Product: The Sandbaggers Collection Set 1
Rating: 5.0
If you want James Bond, go to the library.
The best line in all the episodes is in the first one, titled "First Principles'"The odious Neil Burnside flies to Oslo only to rebuke his Norwegian colleague face-to-face with a sort, sharp lecture delivered at the boarding gate of the airplane on what it takes to succeed in the Cold War. Burnside says the Norwegians must learn more about intelligence works and that takes time. His Norwegian counterpart protests that there was no time and action was necessary. Action was taken and it ended disastrously. Burnside replies, "If you want James Bond, go to the library."If you want success then do the hard, boring, endless, tedious, and detailed work of preparation. Read maps, study weather patterns, train and train again, learn languages, stockpile equipment that may never be used, argue over budgets to do these tasks, guard against cost-cutting pressures, consider every possible and few impossible alternatives, and then start over. Most of all jealously preserve the capacity to take action, and more insidious and constant threat again the capacity to act is the office politics of any large organization, the competition for resources, for recognition, for promotion, for one's ideas, and son on.That brief dialogue sets the theme for most of the rest of the Sandbaggers where the focus is first on securing the Sandbaggers in the dangerous and ruthless world of Whitehall, where it makes sense to send assassins economy class on long international flights and expect them to do the killing efficiently and secretly and return economy class. One of Burnside's recurrent fights is over budget for exactly such needs as first class travel for the Sandbaggers who do the killing. (There is no point in hiding behind metaphors like "dirty work" or "heavy lifting" because mostly the Sandbaggers kill. If anything less than murder was required, someone else could do it.Anyone working in an organization knows all of this to be true, and "The Sandbaggers" is on this score one of the most realistic television programs ever made. It is all about budget most of the time.