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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.