The Last Kingdom: BBC 2 preview (22 October)

If you love Sky Atlantic’s Game of Thrones, you will no doubt enjoy BBC2’s new medieval epic, The Last Kingdom. However, this is based on fact, not fantasy.

It really hits the ground running in this opening episode with enough fights, shocks, deaths, reversals and memorable scenes to fill a entire series for some shows.

The series, based on Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell’s series of Saxon novels, is set in Northumbria in AD 866, where a local warrior king is flying a falcon on the seashore when his son spots Viking sails coming round the headland. This heralds the start of the Danes’ latest land-grab.

Matthew Macfadyen is terrific as the embattled Saxon king, Matthew Macfadyen is superb and it is great to see Rutger Hauer back on screen – as a viking, obviously.

Macfadyen’s ten-year-old son Uhtred finds he has to grow up fast after his life is turned upside down when he is seized by a Viking warlord after his father’s defeat in the invasion of York.

He is raised to manhood as a Dane, and eventually embarks on a quest to reclaim the lands of his birth and to discover whether he is a Saxon or Viking.

The Last Kingdom begins tonight (22 October) at 9pm on BBC2.

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