Pr1.2

TEN THINGS I NOTICED ABOUT...

SYNOPSIS:

An international hit man comes to the UK to kill Cowley.

001: The late Roger Lloyd-Pack is a poor choice to play Ramos, the super-cool international playboy assassin who is the 'very, very best', especially as he dresses like a cross between Jimmy Savile and Roy Orbison. Like all maniacs, Ramos often talks about himself in the third person, which somehow seems appropriately dissociative as Lloyd-Pack's voice is clearly dubbed.

002: Ramos is wearing a pair of those bloody glasses from the last episode. They look awful, but were obviously cheap in bulk. I would imagine that dark glasses would be a potential nightmare for a hired killer, bearing in mind that they have to keep all of their senses on a state of high alert at all times. These don't even look cool.

003: While we're talking about the last episode, here's that prison set in its natural state, i.e. not a prison but a gym / squash court with a female operative doing Kung Fu in it. The lads look good though, don't they? Doyle doesn't wear socks, you know, which doesn't make me like him any more than I already do.

004: Bodie is off the chain in this story: grimacing, gurning, hamming it up like mad. Lewis Collins takes what's on the scripted page and enhances every single word and nuance with every last little fibre of character in his beefy body. He's a hoot. Later on, he interrogates a millionaire and uses a really rich, fruity actorly voice for no particular reason other than it clearly amuses him.   

005: Ramos hides in the bushes and watches Bodie and Doyle as they mess about in a surveillance tower pretending to be Cowboys in a fort. I do hope he's kept the receipt from 'Scientific & Technical', however, as the magnification and clarity of his enormous and obviously very expensive binoculars is woeful. 

006: Cowley hates rats, but knows enough about them to know that this one has had its neck broken.

007: Ramos keeps a vital hostage in the most unsecure place imaginable, a block of half-demolished flats in London. I mean almost anyone could come along - kids, builders, a passing Bobby on the beat, maybe even a Beefeater. It's also full of jagged surfaces and looks really easy to get out of - if his hostage wasn't so set on lying around feeling sorry for herself she could have cut through her bonds on some broken glass and been home for tea days ago. Still, it's all ultimately worth it for the rather touching sight of a rueful looking wrecking ball.  

008: CI5 are assigned to protect the US Secretary of State, Dr. Harbinger (it's little things like this that make the programme look daft, you know), so when Harbinger (played by our favourite Yank in the UK, Ed Bishop) wants to go for a run, Bodie and Doyle accompany him in matching sportswear. This leads to some great shots of the trackie triplets jogging through the countryside looking very much like part of the all conquering seventies Liverpool team on a training run. Doyle even has Terry McDermott's haircut.  

Just as they are coming in for a shower and a much needed change of clothes, Ramos strikes. He fails, but Bodie and Doyle are left to chase after him still wearing those awful fucking tracksuits, reminding me of a time when I saw two blokes dressed as the 118-118 guys chasing down a student who had made one too many sarcastic remarks. Ramos gets away, so Bodie and Doyle do their angry faces. Don't worry, lads, you'll get him later. Sort of.

009: In order to get into CI5 HQ, Ramos gets his associate to knock on the door in the pretence of looking for directions, then ruthlessly guns his pal and the answering agent down. I was struck by the poignancy of these two complete strangers (and enemies) dying in each others arms. It's tough stuff, this international espionage and murder business, you know - you take love where you can get it, I suppose. 

010: Finally, there is a scene where Gordon Jackson is wearing just a towel. Even though I really wanted to, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen, especially when he started walking around the office on his surprisingly large feet. All I could do was pray that the towel would hold and hope nothing stirred.

Pr1.1

TEN THINGS I NOTICED ABOUT...

SYNOPSIS: 

An East End gangster plots to kidnap the Home Secretary so the authorities will release his incarcerated twin brother. 

001: The prison location is clearly a gym or a squash court. You can see the lines.

002: The Geometry of the Gun. Shooters feature heavily in 'The Professionals' angry, dangerous world. A recurring motif is an unusual camera angle that emphasises the phallic dominance of the weapon and the imposing danger of the armed man (or woman - but mostly men) - as well as the submissive, degraded nature of the victim.  

003: Actor Johnny Shannon essays his usual cockney psycho gangster role, but his performance is fatally undermined by three things: his voice is dubbed; he is wearing a floppy fringed wig and, most damagingly of all, he is given a really shitty sit on mower to drive about.   

004: CI5 are constantly breaking the speed limit, whether they need to or not. They're a menace. In this episode, whilst simply returning to the office from an abandoned warehouse, they screech off at the speed of stupid, blowing a load of dust around and, ultimately, engulfing a couple of uniformed police officers in a great cloud of crap. Bastards!

005: Veteran character actor Basil Hoskins is given stupid asymmetric upside down looking glasses to wear as part of his characterisation as a psychiatrist. In 1985, Dennis Taylor will win the World Snooker Championship in a pair of specially designed sports spectacles that approximate these oddities, but that is eight years away. In 1977, these are just baffling, especially when Bodie puts them on.  

006: It's an obvious comment, perhaps, but how camp is Bodie? He's part killing machine, part pantomime dame. He reminds me of blokes I used to work with in the building trade: strong as oxen, hard as hammers, camp as a row of tents - as if they were so obviously heterosexual, it seemed ridiculous not to try and have a bit of fun with gender stereotypes. Bodie was always my favourite. In this episode he also makes a Samuel Beckett reference and gives a young and gormless Phil Davies (see above) a few pointers on the opposite sex: "All girls are nice girls, as long as they're under 50 and come across".  

007: Two pivotal plot points revolve around members of CI5 endangering lives by randomly impersonating people who they do not resemble in the slightest. 

008: When it becomes apparent that Cowley is going to have to pretend to be the Home Secretary and Bodie his bodyguard, Bodie is sent to find a tailor's shop, buy a suit, shirt, shoes and tie, change into it and return ready for action in ten minutes. In a quiet suburb of Windsor. It's simply not feasible. Believe me, I know - been there, only got a tee shirt. 

009: Fresh from the shitty sit on mower fiasco, Shannon also turns out to be a criminal idiot as his plan goes awry almost immediately and he is panicked into pop eyed hysteria and then rendered almost catatonic by a few seconds of dissonant music and the sight of Doyle holding his brother at gun point in front of a 'Mr. Chippy'. Oh, and Cowley tells him that CI5 make the law, so are quite prepared to kill every last one of them, bury their bodies in a hole and say it never happened and, if someone cared enough to prove it did happen, CI5 would just say they had it coming. As Bodie says questioningly when Cowley tells him he 'broke all the rules': "Rules, Sir?".

Here's that submissive / degraded - gun / cock in face pose again.

010: To finish: not exactly breaking news, but - 'The Professionals' is BRILLIANT!

Pr1.0

The first series of 'The Professionals' has a different title sequence to the later ones, presenting us with forty seconds of frantic action which immediately plunges us into the bonkers, balls out world of CI5. 

A Rolls Royce (!) roars up to a warehouse and five men jump out. One (Cowley, of course) is noisily directing the action and timing it all. The other four men run at full pelt into the building where two of them (Bodie and Doyle) proceed to kick the shit out of a load of hanging targets and the odd actual person. Bodie gets hit over the head with a chair - he couldn't care less. They're pretty out of control, really. In a couple of early episodes, this sequence is accompanied by a voice over in which Cowley loudly declaims CI5's raison d'etre / raison d'etat:

"Anarchy! Acts of terror! Crimes against the public! 

To combat it, I've got special men: 

experts from the army, police, every service. 

These are THE PROFESSIONALS!'

The four men (we never find out who the other two are, by the way) then climb a cargo net before dropping to the other side - Bodie throws a knife, although it's not clear what he throws it at. They then slide down a rope line, doing their war faces - they land, run, jump through some pretend French windows, roll and pull their guns out and start firing, although it's not clear what they are firing at. So far they've been in there for about twenty five seconds. 

Cowley shouts for them and they exit the building and pile back into the Rolls which immediately screams off at great speed as they are still closing the doors. It's totally and utterly preposterous. I wish my job entailed training days like that. But it doesn't. Ever. Sigh. See you Monday!

Professional Suicide

Like all perfectly respectable but slightly brain damaged men-children of a sixties / seventies origin I have recently taken possession of a digital versatile disc containing the first ever adventures of top government department CI5, also known as 'Criminal Intelligence, The Action Squad, The Big A or The Squad' but, oddly, never, ever as 'The Professionals’.

In a change from the usual shizzle, from Monday I will watch a Series 1 episode every other day (or thereabouts) and then post ten things I picked up from the experience. Yes, it is self-indulgent: that’s what weblogs are for, mate.

For a more comprehensive and less egocentric analysis, please do check out new blog Nobody Ever Wins which is shaping up to be The Big A.

Interesting Postcards

The Frogmore Shopping Centre,

Lovedean

Not so much a centre as a short parade, these three shops nevertheless can fulfil most of the Hampshire village of Lovedean's more pressing needs, as long as they need a loaf of bread, a paper or a perm. I like the lady emerging from the lane, love the flats above and if there's a better name for a retail operation than 'Mr. Butch', I've yet to hear it.

Regular readers might recognise this from a previous posting on my defunct weblog 'This Is Not The Universe'. Weirdly, this was the most popular thing to ever appear there, with an astounding 72,000 hits. I'm prety sure the internet must have been broken that day.

Oh, Norman!

Have you ever wondered what Norman Wisdom's arse looks like? Want to see him frugging and fugging along to a group called The Electric Banana (The Pretty Things) in a swinging nightclub called The Screaming Apple? Check. Want to see him dressed as Austin Powers? Check. Want to see him cop up with a promiscuous dolly bird half his age? Check. And you want to see all of this take place against a backdrop of swinging Southport? KER-CHING! 'What's Good For The Goose' has it all, and so much more besides.

Little Norman plays Timothy Bartlett, a London assistant bank manager who has a home in the suburbs, a wife, three kids and a tank full of tropical fish. He seems to like the fish best, perhaps because they're the most exotic thing in his life. When his boss dies suddenly, Timothy is expected to attend the annual conference at the Grand Hotel in Southport (it must be a fairly minor bank, there's only about ten of them there). Before he even gets there he has been accosted by two teenage hitch-hikers who spend the drive down messing about with his bowler hat, eating his sandwiches, licking his fingers and getting him done for speeding. He takes a shine to Nikki (Sally Geeson, in her film debut), especially when she shoves her bare leg inbetween his and pumps his accelerator.

When they get to Southport, they go their separate ways but Timothy finds himself thinking about Nikki throughout the day. In the evening, bored by the load of bankers he's supposed to be socialising with, he goes out to find her, eventually walking voluntarily into a psychedelic seaside world of free love, loud music, double whiskies and dancing like a monkey on a psychotropic banana diet. Little Norman looks so small and sweet and old as he jigs and jumps about, but then his most endearing qualities were always his total enthusiasm and the physical abandon he brought to every task. Nikki can't help but be impressed by Timothy's sudden dedication to the cause of 'in' and the fact that he has a hotel room rather than a sleeping bag under the pier, so she decides to go back with him and, after quite a lot of unfunny messing about, including a flash of the Wisdom pubes, they finally have sex. Probably: we don't see any of that, it's not quite that sort of film.

The following day, Norman claims to be ill so he can spend the day with Nikki. They do pretty much everything Southport has to offer, from amusement rides to having it off on the sands to skinny dipping (cue arse). The whole sequence seems to prove what I had surmised it would be like to have an affair with a much younger woman: exciting, but extremely tiring. Give me a woman who appreciates the value of a sit down and a nice cup of tea any day. Timothy thinks it's love, of course, and goes out and buys a load of mod gear and rents a flat for him and Nikki to live in, only for him to quickly realise that the free and easy attitude to sex that led her to sleep with him also means that she will sleep with others. Crushed, he calls his wife and asks her to join him.

When Mrs. Bartlett arrives he basically takes her through a whirlwind induction to what's happening, baby, kitting her out in hot pants and groovy sunglasses and doing all the things he did with Nikki (although the pants stay on during the swimming this time, which is a relief). His wife is, of course, pretty surprised at his behaviour but strangely unsuspicious. Timothy's a lot more fun this way, and Mrs. B scrubs up pretty well, so they're both happy. As they head home, it's clear that life will go on in much the same way for them, but with far more sex and a hipper wardrobe. Result!

'What's Good For the Goose' is a fairly harmless film, although a moderately more explicit version was released on (ulp) 'The Continent'. Much of its appeal, of course, depends on whether you like Norman Wisdom or not. Personally, I think he's great, although I prefer him with his kit on. Already playing against type as a banker, Norman goes fairly off piste here, although he does it in his usual guileless, gormless, 'gumpy' way. It takes him literally five minutes to decide to cheat on his wife, for instance, but he never comes across as immoral or self-serving - it's just Little Norman getting his end away and, as long as most of it is left to the imagination, who could object to that?*

* The British public objected to it. Norman didn't appear in another feature film for 21 years.

What's Good For The Goose



W Is For Wyngarde

Here’s a familiar face in a 1968 episode of ‘The Champions’, yes, well spotted, it’s Peter Wyngarde! Our Peter plays a roguish villain called Hallam and takes the opportunity to run the Wyngarde gamut: he prowls, he purrs, he dresses up, he has a comedy fight and pulls some faces. I usually find ‘The Champions’ a bit dull, but Peter - as ever- makes this episode a joy.

It's A Small World

Town Centre,
Model Village,
Babbacombe,
Torquay

I really like this high, wide shot showing the real life, full size human beings traipsing about. It gives you a very clear idea of the scale of the village (pretty big) and, if you are amused by that sort of thing, the lady right at the front looks like she's topless.