from the Professionals thread:
Yeah, I rewatched series 1 and 2 of The Sandbaggers before Christmas (I'd only seen them about two and a half years ago, but they reward repeated viewing) and I'll be starting on series 3 again once I've got CI5 out of my system.
It has dated in the sense that its televisual grammar is from another age, and technically it's very primitive too - while The Professionals was shot entirely on film and on location, and is obviously trying as hard as it can to look like a feature film, The Sandbaggers is mostly studio-bound, multi-camera, shot on unforgiving 70s videotape (like so many of the greats). Most of the location shooting - apart from the London scenes - was done in Bradford and Leeds, which can double quite convincingly as the Eastern Bloc, less so Cyprus or the USA.
Its scripting, pacing and rather stagey feel are very old-fashioned too, and thank God for that. There's none of the look-at-me crap you get with even the best British dramas these days, no attempt to hurry everything along to the detriment of atmosphere and tension, no assumptions that the audience are thick, or are sitting there with fingers twitching on the remote. It travels at its own pace, is resolutely grim and cynical, and makes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy look like fuckin' Octopussy.
And you remember right: it's fantastically well-acted, fantastically well-scripted, and while obviously more dramatic than it is realistic, it's rarely less than 100% convincing - the details of how the secret service actually works are spot-on by all accounts, which isn't surprising considering the bloke who wrote it was almost certainly a spook himself. In fact, series 2 is an episode shorter than the others because one script was found to have broken the Official Secrets Act, and the episode had to be pulled.
It's amazing, anyway, and everyone I know who likes old telly has fallen head over heels for it after just one episode. Me and delicatemoth were watching a couple of Pros episodes the other week, chuckling and chuntering all the way through, then we stuck on a Sandbaggers (not one of the more eventful episodes, and we'd both seen it in the last couple of years) and it was only when the "End Of Part One" slide came up that we realised we'd been sitting there in near-total silence for twenty minutes.
Roy Marsden as Burnside is just so fucking incredibly good you don't want to miss a second of him (the glacially-slow development of his character - very much in the wrong direction - is extremely well done too). The actual Sandbaggers, the crack MI6 agents, tend to have this weirdly stilted clubbability with a kind of deadness underneath; it makes sense that Willie Caine is the one we really get to know, since he's the one who vaguely resembles a properly-functioning human being, reacting to successive traumas with a growing restlessness he just about keeps in check. But there's something weirdly disconnected about Willie too, seen most clearly at the beginning of the second episode of series 2, in a scene I can't describe without spoilering the fuck out of the first episode of series 2 (which you really don't want, because it's stunning and best watched when you're unprepared).
It's brilliant at communicating the strangeness of these people's jobs, long periods filled with nothing but paperwork and interdepartmental intrigue punctuated with brief moments of intense danger and extreme violence. By the end, those scenes in the Ops Room with everyone swilling coffee and puffing a million billion fags with their sleeves rolled up - talking, talking, talking - are almost a cliche, but what's actually being said is so gripping at all times that you don't dare laugh or roll your eyes.
Also - as Purves Grundy, formerly of this parish, rightly loves to point out - the early episodes have the most fantastic fuck-you opening sequences for anyone expecting a conventional spy drama. The very first episode begins like this: we see Roy Marsden/Burnside walking through London. He stops at a shop window and pretends to look in it; turning back, his eyes follow whatever he was looking at until it disappears, and then he walks on. Cut to a shot of him striding down Whitehall, turning into a dingy sidestreet and entering a gloomy-looking office block. He storms into his office - a tiny room painted battleship grey, full of filing cabinets - and picks up an enormous telephone. He pushes a button, and two and a half minutes into the episode we hear the first line: "Micky? Neil. Am I on a random surveillance check? Yes, well tell them they're not very good. Front tail's old hat, couldn't miss him." He listens for a moment, then purses his lips tartly. "Mm," he says, and puts down the phone.
You sense at this point - long before the magnificent monologue at the end of the episode, where Burnside lays into the gung-ho secret service chief from Norway who's put British agents in danger, hissing at him that the Cold War isn't fought on the end of parachutes but in drab, dreary corridors - this is a different kind of series altogether.
In case you were in any doubt, episode two begins with a very slow pan across London rooftops and down into the street, where Burnside is leaving his flat on a bleak wintry day. The camera follows him walking for a while, hunched over and carrying a briefcase with a glazed expression on his face. Finally he reaches a bus stop, but his bus is just pulling away - he stands in the queue, shuffles his feet, exhales, looks around several times for another bus, then finally one comes round the corner. A montage shows him boarding the bus, the bus door closing, the wheels turning... then finally, it pulls up in Whitehall. Burnside gets off and quickens his step down the dingy sidestreet, into the gloomy-looking office block. He barges into his office, strides past his secretary without looking at her and slams his briefcase down on his desk. And then, three minutes into the episode, we hear the first line: "It gets worse and worse every morning," he says.
Just buy the complete boxed set from Network DVD (though you may be able to find it cheaper than that elsewhere - I did). It's one of the best television programmes I've ever seen in my life, and I can't imagine how anyone (with a tolerance for serious, stagey TV drama of the old school) could be anything other than thrilled by it.
Just don't watch them out of sequence, because it's got what they'd now call a story arc, and you really don't want to spoiler yourself.
Tony C wrote: Taylor, are you actually watching old 'Sandbaggers' episodes at the moment, too? You've referred to the show a couple of times.
From memory, I recall 'Sandbaggers' as being pretty good - well acted, authentic looking scripts (well, as far as I could tell, I haven't a bloody clue what goes on in the security services) and smart-ish dialogue. I remember being genuinely rivetted by it as opposed to simply laughing at 'The Professionals".
I wouldn't mind buying some old 'Sandbaggers' boxsets - although they may have aged badly.
From memory, I recall 'Sandbaggers' as being pretty good - well acted, authentic looking scripts (well, as far as I could tell, I haven't a bloody clue what goes on in the security services) and smart-ish dialogue. I remember being genuinely rivetted by it as opposed to simply laughing at 'The Professionals".
I wouldn't mind buying some old 'Sandbaggers' boxsets - although they may have aged badly.
It has dated in the sense that its televisual grammar is from another age, and technically it's very primitive too - while The Professionals was shot entirely on film and on location, and is obviously trying as hard as it can to look like a feature film, The Sandbaggers is mostly studio-bound, multi-camera, shot on unforgiving 70s videotape (like so many of the greats). Most of the location shooting - apart from the London scenes - was done in Bradford and Leeds, which can double quite convincingly as the Eastern Bloc, less so Cyprus or the USA.
Its scripting, pacing and rather stagey feel are very old-fashioned too, and thank God for that. There's none of the look-at-me crap you get with even the best British dramas these days, no attempt to hurry everything along to the detriment of atmosphere and tension, no assumptions that the audience are thick, or are sitting there with fingers twitching on the remote. It travels at its own pace, is resolutely grim and cynical, and makes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy look like fuckin' Octopussy.
And you remember right: it's fantastically well-acted, fantastically well-scripted, and while obviously more dramatic than it is realistic, it's rarely less than 100% convincing - the details of how the secret service actually works are spot-on by all accounts, which isn't surprising considering the bloke who wrote it was almost certainly a spook himself. In fact, series 2 is an episode shorter than the others because one script was found to have broken the Official Secrets Act, and the episode had to be pulled.
It's amazing, anyway, and everyone I know who likes old telly has fallen head over heels for it after just one episode. Me and delicatemoth were watching a couple of Pros episodes the other week, chuckling and chuntering all the way through, then we stuck on a Sandbaggers (not one of the more eventful episodes, and we'd both seen it in the last couple of years) and it was only when the "End Of Part One" slide came up that we realised we'd been sitting there in near-total silence for twenty minutes.
Roy Marsden as Burnside is just so fucking incredibly good you don't want to miss a second of him (the glacially-slow development of his character - very much in the wrong direction - is extremely well done too). The actual Sandbaggers, the crack MI6 agents, tend to have this weirdly stilted clubbability with a kind of deadness underneath; it makes sense that Willie Caine is the one we really get to know, since he's the one who vaguely resembles a properly-functioning human being, reacting to successive traumas with a growing restlessness he just about keeps in check. But there's something weirdly disconnected about Willie too, seen most clearly at the beginning of the second episode of series 2, in a scene I can't describe without spoilering the fuck out of the first episode of series 2 (which you really don't want, because it's stunning and best watched when you're unprepared).
It's brilliant at communicating the strangeness of these people's jobs, long periods filled with nothing but paperwork and interdepartmental intrigue punctuated with brief moments of intense danger and extreme violence. By the end, those scenes in the Ops Room with everyone swilling coffee and puffing a million billion fags with their sleeves rolled up - talking, talking, talking - are almost a cliche, but what's actually being said is so gripping at all times that you don't dare laugh or roll your eyes.
Also - as Purves Grundy, formerly of this parish, rightly loves to point out - the early episodes have the most fantastic fuck-you opening sequences for anyone expecting a conventional spy drama. The very first episode begins like this: we see Roy Marsden/Burnside walking through London. He stops at a shop window and pretends to look in it; turning back, his eyes follow whatever he was looking at until it disappears, and then he walks on. Cut to a shot of him striding down Whitehall, turning into a dingy sidestreet and entering a gloomy-looking office block. He storms into his office - a tiny room painted battleship grey, full of filing cabinets - and picks up an enormous telephone. He pushes a button, and two and a half minutes into the episode we hear the first line: "Micky? Neil. Am I on a random surveillance check? Yes, well tell them they're not very good. Front tail's old hat, couldn't miss him." He listens for a moment, then purses his lips tartly. "Mm," he says, and puts down the phone.
You sense at this point - long before the magnificent monologue at the end of the episode, where Burnside lays into the gung-ho secret service chief from Norway who's put British agents in danger, hissing at him that the Cold War isn't fought on the end of parachutes but in drab, dreary corridors - this is a different kind of series altogether.
In case you were in any doubt, episode two begins with a very slow pan across London rooftops and down into the street, where Burnside is leaving his flat on a bleak wintry day. The camera follows him walking for a while, hunched over and carrying a briefcase with a glazed expression on his face. Finally he reaches a bus stop, but his bus is just pulling away - he stands in the queue, shuffles his feet, exhales, looks around several times for another bus, then finally one comes round the corner. A montage shows him boarding the bus, the bus door closing, the wheels turning... then finally, it pulls up in Whitehall. Burnside gets off and quickens his step down the dingy sidestreet, into the gloomy-looking office block. He barges into his office, strides past his secretary without looking at her and slams his briefcase down on his desk. And then, three minutes into the episode, we hear the first line: "It gets worse and worse every morning," he says.
Just buy the complete boxed set from Network DVD (though you may be able to find it cheaper than that elsewhere - I did). It's one of the best television programmes I've ever seen in my life, and I can't imagine how anyone (with a tolerance for serious, stagey TV drama of the old school) could be anything other than thrilled by it.
Just don't watch them out of sequence, because it's got what they'd now call a story arc, and you really don't want to spoiler yourself.
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