Sharpe the TV Series Starring Sean Bean Starts Today on WETA UK

The TV series that made Sean Bean a legend comes to Public Television starting tonight, February 15 at 10:00pm thanks to WETA UK.   

Based on the book series by Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe   follows the life of British soldier Richard Sharpe and the 95th Rifles during the Peninsular War (1807-1814). 

If you are in the Washington DC Metro Area and don't know WETA UK go to the link below on how to watch this fantastic PBS channel we have the good fortune to have access to in our viewing area:

https://weta.org/tv/uk/faq

If you are new to the Sharpe TV series and want to know a little more about it, I wrote a series of posts about the series episodes back in 2012.  But beware of spoilers and follow the posts in chronological order:

http://whiterosewritings.blogspot.com/search?q=Sharpe+Sundays&max-results=20&by-date=true

There was a time when I was very involved in the Sharpe fandom, and even with some of the people that worked on the Sharpe series.  Alas, those days are long gone, but I have good memories of those times.  (For the most part 😊).  For the memories:

http://www.reenactor.net/index.php?topic=1251.0

For Sean Bean fans in the DC area who know him from The Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones, or his wonderful series last year, Broken, but are not aware of the Sharpe series, this is a great opportunity to catch up.  

Sean Bean is Richard Sharpe, and always will be. 

Memory Lane: Back to the Beginning of Lord of the Rings Media Coverage

Martin Freman, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis at SDCC 2012

From Warner Bros Pictures Website

In interviews during the just ended San Diego Comic-Con 2012, Richard Armitage said (I'm paraphrasing a lot now) how envious he was of the relative obscurity and seeming innocence of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy cast when they were filming in New Zealand over a decade ago.

So I thought it would be fun to go back to some of my favorite interviews of the LOTR cast from those days back in 2001 when a large part of the world had yet to encounter Hobbits, Dwarves, Wizards, and Orcs.

I should also mention, in case you're new at visiting this blog, that I'm a long time fan of Sean Bean and so I followed LOTR news as soon as he was cast. (Sean was in his 20's when I first became a fan, but amazingly I was just a toddler in those days). 

Two interviews from Cannes 2001 when the movie industry insiders and the press got to see 20 minutes I believe of the Lord of the Rings:The Fellowship of the Ring and marked the start of PR for the film and the trilogy, much like SDCC just marked the start of major PR for The Hobbit:

Sean Bean (Boromir), John Rhys-Davies (Gimli), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) Cannes 2001

Sean Bean on the Frank Skinner Show (Part 1) trying, not entirely successfully, to explain some of LOTR's special effects without giving away any secrets...and can we say "action figure":

The Other Side's Version of Middle Earth

Not only have I been immersed in all the coverage about "The Hobbit" movie and the first joint appearance of the main cast, but I've started to listen to an audio-book of the unabridged version of the tale in my car. (Unfortunately not read by Richard Armitage...but maybe in the future?)

So searching for new news I stumbled upon this article in Salon.com about a different version of the events in "The Lord of The Rings".  What if the other side, the dark side, the evil side, wrote their own version of the story:

That's the philosophy behind "The Last Ringbearer," a novel set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of "The Lord of the Rings") and told from the point of view of the losers. The novel was written by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, and published to acclaim in his homeland in 1999. Translations of the book have also appeared in other European nations, but fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English.

 To read the entire article in Salon.com click HERE.

Of course it's understandable that Yeskov's book is apparently also controversial with Tolkien fans. No one wants to see their heroes destroyed.

But thanks to the Internet, these days there's always someone that will make the information available to the curious, and so it was that last year Yisroel Markov posted his English translation of the "The Last Ringbearer". To go to his site and read his version of tales from the Mordor side, click HERE