Here’s a frightening thought for those of you who remember the original Shogun (1980), starring Richard Chamberlain as the Elizabethan navigator who ends up playing kingmaker amid the power struggles in the Japan of 1600. We are now further away in time from that series than that series was from the beginning of the second world war.

And yet it feels almost like yesterday when we gathered with our parents in front of our tellies with their bulbous backs and no remote controls to watch Chamberlain in his natty kimonos grappling with Japanese culture. TV was so much more of a family affair in those days, with blockbuster mini-series – Roots, Jesus of Nazareth, The Thorn Birds etc – garnering ratings which, in our fragmented modern culture, would be impossible. In the US alone, nearly one third of all households with TV sets watched at least part of that 1980 Shogun, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of sushi restaurants. As a measure of how innocent things were back then, it was the first network show to allow the word ‘piss’ in the dialogue and to depict the act of urination.

The warring Japanese factions are by no means averse to boiling captives alive to watch how well they did

Chamberlain was fourth choice to play sea dog John Blackthorne (after Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Albert Finney). He was pretty good, as I recall, but perhaps too much of a smoothie. Cosmo Jarvis does it better in the new version on Disney+, helped by the fact that, like Drake, he is a Devonian (if Totnes counts), but mainly because he attacks the role with such rough-hewn gusto you can virtually smell the rancid sweat on his salt-encrusted jerkin. Jarvis’s father was a merchant seaman who was never much impressed by infelicities in TV nautical dramas: ‘I kept thinking of him sitting there as I’ve seen him do in the past.

QOSHE - Lavish, graphically violent swashbuckling: Disney+’s Shogun reviewed - James Delingpole
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Lavish, graphically violent swashbuckling: Disney+’s Shogun reviewed

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14.03.2024

Here’s a frightening thought for those of you who remember the original Shogun (1980), starring Richard Chamberlain as the Elizabethan navigator who ends up playing kingmaker amid the power struggles in the Japan of 1600. We are now further away in time from that series than that series was from the beginning of the second world war.

And yet it feels almost like yesterday when we gathered with our parents in front of our tellies with their bulbous backs and........

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