On 26 January 1885, two days before his 52nd birthday, on the steps of the Governor's Palace in Khartoum, Charles George Gordon , Major-General in the British Army, Governor-General of the Sudan by commission of the Turkish ruler of Egypt, the Khedive, met his death in the morning at the hands of soldiers in the army of the Islamic Revolutionary Mohammad Ahmed Ibn Abdullah - the Mahdi.' With these words, spoken in a quiet school chapel in Surrey in front of a quaint Victorian painting, Robert Hardy begins this television portrait of one of the most famous and most controversial of British heroes. The story ranges across many conflicts and many continents before reaching its tragic climax, by the banks of the Nile. Photography JIM PEIRSON. JOHN GOODYER Film editor PETER HARRIS Produced by MALCOLM BROWN