An Unexpected Crossover

Ridiculous or Ridiculously Awesome moments from Mahabharat: The Road to Kurukshetra

The lesson of Mahabharat is that we took our first steps on the road to Kurukshetra the moment the very first episode began. But now that the Pandavas have completed their years of exile and still cannot come to a peaceable arrangement with their cousin Duryodhan, war between them is inevitable.

1. Duryodhan and Arjun both ask for Krishna's help, and both receive it [Episode 63]

Krishna is the incarnation of Vishnu, who is right at the top of their pantheon of gods. As a prince of the Yadavas he also has a "divine army" of a million soldiers under his command. Duryodhan and Arjun, as representatives of their opposing factions, arrive to ask Krishna to side with them. They arrive on the same day, and find Krishna having sleeps. When he wakes up, he says he will have to help both of them, and proposes that one can take his million soldiers, and the other will get

"I, alone. Unarmed. And I won't take up arms in the battlefield."

He gives Arjun the choice, because Arjun is the younger of the two.

Arjun rejects the army and chooses Krishna, which pleases Duryodhan because it means he gets the million mannys. He can't believe his luck that Arjun didn't choose it and leaves, smiling smugly. Both sides think they have gotten the best out of the arrangement, at least until Duryodhan tells evil uncle Shakuni the outcome - he is quick to tell Duryodhan how bad this is for them.

Arjun knows that, even unarmed, Krishna can still take part in a battle as a charioteer, and he wants him to be his charioteer.

2. Duryodhan tries to arrest god [Episode 65]

Evil Duryodhan's next foolish action occurs when Krishna comes to the court of Hastinapur as a peace envoy, in one last, desperate attempt to avoid war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Krishna speaks to the assembled princes and elders, and in making the case for peace over war he makes the sort of speech that Captain Kirk would be proud of.

Duryodhan not only rejects Krishna's proposal, he also insults Krishna and then calls for his guards to arrest him.

Even surrounded by soldiers, Krishna doesn't stop smiling. He manifests his divine weapon (as previously used to cut off the head of Shishupal) which is enough to frighten the guards, and then becomes giant and glows with divine light. Duryodhan has again forgotten that Krishna is the avatar of the god Vishnu, and cannot be arrested as easily as all that. We don't even need to see what happens next, the story cuts straight to the next bit...

3. Karna gives away his divine protection [Episode 65]

Karna is another character who has sworn an oath that would later come back to harm him. His oath is that if, after he finishes his daily religious worship of the sun god (who is actually his divine father), anyone asks him for a favour, he will always grant it. The god Indra knows that the sun god gave his son divine protection that makes him proof against any weapons, even divine weapons such those possessed by Indra's own son, Arjun. So Indra disguises himself as a mortal manny and visits Karna at the right time of day to ask him for a favour and have Karna be oathbound to grant it.

When asked to give up his divine shield, which takes the form of a golden shield vest and earrings that are supposed to actually be part of his body, Karna recognises Indra. He was forewarned by the sun god that this would happen. Even so, he still grants the god's request, saying

"I am proud to be the only man from whom Lord Indra himself is asking for something."

and then takes a knife and cuts away his vest and earrings.

Indra is so impressed with Karna's actions that he offers him a boon. Karna asks for the "Shakti" weapon to use against his enemy, and Indra is now compelled to grant this - so he has saved Arjun from one power of Karna, only to then arm him with another.

4. "Karna, I am your mother" [Episode 67]

Kunti reveals to Karna that she is his birth mother, and that he is therefore half-brother to the five Pandavas. Since the Pandavas are his sworn enemies, this revelation goes down about as well as you'd expect.

At first Karna suspects a trick designed to make it impossible for him to fight and even kill those he thinks to be his own family members, but Kunti's tears convince him that it is true. Since he has already sworn to kill Arjun or else die in the attempt, he cannot now promise Kunti that he will not do this, but he does promise her that he will not kill any of the other Pandavas so that, whatever the outcome of his duel to the death with Arjun, Kunti will still have five living sons at the end of the war.

5. Sage Vyasa blesses the king's charioteer [Episode 68]

Sage Vyasa visits the blind King Dhritarashtra on the eve of the war to offer him a unique blessing - "divine sight" with which he would be able to see all that occurs in the forthcoming battle from the safety and comfort of his palace. Given that Dhritarashtra knows that many of his relatives, inclusing his own sons, are likely to die in this war, he considers that this would be more of a curse than a blesssing. And given that Vyasa holds Dhritarashtra responsible for failing to stop the war, perhaps he even intended it as such.

With Dhritarashtra declining the offer, Vyasa instead gives the divine sight to Dhritarashtra's loyal charioteer, Sanjay, so that Sanjay might narrate what unfolds to Dhritarashtra.

Since Vyasa is not just a character in Mahabharat but is also the great author of the Mahabharata, this is an extremely meta power for him to be able to bestow: Vyasa enabling Sanjay to tell a tale within the tale told by Vyasa.

6. The armies assemble on the battlefield [Episodes 69-75]

Episode 69 begins with the two opposing armies travelling to the battlefield, to the tune of a ten minute musical number which lists all of the named characters who will be fighting on both sides - that there are so many characters might explain why the song needs to be so long!

You could be forgiven for expecting that this means that the great battle is about to begin, but it will be another six episodes before any fighting actually starts. There's still a lot of character development to come, plus the backstory of Prince Shikhandin (the reincarnation of Princess Amba, calling back all the way to episode 5) and the framing of the rules of war by Bhishma. Not to mention the single most significant event in the whole story...

7. Arjun and Krishna, at Kurukshetra [Episodes 72-74]

With the armies facing each other and battle about to commence, Arjun suddenly despairs at the prospect of having to fight and kill his elders, his teachers, and members of his own family. He refuses to fight until Krishna makes a long speech to convince him of his duty, and then the two of them debate philosophy until Arjun is persuaded to take up his bow again.

Occupying almost three full episodes, this dialogue is known as the Bhagavad Gita and is considered sacred by Hindus. It would not be right for me to make fun of these deeply held beliefs of millions of mannys (even though I do not subscribe to them myself, being a cat made from socks) so I will confine myself to discussing the way this vital portion of the Mahabharata is presented in this TV series, which I think could subjectively be described as being either "ridiculous or ridiculously awesome" depending upon the tastes of the viewer.

Occupying such a long, continuous stretch of the story, the viewers' attention needs to mostly be held by what Krishna and Arjun are saying, but there are some attempts to make things more visually interesting by occasionally cutting away either to Time, the all-seeing Ceiling Cat-like narrator of the series, or to Dhritarashtra and Sanjay who, thanks to the divine sight bestowed upon Sanjay, are the only other characters able to witness and comment upon what Krishna is saying to Arjun. This is used to strongly contrast Dhritarashtra against Krishna since the king hopes that Arjun will not fight, because then the victory of his son's army would be assured.

The importance of this section to the overall story can be seen from its prominent inclusion in the title sequence of every episode. The credits are shown over a series of paintings depicting events from the story, and the majority of these are of Arjun and Krishna, with emphasis on the moment when Krishna reveals his cosmic manifestation to Arjun.

When the time comes to show this event in the series, they pull out all the stops to do it justice, and attempt something much more ambitious than when Krishna last revealed his divine power back in episode 65 by becoming giant and glowing.

Judge for yourself whether their reach exceeded their grasp with this bit of SFX, but either way it certainly makes for an unforgettable moment:

Robin of Sherwood, season two

The Prophecy

The series returns for its second season with an episode so full of incident that I wonder if this was originally intended as a two-parter that got cut down to fit into a single part's duration. We've got Prince John turning up, played by Phil Davis as a dangerously unstable megalomaniac, and John "Bergerac" Nettles as his chief henchmanny Peter de Leon. Nettles doesn't have much to do, but we do get from him the sense that he's a lot more afraid of the prince than of Robin Hood.

Then we've got the return of Marion's supposedly ded dad, played by George "Tiberius" Baker, who the Merry Mannys have to rescue from Prince John. And on top of that we've got Sir Guy's plan to put a ringer among the Merry Mannys to betray them from the inside - another one of those dreadfully clichéd plots so beloved of this kind of series, so we should be grateful that it's only a subplot here since it could have been very, very wearisome if they had tried to make the main plank of the story out of it.

I'm guessing they must have known they weren't going to be getting John Rhys-Davies back as, even though he was only in the previous episode, King Richard is killed off off screen and Prince John becomes King John during the course of the episode. This was a good decision to have the news of Richard's death arrive while John was in Nottingham, since then we can see him being proclaimed king (by Sir Guy) rather than simply hearing about the event happening elsewhere, which would have been much less dramatic.

The Sheriff of Nottingham is missing in this episode, which allows room for more screentime for Sir Guy and Abbot Hugo taking his place in the narrative. It also keeps Nickolas Grace and Phil Davis apart, thus preventing a massive ham-off from taking place. I know King John will be back in the third season, so there's still time.

The Children of Israel

The Sheriff owes Jewish moneylender Joshua de Talmont (played by David de Keyser, who played the Israeli Ambassador in Yes Prime Minister around the same time as this was made... not that he was typecast or anything) a lot of moneys, and in the time-honoured tradition of the middle ages, decides that instead of paying it back he will whip up an antisemitic riot in order to kill Joshua and his entire family.

They are saved from this not by Robin and the Merry Mannys (who spend the first half of the episode in a completely separate subplot that sees Will Scarlet leaving the band because he can't be in charge - hmm, remind you of anyone?) but by Gisburne. This is because Sir Guy has designs on Joshua's eldest daughter Sarah, and once the family are fleeing Nottingham he kidnaps her and even gets a bit rapey... though in a family-drama-friendly way, claiming he's going to marry her against her will and otherwise threatening her in ways that the adult audience would understand but which would be over the heads of the kittens watching.

The Merry Mannys finally get involved with the main plot when they come to Sarah's rescue. But having saved Joshua's family from Sir Guy, most of them are then captured along with the family by the Sheriff, who was hunting for the rebellious Gisburne.

The episode is most memorable for the climactic scene that follows, which sees our heroes saved when the Sheriff cannot resist his curiosity over the precious treasure that the family took with them when they fled. It is a book, which drives the Sheriff mad (termporarily, up until Robin slaps him out of it) when he looks upon its pages. This is notable for two reasons - first there is the clear influence of the climax to Raiders of the Lost Ark, released only three or four years before this was made, where the Nazis are defeated when they open a "Jewish" artifact. And second there is the magnificent overacting of Nickolas Grace as he finally goes completely over the top to depict the Sheriff's insanity.

Lord of the Trees

This is a bit of a weird one, continuity-wise, since the Sheriff is away and has left Sir Guy in charge, which was the same situation as in The Prophecy before he then returned in The Children of Israel, so either this was supposed to come between those two episodes and they got shown in the wrong order for some reason, or else the Sheriff went away, then returned, then went mad for a bit, and then promptly buggered off again.

Another story heavy on the mysticism, Sir Guy recruits some mercenaries to help him kill Robin Hood during a period called "the Blessing," a pagan ceremony that lasts several days and during which the followers of Herne are not supposed to shed any blood. But even Abbot Hugo (who you'd think ought to have more faith in the power of Christianity) warns Sir Guy not to mess with Herne.

Sir Guy attacks a tree that is sacred to Herne, and is promptly cursed with temporary insanity. This would have been more impressive had we not seen the Sheriff similarly afflicted in the episode right before this (I'd suggest this as more evidence that this one should have come before it, but then having seen this first might have detracted from the spectacle of the Sheriff's madness). Trying again, he and his mannys interrupt the climax of the pagan ceremony and try to assassinate Herne, but only manage to wound him. This has the result that Sir Guy goes mad for the second time in the same episode.

Appearing for the first time in the series is Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch as Edward of Wickham, here acting as some kind of priest of Herne but who would go on to become a semi-regular as the head villager of Wickham.

It's not a great episode, and may even be the weakest one since The Witch of Elsdon. There's not really enough plot to fill the run time so it is heavily padded, mostly with either repetitive scenes of the Merry Mannys enjoying themselves in their pagan way, harmlessly having fun with the locals, or else with repetitive scenes of the mercenaries enjoying themselves in their pagan way, harmfully brutalising the peasants. Oh look, in that sentence I have managed to show the thematic contrast between the goodies and the baddies far more succinctly and successfully than the episode achieves.

The Enchantment

This is an incredible episode. While slight in terms of plot, it more than makes up for that in having phenomenal atmosphere.

A direct sequel to the two-part series opener Robin Hood and the Sorcerer, this sees a witch and former acolyte of the satanistic sorcerer Baron de Belleme put an enchantment (hence the title) on Robin so that he will steal the magic silver arrow from Herne to use in a ritual that brings the evil Baron back from the dead.

At the same time there's a secondary plot in which Sir Guy is competing with the Sheriff's new henchmanny-of-the-week to be the one to find and retrieve the Baron's hidden cache of jewels. Sir Guy is therefore present in Castle Belleme when the Baron is resurrected. This leads on to the Sheriff's mannys and the Merry Mannys arriving at the castle at the same time, where they have a great big fight. We are treated to no fewer than two of Terry Walsh's trademark falling-of-a-wall stunts during this impressive sequence.

Having been slowly ramping up the supernatural for the past couple of episodes, this one goes all-out. The witch, named Lilith (played by Gemma Craven), uses voodoo dolls to hypno-eyes Robin, and when we see the world through his enchanted eyes she looks done up like Helen Mirren's Morgana in Excalibur. The Superb Anthony Valentine comes back to play the Baron, and then uses his magic to terrify the Sheriff and his mannys into fleeing (Nickolas Grace getting another chance to overact tremendously upon seeing that the Baron really is alive again, and this wasn't just Sir Guy bullshitting him to excuse his failure), and to separate Robin from the rest of the Merry Mannys.

He's about to kill Robin with the silver arrow when we finally get some magic done by the good guys - a cornus ex machina as Herne appears and saves Robin at the last second. They were obviously leaving things open for a later rematch with the Baron, since he's still alive at the end credits (though this was the last time we saw The Superb Anthony Valentine in the series). That puts the score at a 1-1 draw between Paganism and Satanism, with Christianity barely getting a look in.

This is the series really hitting its stride.

The Swords of Wayland (Part 1)

This opens with a superbly atmospheric pre-titles sequence in which we first see the supposedly demonic horsemannys "the Hounds of Lucifer." Silhouetted against a red-filtered sky they look like nothing less than live-action Black Riders.

While we know there is plenty of supernatural stuff in the world of Robin of Sherwood, the fact that these riders are just mannys in scary costumes, wholly mundane in explanation, is a sort of reverse twist. But it doesn't explain why Robin and the Merry Mannys are so quick to be skeptical of the villagers' beliefs when only in the previous story did they witness a dead Satanist come back to life, never mind all the stuff they saw in even earlier episodes.

The audience are put ahead of our heroes when we get to see that the local Ravenscar Abbey is the base for the coven, with the abbess herself (Rula "Lintilla" Lenska) as its head. This is a bit of doubly subversive writing from Richard Carpenter - not only do the devil-worshippers have real power, but they have taken over what should be a centre for Christianity.

A local miller called Adam, played by Norman Bowler (best known to us cats and doggys for being one of the core cast in Softly Softly and Softly Softly: Task Force) is their agent who leads the riders against the Merry Mannys, who proceed to turn the tables on them. There's then a well staged, tense fight between Robin and Adam in the mill. The well-worn trope where fanatics are less afraid of death than of betraying their master is given a bit of life by Bowler's convincing display of terror. He and the other cultist that get captured both choose to kill themselves - this is strong stuff for an adventure series that was broadcast at tea-time.

The Swords of Wayland (Part 2)

While part 1 had some issues with padding and its pacing, part 2 is a tour de force with set piece after set piece all the way through. It is clear that there's no way this could have been a single-parter, not without being considerably rushed and therefore significantly worsened.

It starts with Marion on her own going to rescue Robin from the Earl of Godwin, with the strong suggestion that they're allowed to escape when the earl realises Robin was telling the truth about the abbess being a baddy. Meanwhile the rest of the Merry Mannys are off getting hypno-eyesed by the abbess, in a reversal of the situation from The Enchantment when it was Robin's turn to be the hypno-eyesed victim.

The next section sees Robin and Marion versus the Merry Mannys, which ends in Robin and Marion again getting captured. That the episode has been something of a capture-escape-capture runaround up until now scarcely matters when the presentation of the runaround feels so original. Robin is then freed thanks to the help of a random madmanny they encounter, but who we viewers alone are later privileged with the information that he was sent by Herne, whom we (but not Robin) can glimpse in the background.

This leads on to the climax of the story at Ravenscar Abbey. With the hypno-eyes having worn off, the Merry Mannys are placed in a big cage along with Marion, and the abbess intends to sacrifice them in a big fiery pit as part of a ritual to summon Lucifer. This story was originally broadcast over Easter weekend in 1985, and so it's quite a lot of devil worship for ITV to show in an early evening Saturday slot at any time of year, never mind in the middle of the holiest Christian festival.

The ritual itself is the scene de resistance, with the slow manifesting of Lucifer being a shockingly effective bit of SFX. Being unable to show anything too violent or horiffic in its pre-watershed slot, the show goes out of its way to suggest as much as possible without the need to depict anything graphic, and of course it ends up so much more powerful than if we had seen it all.

Naturally Robin saves the day at the last minute, and then there's the traditional big fight between our heroes and the cultists. But the true ending is the slow-motion coda in which the Hounds of Lucifer turn upon the abbess as she tries to run away. I suppose their organisation does not tolerate failure.

The Greatest Enemy

Robin of Sherwood owes a lot to Blakes 7, just as Blakes 7 owes a lot to the old stories of Robin Hood, but the resemblance was never so close as in this episode. Blakes 7 showed that you could lose the lead halfway through the series provied the rest of your cast was strong enough, and now it is time for Robin of Sherwood to do the same. Blakes 7 proved that you could end your series by killing your hero and title character in full view of your audience, and still leave them hungry for more.

There's even a fight between Nasir and a couple of Assassins in a wood that looks a lot like the one in which we first see Blake in Blake.

The Swords of Wayland was so good that I scarcely even noticed the absence of the Sheriff of Nottingham or Sir Guy of Gisburne, but they're both back with a vengeance this time. This is a season finale worth the name. That small subplot with Nasir and the Assassins aside, the majority of this episode consists of an extended action/chase/fight scene in which the Sheriff, having been given the ultimatum by King John to either kill Robin Hood or else lose his title, goes after the Merry Mannys in force, pursuing them through Sherwood and driving them from the places where they thought themselves safe.

Little John, Will Scarlet, Tuck and Nasir are captured one by one. Robin then sacrifices himself to allow Marion and Much to escape, with the scene of him holding off the Sheriff's small army single-pawedly being one of the series' greatest moments. Eventually Robin runs out of arrows, so he is surrounded and killed - though the camera cuts away so that we don't see him fall.

Killing off Robin parallels the earlier BBC series The Legend of Robin Hood, and in a similar way the legend lives on after him. A hooded manny rescues the captured Merry Mannys, and the Sheriff's mannys who see him are so terrified he is Robin that they don't even fight back against him. We viewers get to see a short scene of Herne summoning this mysterious figure, but even we are not privileged to see who he is, or even if he is a manny or a spirit, such as the spirit of Robin returned. Herne's mystic incantations, along with some judicious use of atmospheric music and slow-motion, give us the impression that it could be either.

Or it could just be Robin on his second life, mew.

Marie Antoinette, season two

This picks up from where season one left off with an immediate change of emphasis. While the lower classes were almost entirely absent in the first run, they now make their presence felt - albeit only via their interactions with the central characters, the royal family of France in the 1880s.

Queen Marie Antoinette is no longer portrayed as sympathetically as before, with her arrogance coming to the fore as her dominant character trait. And her repeated infidelity to the king is contrasted against his refusal to take a mistress even when it is something that is virtually expected of him by the society of the day.

King Louis xvi (played by Louis Cunningham, giving a stronger performance than the first season allowed him) is presented in such a way that even the most hard-hearted abolitionist will struggle to dislike him as an individual - one of the main plotlines is the terminal illness and death of their eldest son, the Dauphin, and how this affects Louis on an emotional level.

Where he loses our sympathies is in his role as king, since he is a terrible autocrat who makes mistaik after mistaik (the writing cleverly shows us that he makes his decisions with the best of intentions before showing how they backfire upon him) with the goal of retaining as much power to himself and "the crown" as possible. Each time he stubbornly resists pressure to make concessions to his political enemies, the situation then gets worse and he ends up having to concede even more than he would have if he had compromised to begin with.

The king's main opponents are his younger brother (confusingly also named Louis, but helpfully known as "Provence" due to his title), who conspires with the nobles to have the king declared incapable so that he can seize power as regent, and their cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who uses his vast fortune to print propaganda and stage plays to turn the people against the king while at the same time making himself seem like the peoples' friend. They both make progress with these plans, but while neither of them totally succeed in their objectives they do manage to erode support for the royal family in general - not something they want to happen if they are to one day be king themselves.

Meanwhile, the queen becomes involved in a scandal not of her own making but which her reputation (which is in a large part her own fault) makes the people believe is due to her. This is the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a real historic event which I am most familiar with due to the lesser-known Alexandre Dumas novel The Queen's Necklace, which plays out over the first six episodes of the season, and where the aftermath is felt in the last two instalments.

As part of a plan to steal the world's most valuable diamond necklace, a trio of con artists forge letters which pretend to be from the queen to Cardinal Rohan* who is out of favour at the court but desperate to get back into good graces with the royal family. They trick the cardinal into acting as an intermediary buying the necklace on the queen's behalf, and then handing it over to her "special guard" who is really one of their number. The con is then uncovered when the jeweller wants paid and the queen denies any knowledge of it.

We follow the prime mover of the conspiracy, Jeanne la Motte de Valois (played by Freya Mavor, a magnetic presence who at times becomes as much the central character of the series as the title character) as she executes every part of the plan, and the addition of this storyline lets this season equal or even exceed the brilliance of the first, due to the way it moves in parallel with the court intrigues and then at times influences it, even in ways Jeanne has not intended and - in many cases - does not even know about.

Dumas's novel makes the Italian occultist Count Cagliostro the mastermind behind the affair, but this series sticks closer to real history (at the same time as giving a female character more agency) by depicting him as a con artist who was active in Paris at the time, and known to both Jeanne and Cardinal Rohan, but who was innocent of any involvement in the plot.

The decision to make the series protagonists act like 21st century people who find themselves living in the past, which was present in the first season, is if anything even more obviously the case here, with multiple instances of anachronistic modern turns of phrase being used. Also, the French financial crisis caused by the massive cost of their war with Britain is described using modern terms that viewers can be expected to be familiar with from real-world events of the last 20 years. The attempts by the king and his "Financial Controller" to reduce the deficit can also be compared and contrasted to 2010s austerity policies or Liz Truss panicking the markets, which gives us a shortpaw way of comprehending why they fail so disastrously.

The season concludes as the French Revolution begins in 1889, with news of the storming of the Bastille prison reaching the court at Versailles. What comes next could be left as an exercise for the viewer, so it will be interesting to see if there is a third (and presumably final) season covering the events of the revolution up to the deaths of the king and queen. There's surely plenty of material from history to fill another eight episodes, not least the royal family's ill-fated attempt to escape from France. With the Duke of Orelans being such a major character in the first two seasons, a subplot about his futile attempts to manipulate the revolution to his benefit could be just as interesting as the fates of Louis and Marie Antoinette.

Both seasons are currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

* Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Marie Antoinette, season one

I was only put onto this when its second season began showing on the BBC. If historical accuracy is what you're after then this series is not for you, but I get the strong impression that it is not trying to be - there are enough details there as if to say 'we could have been more accurate if we had wanted to.'

Set almost entirely among the highest echelons of the French and Austrian courts of the late 18th century, the characters nevertheless speak and interact in a very modern way, with even the supposed extreme formality of the French court at Versailles seeming laughably informal to those of us who have watched, say, Wolf (...pause for 20 seconds while Mark Rylance takes off and then puts back on his hat...) Hall.

The main character throughout is Marie Antoinette (hence the title, but I suppose they couldn't exactly call it Versailles since there was a different series with that name made between 2015 and 2018), played by Emilia Schüle - a sort of female Matt Smith, I could imagine her playing the Doctor much more easily than I could imagine someone like, say, Billie Piper in the part. The series takes us from her marriage to the heir to the throne of France, the future king Louis xvi who famously lost his head, to the birth of their first son which made the marriage secure.

Louis here is an interesting character because he is so obviously being written and played as what we would now recognise as neurodivergent, what with his extreme social awkwardness. This is possibly the main reason why I cannot decide if the modernisation of the characters is something forced upon the makers of the series as a way of making it accessible (more than just the usual things we take for granted in historical dramas, such as the way they all speak 21st century English instead of 18th century French), or if this was a purposeful stylistic choice to make the main protagonists seem like 21st century people forced to live in the past.

The series tries its hardest to make us feel sympathy for Louis and Marie Antoinette by carefully never showing us how the common people of France lived at that time showing us how they were trapped in their roles as heir to the throne, close to power but  essentially powerless, their everyday actions dictated to them by court ritual and etiquette, and surounded by the rest of the French royal family, most of whom hated them.

At the beginning of the series the king of France is Louis xv, magnificently (and scene-stealingly) played by James "Mark Antony" Purefoy (more like Purrfoy) as an old letch. His mistress, Madame du Barry, is the main antagonist to Marie Antoinette for the first half of the season, who is eventually defeated by means of the old king dying. The second half of the series then shifts to being about Louis and Marie Antoinette adapting to their new roles as king and queen.

Louis now has power but his wife still has almost none, unless and until she can give birth to a male heir (the French never allowed women to be monarchs so a daughter wasn't good enough), and she remains surrounded by enemies since anyone at the court who wants to end the French alliance with Austria wants to get rid of the king's Austrian wife. Marie Antoinette doesn't do herself any favours here since her behaviour, rebelling against the constraints placed upon her and spending lavishly on her favourites, gives her enemies plenty of ammunition to use against her. And foreshadows her eventual fate.

Filming at the actual palace of Versailles makes the series look fantastic, so the authentic appearance of the locations (and interior sets and costumes, to be fair, although this is par for the course when it comes to costume dramas) contrasts with the purposefully anachronistic characters inhabiting them to create a distictive take on the story of the period.

At the time of writing this I haven't watched the second season yet (it is all up on the BBC iPlayer already, though it won't finish being broadcast until near the end of June) so I don't know how far that will take us towards the revolution. It will be interesting to see how long the series can maintain viewer sympathy in Marie Antoinette, or if it even tries to.

Robin... The Hooded Manny

Robin of Sherwood, season one

Robin Hood and the Sorcerer (Part 1)

Eight years after the legendary outlaw met his end (and two years after a certain band of space outlaws were gunned down) on BBC1, HTV launched their take on the legend of Robin Hood.

I may be watching this on a modern DVD but even taking that into account you can immediately see that this is a much higher quality product than the BBC was producing in the '70s - no more studio sets on videotape, this is 100% filmed and 100% on location.

Like its BBC predecessor, this begins with a pre-titles sequence showing the young Robin and his father, though with quite different circumstances - this Robin is no noblemanny. But very much unlike the BBC series,  as soon as the story properly starts it's in a hurry to get to the good bits - it wastes no time in introducing Guy of Gisburne, who arrests Robin and his foster-brother Much for poaching, taking them back to Nottingham Castle where they are imprisoned along with several other potential Merry Mannys, not least of whom is Will Scarlet, already a convicted killer of Normans.

They stage an escape, but get separated in the process and each gets to show a little bit of their individual characters as they escape in different ways (Much being established as the useless one already). Robin hides in a part of the castle where he has his first meeting with Lady Marion. This Marion may not have the classical beauty of Diane Keen, but she makes up for this by having immediate chemistry with Praed's Robin, something The Legend of Robin Hood never quite got right... although that might have been because it was far more interested in setting up the homoerotic subtext between Robin and King Richard, lol.

The supernatural element is present from the start, though kept reasonably low-key for now, with both the evil sorcerer (of the episode title) Baron Simon de Belleme and the good mystic Herne being met by us viewers. The most overt display of magic in this first episode is that Belleme has seemingly mind-controlled Little John into being his loyal henchmanny - he sends him to kill Robin but after the traditional fight over a river (really well done and with some decent stunts - which I reckon were done by the actors themselves, not stuntmannys) Robin frees him from the Baron's spell by rubbing the mark of the pentagram off his chest. I'm not sure how Robin knew to do this, but on the other hand it's not hard to guess that wiping away such a blatantly evil-looking mark was probably a good idea.

Sir Guy murders Much's father (and Robin's foster-father) when he refuses to tell him where they are, thus establishing their mutual hatred as being personal. The role that the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy play in this is very similar to their respective roles in The Legend of Robin Hood, with the Sheriff as the brains and Guy as the muscle. Where we get a little bit of difference is that instead of a succession of corrupt priests across the series, these are all replaced by the Sheriff's brother Hugo, an evil abbot who thinks of nothing but acquiring land - especially that belonging to Marion's family.

The Merry Mannys ambush Sir Guy and his soldiers, rescuing Marion from them and sending Guy back as the last survivor to tell the Sheriff about "Robin in the Hood" and how Sherwood belongs to him. It ends with Avon Will Scarlet saying that they should have just killed him. This means that as well as introducing almost all of the main, regular characters in this episode, it has still found time for enough plot to get to the same stage of the story that The Legend of Robin Hood got to after almost three full parts.

There's a superb cast here from the very beginning - Michael Praed stepping out of the early-80s zeitgeist looking like a New Romantic, Ray Winstone ready to fuck up Normans as Will Scarlet, John Abineri (who was of course in The Legend of Robin Hood as Marion's uncle) suitably mysterious as Herne, Robert "fish and a chip emporium" Addie is instantly loathsome and easily hateable as Sir Guy, Philip "Inspector Japp" Jackson as the abbot Hugo. Clive Mantle spends most of the episode as a mute slave to the evil Baron so we don't see much of the 'real' Little John, but he certainly looks the part and the fight scene proves he has the physicality.

The real tough act to follow from The Legend of Robin Hood was, of course, Paul Darrow's turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Much as I love him, I have to admit that this series has his Sheriff beaten, because they found an actor capable of being even more hammy than him - Nickolas "I can't believe it's not Tim Curry" Grace. We don't see him go fully over the top in this initial episode, but I know for a fact that later on in the series he will go stratospheric at times.

Last but not least is the guest-star - Baron de Belleme is played by (to give him his full name) The Superb Anthony Valentine. To be honest he doesn't do a huge amount in this part, but that's because it's just setting him up to be the main antagonist of part two...

Robin Hood and the Sorcerer (Part 2)

This episode contains the classic Robin Hood tale of the archery contest where Robin splits the arrow, though here it is skilfully intertwined into the main plot with the satanist sorcerer Baron de Belleme, since in this case there are three ace archers rather than the usual two: in addition to the disguised Robin (where did he get such a realistic fake beard in the 12th century?) and the Sheriff's manny, the Baron enters his mind-controlled assassin Nasir, who is the one whose arrow Robin has to split in order to win.

Thus we are introduced to the one of the missing regulars we didn't properly meet in part one. Nasir is a new introduction to the legend, and in this we see he is almost Robin's equal with both bow and sword (and may be his superior in the latter because he is a dual-wielding badass). After Robin wins the contest his identity is revealed and there is a big fight, which includes some of stunt arranger (and former Doctor Who) Terry Walsh's trademark falling-off-high-places-after-being-shot stunts.

After this the Baron's plot really kicks in as he wants to sacrifice Marion to the (or possibly a) devil (token protests against this by the abbot are soon overcome when Belleme says he doesn't want her lands). The Sheriff is happy to go along with this when the Baron says that Robin is bound to attempt a rescue so this is a good opportunity to trap and kill him.

The last significant regular to be introduced is Friar Tuck, who was present in part one but only really in the background. He tries to rescue Marion but after Belleme's mannys capture her anyway all he can do is warn the Merry Mannys, and after that he is basically one of the gang.

The scenes in the Baron's gothic-style castle as Robin attempts to rescue Marion in the nick of time are superbly atmospheric, and the Baron's comeuppance suitably satisfying. And all credit to The Superb Anthony Valentine for making this potentially camp role into a sinister and threatening antagonist.

This is followed by Robin's fight with Nasir, which is pretty good although we don't really see that actual moment when Nasir is freed from the Baron's service the way we did with Little John - this might be due to it being a last minute change of plan to have Nasir survive and become a main character instead of just a one-off henchmanny, but either way I think this turn could have been shown to the audience better.

There's a third climax to the episode as there's then a big fight between Guy of Gisburne's soldiers and the Merry Mannys. Some of the Merry Mannys are killed in this fight, including a couple of named characters who we might have expected to become regulars - a rare subversion of the law of conservation of narrative details.

A significant divergence between this version of the Robin Hood legend and many others comes at the end of the episode as Robin and Marion marry in a pagan ceremony, with Herne officiating. So no need to refer to her as 'Maid' Marion for this series, mew.

This is a great two-part introduction to the series and really sets out its stall from the start, letting you know there will be all the usual tropes of Robin Hood, but also quite a bit more besides those to help set this version apart from the rest. Combine that with the high production values and it is no surprise that this is a well-remembered series.

Another significant factor in making the series as memorable as it undoubtedly is is the music by Clannad, which is so distinctive that this doesn't sound anything like any other version of Robin Hood. To me it feels inseperable from the series, with the haunting sounds going with the mystical atmosphere of the forest setting like a head in a hood.

The Witch of Elsdon

This episode, while it has its good points, is a big step down in quality from the opening two-parter. It begins with the abbot conducting a witchcraft trial, which is anachronistic by over 300 years. I have to conclude that Robin of Sherwood is set in an alternative reality, in which the existence of genuine supernatural forces has influenced the legal system of England and caused such laws to be introduced much earlier than in our history.

The problem with the episode is that its fundamental storyline is based on a major cliché - Sheriff forces somebody to help him catch Robin Hood if they don't want their relative executed, but the Merry Mannys turn the tables on him and manage to free both the manny W-wording for the Sheriff as well as their relative. I'm not going to criticise it for the lack of any familiar faces in the guest cast, but neither can it earn any bonus points from these when there aren't any.

Where it has points in its favour are found in some of the details - we see a lot more of the story from the Sheriff's point of view which allows him some character development (which is good coming this early in the series since he had to take something of a back seat to Simon de Belleme in episodes one and two), and there's also a bigger role for Marion when it is her actions that save the Merry Mannys from the Sheriff's trap.

Then there's a couple of well-executed set piece scenes - the first of these wrong-foots the audience into thinking the Merry Mannys are at Guy of Gisburne's mercy when in actual fact it is they who are about to ambush Gisburne, and the second sees the first swordfight between Robin and the Sheriff. Most of these enjoyable little touches (save the Sheriff's increased screentime) come towards the end of the episode, so it is the first half of the episode that weighs it down.

Guy of Gisburne gets defeated and humiliated by having his clothes stolen again, giving him an even worse success rate than Space Commander Travis (who is clearly his direct counterpart in Blakes 7) at this stage of their respective careers.

Seven Poor Knights From Acre

This is a superb episode with some well-choreographed, tense and dynamic fight scenes. The introduction of a third faction - the seven Knights Templar of the title - who are enemies of Robin without being allies of the Sheriff, makes for a great setup. The Sheriff thinks he can manipulate one group to wipe out the other, while Robin is just happy to see off the knights and restore the status quo by the end credits.

This makes for a packed episode and the knights, while there are only seven of them, constantly feel like way more of a credible threat to the Merry Mannys than Guy of Gisburne and any number of Nottingham soldiers because of the early encounter where they show how dangerous they can be as disciplined, veteran fighting mannys. These scenes also sometimes portray the knights like they are POV monsters, with us seeing through their letterbox helmets, and this somehow makes them even more threatening.

We also get an appearance by Simon "Hindle" Rouse as the thief Siward (no relation) who sets the plot in motion and is then instrumental in its resolution. He only has one eye, and after the Sheriff captures him he threatens to put out his other one. Somebody should tell him that... you know...

This is just a generally all-round great episode and truly a highlight of the season.

Alan A Dale

Nickolas Grace had obviously been taking lessons from Paul Darrow's Sheriff of Notingham since in this episode he totally steals the show. He is such an obnoxious, bullying baddy to everyone in this, including Guy of Gisburne, that he almost manages to make you feel sory for poor, put-upon Sir Guy, save for the fact that we learn early on that Guy has recently had a whole village whipped for the crime of helping to hide Little John.

The main plot is that the Sheriff is about to get married - for the dowry money, obviously, he has no interest in women for any other reason, mew. Alan A Dale (clang!) is in love with the bride-to-be and teams up with the Merry Mannys to try and liberate both her and the dowry. Here we see the episode's main weak point as Alan, despite being the title character, is useless and whiny and incapable of accomplishing anything without help from Robin and co. We see no indication as to why the lady should love him back, save only that he is less of a baddy than the Sheriff.

The Merry Mannys' plan involves ambushing the Sheriff, Guy and the Nottingham soldiers with two hives of bees, which they shoot the top off to unleash the bees upon the bad guys. Unfortunately, the SFX used for the bees is only marginally more convincing than what was used in Delta and the Bannermannys, and is a real low point of the episode.

The Sheriff actually comes out ahead at the end of the tale, since although the bride successfully runs off with Alan, he successfully holds on to the dowry money while at the same time convincing his would-be father-in-law that Robin Hood stole it, so as far as he is concerned he got all of the advantages and none of the downsides to the marriage. This helps give the villains of the series a little bit of their credibility back, since it means that they have not lost to the Merry Mannys in every episode.

The series takes influence from The Legend of Robin Hood with homoerotic undertones in several scenes - firstly when we see the Sheriff in his bath, from which he berates Sir Guy about his incompetence and then demands Guy towel him off, then later when Robin and Sir Guy have a fight on a muddy riverbank that soon descends into slow-motion mudwrestling, and then finally at the end the Sheriff has another bath, this time with Guy actually in there with him, lol!

This is a bit of a step down in quality from the superb preceding episode, but there's still a lot to enjoy here, mainly thanks to Nickolas Grace finally being allowed to take it up a notch or two. But if you think he's over the top now, just wait until the later seasons, when we will see what he's really capable of...

The King's Fool

When King Richard turns up, played by John "Macro" Rhys-Davies, and pardons Robin and the Merry Mannys, you could be forgiven for thinking this'll be the end of the series. After all, at six 50-minute parts we've had an equivalent amount of screen time to The Legend of Robin Hood, so why not?

Of course this isn't the end of the series, only the end of the first season. King Richard turns out to be a wrong'un, which would have surprised me more if I hadn't seen Maid Marian and Her Merry Mannys long before I ever saw this episode - that series, while made afterwards (1989), also ended its first season with the 'twist' of King Richard being villainous and his return to England not being the solution to the Merry Mannys' problems.

Will Scarlet is at his most Avonish in this episode, since he is the first to sense that the king's pardon is a trap and so stays behind while the rest of them go to Nottingham. Nasir, Little John and Martin* also leave before the trap is sprung, so that only Marion, Tuck and Much are with Robin when Guy of Gisburne comes in to try and kill them.

This leads into a pretty good fight scene as our heroes have to escape from a fire as well as fight off Gisburne and his soldiers, and it ends with Gisburne and Marion shooting each other with crossbows. Sir Guy is last seen collapsing (and a bit on fire), so we might have presumed him killed if they had ended the series here.

With the Merry Mannys disbanded and Marion injured, the episode, and season, ends in a distinctly mythic way, with Robin taking Marion to the stone circle "Rhiannon's Wheel" where, unbeknownst to him, the Sheriff killed his father in the pre-titles sequence to the first episode. Herne appears and saves Marion (or possibly gives Robin the power to save her, or it could be he tells Robin that the power to save her was in him all along) and then the Merry Mannys reunite with Robin and Marion in time for the end credits.

This was actually the first time Herne appeared in the series since The Witch of Elsdon, so we had basically had the two episodes before this one with nothing supernatural in them at all, meaning the series didn't fell it had to include some magical or mystical element every time. Possibly that was for the best, but I can't help feel that John Abineri's mysterious Herne is an integral part of the show's success and distinctiveness as an adaptation of the Robin Hood mythos.

While the opening two-parter is superb, and Seven Poor Knights From Acre is the standout single episode of the season, I think the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. The quality of the casting and the high production values shines through each instalment so that, while some episodes are weaker than others, none are truly bad and all of them are enjoyable.

* You know... Martin... the famous Merry Manny Martin... No? Oh well, don't worry, this is the last time we'll see him in the series. Mew.

Eurovision 2025

The Eurovision Singing Competition Caturday is always a highlight of the cat calendar every year (except for the year the mannys forgot to do it). Even as it increasingly becomes serious business for the mannys who sing the songs, we cats watch it for the lols so will always prefurr the colourful, fun, entertaining songs over the heartfelt ballads.

Here are my highlights from this year's entries...

Luxembourg set the bar early (they performed second, which by an old rule of Eurovision meant they were not allowed to win) with their strange visuals, including some giant hands (with giant thumbs) to help the singer out as though she were a cat.

Latvia's six singers had eyes painted on their eyelids, which was... not right.

Dragon doesn't normally show much interest in Eurovision, either sleeping through it or else watching Taskmaster repeats over on a different channel. But for some reason he really enjoyed the Poland entry.

The singer from Greece wore big specs, a bit like these late '70s ones worn by Diane Keen when she was in The Sandbaggers.

My favourite entry this year was the song from Malta, which was very colourful and even featured giant CGI cats in the background. My friend Kitkat was watching Eurovision with us for the first time and she also liked the Malteser.

But don't forget Sweden! They chose to do a comedy song this year, which is quite unusual for them. They did quite well and came fourth. Estonia also did a comedy song and came third. Either of these would have been worthy winners in the eyes of the cats of Europe.

But the voting is done and the winner decided by mannys, who - as always - vote in an way incomprehensible to all right-thinking felines. The two songs they gave the most points to were not ones we rated at all highly, but at least the one that won - from Austria - was the more deserving of those two.

I have heard a persistent rumour that mannys don't always vote for the song they like the best, and sometimes they just vote for the country they like the most. Mannys can be incredibly stupid, so I find this a very plausible theory, but I'm sure it can't really be true.

Except for Cyprus always voting for Greece. That is true. Mew.

Who will get the 12 points? It's not exactly keeping us in suspense.

Further Adventures of the Musketeers

Made by the BBC in 1967 and not, as one might expect given the title and the vintage, a series of unconnected episodic adventures about the Four Musketeers taking the characters from the books but not the plots (in a similar vein to The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, among other series of the black & white era of television), but rather this is an adaptation of the middle of the three Musketeers novels - not the most famous one where they save the honour of the queen of France by recovering her necklace (as used for the main plot of Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds), nor the final one involving the manny in the iron mask, but the one where they lol about in France and England getting involved in various civil wars.

No? Me neither.

Joss Ackland stars as DogD'Artagnan, with BRIAN BLESSED backing him up (and stealing the show as often as not) as Porthos - superb casting - and the title characters are rounded off with John "Armageddon Factor" Woodvine as Aramis and Jeremy Young (a familiar face, but I'd be hard pressed to say what he's best known for) as Athos.

The most notable in the secondary cast are Edward "As you can see, the INTERNET is extremely complicated" Brayshaw as Rochefort, Nigel "Look Around You" Lambert as Planchet, Vernon Dobtcheff as a minor antagonist Monsignor de Gondy, and - during the episodes where the Musketeers are loling about the England of 1649 (this can be dated precisely due to the actual historical execution of King Charles i being a key plot point) - Geoffrey "Masters" Palmer as Oliver Cromwell, in a surprisingly nuanced (and almost sympathetic) portrayal, even though he is an antagonist to the royalist-supporting Musketeers.

I have no idea if the depiction of Cromwell was lifted from the novel since, although I have read a few of Dumas's novels (English translations, naturally, since translations into Cat are surprisingly hard to come by) including The Count of Monte Cristo and the Marie Antoinette romances, I haven't ever read any of his D'Artagnan stories. This means I can't judge the series' quality as an adaptation either - although you can pretty much tell that it must be an adaptation because the pacing and episode structure feels different to most stories written specifically for the format of a television serial. For example, despite being 16 half-hour parts, it fair flies by with constant twists and turns, but the most dramatic moments don't often line up with the climactic moments of individual episodes.

There's an unusual format point where each episode begins with a recap of the story so far that is delivered in-character by one or more of the main characters (often including D'Artagnan, but not always) addressing the audience directly, but in a conspiratorial fashion, as if letting us in on a secret. This is done in voice-over only, with still images of the characters as the only visuals, so I wonder if this was added after the main filming of the story was complete.

Loads of swashbuckling tropes are included, as you might expect, and a lot of swordplay - plenty of which occurs out on location, so this was no studio-bound production as might have been expected from the BBC in the 1960s. Some of the duels were really well done, inclusing several between our heroes and Brayshaw's villainous Rochefort (he's no Christopher Lee, but still very good in the part), but my favourite fight was between Porthos and Rochefort and didn't involve swords - Porthos used his fists and Rochefort used whatever props and bits of scenery he could get his hands on that BRIAN BLESSED hadn't already been chewing upon.

It was directed by Christopher "First Morbius Doctor" Barry so no wonder this was a polished production for its time. That said, there was still a lot of studio-based action, and at least one scene where a door needs to be broken down and the whole wall wobbles as it is struck, lol. Also a few fluffed lines, and I think I caught one bit where Ackland seemed to forget his line entirely for a moment. None of this detracted from my enjoyment - in fact I would say it added to it, since it is fun to watch these old series warts and all.

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

Recent news about the expensive luxury James Bond films having been bought by the Amazon Corporation of America has reminded us cats that back in 1979 James Bond already fought against a baddy who was a megalomaniac, space-obsessed billionaire with a secret lair in the Amazon.

This was Moonraker, the fourth of the seven expensive luxury James Bond films to star Roger Moore. It had the unenviable task of following on from the iconic Bond outing The Spy Who Loved Me, and it did this by going even more Over The Top than its predecessor - thanks to a little inspiration taken from the late-70s zeitgeist, a.k.a. the post-Star Wars era.

In the first scene some baddys steal a space shuttle off the back of a plane and then the plane blows up. It cuts to M in his office talking on a red (i.e. serious business) telephone asking

"What happened to the Moonraker?"

Clang! Well that didn't take long.

Bond is having kiffs with a lady in a different plane when she pulls a gun on him. Oh noes, she is really a baddy! This is exactly what happened with the lady Bond was having kiffs with at the start of The Spy Who Loved Me, except this one didn't even wait for him to leave before turning out to be a baddy. She has a manny with her for Bond to have a fight with. That manny ends up falling out of the plane, and then Jaws turns up and pushes Bond out too.

We cats love Jaws, he makes any Bond film he is in (all two of them) even more expensive and luxury than they would have been without him.

Bond doesn't have a parachute, and unlike cats he cannot expect to land on his feet, so he sends his stuntmanny to have another fight with the manny over the one parachute between them. Jaws arrives to have a mid-air fight with Bond, but Bond uses the parachute to escape from him. Jaws then lands on a circus tent for some reason.

This leads in to the title sequence. The theme song for Moonraker is rubbish, and would be much better if they had just reused the Goldfinger song but replaced the word "Goldfinger" with the word "Moonraker." The lyrics wouldn't make sense, since the baddy is called Drax and not "Mr Moonraker," but when has lyrics not making sense ever stopped them?

The titles are followed by the traditional Bond briefing scene. Bond gets sent to look for the missing Moonraker space shuttle (what do mannys want to rake the moon for, anyway? Silly mannys, always making W-word for themselves for no reason) and he also gets given a gadget by Q - a watch that can fire darts that will either explode or be poisonous. We can look forward to both of these types coming in useful for him, in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail.

Bond goes to visit Hugo Drax at his French chateau in California. A bit like Columbo, Bond has immediately identified the main baddy as being the richest, most obnoxious manny in the film in order to save time. Drax, the ultimate snob, is played by Michael "Grigoriev" Lonsdale, still three years from his role of a lifetime when this was made - and I'm presuming he got that part because they were practically rounding up former Bond Villains to be in Smiley's People.

Bond and Drax have a superficially friendly first meeting but, as soon as Bond leaves, Drax says to his henchmanny

"Look after Mr Bond. See that some harm comes to him."

Lol, this is a classic Bond Villain line.

Bond goes to meet Dr Goodhead, who turns out to be

"A woman!"

This bit would have been... how shall we put it... old-fashioned (to be rather more polite than it deserves) in a '60s Bond film, never mind one made in 1979. However the film quickly makes it clear that it is Bond who is being sexist, not the film itself, since Dr Goodhead soon gets her own back by patronising him for his lack of knowledge about her. She claims to be a trained astronaut

"On loan from NASA... the Space Administration."

Her explaining things to Bond as though he is thick as shit, and then Bond trying to salvage some dignity by showing off about the few things he does know about, is actually quite a clever way of getting exposition to casual viewers who may not be as knowledgeable about space as Monkeys With Badges us cats.

Dr Goodhead dares Bond to have a go in a machine that spins mannys round and round really fast. Presumably for the lols. Once it has started the henchmanny sabotages it so that it won't stop when Bond presses the stop button.

Bond makes a face to let us know he is in trouble, then uses his gadget to shoot the machine with an explosive dart - breaking the machine's main rivet, I presume, and therefore stopping it.

Bond decides to kiff some information out of Corinne Dufour, whom he met when he first arrived, on the grounds that as a named character she must have a clue for him. The henchmanny sees them, but he doesn't do anything about Bond yet.

In the next scene we see Drax and some henchmannys hunting and shooting at some birdys for no reason, just in case we hadn't realised that they were the baddys yet. Drax invites Bond to have a go, but instead of shooting a birdy he shoots a henchmanny that was about to shoot him.

Drax: "You missed, Mr Bond."

Bond: "Did I?"

After Bond has left, Drax sacks Corinne for helping Bond. He the sends his two doggys to chase her. The incidental music for this bit is very dramatic, verging on sinister, although I'm quite sure the doggys are well-behaved doggys who only want to play. The last we see of Corinne is when the doggys catch up with her to give her friendly cuddles and licks. Maybe Hugo Drax isn't so bad after all?

The scene changes to Venice, where Bond is here following up the clue he got from Corinne. He sees Dr Goodhead is also there and decides to follow her through the streets of Venice. That doesn't take long so then he decides to talk to her about why she's here. Each of them thinks the other might be a baddy, so they don't trust one another.

Bond is sitting in a gondola minding his own business when a manny hiding in a coffin starts throwing knives at him. Bond throws one back and kills the manny - the punchline to this bit being that the manny is already in his coffin when he goes

A speedboat starts to chase Bond, and it turns out that his gondola is really a speedgondola. We know by now that Roger Moore's Bond loves a chase scene almost as much as Jon Pertwee's Doctor, so this is a good bit which successfully blends the exciting peril with a number of komedy moments.

Bond escapes the speedboat by turning his speedgondola into a hovergondola and taking it across the land. This provokes a number of amusing reaction shots from the bystanders, including Double-Take Manny (returning from The Spy Who Loved Me to make his second appearance in the film series), and even one of Venice's world-famous double taking pigeons.

At night Bond stealths into Drax's base where he discovers a secret room that you can only get into by playing the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wonder if Drax has other rooms that use different late-70s sci-fi themes as their keycodes? I expect there must be at least some, because if you only had one then Blakes 7 would obviously be your first choice.

This secret room is a laboratory where some mannys are doing experiments on mouses... or possibly the mouses are doing experiments on the mannys - Double-Take Manny does look an awful lot like Douglas Adams, after all. Thanks to Bond's meddling, the mannys get poisoned when they release some gas, but the mouses are unharmed by it.

Bond is trying to get away when he gets attacked by Drax's main henchmanny, leading to a big fight. They quickly take the fight into a glass museum, where they do their best to ensure that everything that could be smashed gets smashed. In the midst of the fight, Bond finds a clue - a lot of boxes addressed to Rio de Janeiro.

After winning the fight by throwing the henchmanny through a big clockface into a piano, Bond visits Dr Goodhead. He finds she has gadgets because she is also a secret agent, although hers are concealed inside lady things like perfume and a pawbag instead of a manly thing like a wristwatch. Dr Goodhead W-words for the American CIA, and now they team up in a reversal of the UK-USSR team-up of the previous film, only with even less trust on both sides.

Bond takes M and the Minister of Defence to see the secret laboratory (presumably this is meant to be the next day, although it is unclear how much time has passed - clearly it must have been enough to allow M and the Minister to travel from London to Venice, but we don't know if they did that as soon as Bond said "come and see this secret laboratory what I have found"), but Drax has already replaced the entire room with more chateau-type stuff. The Minister orders M to take Bond off the case, and so Bond says he is going on holiday to Rio.

Drax needs a replacement for his main henchmanny, so he telephones an unseen manny to arrange it. This cuts to a scene where we see Jaws getting on a plane to Rio. It is not often that we see the process of henchmannys getting employed and sent on missions - normally they just turn up and attack Bond - so this is a nice little peek behind the curtain.

Obviously there's a carnival going on in Rio when Bond gets there and starts looking for clues. There's a superbly sinister scene as his MI7 contact Manuela is waiting for Bond in a dark alley with carnival going on around her. A manny in a giant clown mask approaches her, then takes off his mask to reveal it is Jaws.

This scene helps to re-establish Jaws as looking like a credible threat after his last few appearances have all been unsuccessful attempts to kill Bond - particularly the pre-titles sequence which was mostly played for lols. Jaws is about to nom Manuela when Bond sees them and jumps on Jaws for a fight. The carnival then carries them apart, delaying their eagerly-awaited rematch.

Bond meets Dr Goodhead again. They are in a cable car when Jaws stops it and noms his way through the cable to make sure it stays stopped.

This is an iconic scene for Jaws, and is followed by a great fight sequence as he goes out to try and kill Bond on the roof of the cable car. Bond and Dr Goodhead escape as Jaws gives chase, his henchmanny (henchhenchmanny?) controlling another cable car and sending it after Bond. As Bond and Dr Goodhead get out of the way in time, Jaws crashes into the building below.

Jaws is rescued from the wreckage by Dolly and, as the incidental music informs us, they fall instantly in love.

Some mannys arrive to capture Bond and Dr Goodhead, and take them away in a fake ambulance. Bond escapes, but falls out of the back of the ambulance before he can rescue Dr Goodhead, so she is taken away still a prisoner.

The next scene sees Bond arrive at a monastery dressed as a cowboy. Bond is dressed as a cowboy, I mean, not the monastery. Mew. Sorry, but this is a very silly bit. Bond sees Miss Moneypenny and Q. Q is testing some experimental gadgets, which is not too unusual for him (save that he doesn't normally do it in a monastery), but one of them is a pewpewpew gun - foreshadowing all the mannys having pewpewpew guns later on. Q has found out that the poison gas Bond found in Venice was made from a rare orchid found in the Amazon jungle, so now Bond's task is to go there to look for his next clue.

Bond is travelling along the river in a boat when he gets attacked - yes, that looks like a clue to me! Several other boats chase him, one of which has Jaws aboard. They shoot at Bond's boat, but naturally it has gadgets on board which Bond uses to fight them with - mines, torpedoes, and one simply labelled as "roof." Obviously Bond uses each of them in turn, and the last of them releases a hang-glider that he uses to glide away and thus escape from a waterfall. Jaws isn't so lucky and his boat goes over the edge - he makes a great "oh noes!" face as it does so.

In a scene that would make Barry Letts proud, Bond hang-glides about for a bit in front of a greenscreen, until he crashes in the jungle. He then follows a scantily-clad lady who leads him to Drax's secret base. There he sees so many scantily-clad ladies that his eyebrow can hardly cope.

Bond has been in too many SECTRE lairs to fall for the old bridge-turning-into-a-trapdoor-while-you're-walking-over-it ploy, but he is then caught out by the unassuming-rock-tips-you-into-the-water trap and gets wet. Oh noes! The baddys send a snake to try and nom Bond, but he escapes and is instead captured by Jaws.

Drax comes in and explains why he - and by extension most if not all of his fellow evil masterminds - always tries to kill Bond in overly elaborate ways:

"Mr Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you."

Bond is taken from the ancient temple part of the secret lair to the futuristic space part. He sees Drax launch multiple "Moonraker" shuttles into space, and learns that the Moonraker that was stolen at the start of the film was needed by Drax to replace one of his secret shuttles that had become borked.

Bond is put into a room where he meets Dr Goodhead again. This turns out to be directly underneath the next Moonraker that will be launched - Drax's plan being that when the shuttle takes off, they will be killed by the fire. This bit is lifted from the original Moonraker novel, which is good because it prevents The Girl Who Was Death from otherwise being an inarguably better adaptation of the book than this film is.

Bond uses his gadget to explode open a door and so they escape. After stealthing around the base for a bit, they steal some henchmanny costumes and use them to get on board the next Moonraker scheduled for lift off. Bond has disguised himself as a spacemanny before, and it didn't go so well for him then, but there's no Number One here to spot him this time.

Bond and Dr Goodhead launch into space and fly after the shuttle with Drax and Jaws aboard - an exceptionally elaborate way of chasing after the baddy, even by Bond's standards. Luckily for him, Dr Goodhead knows what all the space buttons do - Bond is like a cat, getting her to do all the W-word.

A bit like this, really:

They fly towards 

"An entire city in space."

(thanks Dr Exposition Goodhead) and dock with it.

Now that they're in space, all the actors get to do lots of pretend slow-motion weightless acting, which is the closest thing this film has in it to padding. 

Drax makes a pretentious speech to his assembled henchmannys which lays plain his megalomania:

"First there was a dream. Now there is reality. Here, in the untainted cradle of the heavens, will be created a new super-race. A race of perfect physical specimens."

Does he not know that cats already exist? Oh, wait, he's talking about mannys, isn't he? As if they could ever be as perfect as cats, mew. He goes on:

"You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in other capacities in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."

He thinks he can be Ceiling Cat!

Bond and Dr Goodhead disable the city's radar jammer so that the mannys still on Earth can spot it. We get a fleeting appearance by General Gogol as the Soviets and Americans communicate with each other to find out that neither of them is responsible for making the city in space, so therefore it must have been a Bond Villain! The Americans launch a shuttle of their own to investigate and, if necessary, have a big space battle for the climax.

Meanwhile Drax starts launching his poison gas bombs at the Earth.

Jaws captures Bond and Dr Goodhead and takes them to see Drax, who says

"James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season."

Great though this line is (and delivered in such a deadpan way by Lonsdale), I have to wonder which season he's talking about? It can't be any of Blakes 7's four seasons, that's for sure. Drax is such a snob he's probably taking about Doctor Who's 24th season, even though it is actually much better than its reputation.

Another great bit is how Bond escapes from his predicament - pointing out how Drax will kill anyone "not measuring up" to Drax's "standards of physical perfection" within earshot of Jaws and Dolly. Jaws realises this means Dolly, because she is too tiny. He refuses to kill Bond when Drax orders him to, and Drax has a classic moment of realising his previously loyal henchmanny has turned against him:

"Jaws! You obey me!"

Bond pushes a button that turns off the gravity, and all the mannys start floating around. 

Drax's spacemannys and the American spacemannys start having a pewpewpew fight in space. Anyone who tells you that "in space, no one can hear you scream" obviously hasn't watched this bit, since here the mannys clearly scream whenever they get pewed.

The Americans get on board the city and team up with Bond, Dr Goodhead and Jaws. Bond chases after Drax when he tries to run away from the fighting, but then Drax gets his paws on a pewpewpew gun and aims it at Bond.

"At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery."

he quips. But then Bond shoots Drax with a poison dart from his gadget watch. Bond puts Drax in an airlock and outquips him with

"Take a giant step for mankind."

Dr Goodhead asks Bond

"Where's Drax?"

"Oh he had to fly."

With Drax ded it can be safely assumed that his henchmannys will be defeated offscreen by the Americans. However Drax had already launched three poison gas bombs at the Earth that will "kill millions" (thanks again Dr Exposition). Also because Drax is ded his space city starts to suffer from a lack of ontological inertia, so Bond and Dr Goodhead have to dodge explosions and the set falling down around them.

They escape in one of the Moonrakers, while Jaws and Dolly search for each other in the wreckage. As the last two mannys on board, they sit and drink a toast. We hear Jaws's only line of dialogue in either of the films he's in:

"Well, here's to us."

Bond tells Dr Goodhead (and the viewers at home)

"Don't worry, they'll make it. It's only 100 miles to Earth."

While I can understand them not wanting audiences to think Jaws is ded because he is such a great character that they might want to bring him back in later Bond films (although they didn't, mew), surely he is the one character who can be safely assumed to somehow survive offscreen, like he has done multiple times already? This line of Bond's smells to me of a late addition to the film, perhaps after test audiences were too sad at Jaws's final scene.

Dr Goodhead flies the shuttle and Bond pews the three bombs. For the last one the targeting computer can't hit the bomb, so Bond has to use the Force pew it manually. While one could see this as re-establishing the superiority of mannys over machines, really it is just ripping off the ending to Star Wars.

On Earth, the NASA mannys hack into the shuttle's on-board cameras to see Bond and Dr Goodhead having kiffs and getting up to naughtiness with no clothes or gravity on. M, Q and the Minister are also there, and M just says

"Double-Oh Seven!"

in a disappointed tone of voice that makes Bond's code number sound like a rude word. And then we end on an absolutely stone-cold classic James Bond double entendre moment as the Minister asks

"My god, what's Bond doing?"

Even though this was presumably a rhetorical question, Q replies

"I think he's attempting re-entry, sir."

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Very Expensive and Luxury

Moonraker!