The Flashing Blade (Le chevalier Tempête, 1967)

Le chevalier Tempête was a 1967 French historical adventure TV serial. It was dubbed into English by the BBC and screened, with some success, as The Flashing Blade.

It is set in 1630, during the Thirty Years War. The French garrison of Casal has been besieged by a large Spanish army. The garrison is hopelessly outnumbered, food and ammunition are running very short, the surviving soldiers are exhausted and on the verge of demoralisation. Only the steely determination, and the harsh discipline, of the French commanding officer, Thoiras, has allowed the French to hold out this long but the end is certainly approaching.

There is a buzz of excitement when a French officer penetrates the Spanish lines (leaving mayhem behind him) and makes it into the fortress of Casal. Perhaps he is a messenger bringing news that a relieving force is on its way. Alas it turns out that it is merely the young, hot-headed and totally undisciplined Chevalier Recci (Robert Etcheverry) who has decided it would be a fine adventure to join in the heroic defence of Casal. He was is a little taken aback when Thoiras does not seem to be terribly delighted by his grand gesture.

Within hours of his arrival the impetuous young chevalier has taken it into his head to start waging his own one-man war against the Spanish. He leads a daring sortie and returns to Casal with a wagon loaded with food and ammunition. Unfortunately he neglected to ask Thoiras for permission to conduct his raid and instead of being congratulated he faces a court-martial and is condemned to death. There is however one way in which he can escape execution - by undertaking an almost impossible and breathtakingly dangerous secret mission. He must escape from the fortress, slip through the Spanish lines, traverse two hundred miles of Spanish-occupied territory, make contact with a series of French agents and finally reach the commander of the main French army and persuade him to send a force to the relief of Casal. In the unlikely event that Recci succeeds in this bold venture Casal might be saved. 

This serial is therefore not just an historical adventure but a kind of spy thriller as well, with Recci having to hide his identity while carrying out his secret mission deep behind enemy lines, accompanied by his faithful valet.

That mission turns out to be even more difficult than he’d anticipated. There’s a Spanish officer who has discovered Recci’s secret and he’s on his trail, and he has the remorselessness of a hunting dog.

There is of course time for some romance. At one point Recci manages to get himself captured by bandits. The bandits have also captured the Duke of Sospel and the duke’s proud, imperious but extremely courageous daughter Isabelle (Geneviève Casile). The dashing young chevalier and the young noblewoman do not hit it off at first but they slowly come to develop a certain mutual respect, and a certain mutual affection that we have reason to suspect will blossom into romance.

Of course it’s always difficult to judge the acting in a dubbed movie or TV series but the performances are certainly energetic. Robert Etcheverry certainly looks the part as the hero. 

One of the more pleasing surprises to this series is that the BBC really did a fine job with the English dubbing. The voice actors (who sadly don’t get any onscreen credits) are well cast and they approach their task with real zest. 

The Chevalier Recci is a fine storybook hero, headstrong to the point of foolhardiness but outrageously brave and with an old-fashioned sense of honour. He is impetuous without coming across merely as a young idiot. Isabelle de Sospel is, for a 1967 TV series, a delightfully old-fashioned heroine. She is accustomed to being obeyed without question and to being treated with a very high degree of obsequiousness. Her courage and her usefulness in a crisis come from her arrogance. She simply refuses to admit the possibility that anyone would dare to place an obstacle in her way. She’s a far cry from the average action adventure series heroine of that era, but she demands our respect. 

The most entertaining character is Mazarin, at this time an Italian diplomat in the service of the Pope although he would of course go on to gain a cardinal’s hat and be chief minister of France for many years. In this series Mazarin’s ambition, cunning and complete lack of scruples provide a good many moments of light comedy we also sense that despite his foppish and slightly foolish exterior he is a man whom it would be very foolish to underrate.

There's a fine villain in the person of the scheming and perfidious Don Alonzo (Mario Pilar) and he has an even more ruthless henchman, the evil Don Ricardo (Franck Estange). The Spanish are of course very much the villains. Don Alonzo might be unscrupulous but it has to be admitted that he is also a very brave man.

While this was intended as a kids’ adventure series it has a slightly more adult feel when compared to British TV adventure series like The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. It’s very much in the style of the classic French adventure novels of Dumas such as The Three Musketeers.

One odd aspect of the British version is that every time they tried to transmit the final episode they encountered such severe technical problems that the broadcasts had to be abandoned. As a result the final episode on the DVD release is the original French version with English sub-titles. This is interesting because it does give us a better chance to judge the quality of the acting. The final episode is a kind of epilogue - the main story actually concludes at the end of episode eleven.

By the standards of children’s television this is a fairly lavish production with some fine location shooting and some excellent action sequences. The siege scenes are impressive and there’s a pretty impressive full-scale battle scene.

Mention must be made of the rollicking theme song for the English-dubbed version.

Network’s DVD release offers reasonably good transfers without any extras.

If you’re a fan of adventure tales in the spirit of The Three Musketeers then this series will be right up your alley. It really is great action-filled fun with a strong romantic sub-plot and a nice leavening of humour. Highly recommended.

The Search for the Nile (1971)

It’s a rather different sort of program compared to most of those that I discuss here but The Search for the Nile is in its own way an astonishing television achievement. This is not a spy series or a science fiction series but a documentary-style historical drama about exploration. A mini-series centred on African exploration might sound dull but The Search for the Nile is anything but.

This was a very ambitious (and clearly very expensive) project for the BBC featuring a good deal of location shooting. The results are certainly impressive.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the hot topic in geographical circles was the source of the River Nile. In fact it had been a hot topic in geographical circles for around two thousand years and no-one was any closer to finding the answer.

This is more than just a story of exploration. It is a race. The rivalry between Captain Sir Richard Burton and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke for the honour of making the great discovery is an epic in itself. Burton and Speke undertook joint expeditions as well as solo expeditions and the relationship between the two men was uneasy and complex. It is difficult to imagine two men less suited to work together in harness and Burton’s decision to choose Speke to accompany him on his first major attempt to find the source of the Nile in 1856 is at first sight surprising. The one thing they had in common was the obsession to unravel this greatest of all geographical mysteries.

There was also another potential runner in this race. Scottish missionary David Livingstone  was rumoured to have an interest in finding the source of the Nile as well and the depth of Livingstone’s knowledge of Africa made him a formidable rival. There would be others joining the race later, most notably Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Burton was one of the most extraordinary men of the nineteenth century (a century that produced more than its share of remarkable men). He initially gained fame as the first European non-Muslim to visit Mecca, an incredibly foolish and dangerous undertaking  as the city was absolutely off limits to non-Muslims. Burton mastered countless languages and gained as much fame as a translator of eastern classics as he did from his journeys of exploration. His interest in eastern erotica scandalised Victorian England. He immersed himself in non-European cultures to an extent that raised eyebrows. He was wildly eccentric and unconventional and nothing pleased him more than to shock English society.

Speke was more of an enigma, a man driven by burning ambition that led him to make great discoveries and tragic errors of judgment. Speke was rather straitlaced and while Burton was fascinated by other cultures Speke hated everything about Africa and its people. Their joint expedition would prove that they were disastrously ill-suited to the task of working together. 

The TV series deals not just with this one epic journey of exploration but with a whole series of expeditions led by an assortment of extraordinary larger-than-life and often eccentric characters - Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Samuel and Florence Baker and Henry Morton Stanley. The search for the source of the Nile proved to be elusive and frustrating. Each of the various expeditions filled in some of the missing pieces but it seemed that the final solution to the puzzle was always just out of reach.

The journeys of exploration make fascinating viewing and the personal dramas of these remarkable human beings provide even greater interest. 

The excellent cast is a major asset. Kenneth Haigh is splendidly extravagant and outrageous as Burton. Michael Gough is equally good as the obsessive, saintly but amiable Dr Livingstone. John Quentin landed the most challenging and potentially most thankless role as Speke. Speke’s motivations remain mysterious and although he gave the impression of being something of a straight arrow his conduct on several crucial occasions is difficult to explain except as the actions of a man whose excessive ambition drove him to behave selfishly and dishonourably. It isn’t easy to make Speke sympathetic but Quentin does manage to make him a tragic figure.

James Mason adds a touch of further class as the narrator.

The location shooting is stunning and by the standards of 1971 British television it’s really quite spectacular. 

This being 1971 the material is handled in a pretty even-handed manner with surprisingly little preachiness. The viewer is assumed to be capable of making his own judgments. It’s actually a little surprising that the BBC has finally allowed this series to be released on DVD - this is an historical series for grown-ups who do not require everything to be filtered through a lens of political correctness.

The Victorian era produced an immense number of colourful larger-than-life heroic figures like Richard Burton and (albeit in a very different way) David Livingstone. These were men whose achievements and virtues were on the grand scale, and at times their vices were on an equally grand scale. They were complex men and this series takes them seriously and generally speaking it takes them on their own terms without trying to judge them by late 20th century standards. The courageous and indomitable Florence Baker, who accompanied her husband Samuel on his expedition down the Nile, showed that Victorian women could be just as remarkable and just as heroic.

The Search for the Nile is intelligent literate television and it’s also immensely entertaining. Very highly recommended and it looks great on DVD.

Sir Francis Drake (1961)

Before turning their attentions to contemporary action adventure series Lew Grade’s ITC had enjoyed great success with a succession of historical adventure series beginning with Robin Hood. The last of these ITC historical series was Sir Francis Drake. It was made in 1961 by which time the success of Danger Man had already pointed towards the future for ITC.

Sir Francis Drake ran for a single season of 26 episodes but while it failed to achieve the level of success that had been hoped for it’s actually highly entertaining.

As always Lew Grade was prepared to spend the money to make the series look good. ITC even built a full-size sailing replica of Drake’s famous ship The Golden Hind (not as expensive an undertaking as you might think since The Golden Hind was a fairly small ship). The costumes look terrific and the sets are mostly very good. With some reasonably decent scripts and a generous helping of action scenes the results are most satisfactory. Like ITC’s other historical series it’s aimed at a young audience but compared to The Adventures of Sir Lancelot the tone is less whimsical and it’s less obviously a mere kids’ show.

The Prisoner kicks off this series in impressive style. It has a sea battle, and a beautiful Spanish lady taken prisoner by Drake, a lady who is determined to avenge Spain’s disgrace by sinking The Golden Hind. There’s adventure, intrigue and action and all pretty well executed as well.

The series tries to provide a balance between adventures afloat and ashore and to provide plenty of variety in story lines. In The Lost Colony of Virginia the fledgling colony’s survival is in serious doubt. Drake is determined that it will survive and gets some unexpected help from a feisty girl who happens to be an expert gunner. 

In Queen of Scots the imprisoned Scottish queen may have engaged in one too many conspiracies but Drake suspects she may be less guilty than she seems. 

The writers were obviously determined to feature every famous and colourful character of the Elizabethan Era. Scientist, magician and astrologer Dr John Dee qualifies as both famous and colourful. In Dr Dee he runs foul of Sir Francis Drake but Drake cannot afford to make such a powerful enemy (the Queen trusts Dr Dee implicitly) and perhaps Dr Dee is more innocent dupe than villain.

Bold Enterprise has Drake risking his neck by defying an explicit order from the Queen. The temptation to raid a Spanish outpost is just too much for him. Lots of action in this one - a very fine piece of swashbuckling adventure. 

The English Dragon has Drake trying to rescue the Queen’s cousin Lord Oakeshott (David McCallum), a difficult task since Oakeshott considers he has very good reasons for not wanting to be rescued and soon Drake himself may be in need of rescue as he blunders into a trap set by the crafty Spanish Ambassador Mendoza.

The Garrison sees Drake delivering supplies to a beleaguered English garrison in the Netherlands, but it turns out to be a phantom garrison. What has happened to the 500 English soldiers? An excellent episode with a few dark overtones and a nicely ironic ending. And a rare episode in which the chief villain is not a Spaniard.

The Flame-Thrower involves an English secret weapon with the perfidious Spaniards trying to steal the secret, the problem for both sides being that the inventor does not want his brainchild used as a weapon. 

The Governor's Revenge offers us another example of Spanish wickedness and treachery. The governor of one of the King of Spain’s colonies in the New World has hatched a plot to take his revenge, the governor’s brother having been slain in a sea fight with Drake. He finds that it is not so easy to outwit Sir Francis Drake.

The series is set at a time when England was not formally at war with Spain although the possibility that war might erupt at any time is ever-present. Drake’s plunderings of Spanish treasure ships were in theory private adventures and were in fact not too far removed from piracy but both Drake and the Queen (who supported his ventures) always had to be careful not to go too far. With the two countries being officially at peace many of the episodes are tales of diplomacy rather than war. This actually gives the writers more scope than straight-out war stories would have done. It’s also worth mentioning that Sir Francis Drake’s approach to diplomacy tends to be very proactive. For Drake diplomacy shades easily into espionage and can be a very exciting and very dangerous (and sometimes quite bloody) business. In this respect the concept of the series was thought out very well - it can be considered to be more a spy series than a war action series. 

Visit to Spain is typical of these episodes. Sending Drake as her official representative to a Spanish royal wedding is the kind of thing that is almost bound to result in adventure and quite possibly bloodshed, although the Queen may not have expected the adventure to go so far as the kidnapping of a princess. 

In Boy Jack the Queen sends a very young courtier on a delicate diplomatic mission. The mission might have gone very wrong had it not been for Captain Drake’s presence.

The Spanish are portrayed without exception as cruel, violent, treacherous and also remarkably inept. The anti-Spanish tone is rather startling. The Spanish attempt to invade England was after all four hundred years in the past. I can only assume that the producers meant us to see the Spanish as stand-ins for a much more recent enemy - the Nazis. Or that the somewhat authoritarian Philip II of Spain was meant to remind us of modern dictators like Hitler and Stalin, which seems a little unfair to Philip II! 

A major asset to this series is the very strong supporting cast. Jean Kent is a glamorous but shrewd and slightly coquettish Queen Elizabeth. Roger Delgado plays the wily, scheming and totally perfidious Spanish Ambassador Mendoza as an out-and-out melodrama villain and his performances are a delight. Actually Delgado is used as an all-purpose Spanish villain, playing a Spanish governor in The Governor’s Revenge.

Terence Morgan makes a very solid hero. He perhaps doesn’t quite convey the large-than-life quality of a man who became a legend but he does capture the right blend of daring and sometimes insane risk-taking and he plays the rôle with a bit of a twinkle in his eye which is I think the right way to approach it. 

Don’t expect too much in the way of historical accuracy from this series. This is escapist adventure fun not a history lesson.

Sir Francis Drake is one of the very best television swashbuckling adventure series. Enormously enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Warrior Queen (1978)

Warrior Queen is a six-part 1978 British television series dealing with Queen Boudicca’s revolt against the Romans in AD 61. It’s an ambitious idea and it’s not without interest but it is sadly somewhat let down by a minuscule budget.

Warrior Queen was made by Thames TV and was undoubtedly inspired by the huge success the BBC had had with the superb I, Claudius series a year earlier. Welsh actress Siân Phillips had played the wicked but fascinating Empress Livia in that series and had created something of a sensation. Starring her in another historical drama, especially in such an iconic rôle, must have seemed like a splendid idea at the time.

The series begins with the death of the king of the Iceni, a British tribe that had been allied to Rome. Roman imperial policy in dealing with client kingdoms was to annex the kingdom on the death of the client king. The king of the Iceni has tried to forestall this by making a will leaving half his kingdom to Rome and half to his two grand-daughters. The king has however not counted on the rapacity and foolishness of the Roman procurator Catus Decianus (Nigel Hawthorne). The procurator has the king’s widow Boudicca (sometimes known as Boadicea) flogged while Boudicca’s two daughters are raped.

Boudicca is not prepared to let this outrage pass. Encouraged by the druid priest Volthan (Michael Gothard) she decides on open revolt. To have any chance of success she will need allies from other British tribes. She establishes herself as leader of the revolt by defeating Morticcus, king of the Catuvellauni, in single combat.

The revolt goes well at first but challenging the Roman Empire was not something to be undertaken lightly. The Roman Ninth Legion is destroyed in battle and Boudicca’s Britons sack the cities of Verulamium, Camulodunum and Londinium. The Britons will however still have to face the army of Suetonius Paulinus, a tough professional soldier.

The casting of Siân Phillips as Boudicca is generally successful. She has the kind of charisma to make a believable leader although she’s less confident in action scenes. Her single combat with Morticcus is ludicrously unconvincing and quite embarrassingly badly staged.

Nigel Hawthorne as Catus Decianus gives exactly the kind of overripe performance you’d expect from the actor who went on the win fame as Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. Hawthorne plays the procurator as a full-blown melodrama villain. He doesn’t actually twirl his moustaches when contemplating evilness (Romans being clean-shaven) but you know that if he did have moustaches he’d be twirling them. Surprisingly the performance works.

The standout performance however is by Michael Gothard as the druid priest Volthan. Volthan is actually the most interesting character in the series. Catus Decianus is pure wickedness and Boudicca is brave and noble but Volthan is more ambiguous. To a certain extent he manipulates Boudicca for his own ends but at the same time there’s no question of his ultimate loyalty or of the ferocity and sincerity of his hatred of the Romans. At times he’s a wise adviser, at other times he can be seen as an evil genius propelling Boudicca towards a tragic fate.

The series does take a rather sceptical (or at least ambivalent) stance towards the druids. If the Romans are stereotypical bad guys and the Britons are depicted as stereotypical good guys then the druids are something else again. The series makes it plain that the druid religion was pretty savage and Volthan is most certainly a fanatic. He is not however an outright villain. He is totally sincere in his belief that cataclysmic disaster will inevitably follow if the Britons turn away from their old gods. 

Michael Gothard goes totally over-the-top, all crazed eyes and doing some delightfully creepy wolf growls. The scenes where Volthan writhes on the ground in a wolf-skin are probably the most striking scenes in the whole series. And the most effective - those scenes really do convince us that we are dealing with a civilisation that is very alien in its values. It’s also makes it easy to understand why the Romans regard the Celtic inhabitants of Britain as complete barbarians.

The sets and costumes are reasonably good and the makeup (when the Britons paint their face prior to battle) is effective. The problems with this series arise when it comes to the battle scenes. This is after all a story of war. The battle scenes are crucial. And it’s not easy to do memorable battle scenes when you only have a couple of dozen extras. The method chosen to get around the difficulty is to use lots of freeze-frames and close-ups but it’s hardly satisfactory. Most fatally we just don’t get any genuine sense of the might of Imperial Rome, or of the awe the Roman soldiers must have felt when facing Boudicca’s army which at its peak certainly numbered many tens of thousands.

In 1978 British television’s obsession with gritty realism was starting to reach its high-water mark and at least some of that obsession is on display here. Warrior Queen does pull its punches at times, perhaps not altogether surprising since the half-hour format suggests the series was originally aimed at younger viewers. On the other hand there are some quite grim moments, and some very grim concepts, so I can't say I’m entirely sure it was ideal viewing for the kiddies.

The overall atmosphere is fairly convincingly grungy, very much in the style that became increasingly popular for historical dramas.

Warrior Queen has its problems. As spectacle it falls pretty flat. It does feature some fine acting though, Volthan is a wonderfully larger-than-life figure, and the series moves along at a pleasingly brisk pace. The basic story is reasonably accurate historically. And it’s generally quite entertaining. I’m quite happy to give this one a recommendation and if you’re a fan of British historical dramas you’ll definitely want to see it. Worth a purchase. Network’s single-disc DVD release looks perfectly fine.

The Caesars (1968)

The Caesars is a six-episode British historical drama series set in ancient Rome, made by Granada in 1968. It covers more or less the same time period and the same events as the BBC’s much better-known 1976 I, Claudius series, but deals with these events in a somewhat different way.

The Caesars was written and produced by Philip Mackie, a television writer who had a very distinguished career from the late 1950s up to his death in 1985.

The Caesars has been overshadowed by I, Claudius because it had the misfortune to be the last large-scale historical drama series filmed in black-and-white. As a result it has fallen into obscurity although it is in fact an exceptionally interesting and subtle series.

The most notable difference as compared to I, Claudius is that The Caesars takes a very much less sensationalistic approach. I, Claudius was based on two novels by Robert Graves and while Graves was a very great writer of historical fiction it does need to be remembered that it really was historical fiction that he wrote, with as much emphasis on the fiction as the history. Graves certainly knew his history but he had his own hobby-horses his own agendas to pursue and his approach to history, although brilliant, was more than a little eccentric. 

Graves was also a writer who delighted in historical scandal. Of course he was in good company, given that many (if not most) of the great Roman historians who are our main sources for the period also loved a good juicy scandal. Suetonius, who wrote in the early second century AD, was particularly addicted to scandalous gossip. Basing a work of historical fiction largely on his work makes for splendid entertainment but it’s a bit like basing a history of modern Britain on the tabloid newspapers.

Philip Mackie took a more conservative approach. That does not mean that The Caesars is dull. Far from it. It just isn’t possible to make a dull television series about ancient Rome.  

Like I, Claudius this earlier series also benefits from superb performances from some very fine actors, most notably André Morell as Tiberius, Ralph Bates as Caligula and the criminally underrated Freddie Jones as Claudius. Viewers approaching this series for the first time will inevitably be comparing Freddie Jones’ interpretation of the role to Sir Derek Jacobi’s iconic performance in I, Claudius. The comparison is by no means unfavourable to Jones.

Having been made in 1968 this series is, unsurprisingly, rather studio-bound and has the characteristic shot-on-videotape look of 1960s British television.  In some ways this is a plus rather than a minus. It means the focus has to be on the writing and on the characters and their very complicated relationships, and in these areas the series scores very highly indeed. Don’t go into this series anticipating spectacle. There are no epic battle scenes. This is intelligent and subtle psychological and political drama and the claustrophobic feel of studio-bound shot-on-videotape 1960s television enhances the tension. This is a drama about people trapped by their destinies, people who have in many cases been dealt a very bad hand by fate and whose very survival depends on their ability to play that hand for all it’s worth.

The drama of Mackie’s writing comes not just from the characters, but from the way various key characters understand, or fail to understand, one another’s motives. Mackie is confident that his audience will pick up the subtleties in these understandings and misunderstandings. One of the key moments in the first episode comes from a simple question Augustus asks of his grandson Agrippa Postumus. Agrippa’s answer to what he takes as a harmless question will have momentous consequences for Agrippa and for Rome. Tiberius’s assessment of the character and the likely behaviour of his nephew Germanicus (his most credible rival as Augustus’s successor), and Germanicus’s reading of Tiberius’s character and likely actions, are absolutely crucial and again Mackie trusts the viewer to follow both men’s reasoning and to comprehend their subsequent actions.

Philip Mackie is particularly interested in the psychology of power. The first two episodes are entirely devoted to the events immediately preceding and immediately following the death of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. They are dominated by the personality of Tiberius. Tiberius was a strange and complicated man. He was the natural successor to Augustus but he was by no means the only possible successor. Tiberius made a great show of being extremely reluctant to take on the duties of emperor and claimed to be anxious to restore the republican constitution which had been in practice (although not in theory) swept away by Augustus after a century of almost continuous political violence and civil war. 

What makes Tiberius interesting is that in some ways he was quite sincere in his stated beliefs on these subjects. At the same time he was certainly never lacking in ambition, and he was very much aware that democracy had proved to be a catastrophic failure. He was therefore a man who was quite capable of holding perfectly sincere opinions that were utterly contradictory, and at the same time intelligent enough to recognise the contradictions. He was in other words very much an enigma. Mackie’s intelligent script and Morell’s subtle performance combine to turn the enigma of Tiberius into riveting drama. Tiberius’s nephew Claudius sums him up rather neatly when he says that Tiberius moves so slowly that he appears to be standing still until you suddenly realise that he has somehow contrived to be miles ahead of you.

This is of course a drama about power, a subject that has been dealt with many times but Mackie approaches it with intelligence and subtlety. Augustus created a state in which immense power was concentrated in the hands of one man. That is a situation that is sustainable only in exceptional circumstances, when that power is in the hands of a man with not only the skill and the judgment to exercise that power, but also the personality to do so. There is an old Chinese proverb that states that the problem with riding a tiger is that it is impossible to dismount. This is the situation faced by Tiberius, a situation made more bitter by the fact that he only mounted the tiger against his will. Tiberius is a shrewd and conscientious ruler who finds that governing well does not ensure popularity. He tries to deal with his unpopularity by retiring to his villa on the island of Capri but even there he cannot escape. He must continue to exercise power, even if he does so indirectly. And if he does so indirectly he may not only become more unpopular but also become fatally isolated, making his situation both more dangerous and more unpleasant. Absolute power can become a prison.

Mackie uses the reign of Caligula to illustrate other dangers of power. In order to exercise absolute power you have to have someone to enforce that power. In order for them to exercise that power on your behalf you must give them a great deal of power. As a result your power is no longer absolute. Caligula has his Praetorian Guards to enforce his power but it does not occur to him that their power has now become potentially greater than his own. Caligula also discovers, too late, that you cannot oppress everybody. If you want to tyrannise the poor you need to maintain the favour of the rich, and if you want to tyrannise the rich you had better make sure not to offend the poor. Tyrannise everybody and you will find yourself with no support base at all, and even the most absolute power will not help you then.

Ralph Bates gives an extraordinarily chilling performance as Caligula. It is not Caligula’s madness or his savagery that is truly terrifying; it is his capriciousness, his horrifying unpredictability. It is possible to endure even the most extreme tyranny as long as it is predictable, but Caligula’s unpredictability makes it unendurable. The terrors of living under unpredictable tyranny are conveyed with remarkable effectiveness. Bates does not resort to ranting; it is the cheerfulness of his viciousness that chills us. Other fine actors have attempted the role, with some success, but I don’t think anyone has surpassed Bates’ performance. 

While this series is somewhat less sensationalistic than I, Claudius it does not back away from the more lurid aspects of the era of the first emperors. In fact it must have pushed the edge of the envelope very far indeed by the standards of 1968. There is a great deal of violence, some of it quite horrific (although the horrific nature of the violence often comes more from the implications than from what we actually see). And there is plenty of perversity, sexual and otherwise.

Network DVD have released the complete six-episode series in a two-DVD boxed set. Tragically the source materials are not in very good shape, the picture being at times very grainy and occasionally just a little muddy. Despite the problems The Caesars is so good (and makes such a fascinating companion piece to the BBC’s I, Claudius) that it is an essential purchase for any serious fan of television historical drama at its best. Highly recommended.