F*** Me, It's Freddie!

FMIF as Harry Field's Dad in 'Who Killed Harry Field?', a 1991 episode of 'Inspector Morse'. If you're wondering who did kill Harry Field, you'll have to watch the show, but, believe me, he definitely had it coming.  Freddie gives a great performance, by the way, but then that's Freddie's stock in trade, isn't it? He's a great hero of mine, and it feels good to be paying tribute to him again.

Harry's Game

After ‘The Sandbaggers’ hasty conclusion, the likeable and capable Ray Lonnen starred in the critically acclaimed and hugely downbeat ‘Harry’s Game’, a programme about 'The Troubles' (a euphemism which seems a bit like calling World War One 'the big tiff') originally broadcast in 1982.

The programme begins with the ruthless assassination of a British cabinet minister by an IRA hitman (played by Derek Thompson, in-between ‘The Long Good Friday’ and his never ending stint in ‘Casualty’). The government can’t let this very public act stand, of course, so they send army officer and undercover specialist Harry Brown (Lonnen) to Belfast to track down Thompson - not to arrest him, not to bring him to justice - but to kill him, publicly, so everyone knows that the powers that be pay their debts. 

Brown was born in Northern Ireland, so it’s a homecoming of sorts for him and he can (almost) do the accent. He is also recovering from a complete nervous breakdown and doesn’t seem to care whether he lives or dies. He does, however, understand the rules of ‘the game’: in war, an eye for an eye is everything, no matter how futile it might be. 

Thompson’s IRA man is a much more reluctant player. He does what he is told, even though he hates it, and retains a core of unpredictable humanity (he loves his family; he can be kind; he refuses to kill a child). Brown is more detached, a hollow man who does what he has been trained to do because it is the only thing he really understands. He has a wife, a family, but he doesn’t give them a second thought, refusing to withdraw time and time again in order to see out the game. For what it’s worth, the end result is a pointless draw, leaving both players dead in the street like so much human rubbish.      

In hindsight, the Northern Ireland war seems incredible, unbelievable, impossible: if it wasn’t for the dead and the disappeared and the ongoing repercussions for those left behind, we might even be able to dismiss it as a terrible nightmare we once had. Neither side emerges with any credit: the British overlords are shown as arrogant and spiteful, men who believe the Irish are savages who need to be beaten into submission – the enlisted men are brutish and thick – and happy to wield the whip. 

The IRA treat each other like shit, motivating their soldiers with the threat of further violence. The men portrayed here are not comrades, or proud, principled revolutionaries, these are desperate, violent men who will do anything to further their cause, so much so that they terrify the people they are fighting for to the extent that they would rather commit suicide than cross them. It’s an appalling, depressing mess.

The production was (understandably) filmed not in Belfast but in a condemned part of Leeds and, yes, the accents are all over the place, but it has an enormous power in that it conveys an almost surreal situation (as seen from the relative safety of mainland Britain*) in sharp, horrible relief. At the centre of it, Harry Brown drifts around the streets, always under scrutiny, waiting to kill or to be killed, delaying the inevitable by an ill-fated liaison with a local widow. It’s a tragic, haunting programme, and one that makes you feel vaguely ashamed.

*England wasn’t unscathed, of course. I can remember armed troops on the streets and hearing the dull boom of the car bomb that blew a soldier’s legs off  a mile away, but then I lived in a garrison town, so the IRA brought the war to us. I can’t imagine how terrible life in Belfast must have been.

The Sandbaggers

What can one say about ‘The Sandbaggers’ that can adequately describe what a superlative programme it is? My friend and colleague, Fearlono, once called it ‘televisual heroin’, which comes very close, but still doesn’t convey all of its intelligent but savage genius.

Lasting three series from 1978 to 1980, ‘The Sandbaggers’ is about the British secret service. There are no James Bond type characters, no nights at the casino, no pointed bon mots, no arched eyebrows, no super villains with mountain retreats or space stations; nobody has sex. Instead, an agent dies in agony in a crummy bedsit in Poland, lying alone in his own mess with a bullet in his spine; an intelligence chief who has been passing secrets to the Russians apologises profusely to a colleague and then bites down on a cyanide capsule; the department head has his own fiancée assassinated rather than risk her giving away national secrets. It’s a tough, supremely unsentimental show – and utterly compelling.

The cast is superb, but Roy Marsden dominates as intelligence chief Neil Burnside. Burnside is a man possessed, willing to cut any corner, ignore any order, make any deal to achieve his goal. He drinks only coke and coffee and almost never goes home. His top man is Willie Kane (Ray Lonnen), an easy going, likeable guy who just happens to be a world class undercover man and assassin.  Kane is not a hero, and he hates violence, but he is supremely good at his job, even if he knows the best case scenario for his prospects is an obscure retirement on a pittance of a pension.

These spies are very much part of the Civil Service, and their work is complicated by departmental squabbling, uncomprehending superiors, complicated approval processes and penny pinching (they are allowed to fly to missions first class, to keep them fresh; coming back they are crammed into the cheap seats). Most of the time, their assignments, which are enormously dangerous, seem to be almost meaningless outside of the framework of the Cold War, a deadly comedy of manners; much of their work revolves around favours owed to other intelligence agencies. If they are caught they will be either imprisoned or put against a wall and shot and the UK government will deny all knowledge of them. Only now and again do we really feel that the missions matter, the rest is simply part of a chess game where half of the board is obscured.   

      

Halfway through the third series, creator and writer (and alleged former spy) Ian Mackintosh’s light aircraft disappeared somewhere in Alaska. No trace of him or the plane has ever been found. Writers were called in to complete the series (Mackintosh had already written the final episode), and the producers decided to call it a day without Mackintosh, leaving the narrative arc unresolved. It’s a real shame, as it’s an incredible series that could have gone on twisting and turning for years.  

W Is For Wyngarde

Peter Wyngarde plays Oberon, King of the Fairies*, in a 1964 ITV production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.  Never quite the crass, commercial machine the BBC made them out to be, ITV had a fine tradition of drama and the arts, although putting Benny Hill’s name above the title (he was playing Bottom, using his Fred Scuttle voice) and the rest of the cast underneath was, in the words of one contemporary commentator, ‘putting the arse before the court’. 

* Pack it in.

The Feathered Serpent

'The Feathered Serpent' is a weird one. At first glance, the notion of a television series for children about religious and political conflict set in the royal palace of the Aztecs seems a bit left-field but, believe me, it’s enormously entertaining, especially if you like to fancy seeing Diane Keen or Patrick Troughton walking around in their underwear (I make no distinction or judgement, the choice is yours).

I watched this as avidly a child, both gripped and appalled from the scary music and credits onwards. Much of it resembles a well-acted panto, but there are enough stabbings, witches, hallucinations, poisonings, mad bats and dancing skeletons to make each twenty five minute episode fly by. The aforementioned second Doctor has a particularly good time as Nascar, the extravagantly made up High Priest, who will happily kill anybody who dares to threaten the supremacy of his bloodthirsty God.

Despite the polystyrene pillars and painted scenery, there’s an energy and realism about the show, perhaps because it has some proper actors in it who take it seriously, and because it presents a rounded view of what is often simply dismissed as a somewhat savage civilisation. For the most part, the protagonists want stability and peace, and the apparent demands of their God (human sacrifice, mainly) are viewed as an unpleasant but necessary evil. It is never made explicit whether Nascar is a religious fanatic or a power crazed lunatic, but then it isn’t always very clear, is it?

Here’s the opening credits which, even now, cause minor vibrations along my skeleton. The haunted house theme is by David Fanshawe, of ‘African Sanctus’ fame, and I've decided I'm going to have it as my new ring tone.

Valerie Leon, Kidnapper

Lovely Valerie Leon is all smiles as she pulls her Jag alongside a young girl on a bike. 'I've got a note from your Mum' she says. Taken in, the young girl stops pedalling only for Valerie to grab her while that bloke who used to be in Emmerdale puts a bag on her head and bundles her into the back of the motor. Valerie! Really? Has it come to this? Kid-kidnap? 

From a 1982 episode of odd (but very popular - it ran for four years and five series) crime show 'Strangers' called 'A Swift & Evil Rozzer'.

Derren Nesbitt, Actor

 

Derren Nesbitt is one of the great British characters, capable of creating hugely interesting characters wherever he goes, especially when it comes to bad guys. A powerful presence and scene stealer, he pinches everything that isn't nailed down in a 1964 episode of 'Gideons Way' called 'The Tin God', playing a super-confident, super-smooth psycho bastard with great hair called John 'Benny' Benson. Benson breaks out of prison in order to kill his his wife, who turned him in because she realised he was a monster - and, true to form, the bastard plans to ruthlessly uses his adoring son as bait to bring her to him. 

Dez is great - at first he's charming and funny and likeable - although clearly something of a rogue. As soon as you warm to him, however, he commits an unnecessary, furtive murder and you realise that you've fundamentally misjudged him: he's a psycho. 

Just for company, he takes a seemingly pre-pubescent John Hurt along for the ride. Then makes him drive. Then shoots him when things don't work out. Hurt looks ridiculously young (he's actually 24, which still seems ridiculously young to me given my advanced age) and hasn't yet developed his trademark voice, equal parts whine and gravel. 

The son is played by a 14 year old Michael Cashman, later to become Colin in 'Eastenders' and, since 1999, a Member of the European Parliament, although I always think of him as Terhew in 'Unman, Wittering and Zigo' for some reason.

All these older people seen when much younger gives me an idea for a new feature, but I think the title will need some work. 

Tomorrow People: A Much Needed Holiday

‘The Tomorrow People’ is a show of enormous ambition, being set at all times and all points in the universe and relying heavily on special effects, but it is undone by the execution, which is cheap and clunky and relies upon a largely untutored cast of kids to paper over the cracks. Where the show was successful, however, was in being emotionally disturbing. It’s easy enough to have a monster jump out at you, of course, and lots of people do that, but ‘The Tomorrow People’ took an indirect but no less affecting route, specialising in showing its youthful audience things that would nag at them and, later, twist their dreams into nightmares (I speak from personal – although not recent - experience).

Case in point:‘A Much Needed Holiday’, in which the young homo superiors repair to a distant planet to put on false beards, wear flip flops and swim listlessly and endlessly up and down an eight foot long paddling pool. Outside of the resort, however, nasty aliens with faces like the gravel at the bottom of a fish tank are at large, and are steadily stripping the planet of precious stones using a slave force of adolescent boys. They treat the kids appallingly: zapping them with stun sticks, making them grope around in the mud, putting them in cages, chaining them together as if they were livestock. I can clearly remener that, as a kid, I didn’t like that; I didn’t like that at all, and I was unable to process it before putting my sleepy head on. The resulting bad dream was almost as disturbing as the one I had about Terry-Thomas chasing me around the dining room table whilst dressed as a Pharaoh.  

Happily, back in the awake world, the Tomorrow People were able to sort it all out, freeing the boy slaves and exiling the arsehole aliens to some shitty rock in the middle of nowhere – forever.

I met Mike Holloway once, quite by chance, in the early nineteen nineties (he hired a video from the shop I was working in). Actually, I met him twice, as he had to return the film, and the second time he signed my Look In annual and we had a little chat about the show and the seventies in general. He was a really nice, cheerful, enthusiastic chap, but couldn’t quite disguise the wistfulness in his voice when he described the decade as ‘great times – the best’. I assumed he was talking about being in a group and on posters and starring in a TV show where he got to fire a ray gun every week, not about his legendary impersonation of a man who would later be revealed as the devil incarnate.

I particularly like the way he artlessly gives a little look to the right to get his cue. Bless him, he's just a boy.

New Scotland Yard

‘New Scotland Yard’ is a police procedural programme which ran on ITV from 1972 to 1974. It’s a programme that I can distinctly remember watching as a really quite small kid, perhaps because, although it seems fairly restrained now, there was an inventive and sadistic quality to the violence perpetrated – an element of the unusual that scored my squishy young brain. In the episode 'Shock Tactics', for instance, a man kills his wife by sneaking up behind her in a gorilla mask and literally scaring her to death. In other episodes, an ex-SS officers is stabbed with his ceremonial dagger, and a woman's corpse is found in a trunk in the bedsit she used to share with her retarded husband. I also remember an episode where a number of long dead bodies were found bricked up behind a wall, but I haven't tracked that one down yet.

The show stars the great, stone faced John Woodvine as the rose growing Detective Chief Superintendent John Kingdom and John Carlisle as his assistant / adversary, Detective Inspector Ward. Ward is a know all, whereas Kingdom knows all - which inevitably leads to an interesting dynamic (in later series, Ward has been busted down to Sergeant). They are called in to deal with the big cases – the murders and scandals – which Kingdom, after ascertaining the facts, usually solves using a blend of calm intelligence and adherence to routine. The crimes they investigate are varied, which makes the show unpredictable – and uneven - but, when it's good, it's great. 

Woodvine and Carlisle were replaced for the final series, which I haven’t seen, and the show was cancelled after that. In the end analysis, 'New Scotland Yard' was simply not action packed enough, and the leisurely pace was matched by a reflective, sometimes mournful tone, which wasn't what people wanted from their Saturday night telly.