Fall of Eagles: Indian Summer of an Emperor

This episode introduces us to World War 1, which is an underrated war (usually it gets overshadowed by its more famous sequel) probably best known these days for its appearances in Blackadder Goes Forth.

To begin with there is little sign of what is to come. The focus here is back on Austria, where Emperor Franz Josef is now very old and his ministers and generals are preparing for when his nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, will take over.

They are represented here by Count Conrad von Hotzendorf, played by T P McKenna (Ex-President Sarkoff in Blakes 7's Bounty, Captain Cook in Doctor Who's Greatest Show in the Galaxy), and form an unofficial party in opposition to the the Emperor - the sort of thing that Bismarck prevented Crown Prince Frederick from doing in Germany all the way back in episode two.

Speaking of Germany, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is great friends with Kaiser Wilhelm, and they go hunting bunnies together. (I'm not sure why mannys need shotguns to go hunting bunnies, unless...)
Franz Ferdinand is played by Peter Woodthorpe, his voice unmistakable: the one true Gollum and Pigsy.

Franz Ferdinand has fallen out with Franz Josef over his decision to marry someone that Franz Josef doesn't think is important enough, and as a result he gets on better with the Kaiser than with his own uncle. To assert his independence from the Emperor, Franz Ferdinand decides to take his wife with him to Sarajevo where he thinks they will be appreciated and where he can get assassinated properly.

Emperor Franz Josef does not have much luck with his heirs in this series, seeing as the last time we had an episode focus on Austria we saw his previous heir, his son Rudolf, die.

As is typical for Fall of Eagles, Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated off screen between scenes, and we instead see only the repercussions as the Emperor is informed. Even though this is a serious moment - a turning point in history, even - there is time for a humorous, farcical scene as Franz Josef has to break the bad news to his nephew Karl that he is the new heir over the telephone, a newfangled contraption that the aged Emperor struggles to cope with.

The second half of the episode shows the aftermath of the assassination, with Franz Josef not wanting to have a war, and in fact secretly a bit relieved that Franz Ferdinand is not going to be the next Emperor any more, but his ministers and generals try to push him into war so that Austria does not look weak in front of the other countries.

The Kaiser also wants war, and he and his new Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg (Peter "Dr Warlock" Copley) push their ally into attacking Serbia by promising all the help Austria might need if any country were to declare war right back at them.

The episode's final scene is blackly humourous with the hindsight of what will follow, as the British receive the news of the assassination and decide that it is nothing for them to worry about.

Fall of Eagles: Dress Rehearsal

Dress Rehearsal is part 9 of 13 and yet is the first to feature all three "Eagles" within the same episode. Even then the focus is on Russia, with Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Franz Josef limited to a one scene cameo each, and none of them appearing together.

The main character of the episode is Russia's egotistical foreign minister Baron Isvolsky, excellently played by Peter "Denethor" Vaughan. He has a plan to force the Ottoman Empire to open the Bosphorus strait to the Russian fleet by getting all the other countries of Europe to side with Russia against the Ottomans.

The Tsar has expressed his wish for this, but the new prime minister Stolypin (Frank Middlemass, a Shakespearean actor who I recognise from playing the Fool in King Lear and Cardinal Beaufort in the Henry vi plays, as well as the Master of Baillie College in Yes Minister) predicts that Russia will have to give away more in concessions than they will gain from it.

Most of the episode sees Isvolsky proving Stolypin right, as he travels Europe meeting important minor characters representing their countries, including French foreign minister Clemenceau, played by John "Li H'sen Chang" Bennett (proving he can play a Frenchmanny just as easily as a Chinamanny).

The trouble is that Isvolsky is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and it is with the Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal that he more than meets his match - agreeing that Russia will recognise an Austrian annexation of Bosnia, which would mean betraying Russia's supposed ally Serbia, and foolishly doing so in writing without the agreement of the Tsar or Stolypin.

Then when Austria annexes Bosnia straight away, before Isvolsky is finished making all his deals, Russia has effectively given away Bosnia for nothing. This leads to a great scene where the German ambassador makes it plain to Isvolsky how outmaneuvered he has been, and that he has to go along with what the Germans and Austrians want if he does not want the secret deal made known, or else shoot himself. The First World War only fails to start several years early when Russia backs down.

In the end Britain's King Edward vii asks his foreign minister Grey if all this politicking and backstabbing has been worth it for anyone - all that has been achieved is the change of status of Bosnia from occupied puppet to an annexed part of the Austrian empire (it sounds to me like he's been playing Civilization V). But it has firmed up the alliances between Britain, France and Russia, and between Germany and Austria. The two mannys realise that if a war happens, it will be between these two sides.

Fall of Eagles: The Appointment

In a way almost the mirror image of Absolute Beginners, The Appointment is another episode heavy with politics, but this time showing the Russian government's counter-revolution following on from the events of 1905, as seen in the preceding episode Dearest Nicky.

After the assassination of the Tsar's uncle Grand Duke Sergei leads to the sacking of the chief of the police (who is also the chief of the secret police), Nicholas has to choose a successor. Sergei Witte returns from The Last Tsar to make the liberal case for a reformer, but he is up against a conspiracy led by Interior Minister Trepov (David "Drop the Dead Donkey" Swift) to appoint somebody both reactionary and ruthless enough to preserve the status quo in Russia... even if that means going so far as to replace the Tsar himself.

The conspiracy's candidate is Theodore Rachkovsky, played by Michael Bryant, and most of the episode focuses on his attempt to get "the appointment" of the title. Persuading the Tsar is the easy bit, he must also win over the Empress Alexandra, who got him sacked from the job once before for spying on her favourite holy manny du jour, one Father Phillipe. Rachkovsky maintains he was "a charlatan" and, while we don't meet this Phillipe, from his description alone he seems to foreshadow the coming of Rasputin.

Michael Bryant already had form for turning up in a single episode of a series and walking off with it, as this was made two years after he played Wing Commander Marsh in the Colditz episode Tweedledum. His performance here is every bit as compelling as Patrick Stewart's Lenin was in Absolute Beginners, and he almost single-handedly makes this one of the better installments of Fall of Eagles.

The First Churchills

I have taken a break from watching Fall of Eagles to watch an even older (in both senses) historical BBC drama series, The First Churchills.

Made in 1969 (and so just in time for Monty Python's Flying Circus to come along and make fun of it and period dramas of its ilk), this series stars John "Baron Munchausen" Neville as John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Susan Hampshire as Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and is set over the course of their life together, from 1673 when they first met through to 1714 when Queen Anne died.

Their lives are divided up into 12 episodes, with the first two concentrating on their meeting, falling in love, and then marrying. The rest sees one or both of them getting involved in major political and military matters of the day, due to their closeness to a succession of Kings and Queens of Britain: first Charles ii (who takes his doggy with him everywhere), then his brother James vii, then his daughter and son-in-law Mary and William, then finally her sister Anne.

Other major characters include John's best friend Sidney Godolphin (John Standing, Sam Collins in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and Sarah's best friend - for a while - Queen Anne is played by Margaret "Antonia" Tyzack.

As with I Claudius and Fall of Eagles, there are a lot of minor characters who come and go over the course of the series, either for a single episode or else recurring as required. Some of the most notable include Michael "Captain Needa" Culver as John's brother Charles Churchill, (which is noteworthy mainly because there does seem to be a close physical resemblance between the two actors), Kevin Stoney makes his obligatory one-scene appearance (here as an Archbishop), and the main antagonist of the series is the French King Louis xiv, played by Robert Robinson (no, not that one, would that it were).

In the later episodes John Churchill is captain-general of all of Britain's army, and spends most of his time fighting wars against France. Due to the nature of this sort of series, we see virtually nothing of the actual battles - a handful of soldiers and a single cannon, in a field and on film, stand as shortpaw for the entire army. What we see is the generals and other important mannys making their plans and receiving reports in their tents, and in its own way this is just as enthralling, while being far easier on the BBC budget.

This is an interesting period of history, and this series gives viewers a solid overview of it, using the OTP of John and Sarah Churchill as POV characters gives it a unique perspective and sense of thematic cohesion. However, they are portrayed as unambiguous goodys throughout, so it may not be totally historically accurate. This could be because the series was based on the book Marlborough: His Life and Times by a manny who, by a curious coincidence, had the same surname as the Churchills.

Fall of Eagles: Dearest Nicky

The middle of the series, and this is the first plot to properly crossover two of the countries. The framing device is Kaiser Wilhelm writing letters to Tsar Nicholas to offer him unsolicited advice on how to rule Russia, beginning each one with the "Dearest Nicky" of the title. He also likes sending the Tsar awful allegorical paintings featuring the two Emperors in the picture (and with the Kaiser depicted more flatteringly than the Tsar), which the Russians are too diplomatic to refuse.

Nicholas and Alexandra are, to begin with, more concerned with their pet project of getting a supposed holy manny canonised as a saint than the business of government, to such an extent that Nicholas prefers seeing the Archbishop (John Welsh, probably best known for being the Emerald Seer in Krull) over meeting with his ministers.

This changes when Japan attacks Russia and starts a war. Both Tsar and Kaiser show their racism, calling the Japanese "little yellow men", and expect an easy Russian victory to begin with. Early signs that this will not be the case come when Russian naval incompetence leads to the Dogger Bank incident - we don't see this on screen, of course, just hear about it through the medium of the Kaiser's exposition-delivering letters.

Father Gapon (Kenneth "Admiral Piett" Colley) is a priest who is also a police spy in a trade union, but after von Plehve gets assassinated (a black comedic moment as he tries to close his carriage door to keep the bomb out, only to shut himself inside with it) he properly goes over to the side of the union and begins a strike that leads to an attempt at revolution. Colley gives a magnificent speech full of rhetoric as he whips up the workers into revolting, and we also see him manipulate the workers by using the authority the Russian Orthodox church has over them.

Again we see the bad influence Nicholas and Alexandra have upon each other as they refuse to listen to advice from anyone else, which leads to them sending cavalry in to massacre the strikers.

The news from the war gets worse as Russia's fleet is sunk, and Kaiser Wilhelm sees this time of their weakness as an opportunity to get a treaty signed with Russia, even though Russia is currently allied to Germany's enemy France. His minister von Bülow says he'll be impressed if the Kaiser can pull it off, but for a while it seems as if Wilhelm's policy of "monarch speaking to monarch" has succeeded - a hilarious scene as the Tsar and Kaiser meet, over the top of which we hear Wilhelm's unreliable narration of what happened.

Nicholas signs the treaty and for a moment it looks like the two Emperors are about to kiff (Wilhelm/Nicholas OTP FTW!!111), then there is a hard cut to the room of Russian ministers refusing to ratify the treaty, for the very sensible reason that it would undo 15 years of their diplomacy with France.

On top of all of this, for Nicholas and Alexandra, there is their personal worry about their baby son Alexei who has hemophilia. This weighs upon Nicholas even more than the rest of his and Russia's problems (war, revolution, and Germany "helping"), as shown by the unusual way the episode ends - the Tsar is cut off halfway through a sentence, with his worry about his son the unsaid part. What we don't hear him say only serves to emphasise to us what he is feeling, a clever way to end things.