The Sandbaggers - Series 3 [DVD]

The twenty episodes of THE SANDBAGGERS, first broadcast on British TV in 1978 and 1980, recalls a time when the Cold War was still hot and the West's enemy at least had a national identity, the Soviet Evil Empire, rather than being an amorphous, anonymous, scattered and stateless conglomeration of terrorists that are next to impossible to confront. (At least we knew where to draw battle lines against the Red Army and Navy. Ah, those were the Good Ol' Days, in retrospect.) In any case, the Cold War warrior here is Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden), the Director of Operations for MI6 at its London HQ. Neil oversees a group of specialists, the Sandbaggers, who're available to fly to the world's trouble spots and counter the wicked designs of the KGB and their puppet spy agencies of the Warsaw Pact. The scripted action, however, usually unfolds in the bureaucratic labyrinths of Whitehall where Neil must guard his and his department's backs against the foolish politicians of Her Majesty's Government and the machinations of allied American, French, and West German intelligence services.

This last series disc of THE SANDBAGGERS is perhaps my favorite because it includes my very favorite episode, number 16 ("Unusual Approach"). In it, Burnside must personally chaperone his boss, SIS Deputy Director Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis), and Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan MacNaughten), to a conference in Rhodes. Both Peele and Wellingham are series regulars, but are rarely all in the same room together with Burnside. There's an element of humor as Peele's penchant for sightseeing old ruins and whatnot drives the urbane Wellingham nuts, a state of affairs that almost forces a grin out of the usually stone-faced Burnside as he observes Sir Geoffrey's discomfiture. Concurrently, Neil toys with a supposed-KGB female agent presumably trying to catch him in a honey trap. In the meantime, Neil's colleague in the CIA's London office, Jeff Ross (Bob Sherman), contrives to manipulate the Sandbaggers during Burnside's absence by approaching Sandbagger One, Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen), who's Acting D-OPS, with a request that Sandbagger Two, Mike Wallace (Michael Cashman), infiltrate across the border into the U.S.S.R. to rescue a wounded CIA operative. But Ross has a Machiavellian plan of his own brewing.

Perhaps the least appealing on Disc 3 is number 17, "My Name Is Anna Wiseman", in which Burnside inveigles to place an SIS deep cover agent, Anna Wiseman (Carol Gillies), into the Soviet Union so she can make a human rights statement. Burnside? Human rights advocate? Oh, puhleeze! That's like expecting Eastwood's Dirty Harry to espouse suspects' rights under the Miranda Ruling. This episode seemed to me the most artificially contrived of the entire twenty.

I've not given any of the three series discs 5 stars because their episodes are not uniformly outstanding. But Burnside deserves 5 stars for being consistently watchable. He's devious, insubordinate, antisocial, chauvinistic, bad-tempered, and arrogant. But he's also clever, extremely capable, perceptive, intensely loyal to his subordinates, and the biggest fictional nemesis the KGB ever had. He's both hero and antihero, and someone the viewer can love and hate at the same time. I shall miss him immensely, especially as the miniseries ended so abruptly with so many questions unanswered and avenues unexplored.