April 9: Musketeers and memories of childhood fun

WHAT an excellent series the BBC’s Musketeers has been. I wonder how many of your readers have enjoyed it as much as I have?

At a time when many of us complain about the amount of sex, foul language and gratuitous violence on our televisions screens, it was refreshing to see (and after the “so called” watershed too) a series that all the family could watch together.

The sex was no more than a tender kiss. There was no bad language at all throughout the series, and the violence was no more than one would have seen in the film The Three Musketeers shown way back in 1948. At that time we, as young children, would have been out on our street with a sword fashioned out of a sweeping brush handle and a pistol carved out of some twig.

We would have donned our wellington boots, “borrowed” our father’s trilby and the widest belt that our mothers or older sisters possessed. For the next half day my mates and I were “musketeers”. I wonder how many youngsters of today had their imaginations caught by the series in such a way? I suspect not one... yet another example of our children no longer having a meaningful childhood. I understand that there’s already a second series. For myself, I cannot wait.