My ability from past experience to work with animals has been previously noted on Sharpe. Taking precautions about rabies I had already worked with elephants and camels in India and had absolutely no fear of them - despite regular abuse from their mahouts I continued to enjoy a close relationship with them, feeding them with treats almost every day they were on-set. The result was various ‘tricks’ we both did together and noted by passing journalists. The elephant seen here is ‘Nellie’, a firm friend of the author (seen here) and the female of the pair used on Sharpe’s Peril ; but the male elephant did have what was described as ‘off-days’ when he was singularly ‘bad-tempered’ and on one occasion did seem to prefer to eat the author rather than the banana on offer …

If you like the look of it, helping yourself to part of someone else’s dinner is not regarded as bad manners in Indian society. As on Sharpe’s Challenge, I found that native Indians don’t eat curry of a ‘volcanic nature’. Khansamah Kemal and khitmagar Selim of the Agrisen restaurant in Khajuraho – which being opposite my accommodation became our ‘local’ - encouraged me to try a selection of Indian foods and I sometimes went into the kitchen on ‘quiet nights’ to watch it being cooked and ask a few questions about culinary expertise. Having said that, true Indian cooking from past experience doesn’t resemble what you will receive in an English ‘Indian restaurant’ and eating with the fingers without using utensils (a knife, fork or spoon) though thoroughly normal in India (using a torn-up chupatti as a ‘shovel’ for rice or the more liquid constituents of the meal - and the capacity of the Western stomach) isn’t regarded as usual in England. A four-course meal – split into segments on the same plate or in added dishes and accompanied by several servings of home-baked breads such as nan, chupatti or roti - was regarded as usual in Khajuraho. I never once saw a chicken - having been plucked – with more than two or three mouthfuls of meat on it’s bones and regarding ‘lamb’ I generally expected to eat goat – which is an acceptable alternative - but I did once eat a rarity now in England : mouth-watering mutton. Pork and beef is obviously off-the-menu for Hindoos and Muslims for religious reasons but it is cooked by ‘off-hand’ chefs and served at many hotels and restaurants catering for ‘westerners’ with the menu usually stating ‘all our salad and fruit is washed in bottled water’. Fish I found best left alone in the climate we were operating in as the origin was often in doubt. Vegetarians are common in India due to several non-meat eating castes and don’t raise eyebrows in restaurants and first-time visitors to India are often recommended to stick to a ‘veggy-diet’ to avoid the usual ‘Delhi-belly’ (though your initial exposure to home-cooked native Dal – boiled beans or peas but usually lentils and the usual associated veggy alternatives such as Saag – spinach - can be both an olfactory and visually harrowing experience. On one occasion, due to working late at Orchha we had a hot snack brought out to the Armoury by our faithful pani-wallah and the individual portions were wrapped up in large leaves - which the voracious local goats greatly appreciated and after one gang of predatory goats started eating one of my trouser-legs eventually had to be dispersed by gunfire …

Down-town ‘Old Khajuraho’ in festival-mode.

The author is riding the motorcycle ringed.

The kitchen staff, chefs and cooks on Sharpe deserved a gold medal for the meals they prepared, cooked and dished up in camp for over a hundred people on a daily basis on the two months location-filming of Sharpe’s Peril and even surpassed their usual high-standard of menu (a mix of five salad bowls and a choice from ten hot meals) when they began serving chilled fruit-juice and ice-cream by request. I came to a twice-weekly arrangement with them for a small bag of banana, melon and apple to be put to one side for me to feed the elephants after lunch, which made an agreeable change to their diet of sugar-cane. I never bothered with the camels – had enough of their unpredictable and often ungrateful behaviour on Sharpe’s Challenge. Our ‘bheestie’ (water-boy) - nicknamed ‘Gunga Din’ after the immortal poem by Kipling – and ‘Kung Fu’ (our masallah-wallah, who got his nickname as he looked like Bruce Lee) rarely failed to keep us supplied with water and tea … and their efforts were duly rewarded.

As any Sharpe fan will already know, the commemorative badge worn by the author – a little-known but popular condiment brewed in Sheffield and wholly endorsed by the Sheffield United Football Club and their biggest and most famous fan – and bottles are carried (jealously guarded) on all Sharpe episodes and liberally applied by the author to all local cooking of any nationality to offer a ‘taste of home’.

A week later, I had met and chosen the best fifteen of our local ‘extras’ and in the terrific heat, appraised them not only of Napoleonic arms-drill (due to some props difficulties, we initially had no arms to drill with) and as usual including some advice on the vagaries of film-work on-set. As is my usual they called me by my first name and I by theirs : any interim problems came to me first of which - as usual - there later transpired to be many, including a punch-up requiring a ‘diplomatic’ resolution. After three days of ‘fun and games’ in Khajuraho, we departed for our first filming–location fifty miles to the east – Orchha, a small town surrounded by ‘semi-dense jungle’ (for map-reading fans, lying on the River Betwa west of a town named Jhansi in the province of Madya Prakesh).

One of the Unit Base-Camps at Bala Sagar at an evocative 17th century fortress near Orchha. After the move back to Khajuraho, the unit camp occupied five acres of land to accommodate all departments, dining-tents, the required transport and all our horses and animals. This particular location involved a ‘yomp’ of up to 800 metres to the best filming locations, where everyone tended to ‘muck-in’ by carrying as much gear as possible – usually ending with all our tongues hanging out.

‘Shaking–down’ is a process that goes along with the first scheduled filmed scenes along with everyone getting to know each other better. Presumably by that time the ‘heads-of-department’ have satisfied themselves that they are ‘ready-to-go’ for Day One Filming - but the Armoury Department along with Camera and Costume were still bemoaning several ‘omissions’ of gear and kit stuck in Customs and elsewhere – but such ‘omissions’ are only drawn to the attention of Director and 1st AD in the case of extreme emergency and even after Day Three we all still had some - but as usual decisions are left to heads-of-department to handle to the best of their ability in terms of ‘make the best of it’ in the spirit of the old showbiz adage, ‘the show must go on’.

Camera-crew await ‘lining up the shot’ : James (DOP and operator, behind camera), Richard (focus puller, right), Sandra (loader, absent), Durga (centre, right), Andy the ‘grip’ (centre, leaning on the dolly) and Ramesh the ‘gaffer’ (left) and the rest of their gang. Regularly doing over thirty camera set-ups each day and lighting each one in 40+ degrees of heat was hard work for everyone concerned - but camera and lighting get little rest or respite during filming as they are obviously required for each and every shot wherever it might be. Sharpe’s Peril used two cameras on average - and at times three and sometimes, four.

In the lead-up to the final battle scene during the cavalry-charge, Andy the grip of Sharpe’s Peril set a new ‘world-record’ for a tracking-shot on Sharpe in  laying over eighty metres of track (which was duly nicknamed the ‘India Grand Trunk Railway’) seen here with the horses lining-up just before the actual shot. The ‘dolly-trolley’ which will carry the camera in the shot is seen far-left and during the shot under Andy’s control reached a speed of 30 miles per hour.

Our first filming location near Orchha alongside the river Betwa was in and around a ghat with several fine temples and mausoleums (some of which you will see on tv in the film) built in the 16th Century – the palace of the capital of the Bundela fraternity was in town a mile away and included several senana (areas where women were kept from prying eyes). A pilgrimage is still made to the ghat each November to worship a king named Ram Vivah but at other times only vultures, the odd tourist and a resident ‘holy man’ can be seen there. The spectacular ‘opening procession’ filmed in the Orchha temple ghat involved a column of mounted actors, our faithful sepoys, civilian extras, elephants, bullock-carts, camels and goats (the Armoury Dept ‘shanghaied’ at gunpoint and inserted our tea-wallah at the rear) overall 250 meters in length and brought in a big crowd of appreciative locals and every tourist for miles around. As is usual on location anywhere in the world, a few Sharpe fans pop up especially to see us – visitors usually receive a ‘go and see Richard’ on arrival - and I met one family who had taken two days out from their holiday to come and see us as their Grandfather was a massive Sharpe fan so I took them under my wing and took them over to meet principal actors and have their photos taken with some of them. On another occasion, one girl who showed by her knowledge she was a long-term Sharpe fan on being dragged over by me by hand into the set – was dumbfounded and she just stood there with her mouth agape faced with her favourite star and it was left to me to do the introductions and take her photograph before leading her away : much to the amusement of her friends, she left us still dumbfounded. Poor girl – the shock was just too much for her and despite promises and being given an e-mail address, I’ve never heard from her since. Sharpe does have that effect on people.

Just before dusk. My tent at Orchha is the one in the centre. It was quite comfortable apart from one evening when I had to get up to throw a bucket of cold water over a fight between two jackals on my veranda and another evening where a vulture with a six-foot wing-span (which you will see flying around in the first TV episode) from the temples in the background was scratching around on my roof. As I was the only English resident, all the chairs graduated to my veranda due to an open invitation at my expense to any hotel staff on Sundays for ‘tiffin’. After our first Sunday night, ‘Bombay Mix’ was no longer on the menu due to ‘heavy casualties’ the next day.

The heat and the dust were at times oppressive - on one occasion at Orchha after a particularly hard day, I made my way back to the hotel, kicked off my sandals and walked fully-clothed straight into the swimming-pool to the astonishment of several German tourists - the barman was amused but attentive so got asked by me (head-above-water and I kept my hat on) in my very best Hindoo for ‘ike beer tenda, tepya’ without him batting an eyelid which I then drank whilst dripping water on the veranda followed by a burp the volume of which I think broke the sound-barrier. ‘Learning the lingo’ is not something all the cast and crew bothered with : most had the facility to latch onto an Indian member of the crew who was quite willing to interpret. ‘Acha, Acha’ in Hindoo means ‘Good’ but can be taken for ‘Yes’ and led to one convoluted and confused conversation in the local market where a proffered Indian cigarette named a ‘Bidi’ was offered to a westerner and accepted and answered ‘Acha’ but the man in fact had asked ‘Do you want a Bibi ?’ (Bibi is Hindoo for ‘girl’).

First-Day filming: a publicity-photo of two of the seven people who have done every Sharpe episode screened - the author with Sean Bean (Richard Sharpe) seen here at Kings’ Chhatris near Orchha. The author is growing whiskers to do with the ballroom scene at the beginning of the first episode of Sharpe’s Peril  and the polo-shirt worn here was a ‘well-wishing gift’ from the members of www.95thRifles.com

See BBC Radio Times magazine w/c 31.11.2008 for the full story ….