Eurovision 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpe, season five (1997)

Sharpe's Revenge

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

Unfortunately...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpe's Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpe's Waterloo

My my.

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

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

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

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

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

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

British Politics for the Last Ten Years

Sharpe, season four (1996)

Sharpe's Regiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpe's Siege

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

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

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

To cure Jane use quinine on Jane.

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpe's Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's what you pay me for."

to General Wellington at one point.

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

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

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

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

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