James07?

State of Play, House of Cards (and the other 2 series), Spaced, Life on Mars, This Life, Shameless and the first 2 (3 at a push) series of Teachers.

Bert - if you like Waterloo reduced to a couple of hundred blokes an 8 pounder and half a dozen horses, then Sharpe's right up your street. Otherwise, it's everything you think it probably is and you were correct to avoid it.

paulcl

Thanks - I've seen all the Caroline Quentin series of JC, but haven't seen New Tricks at all. Looks interesting from the reviews on Amazon.

Retro

Yes, the big battles are typical British cheap efforts - but they only play a tiny part in the series. The rest is small skirmishes which I assume was what made up the majority of the Peninsular War.

It's tales of derring-do... very cheesy indeed with awful music. But watchable.

paulcl

Edge of Darkness is definitely tempting, as is The Singing Detective - I've only seen parts of both. I'd probably go for GBH rather than Boys from the Blackstuff, unless I wanted to be completely depressed.

James07?

True, even so, the books include pretty much every major battle Wellington was involved in. From memory each of Salamanca, Vitoria, Talavera, Assaye, Seringpatam, Tolouse and the sieges at Cuidad Rodrigo/Badajoz were used as major set-pieces in the novels...and they try and represent them in the serices but totally failed to capture the scale of events...understandable given the budgetary constraints but disappointing nevertheless.

Rdysn5

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - when the series was released on DVD in 2006, it received almost unanimous praise from otf. Not a single person said they didn't like it, which gives some indicator of how good it is.