Camelot, Series Finale, Channel 4

This wasn't only the series finale, but the last ever episode of Camelot, since the American Starz network has decided to scrap plans for further seasons. It's not hard to see why. After a fairly promising start, Camelot spent several instalments staggering around aimlessly, as if writers and directors had been beheaded by King Arthur's Excalibur. Annoyingly, this tenth and final episode offered belated flashes of what the show might have been.

At last, Arthur himself, played by the aggravatingly petulant Jamie Campbell Bower, began to - if you will - grow a pair. His ridiculous but heroic single-handed defence of Bardon Pass while his bruised band of Camelot warriors made their escape suddenly brought out unsuspected reserves of ingenuity and brutality in the Once and Future King. Displaying a stamina hitherto believed unique to the Energizer Bunny, a muddied and bloodied Arthur spent the night tirelessly digging pits and rigging up booby traps bristling with pointed sticks, pausing only to slaughter the lone spies sent over by the enemy.

He even resorted to coercive interrogation techniques, slicing open the cheek of a grovelling captive (after his foot had been impaled on a spike) and then threatening to take his eye out if he didn't talk. Throwing away the Geneva Convention produced spectacular results, as he learned that his diabolical sister, Morgan, had been plotting his death.

With Morgan (the increasingly mad Eva Green) installed at Camelot and on the point of crowning herself queen in his stead (pictured right), Arthur made it back to base in the nick of time. It had been a long night and he was in a foul temper, even though the death of the faithful Leontes (pictured below) had left the way clear for the king to get his paws back on his widow, Guinevere (the Bambi-blonde Tamsin Egerton). Thus we bade an untearful farewell to the sinister nun Sybil (Sinead Cusack), who was brusquely beheaded by Gawain (Clive Standen) after she took the fall for most of Morgan's sins. However, Arthur, although very cross, lapsed into fatal wet-liberal backsliding when he let Morgan off with merely being disowned and stripped of the Pendragon name. And this even though she'd callously murdered his mother, the duck-faced Igraine (Claire Forlani), for Chrissakes.

I suspect that the underlying strategic error in the production was to have begun with what is now fashionably known as the "origin story". Everybody thinks they have a rough idea about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - gallant knights riding out from Camelot to slay dragons and giants and rescue damsels in distress, with a few extracts from the quest for the Holy Grail on the side - so viewers were probably bewildered to find themselves confronted with a bunch of crude rustics with unfamiliar names. As for Camelot, it looked like a bunch of derelict farm buildings without ceilings or floors, let alone a Round Table. Far better to have begun the saga further down the line, when Arthur's court was in its pomp and packed with gallant household names, and saved all that back-story business for series three.

You also have to wonder if there was some sort of collective nervous breakdown in the screenwriting department. After Camelot had kicked off with a blast of lust, slaughter and black magic, including Morgan getting lewd with James Purefoy's villainous King Lot, it was as if somebody in a senior position said, "Hey, we don't want another Spartacus, thanks," whereupon everyone panicked and replaced all the sex and violence with a series of Dark Ages tourist board commercials.

And whatever happened to Merlin (Joseph Fiennes, pictured above)? As the series progressed, his mystical powers shrivelled away to nothing, taking his entire dramatic purpose with them. He didn't even get to pull out the magical stops to save his beloved Igraine as she lay dying, since she nobly talked him out of it and told him to go and look after Arthur instead. We wanted swords and sorcery and we didn't get enough of either, although Morgan's last-gasp shapeshifting ploy to impregnate herself with Arthur's child had hugely disruptive potential. Unfortunately she was wasting her time.

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