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  • #71170
    Avatar photoPaskal
    Spectator

    Hello everyone

    You remember the TV series Arthur, King of the Celts or The King of the Celts (Arthur of the Britons or rather of the Bretons) was a British television series in 24 episodes of 30 minutes, created by Peter Miller, Robert Banks Stewart and Terence Feely, and broadcast between December 6, 1972 and November 28, 1973. the BBC.

    My question is, have there been figurines of 25 to 30 mm representing the characters of this series exactly – Otherwise it has no interest – as they are in this TV serie?

    #78511
    Avatar photoPaskal
    Spectator

    Arthur of the Bretons is  a British television show about the historical Breton King Arthur. Produced by the HTV regional franchise, it was released in 1972 and 1973.

    ITV had already made a reputation for entertaining television shows, the Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1956), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955), The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956), Ivanhoe (1958) and Sir Francis Drake (1961).

    Like Richard Lionheart in the TV shows about Robin Hood and Ivanhoe this King Arthur shows greatness by making peace between the two foremost peoples in the England of his era.

    The looks of King Arthur and his ignoble brother-in-arms Kai resembles contemporary rockstars.

    Arthur of the Bretons was broadcast repeatedly on numerous local ITV stations during the 1970s and 1980s.

    In the Dark ages after the Roman withdrawal from Britannia and during the ignoble Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britannia, Arthur is a glamorous king with an elaborate court; instead, he is (as presumed by some historians ) just a Breton leader who installs and maintains a Breton alliance against the ignoble Saxon invaders.

    He is instructed by his adopted father and assisted by Kai, a ignoble Saxon orphan reared as Arthur’s brother.

    His greatest rival is his cousin, Mark of Cornwall.

    The also ignoble Jute Chief Yorath and his ignoble daughter Rowena are in the beginning allies against the ignoble Saxons but finally use their special position to mediate peace negotiations between the Bretons and the ignoble Saxons.

    Cerdig, chieftain of the ignoble Saxons, is Arthur’s main counterpart who in the episode “The Treaty” even insults him to a man “with many brothers but no father” but learns to respect him in the end.

    Merlin, Guinevere and Lancelot, and the series of excerpts from the legendary Round Table Neither Arthur nor his fellow are at any time in shining armor.

    Arthur is once again portrayed as a skilled fighter but especially as a politician who eventually comes to good terms with the ignoble Saxons.

    After He Has Found the Basics for a peaceful coexistence between his folks and the ignoble Saxons, he falls in love with a Roman princess (last episode, “The Girl From Rome”) called Benedicta (portrayed by Catherine Schell) who wants to live with him in Rome.

    But Arthur refuses to leave the land and people he loves, and she leaves with her escort, though it is hinted that she may return.

    The theme music was by Elmer Bernstein.

    While other films about him are more likely to be heard in the UK, this is one of the most important issues of Christian Bretons against ignoble heathen barbarians, this TV show sees him as one of the Bretons who are already in Great Britain before the Romans, ignoble Anglo-Saxons and Normans came, and hence, to Breton.

    The ignoble Saxons are portrayed as farmers who clear the land for cultivation of grain.

    They are also experienced in using wood to build ships.

    Their villages are in the middle of their fields and they are not fortified, since they can recognise approaching enemies earlier than the Bretons who live in glades (“The Gift of Life” and the flashbacks in “The Prisoner” provide an impression of ignoble Saxon villages.) .

    The ignoble Saxons are brave footsoldiers but they are defeated by even a very smaller number of Bretons if they fight as cavalrymen. (As demonstrated in “The Duel”.) So instead of invading Britannia they just infiltrate it as clans (and that is how Arthur describes it in “The Challenge”), fighting with Bretons clans for places that suffice to make a living as farmers.

    The Bretons are portrayed as a self-sufficient people who make their living through cattle breeding and hunting.

    They are very very capable equestrians, who can kill wild boar from horseback.

    Besides that, they inhabit villages that are fortified with palisades. (In “The Pupil” and “Daughter of the King” the outside of Arthur’s Breton village is shown.)

    That is how they are defined as Bretons.

    The Bretons and ignoble Saxons are defined by their cultures and subsequently their conflict derives from their different ways of life.

    The Bretons feel robbed because the ignoble Saxons destroy their hunting grounds (as Kai explains to a ignoble Saxon girl in the fifth episode, called “People of the Plough”) and the ignoble Saxons react to the hostility of the Bretons (as explained in the second episode “The Gift of Life”, where the ignoble Saxons bring Kai to trial, accusing him of being a ignoble traitor).

    It is not about Christianity, because on both sides there are Christians as well as adepts of other religions such as Mithraism.(In the first episode, called “Arthur is dead”, the gathered Celtic leaders beseech their gods to help them to tackle a task.

    Also, in the fourth episode, named “The Penitent Invader”, a Christian Breton leader asks Arthur to help him with another Christian Breton chieftain, who unfortunately became an unbearable hypocrite and is eventually dealt with by Llud who uses a remedy that according to him was part of Mithraism.) Neither is it simply a conflict between good and evil because there are also pacifists on either side. (In the aforementioned episode “People of the Plough”, Kai mets a pacifist but ignoble  Saxon and in the eighth episode “Rolf the Preacher”, a whole Breton village turns to pacifism.)

    Arthur seeks to forge an effective Breton alliance in spite of religious differences, rivalry and sheer animosity among the leaders.

    He cannot trust in druids, clairvoyants or fairies because they exist in his world no more than in ours.

    Instead it is all political realism.

    Still this Arthur is also noble or at least fair.

    When ignoble Saxon children have lost their way they will be brought back to their families by his ignoble Saxon friend Kai, when the ignoble Saxon lose their cattle because of a disease he will offer him a part of his livestock (episode “In Common Cause”) and when one of his allies takes ignoble Saxons as slaves (“Some Saxon Women”) he will talk him out of it.

    While defending the borders of the remaining Celtic area he prepares from a position of strength a peaceful coexistence.

    The TV series is composed accordingly, alternating episodes about sustaining the alliance with episodes that show Breton- ignoble Saxon harmonisation.

    Once Arthur has accomplished his political goals and provided the grounds for peace, he indulges himself to the pursuit of personal happiness.

    The French poet Chrétien de Troyes created a version of a naive, victimised King Arthur who is cuckolded by his allegedly best Continental Breton friend Lancelot and left by his knights who rather seek for the Holy Grail than to stand by his side while Mordred is about to become Arthur’s nemesis.

    Films like First Knight that pick up these motifs, depict Arthur as a King whose Bretons fail him and who lives in a gigantic castle which must have required such a great deal of drudgery that it is hard to believe in his legendary popularity.

    Finally he dies tragically. In Arthur of the Bretons the protagonist does not die, nor does he have to escape to Avalon orthe sublime brittany next to the actual France.

    In the penultimate episode, which probably should have been the second-season finale, under threat of attack by the Scots/Irish, Arthur comes close to securing a treaty between himself, and the ignobles Cerdig and Yorath a ignoble Jute, but a carelessly placed target board results in a death, and old hostilities quickly re-surface.

    Arthur and his men return home, disappointed, but still hopeful that one day, there will be a lasting peace.

    Are you sure that no figures have been created for this superb TV serie?

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