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...

Sharpe, season two (1994)

Sharpe's Company

The second season kicks off by introducing us to the only Sharpe baddy who is more iconically series-defining than the odious Sir Henry Simmerson, and that is Sergant Obadiah Hakeswill, played by Pete Postlethwaite in what must surely be a career-defining turn from him. Hakeswill is a rapist, thief and murderer and just generally a character with no redeeming features whatsoever. He is made even more memorable by his twitch from the time he survived a hanging, leading to him being convinced he cannot die - a conviction that seems to be true, at least in this episode, since he survives various close calls with death to trouble our heroes again in a later rematch.

Over the course of this story he meets Sharpe again after years apart, but discovers that Sharpe now outranks him and so he cannot bully and mistreat Sharpe the way he used to - we learn that Hakeswill once framed Private Sharpe for a crime that saw Sharpe receive 200 lashes of military 'justice.' Hakeswill now has to take his venomous hatred of Sharpe out on the Chosen Mannys, which he does by stealing items from officers and placing them in Harper's gear, with the result that Harper gets 100 lashes and reduced back to a private.

Hakeswill also murders three British officers that we see on-screen (one of them accidentally when he was really aiming for Sharpe), rapes a soldier's wife (offscreen) and makes two attempts at raping Teresa, who is by now Sharpe's wife and the mother of his baby daughter.

Aside from Hakeswill who is the most watchable, hateable baddy of the series (and it isn't close), the best part of the episode is the battle scene at the climax, when the British army storm the French-held fortress of Badajoz. Things are looking bad for the British, with a high casualty rate, until Sharpe rallies the mannys and turns the tide - pretty much what you'd expect from the last act of a Sharpe story.

Other than Postlethwaite, other guest actors of note include Hugh "Captain Hastings" Fraser taking over from David Troughton as Wellington from this point onwards, and Michael "not Jayston" Byrne taking over from Brian "not that one" Cox as the intelligence officer - Byrne plays Major Nairn, who is a new character who basically takes the Major Hogan role from the books. I'm guessing they put in a new character instead of just recasting Hogan because Byrne either couldn't or wouldn't do the Irish accent.

There are quite a few one-off characters in this, several of which are there only to get killed off by Hakeswill, but the most notable is probably Captain Rymer, played by the before-he-was-famous Marc Warren.

There's one major problem with this episode, however, and that is with the dialogue - the entire story is written in an overblown, unnatural style. This fits Hakeswill like a sock glove, since it helps to emphasise his horrible brand of madness, and some other characters (like Hogan in season one) could get away with it, but literally every character talks like it throughout from start to finish. It seems to me like it was aiming for melodrama, but ends up coming across as very stagy, which doesn't fit the attempt at a realistic filmed nature of Sharpe at all. No wonder the best scene is one that is largely without dialogue.

Sharpe's Enemy

Probably the closest rival to Sharpe's Eagle in terms of being the very best of the series, this is another one that is packed full of multiple ideas that combine to make the whole thing stronger than the sum of the parts.

Let's start with the most obvious - this is the second (and final) story to feature Pete "Obadiah Hakeswill" Postlethwaite as Obadiah Hakeswill. He's now a deserter from the English army, seeing as his crimes in the previous episode would have given him a death sentence if he had hung around (so to speak), and is the second-in-command of a small army of deserters. They've captured a couple of English ladies, one of them played by Liz Hurley, and Sharpe is given the mission of first ransoming them and then, when that (unsurprisingly) doesn't succeed, of rescuing them.

LOL, naughty Sharpe!

The first twist of the episode is that the other English lady (the one who isn't played by Liz Hurley, I mean) is married to a French colonel, who is also trying to ransom/rescue his wife. Sharpe's joining forces with Colonel Dubreton is worthy of the Doctor and the Master, so quickly and so readily do they team up. Dubreton ends up being the one to finally capture Hakeswill, but not before Hakeswill murders Sharpe's wife Teresa.

Teresa's death puts an end to the first phase of Sharpe as romantic hero, and now he is free to have a love-interest-of-the-week for the next few instalments. The capture and subsequent execution of Hakeswill robs the series of its greatest baddy after only two appearances - something writer of the original novels Bernard Cornwell obviously regretted later, given the way he made Hakeswill the recurring antagonist of many of the Sharpe prequels. Fortunately, almost as soon as Hakeswill is captured his role as main baddy is replaced by that of the French Major Ducos, who is almost as good at being bad.

Ducos is an intelligence officer, the French equivalent of Majors Nairn or Hogan, and it is a stroke of genius to introduce him in the same story as Colonel Dubreton, because while Dubreton is shown as being upright and honourable (despite being French... and therefore on the opposite side of the war from our heroes, mew), Ducos is cold, calculating and devious. Meeting the British during a truce, he insults Sharpe's ded wife just after Sharpe has seen Teresa die in his arms, and in response Sharpe throws Ducos's spectacles to the ground in front of him and steps on them - in other words, the two mannys hate each other immediately.

Other actors of note in this include Jeremy "Howard McDee" Child (previously seen by us along with Hugh Fraser when they were both in Edge of Darkness) as the posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week who, after he has just given Captain Sharpe a slagging in front of General Wellington, gives his word that he will accept whichever Major that Wellington assigns to lead the rescue mission. Wellington then produces a letter from the Prince Regent giving Sharpe a promotion to Major, lol.

This episode also introduces Philip "Inspector Cato from The Bill" Whitchurch as Captain Frederickson, who will go on to appear again in a couple of later episodes. He probably ought to have been in more of them, since he is essentially the now-Major Sharpe's second-in-command, but this would have had a good chance of interfering with the Sharpe-Harper dynamic that is central to the series, so I can see why they only used Frederickson when he had a specific role in the plot.

The final act of the episode sees Sharpe use his cunning to convince Ducos's superior officer that he has a much larger force under his command than he does really, persuading the French to retreat. This involves the use of the "rocket batallion," that had earlier appeared as comic relief because their rockets were so inaccurate, to pretend to be both cavalry and artillery. The commander of the rocket artillery is played by Nicholas "Young Sherlock Holmes" Rowe.

The defeat is really Ducos's, since he had given his word to the French General that Sharpe's force had neither cavalry nor artillery. This leads almost directly into the next episode of the series, in which Ducos hatches a plan to have his revenge on Sharpe...

Sharpe's Honour

This continues the generally excellent quality of the second season, and ends it on a high - this feels like a proper series finale, since in one of the earliest scenes we see Napoleon himself, played by Ron "Richard III" Cook, the only time we'll see the main manny himself until the final episode of the entire series.

Major Ducos returns with a zany scheme to defeat the British. He has his own reasons for placing Sharpe at the centre of his plan, since he wants revenge for Sharpe breaking his glasses and defeating him in the previous episode, and Napoleon approves the plan when he learns Sharpe was the officer who took the Eagle in Sharpe's Eagle, which is both a lovely callback as well as a justified reason why our hero would have come to the attention of the most powerful manny in Europe.

The actual plot begins badly, with that most dreadful of clichés - Sharpe is framed for a crime he did not commit. This won't even be the last time this trope is used in the series - doesn't Bernard Cornwell know that he'll never better the one time this tired old chestnut was actually successful, that being in 1981's Dark Towers?

Anyway, a Spanish noblemanny is murdered by two henchmannys of Ducos's, one of whom is Father Hacha (as played by Nickolas "Sheriff of Nottingham" Grace), the closest Sharpe will come to meeting a member of the Spanish Inquisition. His chief weapons are surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, etc. etc. mew. Sharpe is framed and sentenced to death, but Major Nairn smells a devious French plot and (with the approval of General Wellington) fakes the execution, then sends Sharpe and Harper to discover the plot.

This leads Sharpe and Harper through a bunch of misadventures as they follow the chain of clues, eventually rescuing the Sharpe love-interest-of-the-week, "La Marquesa" the wife of the murdered noblemanny (played by Alice Krige, who would go on to be the Borg Queen in Star Trek First Contact a couple of years after this) from the convent where she was being held prisoner. Meanwhile the rest of the Chosen Mannys are relegated to a comic relief subplot where they help Harper's pregnant girlfriend Ramona give birth.

Sharpe ends up as the prisoner of Ducos, who is kind enough to explain his truly diabolical plan to Sharpe like he's auditioning to be a Bond villain - the murder of the Spanish noblemanny has opened up a wedge between the Spanish and the British that will make the Spanish king switch sides in the war, bringing enough of his supporters over to the French side to defeat the British. It's probably for the best that the episode doesn't dwell on the details of this scheme much, since it is a bit flimsy, but it is fine as a background motivator for the characters.

Sharpe is in the process of escaping when Harper turns up with the Chosen Mannys to rescue him. Ducos runs away and shoots Father Hacha himself, scapegoating Hacha for the scheme's failure, leaving Sharpe to have a climactic fight with the other henchmanny, "El Matarife" - as the one who actually did the murder Sharpe was accused of, this is poetic justice.

There's one odd decision at the end of the episode, where Ducos gets randomly shot by his own side when he encounters French troops fleeing the battle they have just lost. This scene (which is not taken from the original novel of Sharpe's Honour) makes it look as though Ducos is killed, though he isn't ded and will be back in the fourth and fifth seasons. I can only assume they put this in to give an ending to the character in case they never got round to making the later stories with Ducos in, but the fact that Sharpe isn't involved at all makes it extremely unsatisfying.

However, that small point aside, this is still an excellent episode of Sharpe and one of the series' best and most memorable episodes - the four-episode run from Sharpe's Eagle to here is most certainly the series' best and most consistent set of consecutive episodes. As for why this run doesn't continue with the next one, well...

Sharpe, season one (1993)

Well sir, upon sighting the series, I naturally gave the order for it to be reviewed on my blog. That's my style, sir.

The moment the electric guitar kicks in you know you're in for an entertaining couple of hours of Sean Bean killing Frenchmannys and calling English toffs "bastards." Or possibly the other way around...

Sharpe's Rifles

My memory of this series was faulty - I remembered this initial episode as being fairly average, with a minimal plot due to the need to set up all of the main characters, not only Sean Bean's Richard Sharpe - surely still his best and most memorable role, despite all the many things he has died been in since - but the rest of the Chosen Mannys, not to mention the premise of the Napoleonic setting of 1809, just as the British army is about to invade French-occupied Spain.

But this is only partially correct - there is a lot of setting up and introducing of main characters, which occupies most of the first half of the 100 minute episode duration, though the characters are almost without exception introduced organically, with a chance for every one to show a bit of unique personality, and likewise the exposition is very cleverly handled. Brian Cox (not that one) as Major Hogan, the intelligence officer W-wording directly for David Troughton's General Arthur Wellesley (who has not yet been made the Duke of Wellington and regenerated into Hugh Fraser), delivers most of the exposition to Sharpe and via him to us the viewers, but as Sharpe has only just been made an officer the show has a built-in excuse for him not to know much about Hogan's schemes until he is told them.

Where the episode gets good is after the "proper officers" Major Dunnett and Captain Murray (played by proper poshos Julian Fellowes and Tim Bentinck respectively) get killed off in a French ambush, Sharpe is left in command of a rag-tag group of Player Characters, the crack shots of the Chosen Mannys squadron who all carry the rifles of the episode title. They don't treat him with automatic respect due his rank because he is not a proper officer, having only just been made a lieutenant (I can't wait until Sharpe gets promoted again so I don't have to spell that word any more, mew) by Wellesley at the beginning of the story. Therefore Sharpe has to win his mannys' respect, which he sets about doing by being a dirty fighter just like them, but he also shows his intelligence by the use of cunning ruses to outwit and escape from a French force that outnumbers them and just generally has them at a disadvantage.

The plot really gets underway when the Chosen Mannys team up with some Spanish guerillas, led by Commandante Teresa Moreno (Assumpta Serna, almost the only woman in this whole programme but doing enough acting to more than make up for it) who soon becomes Sharpe's love interest. We also see the beginning of Sharpe's relationship with Sergeant Patrick Harper (Daragh O'Malley) as they go from enemies to lovers best friends over the course of the episode - Harper starts off trying to kill Sharpe in a mutiny after the "proper officers" are all killed, and ends up sticking around to save the day in one of the coolest set-piece scenes in the whole series (you might think the show is playing its paw a little early, but just wait until the next programme...) when he kills two French cavalrymannys in just a few seconds.

The various plot strands that have been set up then all come together for an impressive climax that succeeds really well as the first instalment in a series, with Sharpe and co achieving a symbolically significant victory that foreshadows the greater victories they will win in later stories. So I guess you could say that on it's own Sharpe's Rifles is a touch lacking, because some of the later ones take what it does well and do it better, building on the excellent setting up done here without the need to establish series premise and characters. But there's still a lot to recommend about this opener on its own merits.

Sharpe's Eagle

This was the first Sharpe novel written, which you can kind of tell from the way the author Bernard Cornwell absolutely stuffed the plot full of ideas, many of which might have on their own been the subject of a later book once the series was established, but here sharing space with all the other ideas.

In terms of the TV story, this is the best individual episode of the whole run, an absolute tour de force from start to finish (though, it must be said, not the best introduction to the series, which is why it was good that they adapted both it and Sharpe's Rifles together). This is the episode that introduces the classic Sharpe trope of Sharpe vs the toffs instead of the French, because although there are two battles with the French in the story, there are no named French characters as baddys this time.

Instead we have Sir Henry Simmerson, colonel of the South Essex regiment,  as played by Michael "Redvers Fenn-Cooper" Cochrane, the most instantly hateable of all the English upper class officers to appear in the entire series. His cowardice and incompetence sets the plot in motion when he bungles a mission to destroy a bridge over a Spanish river, resulting in the death of his second-in-command Major Lennox (who Sharpe has backstory with and respects) and the dishonour of the regiment when the French force nicks off with "the King's Colours" i.e. the regimental standard.

As he lies dying, Lennox asks Sharpe to take the French equivalent, an "Imperial Eagle," at the upcoming battle to restore their lost honour, and Sharpe silently vows to do so, hence the name of the story. This is followed by one of the greatest scenes of the series in which Simmerson is disciplined by General Arthur Wellesley - easily David Troughton's finest scene - who gives Simmerson enough rope to hang himself by trying to blame anyone and everyone else and Simmerson ends up completely humiliated. Troughton exploding with anger when Simmerson tries to pin the blame on the dead Major Lennox is perfectly timed, demonstrating Wellesley's contempt for the cowardice and dishonourable behaviour of Simmerson. Cochrane, it has to be said, is also superb as he plays what must be the ultimate screen bounder.

When Sharpe gets promoted to the rank of captain after the fiasco, which is as much to spite Simmerson and his nepotistic attempt top get his own nephew promoted as it is for Sharpe's own merits, Simmerson sends his nephew and another lieutenant named Berry (played by a young and unknown Daniel "Bond, James Bond" Craig, the first of a succession of before-they-were-famous actors to play Sharpe's baddys or henchmannys-of-the-week) to kill Sharpe.

Berry comes pretty close to killing Sharpe while on a night patrol, but forgets that Sharpe has mannys on his side and Harper kills Berry first. There's so much focus on Sharpe himself and the variety of guest characters (Cornwell stuffing this story with a much larger guest cast than most Sharpe stories) that there isn't much time for the Chosen Mannys to get screentime - again it is a good thing they all got their chance in the first episode - but Harper gets enough here to become well-established as the main secondary character, which will of course continue for the rest of the series.

Other guest actors of note include Brian Cox in his second and final appearance as Major Hogan, again giving the orders to Sharpe and being the main officer-on-Sharpe's-side, though their relationship is subtly different than in Sharpe's Rifles, since Sharpe is a bit more used to Hogan's ways by now, and a lot of the exposition is delivered not to Sharpe but by him, to the raw recruits of the South Essex regiment.

There's also Gavan O'Herlihy (recognisable because this was not long after he was in a pawful of episodes of Twin Peaks) as Captain Leroy, an inappropriate American Virginian. He has a subplot where he sort of gets on with Sharpe and helps him out when he needs money, but has his own motives for doing so, and he is an interesting character who adds a little bit more depth to the plot, but is another example of Cornwell throwing another character into the story even though he isn't strictly necessary.

I'm not sure this review can really do the episode justice in conveying just how great it is. It really is packed full of action and incident, and scarcely a moment is wasted. The baddys are proper boo-hiss baddys, and Sharpe and Harper and their allies seem even more heroic by way of contrast. This is the point where Sharpe really gets going.

The only downside one might find with the story is the fact that the series might just have peaked too early, what with this being only the second instalment, so it is going to need something special next time so that the follow-up doesn't feel like a letdown by comparison to this one. Something like a really great baddy...

Hey...

 

I think they mean "shouldn't", mew.