The Sandbaggers.
Feb. 10th, 2011 09:04![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyThe Sandbaggers (BBC). Written by Ian Mackintosh, starring Roy Marsden.
I don't quite remember how![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swan_tower sold me on this series, but she did, and it's as awesome as she said.
The Sandbaggers is set at the tail end of the 1970s and follows Neal Burnside, the Director of Operations of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, i.e. MI-6, and in particular follows his dealings with the three-man (later three-person) section known informally as "the Sandbaggers," whose job it is to go in over, under, and around the lines of the Cold War and get the hard jobs done, or pay a considerable price trying. Burnside used to be Sandbagger One, and remains acutely sensitive to the safety of his Sandbaggers, but he's also acutely aware that SIS is financially dependent on the C.I.A. such that any breach in the "special relationship" that unites them would have potentially devastating consequences. As you might imagine, this is the kind of show where, having established both those facts, Burnside and the Sandbaggers are immediately caught between them.
It's interesting to watch this show and compare it to the spate of more recent spy shows--even the good ones like Covert Affairs are firmly convinced that half the attraction is the so-called "wetwork," the covert ops in the field that involve danger, glamour, and gunplay. Mackintosh, whom speculation says was an intelligence officer himself, is far more focused on the office politics that determine whether fieldwork is carried out and by whom, and on the characters; it's rare, furthermore, for Sandbaggers to go armed in the field. Despite this, it's as tense and dramatic a show as any, particularly the last three episodes of the first series, which, yeah. One of my favorite things in narrative is for the writer to lay out a fairly complex plot and then, with that dreadful inevitability of clockwork, have things shift so that the ending becomes unavoidable, and Mackintosh does that. I was reminded just a bit of the sadly canceled Rubicon.
The characters hold up their end, too; Burnside in particular is a magnificent character, a horrible guy, and someone who's sympathetic without ever actually being likable. Everyone in the series is overworked, underpaid, and tortured over what they do, despite and because they're the best at what they do; in the end, they show just how cold the Cold War was, even when it got hot, and the horrible costs a war waged in the shadows--one with no battles, no victories, only casualties--exacts.
ide_cyan just discussed the series from a slightly different perspective.
I don't quite remember how
swan_tower sold me on this series, but she did, and it's as awesome as she said. The Sandbaggers is set at the tail end of the 1970s and follows Neal Burnside, the Director of Operations of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, i.e. MI-6, and in particular follows his dealings with the three-man (later three-person) section known informally as "the Sandbaggers," whose job it is to go in over, under, and around the lines of the Cold War and get the hard jobs done, or pay a considerable price trying. Burnside used to be Sandbagger One, and remains acutely sensitive to the safety of his Sandbaggers, but he's also acutely aware that SIS is financially dependent on the C.I.A. such that any breach in the "special relationship" that unites them would have potentially devastating consequences. As you might imagine, this is the kind of show where, having established both those facts, Burnside and the Sandbaggers are immediately caught between them.
It's interesting to watch this show and compare it to the spate of more recent spy shows--even the good ones like Covert Affairs are firmly convinced that half the attraction is the so-called "wetwork," the covert ops in the field that involve danger, glamour, and gunplay. Mackintosh, whom speculation says was an intelligence officer himself, is far more focused on the office politics that determine whether fieldwork is carried out and by whom, and on the characters; it's rare, furthermore, for Sandbaggers to go armed in the field. Despite this, it's as tense and dramatic a show as any, particularly the last three episodes of the first series, which, yeah. One of my favorite things in narrative is for the writer to lay out a fairly complex plot and then, with that dreadful inevitability of clockwork, have things shift so that the ending becomes unavoidable, and Mackintosh does that. I was reminded just a bit of the sadly canceled Rubicon.
The characters hold up their end, too; Burnside in particular is a magnificent character, a horrible guy, and someone who's sympathetic without ever actually being likable. Everyone in the series is overworked, underpaid, and tortured over what they do, despite and because they're the best at what they do; in the end, they show just how cold the Cold War was, even when it got hot, and the horrible costs a war waged in the shadows--one with no battles, no victories, only casualties--exacts.
ide_cyan just discussed the series from a slightly different perspective.