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.

Valerie Leon, Super Nurse

The frankly flipping gorgeous Valerie Leon plays a very accommodating nurse in the somewhat heavy handed 1967 Johnny Speight TV satire 'If There Weren't Any Blacks, You'd Have To Invent Them'. It's unbelievable what you used to be able to get on the NHS, isn't it?  

W Is For Wyngarde

Peter Wyngarde runs the gamut from light-hearted cynicism to utter revulsion as German newspaper editor Werner Loder in the 1962 Armchair Theatre production 'Night Conspirators'. He gives an powerful, serious performance, as might befit a drama about the unexpected and, in Werner Loder's case, desperately unwanted, return of an aged Adolf Hitler to Germany.   

It bears repeating: Peter Wyngarde was a very fine actor, and he should be as well known for that as his moustache, cuban heels, perm and private life. The Island would be a much duller place without him.  

Whiny Dancer

‘Die Screaming, Marianne’ is a difficult film to categorise in many ways but, at heart, it’s a good old fashioned Victorian melodrama, albeit one with mod accoutrements and a heroine who works as a go go dancer.

Susan George plays Marianne ‘Hips’ MacDonald, a troubled dollybird on the run from secrets and a weird family set up (Mum is dead; half-sister hates her; Father likes his daughters a little too much). Poor Marianne believes the only thing she has going for her is her lithe body and, as a result, she freely donates it to interested parties on a regular basis. When things become complicated, she moves on, packing her pathetic little bag, slipping on her Dr, Scholl’s and moving on like a pouting, bra-less Littlest Hobo. To be honest, to use the parlance of the period, she's a bit of a drag, man. 

Her main issue is that she has the account number of a Swiss safety deposit box in which her late mother stored a number of incriminating documents about her father and, Dad, a defrocked (or whatever) Judge wants them back. Her half-sister, Hildegard (played by super skinny Judy Huxtable, soon to become Mrs. Peter Cook) just wants Maz dead, especially as she is due to inherit a lot of money on her imminent 21st birthday, money that will go to Hildegard if little Marianne is out of the way.

The film bobs along nicely for a while but, in the end, becomes a bit frenzied and confusing, albeit in an extremely languid way. I have heard that the shoot was complicated by bad behaviour from the young leads and this led to beleagured director Peter Walker having to rip several pages out of the script just to keep to schedule. That’s a shame, because although I enjoy random stabbings, car crashes, people (well, Chris Sandford, an actor I find detestable) falling down a hole and being left to die and, in particular, attempted murder by super hot sauna, ‘Die Screaming…’ never lives up to the promise of its credit sequence where Marianne, clad only in a spangly bikini and a few chains, frugs like a funky puppet to Cyril Ordanel’s groovy theme tune. If it did, we might have had something halfway decent, but it doesn't, and that's all there is it to it, I'm afraid.

Die Screaming, Marianne!

Armchair Theatre: The Greatest Man In The World

‘The Greatest Man In The World’ is an ‘Armchair Theatre’ presentation from 1958.

It opens with familiar TV face Ludovic Kennedy introducing a live link from Washington, where the state funeral of Jack ‘Pal’ Smurch is taking place. Smurch, it appears, was the most revered hero in the history of mankind, ‘the greatest man in the world’, and his death has caused an outpouring of national and international grief.  The President (Donald Pleasence), his face taut with emotion, gives a touching eulogy to the enormous crowd that has gathered but, as he observes a moments silence, we hear his private thoughts: ‘it’s a good job they don’t know what the lousy bastard was really like’…

Smurch’s fame is based on a single amazing thing: he piloted a spaceship to the Moon, got out and walked around a bit, threw up (he was drunk) and then came back. The rocket was designed by a dipsomaniac high school teacher, and was developed entirely independently on a tiny fraction of the huge budget the government has expended on not getting to the Moon. Naturally, the President orders that everything possible is done to ensure that this incredible story is rewritten to include the full support of the US government, and the Press are briefed that, if they want to keep their jobs, they help keep the secret.

The big problem, however, is Smurch himself, who is the most incredible arsehole (he’s described as a ‘congenital hooligan' but there are much shorter words). Lazy, dishonest, violent, lascivious, cruel, astoundingly obnoxious, Jack Smurch is universally hated by everyone he has ever come into contact with. His High School teacher shows off a six inch scar Smurch gave him; his Army Sergeant admits that he put him on point while on patrol in the hope he might get shot. His own mother, when told that he is attempting re-entry, says ‘I hope he gets blown to bits’. When he finally arrives in person, he more than lives up to expectations: he’s unbearable – a gum chewing, aggressively ignorant braggart. He’s also played by Patrick McGoohan which, is wonderful and, although his accent is a bit hit and miss (to say the least, he sounds like Jimmy Cricket auditioning for ‘Guys & Dolls’) McGoohan makes Smurch a truly loathsome character, the sort of bloke you want to keep hitting until your fists are worn down to the wrists.

What’s worse, of course, is that everybody has to put up with his shit: the President, the Press, the F.B.I, the Army, the Air Force – they’re all committed to the lie that he is an inspirational person, a man of the highest courage and calibre, simply because of the enormous benefits of ‘the greatest man in the world’ being an American.  

At an official reception a few days after landing, General Smurch (as he is now) is holding forth on his own genius and courage whilst making crude moves on the waitresses and other female guests and showing everybody the nude lady he has tattooed on his chest. When he is told that he is to embark on a World Tour, visiting China and Russia to spread the American message, he starts to rant about how much he hates the Chinks and the Commies, and how he can't wait to tell them that he’d like to drop a bomb on them all. The President and the Secretary of State exchange glances and, realising that Smurch will always be a diplomatic timebomb waiting to explode, the President nods and the Secretary of State calmly pushes Smurch out of an open eighteenth storey window. I wonder if Mr. Mc remembered this scene when he did exactly the same thing to somebody else in 'Braveheart'?

From a story by American satirist James Thurber, ‘The Greatest Man In The World’ is a bitumen black comedy that benefits enormously from a careful, considered turn from Donald Pleasence and a scenery chewing tour de force of infuriation from McGoohan that you really have to see for yourself --

Armchair Theatre: Red Riding Hood

In retaliation to critics who sneered at commercial television for its crassness and vulgarity, ITV created Armchair Theatre, a series employing the best writers, directors and actors Britain had to offer, presenting an eclectic mix of classic plays and new works for television. The series quickly became a flagship show, and ran between 1957 and 1974. On occasion, audiences hit twenty million, which is quite incredible.

The early shows were performed live, with all the problems that can bring (in a 1958 show, an actor died during transmission and the rest of the cast, who thought he had simply been taken ill, had to work around it: ‘Well, if John were here, I bet he’d say…’). At first, the shows were simply ‘filmed plays’, static, from a single view point. Over time, however, the series developed a more fluid style, re-writing the technical and artistic conventions of TV drama as they went along.

As you might expect of landmark telly, many of the episodes have been wiped, but the good news is that there are still a fair few kicking about, so let’s count our blessings. The wonderful thing about the series was its variety: you never knew what you were going to get, and what it was going to be like, but you could be sure it would be worth watching.

Red Riding Hood is an ‘Armchair Theatre’ production from 1973 starring Rita Tushingham and Keith Barron. It’s a strange and compelling drama about Grace, an unhappy young woman whose life is made a misery by loneliness and debt and trying to juggle the demands of two elderly bedridden relatives (her whining father and her nasty grandmother) and an unfulfilling job in a library. With all this going on, she has become drab and lifeless, a person without pleasures or desires of her own. Oh, and she wears a natty red cape and caries a wicker basket.

Henry has seen Grace at the library, but they have never spoken. In order to meet and get to know her, he beats her grandmother to death with her walking stick and waits in her house for Grace to visit. When she does, he asks her to stay with him for a fortnight while her grandmother is ‘away’ – two weeks of total freedom, away from work and the world and all the drudgery of her everyday life. She readily agrees, and they spend their time getting drunk, eating spaghetti, tickling each other and (I assume) having sex. In the meantime, Grace’s pathetic Dad is starving to death, which is terrible but then he is really annoying.  

Grace is nowhere as naïve as she seems: she suspects that Henry has done away with her grandmother and soon discovers the evidence. Interestingly, she doesn’t care: granny was a nasty old bag anyway.

At the end of the two weeks, things get unusual, and it becomes impossible to distinguish between the real and the imagined. It is unclear how much of what has happened has merely been Grace’s fantasy but, in any event, the pressure eventually drives her out of her mind.

‘Red Riding Hood’ was written by John Peacock, an interesting author who was also responsible for ‘The Smashing Bird I Used To Know’ and ‘Straight On ‘til Morning’, a 1972 Hammer film that covered similar ground (a love affair informed by mental health issues), and also starred Rita Tushingham. Rita is great in roles like this, sinister in her wide eyed but overgrown innocence: childlike, but manipulative and capable of spite. In the screengrabs it may look like she's giving a rather broad performance: all funny faces and over-acting, but that's just not the case - her face is incredibly fluid and full of expression, it just looks odd when you pause it and take a snapshot. When she flips, and flip does she flip, her total immersion is quite amazing - and extremely harrowing.

Keith Barron has less to do apart from look creepy, but he does this superlatively well: he has a blank, dead waxiness that is perfect for someone who may or may not exist. There is a great scene where he is playing the piano (a selection from ‘Peter & The Wolf’, of course) and looks down to see that he has smeared blood all over the keyboard. After checking that it is not his blood, he simply rubs his hands and carries on playing.

A genuinely powerful piece of drama, ‘Red Riding Hood’ is compelling and enigmatic and really very good indeed. The pieces don’t necessarily all make sense when you replay them in your mind, but it doesn’t matter: the overall effect is haunting.