Tinker, tailor, soldier, Sandbagger: sometimes TV from the 70s holds up

From watching The Sandbaggers, I have come to appreciate two things. The first is Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade’s ode to bad British genre TV from the 70s is hilarious even if you don’t know bad British genre TV from the 70s. What else would it be with Holness, Ayoade, the incomparable Matt Berry, and the even more incomparable Alice Lowe? But now that I’ve seen Sandbaggers, which has the same style, tone, and production values that Darkplace lovingly mocked, I get the joke even better. So this is what it was like to watch TV in the UK! But then there’s the second thing I’ve come to appreciate.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/08/27/tinker-tailor-soldier-sandbagger-sometimes-tv-70s-holds/

I was really surprised to see this show up on Hacker News top page tonight. I guess older UK programmers were into it, or something.

Direct quote from the comments there:

BTW, I really liked how this article was written.

nice.

Freudian typo:

I’d never heart of Marsden before

If you fancy something grim and cynical but from the 90s, try Between the Lines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Lines_(TV_series)

Absolutely. It’s a masterpiece. And now I have to watch The Sandbaggers, it seems. Luckily, it’s on Cinema Paradiso, so I’ll have a chance when I switch over from LoveFilm.

I am also pleasantly surprised - arrived at work this morning to still see it on the front page - the streams are crossing!

As the best fictional TV of all time (I, Cladius) is from the '70s, I would certainly say sometimes TV from the 70s hold up. Also throw in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Elizabeth R, and add the actual Tinker Tailor despite its coming in after the closing gate at 1980.

Also, one of the funniest bits of comedy ever broadcast was on that by-the-numbers network sitcom Taxi, for what it’s worth.

I know we’re living in an astonishing golden age of television and all that, but it wasn’t all terrible back in the day.

There is a comic book called Queen and Country, by Greg Rucka, which pays direct homage to this show. I thought the comic was more a blatant rip off with no credit given to the original writers but that’s just semantics I suppose.

Rucka specifically cites Sandbaggers as his primary influence so I don’t know about “no credit”.

He wrote a couple of Queen and Country novels as well.

Excellent. Glad you liked it Tom! It is one of those rare shows as you say that can be discovered today and still holds up.

The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger. Like, there’s obviously meant to be something after it, but it’s not a “big dramatic reveal–Now how will our heroes react? Tune in next year!” sort of deal. All the decisions get made and we know what happens, we just don’t see what the fallout is.

I would really encourage you to keep watching if you enjoyed the first season, Tom. The Dickens/Burnside romance really is probably the weakest material in the show, and you’re past that.

Plus there’s some hilarious production values, too: they got to do a location shoot! Somebody paid to fly them to Malta! So guess what? Malta is suddenly a hotbed of international intrigue, with IIRC three episodes having scenes there.

Is this Darkplace show on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu? You piqued my interest when you mentioned Ayoade-- isn’t he one of the dudes on The IT Crowd?

Oh, I’ll definitely stick with it. I’ve actually got an embarrassment of riches in terms of TV, including more Sandbaggers and The Wire. I’m more jazzed about that stuff than, say, Game of Thrones or even Rick and Morty.

I was so hoping there was some sort of long con there. Like maybe she was a double agent or he was manipulating her to test her resolve to be a sandbagger or something. Anything! Anything other than what it turned out to be. He orders a photo of her from HR, gets it blown up into an 8x10, and frames it in his apartment? Ick.

How about Youtube? Enjoy!

No, not at all! He’s Dean Lerner from Darkplace. That he also happens to be in IT Crowd show is immaterial. :)

-Tom

Did you just call Taxi—the James L. Brooks sitcom that starred Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Andy Kaufman, and won 18 Emmys—“by-the-numbers”?

Fucking millennials.

It was a concession to the ‘all sitcoms are bad’ mentality I see floating around here sometimes.

I’m a Gen Xer and I have the childhood memories of Mr. Belvedere to prove it!

C’mon though, that was a paycheck gig for him.

Some sitcoms are freaking brilliant, Taxi, Cheers and Frasier among them. Comparing them to tripe like Hope and Faith is hipster bullshit posturing.

And Barney Miller, before those.

Coming at this from a really Doylist perspective, I think the show doesn’t have the tools for some of what it’s maybe kinda trying to suggest there? Like, I think they’re supposed to have had lots of off-screen time to actually maybe… talk about shit? And the timeframes suggested between episodes do allow for that, certainly… But the show doesn’t have a vocabulary for “and now we’re going to have an establishing shot to let the viewer know that, in contrast to last ep’s drunken hookup, A has now spent enough time at B’s apartment to have a drawer for his clothes.” If we’re extremely charitable, the 8x10 thing is maybe blindly groping towards that vocabulary: it’s a callback to Laura’s first visit to Castle Burnside and the picture of his ex-wife, and if there were other clues to establish that this was a mutual intimacy rather than just Burnside taking liberties, it might read as a cute surprise. (At least the show does make a point of informing us that Laura’s interested in Burnside beforehand.)

It makes me really wonder about Belinda Wellingham: here’s a woman who married Burnside (fair enough, they seem to have married fairly young, possibly while he was still in the Royal Marines: he was smart, talented, and yes, ambitious already, but he hadn’t discarded every human scruple to complete his metamorphosis into the Ogre of SIS), had the good sense to divorce him, and now… WANTS HIM BACK? WHAT? Why on earth would you want to get Neil Burnside back in your life?

And just because we’re mocking the production values, I do have to call out one area they did quite well in: The countryside scenes are pretty bad, very much on par with a lot of TOS Star Trek “ah, here we are on Alpha Quarrius IV, Bluefilter Quadrant” scenes. But the city stuff is often very good. They managed to find spots (apparently mostly in Leeds) that felt very Iron-Curtainy, and others that worked for Vienna and so forth.