Last Night's TV - Nancy Banks-Smith (May 8 1997)
It is a mystery to me how anyone can fail to admire a man whose legs start at his ear lobes, yet Sharpe seems to attract enemies effortlessly. It may, of course, be something to do with the legs.
Confronted with Ducos, an all round bad oeuf, Sharpe kicks him in the groin, stamps on his spectacles and propels him from the scene with a boot up the backside. You won't beleive how badly Ducos takes this. He immediately devises a cunning plot to discredit our hero.
Sharpe's superior officer, Col Wigram, beleives this palpable tarradiddle because Sharpe has kicked him in the groin too, and shot him in the backside. "Stop your whining, Wigram. You won't die from a bullet up the bum," as a fellow officer said bluffly. Some people will moan about any little thing.
Only the fact that soccer hasn't been invented prevents you from advising Sharpe to leave the army immediately and take up a more promising career as a striker with Leeds.
Women do not join this tsk-tsk tendency. Sharpe never raises hand or boot to a woman, but his success is spectacular. In four years soldiering he has been married twice - to a fiery Spanish guerill and an English girl with the intellect of a whippet - and is now in love with a French widow who cooks a mean coq au vin. "Beg your pardon ma'am<" he says, kicking in her bedrrom door. "The door was locked."
He reminds me mightily of the first Duke of Marlborough, who, according to his duchess, "Returned from the wars and pleasured me twice in his top boots."
If we must be perfectly candid, Sharpe's women are all tissue paper. In this tale his wife decamps with all his money in a character swerve violent enough to cause a whiplash injury. If you really want to know what women were like in the Napoleonic wars, read Jane Austen.
Wrenching my attention away from Sean Bean's legs with a noise like Velcro, I must tell you that Sharpe's Revenge (ITV) is the beginning of the end. After two more two-hour films, the Sharpe saga will come to a natural conclusion at Waterloo, when he, so to speak, runs out of war.
I have nothing but the heartiest huzzaa for this really rather brave series. Sharpe is the diametric oppositeof everything TTV is supposed to do most effectively: the small, the claustrophobic, the domestic, the intimate, the interior.
TV can look inside the human body at the hidden heart, but Shapre is all exterior. It gives the impression of size. The war sweeps across Europe like a broom, brushing heaps of green- and scarlet-jacketed soldiers before it like autumn leaves. There is slaughter, slaughter everywhere, but hardly a dop of blood.
And it has a hero. Not an anti-hero, ironic and slightly foxed, but a genuine straight-up, knock-down, homemade, rough-hewn diamond. A man who can part his hair in the middle without looking a prat.
You need oomph to lead people, to be a leading man. Napoleon had it to spare. Wellington said, as wistfully as that perfectly wist-free man could, that Napoleon's appearance on the field waas worth 40,000 men. When Sharpe says, "Pick up yer colours! Do up yer buttons! Foller me!", they foller.
Bernard Cornewell, who writes the Sharpe books, was enthralled as a child by Forester's Hornblower stories. Hornblower was one of Nelson's captains in the Napoleonic wars, and the influence on Sharpe is obvious. Celtic and Picture Palace, the independent producers who made Sharpe, are now making a series of Hornblower for ITV. All they need is their hero.
The BBC must be blowing the dust off forgotten books by sterling chaps, who knew how to tell a good yarn. I used to be spellbound by Rider Haggard's She Who Must be Obeyed (and so, obviously, was John Mortimer) and his heroic Zulu, Umslopagaas, who charged with the blood tingling battle cry: "If we go forward, we die! If we go backward, we die! Let us go forward and die!"
Even as a child I wondered why he didn't go sideways. But heroes don't think like that.