I first saw this years ago having picked up the DVD from a discount table, watched it, didn't really warm to it, then never gave it another thought. Having just recently viewed it again, I have a whole new perspective.
It is very well written (for the screen) by Charles Sturridge, an award-winning, accomplished child actor, writer and director, who later wrote and directed another favourite of mine, Longitude, amongst many other credits over a long and very successful career that is far from over.
Ian Charleson in the lead role (Major Archer) gives a subtle and sensitive performance in what appears to have been his final screen role. (He died in 1990, aged just 40). Ian Richardson as the likeably eccentric yet ultimately quite sinister Edward Spencer is another standout, with a very good quality supporting cast, including Emer Gillespie as the unreachable Sarah Devlin, and a young Sean Bean; a very different soldier from the one he would portray in the Sharpe films a few years later. There is is also a great ensemble of rather quirky characters that lend a human and personal perspective of the anxious last days of the privileged British in Ireland.
I have a feeling that this is a series that will improve again with each subsequent viewing.
