They Smile In Your Face...

...and all the time they wanna take your place.

No, I'm not talking about the Backstabbers, although the O'Jays lay down the most infectious of grooves, so much so that I wind up singing their song whenever I pop a DVD of The Sandbaggers into my player. Family members know I'll sing anything at any occasion. Pity Kathy.

No, The Sandbaggers is a terrific British TV show from the late 70s and early 80s about Britain's Special Operations Unit, led by blunt, anti-charismatic Neil Burnside (played by Roy Marsden). It was created by Ian MacIntosh, a Royal Navy lieutenant-commander who possibly was in the british secret service. Sadly, he is presumed dead after an 1979 airplane accident as season 3 was shooting. The series ended after that. (I'm still watching Season 2, so don't tell me what happens next!)

I first heard about The Sandbaggers in interviews with Greg Rucka, author of Queen and Country, an excellent graphic novel spy series published by Oni Press (and his Atticus Kodiak novels are even better, in my opinion). Sandbaggers is one of the rare tv shows that Kathy & I don't watch together. It's dry as sandpaper -- too much of it is heated conversations in London offices, and not enough spy derring-do to suit her tastes, I guess. But I love it, possibly for the same reason I love prison movies. Burnside is obviously working within an extremely structured system. He's pressured by his bosses, by the crown, and by the various foreign stations to which he sends his three (ideally...he usually only has two) operatives, called sandbaggers. Plus, he's pressured by the enemy (either terrorists or the KGB) and even the CIA, with whom British intelligence has a "special relationship" which no one wants to jeopardize, even if the two agencies might be at odds now and then. Just like a prison movie, I like to see what Burnside can do to fight the system from within it. How can he do what he needs to while he's jumping through all those hoops?

Another way of looking at it is a combination of 24 and The West Wing. It's not just a successful mission that's important, but a success that's politically successful as well. It can be immensely frustrating -- Burnside doesn't always win, and he sometimes sabotages himself with his own acrid personality. But if it grips you -- and Kathy's reaction tells me that that might be a crapshoot -- if it grips you, it carries you right along on its tense, obsessive journey.

Rob