Bringing back the very brief series featured originally in the 1990’s, noted actor Sean Bean (LOTR) brings the character of Lt. Colonel Richard Sharpe to life with a very cutting edge performance. . Airing tonight is Sharpe’s Peril @ 9 PM on PBS (see local listings). (I managed to miss posting this last week). However thankfully for a short time, you can find both titles airing at pbs.org/masterpiece.
Fresh from the Napoleonic Wars, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Sharpe takes a perilous new
mission in British India, in the latest installments of the series based on the Bernard Cornwell. novels. MASTERPIECE Classic presented Sharpe’s Challenge, on Sunday, March 28 at 9pm, with Sharpe’s Peril hitting Sunday, April 4 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings).
Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings) returns as the gallant but wayward Richard Sharpe, when he was fighting Napoleon’s armies in Spain. Bean is rejoined by Daragh O’Malley as Sharpe’s best friend, Sergeant Major Patrick Harper. Also in the cast is ( a younger) Padma Lakshmi (Emmy-nominated host of Top Chef) as the beautiful but treacherous Madhuvanthi, who toys with Sharpe in a secluded fortress where a nefarious plot is in progress and she tries to captivate him.
The London Sunday Times hailed Sharpe’s return to action, calling his opening adventure in
India “superbly made and well cas,.” stated Bernard Cornwell, who has written 24 Sharpe books to date, in addition to his other historical series.
“Sharpe rides again. Sharpe was the hero of my first novel back in 1980, and he’s still going strong,” says author. “I’m delighted that he has made it through the Napoleonic Wars and is still behaving badly–except now in India!”
A born fighter, Sharpe is also a free spirit who is in his element with the 95th Rifles, an elite
unit of advanced-guard skirmishers in the British army. Sharpe retired from the military after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. But in the new episodes, he is sent on a special mission to the Subcontinent by his patron, the Duke of Wellington (Hugh Fraser, Poirot).
Sharpe’s Challenge: the year is 1817 and Sharpe is appointed to rescue a missing British agent who is investigating a rebellious maharaja. Unbeknownst to the English, the uprising is
being fomented by Madhuvanthi, the late maharaja’s consort, together with her lover, a renegade English officer named William Dodd (Toby Stephens, Jane Eyre). Reluctant to take the assignment, Sharpe relents when he learns that the agent is none other than his old comrade-in-arms Sergeant Harper. In the course of finding Harper and going undercover with him to get to the bottom of the insurgency, Sharpe comes face to face with Dodd, who fourteen years earlier led a massacre of a British garrison in India that left only one survivor: Sharpe himself. Dodd doesn’t realize his grave mistake in not finishing the job. Additional complications are that Dodd holds the daughter of an English general captive (Lucy Brown,
Primeval), he employs French soldiers who are suspicious of the two British spies, and he and Madhuvanthi have a plan that will make the massacre of yesteryear look like child’s play.
In Sharpe’s Peril, (Sunday, April 4 at 9pm) Sharpe and Harper trek across the plains and mountains of central India, escorting the willful Marie-Angelique Bonnet (Beatrice Rosen, 2012) to meet her fiancé, Major Joubert (Pascal Langdale), and then to the coast where Sharpe and Harper are due to take a ship for England.The intrepid duo think that the bride-to-be is their only problem. But they are sorely mistaken, as they soon find out when bandits attack their tiny party. The rag-tag unit is now led by the boy soldier Beauclare (Luke Ward Wilkinson). Among Beauclare’s group is a man under arrest, Barabbas Hakeswell (Amit Behl), who turns out to be the son of Sharpe’s sworn enemy. Meanwhile, the deadly raids–in reality the work of a devious opium lord called Colonel Dragomirov (Velibor Topic, Prime Suspect 6)–grow worse and develop into a Little-Bighorn-style scenario that has all the marks of Sharpe’s last stand. With his options narrowing drastically, how can our hero get out of this scrape?
Having had the opportunity to see both episdoes, this is “must see” TV and at it’s best. Sean Bean returns with a bit of weathering around the edges but it serves him well in this role and he has lost none of his charm or good looks
Stevie Wilson, LA-Story.com
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