Product: The Sandbaggers Collection Set 1
Rating: 5.0
The Greatest Television Series About The Intelligence Services Ever Made...
Five stars doesn't do it justice.This is a full ten point five stars out of a possible five.Created by formal naval intelligence officer, Ian Mackintosh, and broadcast on the UK's ITV channel between September 1978 and July 1980, "The Sandbaggers" set a precedent for television spy dramas that, in my opinion at least, has never been surpassed.Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) is the director of operations (D-OPS) of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (a thinly disguised analogue of "MI6" - the real life security services department given purview to counter threats to national security from outside the UK). Burnside is the head of a team of highly trained covert intelligence officers, nicknamed "Sandbaggers", whose job it is to undertake missions of a politically sensitive nature ranging from securing the successful defection of players from "the other side" through to coercion, rescues and even assassination; to "sandbag" in the colloquial English vernacular has a dual meaning - it means to "stonewall", "hide" or "deceive through the means of deception, obfuscation or omission" and it also means to "shore up the defences" or "protect from harm" - in these capacities the three man team certainly live up to both interpretations of their given title.However, if you think you're in for the usual cod-James-Bond antics, let me assure that this series is a far more complex, adult and subtle examination of what it is to be a spy. The entire onus of this series is on the machinations of the players in the corridors of power rather than on the details of the missions themselves. The detail with which Mackintosh renders the Machiavellian goings on between the foreign office, the cabinet, parliament and domestic and foreign intelligence services, as well as his frankly stunning insight into the hierarchy of the British intelligence community has led many to wonder - myself included - whether we were actually being treated to a privileged insider's view from a man who had actually been a player in John Le Carre's legendary "circus" himself. Mackintosh's mysterious disappearance part way through the writing of the third series have led many to conclude that maybe he let on more than was wise. I recommend the excellent wikipedia entry on this mysterious author for those who are interested in the notion of government conspiracies.Being that this was a television production made in 1978 by a UK television channel (there were only three at the time), the majority of these stories are shot on video tape in studio bound sets with only the odd filmed insert here and there. I implore you not to let the low production values put you off though. Pound for pound, this is one of the most intelligent, well-acted and frankly breath-takingly brilliant series ever to drip out of the cathode ray tube. Roy Marsden is by turns touching, terrifying and tenacious as the steely Neil Burnside - a man so completely devoted to and controlled by his job that he virtually lives in his office on a diet of Coca-Cola (he can't risk being drunk), cigarettes and dossiers. Similarly Ray Lonnen's turn as Willy Caine, the veteran "Sandbagger 1", is a masterclass in quiet understatement. Bar Rupert Everett, Lonnen really is the greatest Bond that we never had. British soap fans should also keep an eye out for a turn by gay activist and current Member of the European Parliament, Michael Cashman, in the second and third series.Two final recommendations for those who are interested:1) If you possess a multi-region DVD player, I suggest that you save yourself a few dollars and pick up Network's excellent compendium boxed set of all three series on Amazon.co.uk (it will cost you substantially less than buying the three series individually on Amazon.com). After all, who doesn't need to save a few bucks in these cash-strapped times?2) If you read comic books, and any of the above sounds remotely familiar, a certain Greg Rucka used this series as the template for his brilliant "Queen And Country" comics and novels. By his own admission, Rucka considers "Queen And Country" to be a sequel to this most spectacular of Television dramas.