire, and Bond takes one of the sticks to fend off a baddy. Bond then uses the moneys he won from Khan as a distraction to allow him and Vijay to get away.

Bond and Vijay visit Q so that Bond can get some gadgets. Q puts a homing device and microphone in the fancy egg, as well as giving Bond a pen with acid in it.

Bond has dinner with Khan's henchwoman, then they go to bed together. Naughty henchwoman!

Bond notices a tattoo on the woman's back and asks her about it. She replies

"That's my little octopussy."

Clang! It looks more like an octopus than a cat though, mew. We cats are not happy about this. We were expecting at least eight cats in this film, which would indeed have made it an all time high for the series, but now we're not so sure.

In the morning the henchwoman steals the fancy egg and escapes back to Khan. But we know that this is just what Bond wanted, since the egg has Q's homing device and microphone in it. What we don't know is that Khan's other henchmanny is about to knock Bond out with the classic karate-chop-to-the-back-of-the-neck move.

Khan meets with a mysterious superior who we hardly get to see but who has fishy noms in a tank, so we are obviously supposed to conclude that this is SECTRE Number One from the similarities to his first appearance back in From Russia With Love, except that the new Blofeld manny is a woman

with an octopus instead of a manny with an expensive luxury cat. When she hears Khan has captured Bond, she asks for him to be brought to her.

Bond wakes up in Khan's palace and is taken to have dinner with Khan - this is a Bond villain who knows his business, even greeting Bond with the classic

"Good evening, Mr Bond."

Khan finally introduces Bond (and us) to his henchwoman Miss Magda. The dinner Khan serves Bond is "stuffed sheep's head" with eyeballs (we'd prefer the fish), which has a strange similarity to the dinner scene in 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - was there a wider trend for films in this part of the 1980s that were set in India to have their protagonists encounter exotic noms, or was it just these two films?

Bond uses his acid pen to escape in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail. This escape is such serious business that Bond only pauses for a brief moment to perv at Magda undressing as he escapes past her window. 

When Bond sees General Orlov arriving in a helicopter to meet with Khan he spies a chance to find out more about the plot, and he listens to them discussing their diabolical plot using the microphone in the fancy egg. Er, I mean Bond uses the microphone in the fancy egg to listen to them discussing their diabolical plot, not that their diabolical plot uses the microphone in their fancy egg.

At this point there is a nice little easter egg (a fancy easter egg) for those viewers who have been paying attention to which fancy egg is fake and which is real - Khan attempts to double-cross Orlov by giving him the fake egg and keeping the real one for himself, but Orlov smashes the other egg thinking it is the fake - but he really smashes the real one, lol!

No wonder Khan does a big komedy wince when he sees this. But he also sees Q's microphone, so he now knows there is a chance their diabolical plotting has been overheard.

Khan's henchmanny discovers Bond has escaped so Khan goes out hunting for Bond dressed like a big game hunter. When he sees Bond he says

"Good. Let the sport commence."

Khan is turning out to be an underrated Bond baddy, although he is obviously never going to be as good a baddy as the other Khan. He and his mannys chase after Bond while riding elephants.

The film suddenly gets a lot more expensive and luxury, even more so than it was before, when a tiger appears. This single-pawedly makes up for the lack of eight cats. Bond tells the tiger to

"Sit!"

Silly Bond! That is never going to work on a tiger, you're thinking of doggys...

Oh.

The tiger sits.

Forget Moonraker and Bond going into space, this is by far the least believable thing to have ever happened in a Bond film... and I do include Blofeld turning out to be Bond's adoptive brother in Spectre, mew mew mew. 

I can only conclude that the tiger must have been going to sit down anyway.

Bond also has encounters with spiders, and then a snake, which he tells to "Hiss off" lol. This is followed by a rubbish bit with Bond swinging through the trees to escape from Khan and his mannys, while yelling like Tarzan. This is one of the more questionable choices that must have just seemed like a good idea to the filmmakers at the time, a bit like the way the great car stunt (careful now) in The Manny With The Golden Gun was spoiled by the addition of the komedy sound effect. Or possibly it is just the law that mannys swinging through trees in films must be accompanied by that sound, because how else do you explain the same thing happening in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, made 25 years after this film so they must have known it was a mistaik by then.

Bond gets away when he finds some tourists, so Khan cannot shoot him in front of them. He gets back to Vijay and Vijay's boss Sadruddin between scenes, and asks them about the octopus tattoo on Magda... because clearly that was his top priority, naughty Bond! Sadruddin tells Bond about the mysterious woman who uses that as her sign:

"No one knows her real name, but she's known as Octopussy."

Clang! Again. When he hears from Vijay that Octopussy's island is full of beautiful women, Bond goes there immediately - he can hardly even wait for the scene to change, naughty Bond!

Bond arrives at the island disguised as a crocodile and stealths into Octopussy's base, but she sees him on the CCTV.

We only get to see Octopussy's face at the same time that Bond does - a trick that was previously used with Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, but this time without multiple films' worth of build up. Octopussy is played by Maud Adams, who was previously Andrea in The Manny With The Golden Gun (presumably this is her second life), so it is no wonder she recognises Bond.

Actually she knows Bond from the events of the Ian Fleming short story "Octopussy", since the main character in that story was her father. Octopussy summarises it in a few lines of exposition. This is a pretty neat way of incorporating the original story into the film, and we will see something similar when we get to The Living Daylights.

Khan comes in and tells Octopussy that Bond has escaped. Octopussy then introduces Khan to Bond, lol. Khan says to Bond

"You have a nasty habit of surviving."

That might not seem like the best villainous line, but Jourdan does deliver it well. Octopussy does not let Khan kill Bond, but she does keep Bond her prisoner. Bond seduces Octopussy with a couple of rather forceful kiffs - it's not quite Pussy Galore levels of instant conversion, since Octopussy had already hinted at interest before (such as shielding him from Khan) but it is close.

While Bond is getting up to naughtiness with Octopussy, Khan sends some henchmannys to kill Vijay. This disturbs the birdys on the island, and they wake Bond up - a subtle and interestingly original way to alert Bond that something is wrong, but he does not yet know what. The baddys get onto Octopussy's island and attack Bond, leading to a fight. One of the henchmannys gets nomed by Octopussy's octopus, and another falls in the water with Bond and gets nomed by a crocodile. Octopussy thinks Bond has also been nomed, but really he has used this fight as an opportunity to escape.

Bond follows the trail of clues to East Berlin, by combining what he overheard Orlov and Khan talking about with Octopussy's circus, and connecting that to the ded agent disguised as a clown at the start of the film. At the circus we see the knife twins from the start of the film. When Bond arrives we see, at the same time as he does, all the film's baddys are gathered here - Orlov, Khan, Khan's henchmanny, Octopussy, and Magda.

Bond follows them, but then we get a scene that shows us that General Gogol is also investigating the plot from the Russian side. He discovers the fake jewels, just before we see Orlov pawing over the real jewels to Octopussy for putting on her train. Orlov, Khan and Octopussy all then leave, but Khan and Orlov send their henchmannys with the train so they can then secretly load a bomb on board without Octopussy knowing about it. Bond sees the bomb getting put on the train as well as a manny explaining, presumably for the audience's benefit, how the bomb W-words.

Bond gets into a fight with one of the knife-throwing henchmannys and knocks him out with a circus cannon. The komedy inherent to Bond using such an item as a weapon means that Bond doesn't even feel the need to make a quip afterwards. Bond disguises himself in the henchmanny's clothes so that he doesn't get spotted when Orlov comes to remove the jewels.

Bond captures Orlov and finds out Orlov's plan - to smuggle an atomic bomb into West Germany and set it off there, where the NATO countries will not know it was a Soviet bomb.

Orlov says little and lets Bond do most of the talking, but his smile when Bond sees how clever the plan is says enough by itself. Also, whenever Berkoff does talk he tends to go over the top really quickly, so it might be for the best that his dialogue is kept to a minimum here.

Bond gets distracted by a soldier (not like that, naughty cats!) so Orlov gets away, and Bond chases him. But then Orlov sets his soldiers on Bond (I said not like that!) and it is Bond's turn to run away. He gets to Orlov's car and steals it, so it turns into a car chase when Orlov and his mannys pursue in another car. There are a couple of shots of Orlov in his car shouting orders at his mannys, but where we don't hear him shout we can only see it - this is perhaps even more effective than if we could hear Berkoff, because the visual image of him yelling his hed off is more than enough already.

Bond catches up to the train in his car, and there's a pretty good stunt whereby he jumps from the car to the train just before another train smashes into the car, although the quick cutting reveals more than it hides about how this was done. The train passes across the border between East and West Germany without the border guards finding either Bond or the bomb. Or, for that matter, the unconscious knife henchmanny, who is presumably still hidden where Bond left him. It is possible the border guards have been bribed to deliberately not find anything, but the film does not make this clear.

General Gogol and his mannys find the wrecked car and discovers the real jewels inside. They catch up with Orlov at the border, but he runs after the train and gets shot. Gogol still doesn't know about the bomb, so he thinks Orlov's plan was only to steal the jewels. 

"A common thief. A disgrace to the uniform."

"Yes... But tomorrow I shall be a hero of the Soviet Union..."

Confused Gogol is confused.

Bond tries disguising himself as a monkey, but Khan's henchmanny spots him so Bond escapes onto the roof of the train where he has to do stunts avoiding bridges and things the train passes under, as is traditional for action scenes set on top of a moving train, but you can easily tell that, unlike Sean Connery in The First Great Train Robbery, when asked to do his own stunts Roger Moore said lolno. And probably raised his eyebrow as well.

Bond gets into a fight with the henchmanny, who is now armed with a sword, and the remaining knife henchmanny. Bond and the knifemanny fall off the train and have a fight in a small hut, where Bond uses the knifemanny's own knife to kill him, thus avenging the clown from the start of the film.

Bond races to the circus where the bomb now is, hidden underneath the circus cannon. He hitches a lift with some komedy Germans, and we must be thankful for small mercies that they aren't Sheriff J W Pepper conveniently on holiday again. Bond steals a faster car and immediately gets into a chase with some local police... who we must presume are the German equivalent of Sheriff J W Pepper.

Khan and his henchmanny leave the bomb in place and drive away, so they don't get blowed up by mistaik. They see Bond drive past them trying to get to the bomb, and Khan hopes that the bomb will blow up Bond as well.

Bond arrives at the base and gets chased by both the police and the American mannys who think Bond is a baddy. He hides for a bit and then he disguises himself as...

...a clown, just like the manny did at the start of the film. When the American mannys realise Bond is dressed as a clown, they arrest a real clown instead, lol.

With Octopussy's help, Bond gets to the bomb just in time, and because he saw how to arm the bomb he also knows how to disarm it.

Octopussy is not at all happy at Khan leaving her behind to get blowed up, and she is now on the side of the goodys, so back in India she stealths into Khan's palace with the help of Magda and all the women from her island. But the henchmanny spots the women and does what any sensible henchmanny would do under the circumstances - starts a big fight.

Into the middle of this fight arrives James Bond in a Union Jack Hot Air Balloon, knowing that he doesn't need to be inconspicuous when the fight has already started. The balloon is piloted by Q, leading to a very weak joke that, let's be honest, probably lowers the IQ of anyone who hears it by about ten points.

"I trust you can handle this contraption, Q?"

"It goes by hot air."

"Oh then you can."

Mew. Even Roger Moore and Desmond Llewelyn look like they think this skit is a load of shit as they perform it half-heartedly.

Khan and his henchmanny escape with a captive Octopussy, who has gone from being the leader of the attack on Khan's base to a become a damsel in distress the moment Bond arrived in the scene. Bond chases after them, while Q ends up in the paws of Octopussy's lady henchmannys and is last seen considering attempting a little 're-entry' of his own with Magda, naughty Q!

Khan and his henchmanny reach their emergency escape plane and get on board with Octopussy. Bond has to do a traditional grab-onto-the-outside-of-the-plane stunt as it takes off.

Khan does a great 'whyioughtta' face when he realises Bond is still chasing him even on the plane, so he sends his henchmanny to

"Go out... and get him!"

Perhaps unwisely, the henchmanny does attempt this, but Bond wins the ensuing fight and the henchmanny falls off the plane - luckily for him he acquired a parachute just as he did so, lol.

Bond rescues Octopussy and they jump out of the plane just before it crashes and then explodes. Khan is blowed up, which is a karmically satisfying death for someone who had tried to blow up so many mannys with his bomb plan, but... it just isn't very dramatic, and features no final confrontation with Bond.

The final scene sees General Gogol visiting M and the Minister in M's London office, which seems a bit much even in these days of "Anglo-Soviet relationships." It cuts away before we see the Minister give Gogol a manly handshake. Meanwhile Bond is busy having kiffs with Octopussy. It's not a great ending, but at least it doesn't make us cringe ourselves inside out (not a pleasant feeling, even if you are made from socks) like the final scene of For Your Eyes Only did.

Far from being "an all-time high," Octopussy is a benchmark for a typical, average Bond film - still expensive and luxury, with many enjoyable moments, but there are plenty of other Bond films that are even more expensive and luxury than this one.

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive and Luxury

Eurovision 2026

Here are my top three entries from this year's Eurovision Singing Competition - there were less to choose from than in most years because some countries decided not to enter this time, but at least that made the voting quicker!

My favourite entry was from Greece, which saw a manny dressed as a cat (this was always going to go down well with the cats in the audience - maybe if they had sent an actual cat they would have won, lol) running on the spot to some computer game-inspired backgrounds... although I didn't spot any Civilization references among them.

Also good was the entry from Romania. I am guessing that Xena: Warrior Princess is still popular over there?

Also going for a similar theme of leather-clad fantasy film and TV shows of the past was Serbia, who sent the Kurgan and some Chaos Warriors.

I think this is him after he just chopped Sean Connery's hed off.

My honourable mention goes to Italy's entry, which had its song tell a story through the dancing that was comprehensible even to us cats who don't understand Italian. It told the story of a wedding in three minutes, which as we all know is the correct amount of time for a cat relationship.

The interval act contained a medley of previous Eurovision hits, to celebrate this being the 70th anniversary of Eurovision. There weren't just past winners included - we noticed a short burst of Dschinghis Khan, which came fourth in 1979.

If this only came fourth, imagine how high the standard must have been for the top three!

Actually, it was probably the case that the mannys voted for the wrong ones that year, like they usually do - stupid mannys. This year the UK's entry got only a single, solitary point and came last, and while I don't think it was good enough that it should have won, I also don't think that the gap between it and the other songs was nearly so big as the points difference made it seem.

Just like last year the song from Israel came in second place, and the stupid voting system that they for some reason insist on keeping (where it takes ages for all the countries to give out a few points at a time, and then at the end the hosts just add on massive blocks of points in one go, without us even getting to see where or who they come from) made it seem as though they might win for a while, but in the end they were beaten by a massive 173-point margin by the real winners.

The winning song was a joyful and enthusiastic - and quite silly - song from Bulgaria, which was a deserved winner even if it wasn't one of my personal favourites. Congratulations to them.

Also, the Polish singer said "shit" about 1 minute 20 seconds into her song, lol.

Sharpe, season five (1997)

Sharpe's Revenge

The final season commences with the last battle of the war, at which Napoleon is finally defeated. There's a good idea at the heart of this story, which is that after the war is over Sharpe and General Calvet have to team up against Major Ducos, who has betrayed them both. This results in a great scene at the climax of the story in which Sharpe, Harper, Frederickson, Calvet, Gaston and some of Calvet's mannys are trapped in a fort surrounded by Ducos and his army, and Sharpe has to improvise a brilliant means of escaping and turning the tables on Ducos. If the rest of this episode was even half as good as that scene then we'd be kicking off the season with a Sharpe classic.

Unfortunately...

The first significant problem with this story is that it is another Sharpe-gets-framed plot, which was already the weakest element of Sharpe's Honour (and which Ducos was also behind), and this is little more than a poor retread of the same tired, clichéd ground. There's also a major hole at the centre of the plot to frame Sharpe, which is that his motive for stealing the French gold and murdering the mannys guarding it is supposed to be, according to the tribunal that tries Sharpe, that Sharpe lost all his money to his wife when she left him. Except the sequence of events that we see goes:

• Sharpe promises Jane not to fight any more battles after the last one against the French
• Sharpe gets insulted by the posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week and challenges him to a duel
• Sharpe gets drunk with Captain Frederickson
• The French gold gets stolen and guards murdered
• Sharpe fights the duel
• Jane finds out about the duel and, looking for an excuse to leave and take all his money, claims that the duel counts as breaking his promise and so leaves and takes all his money
• Sharpe gets charged with stealing the gold and murdering the guards

It's just very poorly plotted compared to almost any earlier episode of the series, and on top of this a number of the subplots are intensely irritating. First and foremost, there is the subplot with Jane reaching the apex of her fickle, flighty, vain, selfish, obnoxious, arrogant and downright pathetically stupid and short-sighted characterisation. She meets Lord Rossendale in London and begins an affair with him (after a literal example of the slap-slap-kiss trope). Rossendale is here played by Alexis "Angel" Denisof as a smoove seducing rake, so he might as well be a completely different character to the komedy Prince Regent's hanger-on that Alexander Armstrong played in Sharpe's Regiment. This new Rossendale is even really good* at cards, so he couldn't be more unlike Blackadder if he tried.

Other guest actors of note include John "Prime Suspect" Benfield replacing Olivier Pierre as Calvet, though with the same Gaston as his sidekick. Milton "Guy Crayford" Johns appears in one scene as the obsequious bank manager who hands over all of Sharpe's money to Jane. And it's the final appearance for three recurring characters: James Laurenson as Major General Ross gets the honour of being the only intelligence officer to cross over more than one season, but we say goodbye to him after this.

Féodor Atkine does his best to redeem the episode by making Ducos the slimiest and most hateable he's ever been - he has marginally more contact with Sharpe than he did in Sharpe's Siege, but it perhaps says something about the writer's need to keep them apart to stop Sharpe from killing Ducos too easily that in the end Sharpe kills Ducos not up close in a swordfight, as many Sharpe baddys-of-the-week meet their ends, but being shot by Sharpe from long range. Somehow this seems fitting, and is a lot better exit for the character than the unneccesary maybe-death he got at the end of Sharpe's Honour.

The final recurring character here is Captain Frederickson, who once again manages to displace Harper as Sharpe's main sidekick. They then fall out when they both fall in love with the same woman, Lucille, a French widow (I think this is Bernard Cornwell attempting irony by having our hero's final love interest be a Frenchwoman) but she only requites Sharpe's love, making her the designated Sharpe-love-interest-of-the-week, except that she will be seen again in the final episode. It does at least make sense that you wouldn't put Harper in Frederickson's role in this story, but the issue is that it takes up too much of the screentime - between Jane's subplot and Lucille's subplot, way too much of the runtime is taken up with Sharpe's love life instead of the action-adventure we watch the show for.

But, with the main part of the action-adventure part of the plot being the aforementioned framed-for-a-crime-he-didn't-commit, even that isn't up to much here, mew.

* By the Prince Regent's definition of "good" at cards.

Sharpe's Justice

This is an interesting one. Like Sharpe's Mission the year before, this wasn't based on a Sharpe novel, but this attempts to tell a different kind of story from the usual Sharpe fare, albeit it is structurally quite similar to Sharpe's Regiment even down to having Lady Anne Camoynes (again played by Caroline Langrishe) saving Sharpe's Bacon.

Sharpe's Justice tells the story of how after the Napoleonic war the British army was used to suppress and oppress the British people during the Industrial Revolution. The most obvious inspiration is the so-called Peterloo Massacre of 1819, though to maintain series continuity this is set in 1814 in between Napoleon's first exile and his return, so they can't call it "Peterloo" because the reference wouldn't make sense yet.

Sharpe finds himself dispatched to Yorkshire to lead a local yeomannyry tasked with protecting the interests of capital against the uppity W-worders who want wages they can live on and don't want their jobs replaced by machines. Or at least that's how the situation is seen by the mega-wealthy industrialists pushing for technological advancements that will increase their own profits.

The main industrialist baddy-of-the-week is played by Tony Haygarth, who was in Sharpe's Enemy as a different character. His henchmanny is the posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week, Captain Wickham, played by a young Douglas "conclusive proof the past exists" Henshall. The main guest actor of note, however, is Philip "Talbot" Glenister as Matthew Truman, the rabble rouser and wanted criminal who starts out on the opposite side to Sharpe before the twist reveal that he is Sharpe's brother.

You see, far from Sharpe being a Londoner like in the novels, TV Sharpe has been retconned to being a Yorkshiremanny - probably because Sean Bean's making absolutely no attempt to disguise his accent throughout the series made it impossible for Sharpe to be from anywhere else. The setting is Sharpe's hometown, and this makes for a fitting penultimate episode since we learn more about Sharpe's childhood and backstory here than anywhere else in the series - we didn't need this background, of course, but it is nice to have.

Less nice to have is the ongoing subplot about Jane and Lord Rossendale, which wastes a considerable amount of screentime when Rossendale happens to inherit a rundown old country house a few miles from where Sharpe is staying* and thus bringing them back into contact with each other. Cue tedious scenes of Sharpe getting insulted and gaslit by Jane, who is now so awful she is making up lies about how Sharpe used to beat her, to try and win the sympathy of a society that is treating her as the spendthrift adulteress she has proven herself to be.

There is actually one good scene involving Rossendale and Jane (although it by no means makes up for all the shit bits they're in), which is after the newspapers have pinned the blame for the massacre of civilians on Sharpe (it is actually Wickham's fault entirely) and Jane is glad that Sharpe is facing criminal charges, Rossendale has a brief attack of conscience over Sharpe being discredited in this way. For this single scene the character almost has a second dimension to him.

Harper and Hagman actually get their first significant amounts of screentime and involvement in the plot for the better part of two seasons, even if they are only involved in the plot in the first place because they are regular characters who just happen to be hanging about where Sharpe is. Still, this is a big step up, especially for Harper who used to be one of the two leads, but who hasn't had a decent episode since Sharpe's Regiment.

As with Sharpe's Regiment, the biggest problem with the episode is arguably that it strays too far from what a Sharpe story ought to be about. However I think the subject matter is successfully tied to the period enough to make it worthwhile, even if the Yorkshire setting is an extra degree of removal from the Napoleonic battles of Spain and France.

* A bit contrived, but no more so than Sharpe's brother just happening to be the very criminal Sharpe is sent to catch. Actually, when put like that, this episode does contain more than its fair share of plot contrivances.

Sharpe's Waterloo

My my.

After so many misses this finally feels like a proper Sharpe episode again. Bernard Cornwell did a really good job of weaving a Sharpe story into the well-documented actual history of the battle of Waterloo, and the TV adaptation does a creditable job of translating that to the screen in spite of the obvious limitations of budget compared to big-screen portrayals such as in the 1970 film Waterloo. This has dozens of extras collectively playing the tens of thousands of soldiers that took place in the actual battle - a bit like the way the BBC had only three daleks portraying an entire invasion force in 1972's Dave the Daleks.

The actual plot is by necessity somewhat contrived - Sharpe, Harper, Hagman and Harris, the four surviving regulars from the very beginning of the series, are reunited out of a desire to see the Emperor Napoleon in the flesh. To this end, Sharpe, Hagman and Harris have rejoined the army (Sharpe as a lieutenant colonel in the Dutch army, Hagman and Harris as sergeants) while Patrick Harper is now a horse trader supplying the British army with... well, horses. Mew.

The battle plays out almost as a series of vignettes of events from the real history of the battle - a ball held in Brussels on the eve of the battle, the preliminary battle of Quatre Bras, the struggle over the strategically important farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, and the military blunders of the Dutch commander Prince William of Orange (not that one). The latter provides the main source of the plot, as the fatuous prince (played by a young Paul "Margin Call" Bettany, though at times looking quite a lot like Robert Webb) repeatedly ignores Sharpe's tactical advice, each time getting more of his mannys killed. The last such blunder gets Hagman and Harris killed, causing Sharpe to snap. He takes a pot shot at the prince from long range, wounding him - and historically the prince was wounded at the battle.

The episode also resolves the ongoing subplot about Jane Sharpe and Lord Rossendale (as bad as this subplot is, I have to admit it would have been even worse if it had just been left hanging). Rossendale, for whom this is his first battle, proves a coward several times, contrasting himself with the veteran Sharpe, and he is eventually killed mere moments into his first proper fight with the French, lol. The last we see of Jane she is writing in her diary that she is pregnant with Rossendale's child, which might presuppose us to draw parallels with another Napoleonic-era literary character, Pierre Bezukhov's wife Helene in War and Peace, who died after becoming pregnant to her adulterous lover, freeing Pierre to marry his true love Natasha Rostova. While this is actually something that is left hanging, the ambiguity is probably the better option than wasting more screentime spelling out Jane's deserved fate resulting from her own poor life choices.

The dialogue in this episode tends towards the exaggerated and theatrical, which was something I noted about Sharpe's Company as well, and that's probably not a coincidence since they had the same screenwriter, Charles Wood. Here it succeeds better than in Company, perhaps because the vignette style combined with it being the epic conclusion to the series both help to lend it that melodramatic quality, but mainly because, I think, it helps to disguise what would otherwise need to be a lot of dry exposition about the mechanics of the battle. Hugh Fraser in particular is good at selling this sort of overblown dialogue, and he gets his best part as the Duke of Wellington for quite some time - probably since season three, I'd say.

The final ending to the series is very Sharpe, with Wellington himself cheering Sharpe on as he rejoins his old battalion, the South Essex, to "see off" the fleeing French army. Sharpe and Harper then catch a glimpse of Napoleon - not up close, like you might expect from a lesser writer delivering a final confrontation with the 'big bad' of the series, but in the distance, through the smoke of battle. That's good enough for Sharpe and Harper, and it's good enough for me.

British Politics for the Last Ten Years

Sharpe, season four (1996)

Sharpe's Regiment

Here we are in season four, and we already have a very atypical Sharpe episode. Almost all of it, save for bookending scenes at the start and end, is set in England, and the plot sees Sharpe and Harper investigating the mystery of what happened to Sharpe's regiment(clang!)'s missing reinforcements.

There's not as much action as in most episodes of the series, and a lot more political shenanigans. There are no French antagonists (and the French only appear at all in the aforementioned bookending scenes), and instead of a posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week we have a trio of equally obnoxious poshos who all hate Sharpe.

The baddy-of-the-week is Lord Fenner, a politician and mastermind of a scheme to recruit soldiers for the South Essex regiment but then sell them off to other regiments instead. He is aided in this by the vain, cowardly and incompetent Colonel Girdwood, who has all the hateable qualities of Sir Henry Simmerson, and I might have wondered if Girdwood was no more than a stand-in for Simmerson, except that the third member of their trio is Sir Henry Simmerson.

The return of Simmerson is perhaps something of a mistake coming straight after his appearance in Sharpe's Sword, though at least on original broadcast there would have been a year's gap in between them. Watched back-to-back it feels a touch disjointed to have him go straight from one scheme to another. To make matters worse, in neither episode do we see a proper resolution of the antagonism between him and Sharpe, and since this will be the last appearance of Simmerson in the main series, we would have to wait until the later specials before we get that. Mew.

All three baddys are equally loathsome in their own ways. To counterbalance that we have three love-interests-of-the-week for Sharpe. The first is his (never before mentioned) old flame Maggie, played by Julie T "She-Devil" Wallace. The second is Lady Anne Camoynes, played by Caroline "Lovejoy" Langrishe, who is instrumental in helping Sharpe bring down Lord Fenner. The third is Jane Gibbons, niece of Simmerson, who Sharpe properly falls in love with and he asks her to marry him. Sharpe's complicated relationship with Jane begins here and will carry on until the end of the series, testing the patience of viewers and casting something of a wet blanket over the final two seasons.

Other characters we are introduced to include James Laurenson as Major General Ross, the fourth (and final) intelligence officer - he will have a bigger part in later episodes, but for this one he just appears at the start to give Sharpe his mission, and then again at the end for the final bookending scene.

There's a subplot involving Sharpe meeting the Prince Regent, played by Julian Fellowes in a foppish manner not a million miles from depictions of that character in The Scarlet Pimpernel or Blackadder. Fellowes, of course, was in the first episode of Sharpe as a different character, but as that was eight episodes ago (or three years, if judging by original broadcast times) I think you just have to let that sort of thing pass.

Alexander "Pointless" Armstrong appears as Lord Rossendale, the Prince Regent's more competent minion - sort of the Blackadder role, then. I shall have more to say about Rossendale when he returns in the fifth season, but as he will be played by a different actor and have a completely different personality, he might as well be a different character who just happens to have the same name.

The main part of the plot involves Sharpe and Harper faking their own deaths and then joining the army again under false names, to see where they get sent. The scenes showing the way the recruiting sergeant tempts poor mannys to join with tall tales about moneys and adventures, which then immediately meets the harsh life of brutal army discipline as soon as they accept, are very well done, and it is great to see the contrast between Sharpe and Harper, who are both experienced soldiers, and the actual raw recruits who suffer from their inexperience.

This is then paid off when Sharpe and Harper reappear in their real ranks and turn the tables on the officers and sergeants who treated them badly when they thought they were just private soldiers. This payoff ought to have been the satisfying dramatic climax to the episode, but there is another section after that in which Lord Fenner has Sharpe put on trial. The trial is presided over by a General played by John "Old Star Killer" Savident, which can't help but remind me of Travis's trial from Blakes 7's... er, Trial.

This is when Lady Camoynes comes to the rescue, providing Sharpe withe the evidence he needs to turn the tables on Fenner. While it is good to see a female character with some agency (and Lady Camoynes makes a good contrast with damsel-in-distress Jane), it is a shame that Sharpe couldn't be shown to win this one through his own cunning - him putting one over on the poshos is one of the main draws of the series, after all.

The biggest issue with this episode is that it doesn't feel much like a 'proper' Sharpe episode for much of its duration. The villains are almost cartoonishly villainous at times, and the scenes with the Prince Regent and Rossendale virtually belong in a sitcom. It feels as though the series is in danger of Flanderising itself, or jumping the shark. Individual scenes and sections of the plot are very good on their own, but the whole ends up being less than the sum of the parts.

Sharpe's Siege

Like Sharpe's Battle, another generic title. And also like Sharpe's Battle, an average episode that is pretty representative of the series as a whole.

This is the first episode in which the action moves from Spain to France, though you can't really tell that from the landscapes and really only from the fact that some more of the civilians speak French than Spanish.

It begins with Sharpe getting married to Jane Gibbons, continuing the romance plot from the previous episode, however Jane almost immediately becomes ill to set up a subplot in which Sharpe want to get his paws on some quinine, which here seems like it will act like a magic item in a point-and-click computer game.

To cure Jane use quinine on Jane.

There's then a moral dilemma when Sharpe obtains some quinine and then has the option of using it to cure an elderly French woman or keeping it for Jane. Of course our hero acts selflessly, and is rewarded by the woman's daughter (a potential love-interest-of-the-week for Sharpe whom he resists because he is only just married) giving him and his mannys some information that will help them to beat the baddy-of-the-week. (Jane is later saved courtesy of a Wellington-ex-machina.)

There's a posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week, of course, and in this case it is once more the colonel put in charge of Sharpe. Colonel Bampfylde is one of the more forgettable examples of this recurring trope, but he does at least get a proper and satisfying comeuppance, which is more than some of them do.

Where this episode perhaps scores over Sharpe's Battle in terms of being a typical Sharpe adventure is that this one sees the return of Sharpe's arch-enemy (well, one of them) Major Ducos, last seen maybe-but-not-really being killed by his own side in Sharpe's Honour. Féodor Atkine is just as good in this as he was in his earlier stories, though he is perhaps let down by the lack of a proper Sharpe/Ducos confrontation in this one - the two mannys barely even set eyes upon one another over the course of the story, never mind actually meeting.

This episode also sees the return of Philip "Inspector Cato" Whitchurch as Captain Frederickson. Of his three appearances, this is perhaps the one in which he is least essential to the plot, and could mostly have been replaced with a generic captain to act as Sharpe's sidekick. As for Sharpe's usual sidekick, Harper spends most of this episode relegated to a komedy subplot about him having toothache but refusing to see a surgeon to have his tooth removed - this subplot does at least eventually tie in with the main plot, which is the only thing saving it from being an annoying detriment to the episode.

The last guest actor of note is Olivier Pierre as the French General Calvet. Pierre is one of those actors who was in loads of things, and was liable to turn up in almost anything made in the 1980s in a small part, often in comedies and often playing a Frenchmanny, although he is probably best known to me as the Soviet brain surgeon in Whoops Apocalypse. Calvet's characterisation is that he is a veteran of Napoloeon's disastrous Russian campaign, and he goes everywhere accompanied by his aide-de-camp and chef Gaston who was on that campaign with him. They make for a pretty good comedic double-act, although at times they can go a bit 'Allo 'Allo! We will see Calvet again in the next episode.

Sharpe's Mission

The fourth season ends with the most generic of all Sharpe's Titles. While Sharpe's Battle and Sharpe's Siege were both pretty generic, and even the likes of Sharpe's Sword not exactly telling you much about what the story will contain except that Sharpe will have a sword... you know, like he does in every other episode... The title Sharpe's Mission tells us that Sharpe will... wait for it... go on a mission, mew. Perhaps only Sharpe's Rifles comes as close, but that gets away with it by being the very first episode of the series. This one doesn't.

Unlike every previous episode of the TV series, this is not based on a pre-existing Bernard Cornwell novel at all, not even as tangentially as the likes of Sharpe's Gold. While I don't know exactly why they decided to do this, I suspect it was because at the time they were making this there were only two more Sharpe novels remaining unadapted, so they decided to pad out the series a bit rather than end it sooner.

This episode features a just-after-he-became-famous appearance by Mark Strong as the baddy-of-the-week Colonel Brand, seeing as this was broadcast a couple of months after the BBC finished showing Our Friends in the North, in which Strong starred as the odious Thatcherite Tosker Cox, one of the four main characters. Brand is just as unlikeable as Tosker, a British officer who is secretly W-wording for the French until Sharpe discovers his treachery.

This could have ended up seeming quite similar to Captain Jack Spears in Sharpe's Sword, except there are enough differences to make it feel fresh - we the viewers are given the knowledge that Brand is a traitor before our heroes are and, unlike with Spears, Sharpe has a history with Brand and respects him. Most importantly of all Sharpe actually begins to suspect Brand quite quickly, and then just needs to prove his guilt to his superiors, including Major General Ross. In a way this is Sharpe doing a Columbo - the question is not who the traitor is, it is how will Sharpe catch him.

Brand is eventually caught out, given a hasty court-martial and sentenced to death. But by this point our heroes are about to be attacked by Brand's French allies, so he smugly tells Sharpe about how they can't kill him without Wellington's permission, and how he's going to have his revenge on Sharpe once the French rescue him. What happens next is a classic Sharpe moment, and is easily the best scene of the fourth season, giving Colonel Brand one of the best comeuppances of any Sharpe baddy, perhaps since Sir Henry Simmerson all the way back in Sharpe's Eagle.

Of the supporting cast, Major General Ross gets his biggest part yet - despite not having to take Major Hogan's role from the corresponding novel (since there isn't one), as most of the intelligence officers in the TV series have done, he is written quite a lot like Hogan here, even using Hogan's catchphrase

"That's what you pay me for."

to General Wellington at one point.

Riflemanny Harris gets a larger than usual role when Sharpe tasks him to keep a posho away from his wife Jane. Unusually for the series this episode does not contain a posho-who-hates-Sharpe, instead it contains a posho-who-Sharpe-hates, that being the war journalist and painter Shellington, who tries to seduce Jane with his poetry until Harris points out that all of his poems were not composed by Shellington himself but were pre-existing poems. This is a different literary use to the one Harris was put to in Sharpe's Sword, where he broke the French code, but he was the only regular character for who this could have been remotely plausible for.

That Sharpe needed Harris to guard his wife from Shellington's seductions in the first place is setting up the (sadly rather tedious) recurring subplot from the next season in which Jane grows bored of Sharpe and starts having affairs. Jane is such an annoying, shallow character that it is a shame that Sharpe (the series) is lumbered with her for six episodes when the magnificent Teresa was only in four. The fact that Sharpe (the character) is still in love with Jane at this point means that there is no love-interest-of-the-week for him at all in this story.

The series seems to have run out of ideas for Harper, since this is the second episode in a row where he doesn't get much to do, and his subplot where he has a rivalry with Colonel Brand's sergeant is little more than a retread of subplots we have seen Harper in before, even as recently as Sharpe's Regiment. He does get one really good line, though, in the episode's best scene I already mentioned above.

The French General Calvet and his sidekick Gaston return from Sharpe's Siege, and here we see them playing Russian Roulette with possibly poisonous mushrooms. Except it's not quite the same since Calvet knows which ones are poisoned. When he kills off the French Colonel Cresson for failing in his mission, it does come across a bit like SECTRE Number One having a henchmanny killed for failure.

This is mostly an average episode, with a couple of standout moments. I think season four is showing the limitations of Sharpe's Format - stick too closely to the formula (Siege and Mission) and you risk ending up with an average episode that is too generic and unmemorable to stand out, but stray too far from the formula (Regiment) and you risk losing the qualities that make Sharpe Sharpe. While none of season four is as bad as Sharpe's Gold was, we're still a long way away and getting further from the series peaks of seasons one and two.

Sharpe, season three (1995)

Sharpe's Gold

Oh dear.

After a nearly unbroken string of exceptional, iconic episodes, the third season of Sharpe crashes to the ground by opening with this instalment, which adapts the novel of the same name in a similar way to a lot of Bond films - taking the title and the main characters, and substituting an entirely new plot.

What makes this even more of a punch in the face is that the TV story was written by Nigel "Quatermass" Kneale. You might think this would result in a good episode, but his decision to try and introduce hints of the supernatural, along with putting an inappropriate Aztec death cult in 19th century Spain, makes this a poor fit for the series.

Baddy-of-the-week El Casco (played by the improbably named Abel Folk) has his own spooky incidental music, which plays over his scenes like he's Anthony Valentine's Sorcerer character in Robin of Sherwood, and at one point the Chosen Mannys recover the journal of a French officer like they're Player Characters in a game of Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu says this is his favourite episode of Sharpe, but then he would, wouldn't he? Silly Cthulhu.

As for me, I found my suspension of disbelief being stretched to near breaking point by the way the plot had to be bent out of shape to put a damsel in distress for Sharpe to rescue at the end. The love-interest-of-the-week is supposed to be General Wellington's cousin, Ellie Nugent, who along with her mother is looking for their missing father who was searching for treasure in this part of Spain. They tag along with Sharpe and the Chosen Mannys on their mission, and because they're related to the General it means Sharpe has to look after them despite them doing a lot of foolish things that are liable to get them killed. Ellie gets kidnapped by El Casco, and Sharpe ends up rescuing her from being human-sacrificed in a climax that also has a strong resemblance to Robin of Sherwood's first two-parter. Oh, and then they find her missing father, but he's gone mad from exposure to all the Aztec stuff.

At one point El Casco starts doing cat mews for no reason which, frankly, felt like adding insult to injury.

Major Nairn wisely declined to be in this one, and he is replaced by Major Munro (played by Hugh Ross, not to be confused with Major General Ross, who will be the next intelligence officer we will meet in the fourth season), whose distinguishing character trait is that he's SCOTTISH. Munro stays with us for the rest of season three, continuing the tradition of TV Sharpe to rotate the intelligence officer every season.

A significant subplot involves the provosts, whose job it is to catch and hang looters and deserters from the British army. The posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week is Lt Ayres, who starts by hanging one of Sharpe's mannys for stealing a chicken (we know the soldier in question is in trouble because he is a new character that's just been introduced and not one of the regular Chosen Mannys) and Ayres goes on to be a total arse throughout the episode, never missing any opportunity to be needlessly obnoxious. Unlike some poshos-who-hate-Sharpe-of-the-week he doesn't even get a chance to redeem or prove himself, getting randomly killed off a few minutes from the end, lol.

This is one of the poorest episodes of the entire series, an uncomfortable mix of styles and tones plus a good bad helping of clichéd tropes. It has some redeeming points - the main cast remain as watchable as ever, and there are some nice set-piece fight scenes - but not enough to save it from the bottom of the pile.

Sharpe's Battle

The generic-sounding title lets you know what you're in for - an average title for an average episode. While a big step up from the preceding story, this is still a long way from the highs of the previous seasons.

This might even be the most typical episode of Sharpe. It has a baddy-of-the-week in the form of a sadistic French Brigadier (played by Oliver "Cesare Borgia" Cotton) whose most memorable character traits are that his surname is Loup, which the show likes to repeatedly remind us means "wolf", and his single milky eye that at least gives him a distinctive appearance. He is otherwise utterly generic as an antagonist, dying at the end of an utterly typical swordfight with Sharpe in which is looks like he is about to win, then Sharpe turns the tables and kills him at the last moment.

There is of course a posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week, this being Lord Kiley and a love-interest-of-the-week in the form of Lady Kiley. Unusually for the series, she avoids getting off with Sharpe when he realises she is still in love with her husband even though he treats her badly, and Sharpe helps them to reconcile before her husband gets killed by Loup while in the process of redeeming himself for being an absolute cad to all concerned throughout most of the story.

Perhaps of most interest in the guest cast is Ian "Harcourt" McNeice as Wagonmaster-General Runciman, Sharpe's senior officer for the duration of this episode, who is a manny with no manners whatsoever, so provides the majority of the comic relief. Otherwise the comic relief is provided by General Wellington and Major Munro, who here are as close to a Robert Holmes-style double-act as this series ever gets.

One other thing that helps this story stand out somewhat is that it is the only time (prior to the series finale Sharpe's Waterloo) that we see one of the regular Chosen Manny characters killed off. Perkins has been a Chosen Manny since Sharpe's Rifles, and while other characters introduced back in that first episode have disappeared from the show - Isaiah Tongue didn't make it to season two, and Private Cooper vanished in between Sharpe's Gold and this one - Perkins actually has the dubious honour of dying on screen. This leaves four of the original cast still in place from now on - Sharpe and Harper, of course, plus riflemannys Harris (the one who can read and write) and Hagman (the one who sings the theme song).

Sharpe's Sword

The third season ends on a high point, and a partial return to the quality levels of the first two seasons. This story sees a complex plot of British and French spies, false identities and betrayals, which is one of the best of the whole series, but unfortunately it almost tries to do too much in its run time, with the result that some of the subplots and characters do not get the development or screen time they deserve.

The guest cast is impressive. Stephen "Marvin" Moore is a Colonel who intially doesn't get on with Sharpe, but doesn't count as the posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week because he actually comes to respect Sharpe's skills* quite quickly. Vernon Dobtcheff appears as a Spanish Don who runs a hospice. A young and pre-fame James "Mark Antony" Purrfoy appears as Captain Jack Spears, an intelligence officer W-wording for Major Munro. Speaking of Munro, by this point has completed his journey to becoming an out-and-out Komedy Scotsman, playing the bagpipes badly - not that there's a lot of difference between playing them badly and playing them well, mew - then quipping "I've never had a lesson in my life."

But the real guest-character of note is the return of Sir Henry Simmerson, last seen fleeing in cowardly disgrace at the end of Sharpe's Eagle. Michael Cochrane makes him suitably odious in every scene in which he appears (including trying to blackmail and then rape Sharpe's love-interest-of-the-week), but unfortunately it's a bit of a wasted opportunity to bring him back here, since he hardly shares any screentime with Sharpe, and probably has more dialogue with Riflemanny Harris than he does with the series' lead.

Harris gets to make his biggest contribution to the plot since the first season, when he breaks the French code that allows Sharpe to unmask the spy within their own ranks. Sharpe himself spends the middle of the story injured, so it is left to the supporting cast to carry that part of the story. Sergeant Harper turns out to have unexpected swordsmithing skills - never before and never subsequently mentioned, unless I'm very much mistaiken - and turns an old sword into a brand new one to replace Sharpe's sword that was broken when he was injured... hence the story title, clang! And with Sharpe temporarily out of the picture, it is up to a guest character to defeat Simmerson, once again sending him away humiliated, but the fact that it wasn't even one of the regular characters that did it makes it feel much less satisfying than it should have been, mew.

This is still an absolutely packed story with some great moments and plenty of twists and turns and action set-pieces - you can tell that, unlike with Sharpe's Gold, this was based pretty closely on one of the better Sharpe novels.

* A story title Bernard Cornwell hasn't used yet, but there's still time and he did start writing them again in 2021...