Product: The Sandbaggers Collection Set 1
Rating: 5.0
Cold Warriors; Hot Series
The 20 episodes of "The Sandbaggers" unfold against the clammy backdrop of the Cold War, circa late 1970s, contemporaneous with Yorkshire Television's production of the series. The British Secret Intelligence Service is a familiar milieu for spy sagas. This is turf well trod by thoroughbreds such as John Le Carre and lesser stallions like Ian Fleming. The intelligence community of series creator Ian Mackintosh is brisk and serious, populated by businesslike professionals. The Sandbaggers are George Smiley pushed past The Circus and the Old School Ties by the institutional thrust of modern spycraft; they are James Bond shorn of the pyrotechnics, the carnality and the wisecracks. Characters and plots are more concerned with budgets than body counts, with internal politics as much as Realpolitik in the international order. They are conscious that their actions have moral implications; they debate the purpose and propriety of their covert undertakings. There is no skunkworks in the basement to arm agents with lethal toys. The tools of Special Section operatives are guts, good sense and grounding. They are products of the world's most experienced intelligence service. They never forget that they are employees of Her Majesty's government. They have their meager paychecks to remind them.The central character is Director of Operations Neil Burnside, played sharply by the impeccable Roy Marsden. If ever there was a fictional television hero with a right-wing agenda, the relentlessly machiavellian Neil Burnside is its epitome. Patriotic, nostalgic for the old values, uncompromisingly resistant to liberalizing influences, self-righteous and contemptuous of his adversaries, Burnside seems deliberately modeled on that loathsome cowboy of American espionage, William Casey.What is it about Neil Burnside that so engages our sympathies? It is this: he is always true to form. The Burnside package comes agreeably wrapped in the cultivated diction, the caustic wit, the keen analytical mind, the cool under pressure. But, no matter what, you can count on Neil being Neil. You can accept the duplicity, the intransigence, the mendacity, the audacious scorn for superiors, the heartless means justified by their dubious ends because you can hang a plumb line on Burnside and it will invariably orient itself toward Duty. Although ambitious, Burnside is always willing to subsume his personal aims to his larger loyalty, the S.I.S.It is this ineluctible trueness in Burnside, for example, that elevates Episode Seven, "Special Relationship", from maudlin melodrama to sublime tragedy. Only the intervention of the gods can forestall the inevitable, but as always the gods are conspicuously absent when a hero is faced with a tough call.Most episodes of "The Sandbaggers" are not so majestic, but all are impelled by crisp, blunt dialogue from the lexicon of British bureaucracy and all wrestle with the exigencies of black ops under democratic government. The cast glitters with accomplished English TV veterans Ray Lonnen and Jerome Willis, as well as sturdy film actors Richard Vernon, Alan MacNaughtan and Bob Sherman. Most plots display a satisfying polyphony - contrapuntal story lines reinforce each other, lending momentum and underscoring ironies. Even the less well-executed stories convey urgency, etched in the anxious visages of the directorate staff monitoring crucial developments from the Ops Room.The series is both dynamic and cerebral, a blend of action and rumination that, as it entertains, also invites the viewer to contemplate the nature and purpose of covert missions necessarily executed without the express permission of the public they are meant to serve.How cruel and stupid television can be! So many episodes of "Mission Impossible." So few of "The Sandbaggers."