Fantastic!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's well made, scripted and acted, but one thing makes this "not just another Wartime drama".Most of these sorts of shows are black and white ; good guys versus evil Germans. Cheer when the Germans get shot/bombed/etc, and the heroes return home to their lives.In this show it's all shades of grey, and frequently black. The "heroes" do unpleasant things - right from the start - watch 1x02 and 1x05 - not just to the "bad guys" but to the "good guys". Maybe not unusual now, but really odd for the 1970s. Everyone makes compromises to survive in this show. This is not a show with a lot of happy endings, and indeed the final ending isn't happy either. Not quite Blake's Seven standard though, if you are thinking of watching it.The Germans - are also shades of grey. Brandt is conflicted and hugely flawed, but the best performance in the whole show goes to Clifford Rose's Kessler, who, once he gets into his stride manages to somehow make Kessler evil and human at the same time. Kessler comes over as a human being, albeit one totally committed to the Fuhrer, which actually makes him far more unnerving than the "classic" evil Nazi. When I first watched this as a kid Kessler scared the living daylights out of me.Reinhardt is just ... well , Reinhardt (watch it, you'll see what I mean).Highly recommended.

This brilliant series from the 70's is repeated on UKTVIt is set in the Second World War but is far from the stereotypical wartime drama.The heroes are flawed and the Germans shown in a more realistic light.The Kessler character could be seen by some as a trajectory,but can people who order mass murder at the drop of a hat be portrayed sympathetically?Both the Luftwaffe officers are shown to be ordinary people stuck in an extraordinary situation,and the contempt that Brandt has for his Gestapo superior is cleverly and subtlety done.This can only enhance or understanding of the psychology of the war. The plot revolves around "Lifeline" which is an evasion line for downed airmen run by Lisa who is scarred by the death of her parents and wants to defeat the Nazis.She is portrayed as ruthless and willing to take hard decisions for the greater good.An especially dark episode ends with the Candide owner,Albert,giving up two allied airmen to certain death in order to protect the line.This is brilliant,well thought out drama and very thought provoking.We can all look at the German people and say it couldn't happen here,or at the Occupied Countries and say we would have been in the Resistance.But Nazi domination was based on simple everyday slights to minorities that in themselves didn't seem OTT but produced an atmosphere of fear and the opportunity for ruthless or inadequate people to do their worst whilst people looked the other way or said "It's not my problem".Exactly the type of thing that allows (present tense) Sinn Fein/IRA to keep Nationalist areas under control.Six million don't die because the Nazi Elite thought it was a good idea.You have to make people complicit and feel big or at best make it so they are ambivalent to the fate of others or just plain scared.This drama is for me the best thing broadcast by the BBC ever.Dark,atmospheric,Pinteresque spring to mind.There is a myth that telly was better in the 70's.It wasn't.It was mostly terrible but with the odd absolute gem such as this.I fear these programmes would not be made today due to ratings which is the King.

After seeing Secret Army recently for the first time on UK Drama, I was blown away by it's brilliance. I had read lots about it, but never realised that the show was as impressive as it is.The characters are all very well drawn and the series views World War II from many angles. We don't only get to see the heroic and valiant efforts of the allies and resistance - the Germans, the Belgian police and ordinary citizens of the Low Countries are all represented, and more than anything else the series shows that the war affected different people in vastly differing ways. Nothing is black and white. Albert, our hero in the series, is a flawed hero: he can be greedy, dominating and possessive (Albert is a far cry from Hepton's role as a Nazi Commandant in Colditz, some years earlier). Major Brandt of the Luftwaffe is a German but not like Kessler, a Nazi. Brandt is simply a member of the armed forces who is only doing his job. Secret Army can be commended for not presenting the heroes and "villains" as mere stereotypes. Special mention must also go to Clifford Rose who play the head of the Gestapo in Belgium, Ludwig Kessler - the inspiration for Herr Flick in the spoof series Allo Allo. Rose is magnificent as Kessler and the character is written as a man who is completely and utterly devoted to the Fatherland and the Fuhrer.Secret Army, along with other greats like Colditz and I, Claudius is an example of the great drama serials that the BBC no longer produce. These days we seem to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of police and hospital drama serials. Secret Army was transmitted at prime-time on BBC1 when it was first shown: how many period dramas do we ever see on our screens these days? At very best we get a Jane Austin type adaptation, and that would only ever be broadcast on a Sunday night.Why don't the BBC take the chance to make something as daring as Secret Army? I'm sure that a viewing public tired of the same old shows would thank them for it.I hope that UK Drama will show the spin-off series Kessler now!

I wasn't even born when this series was first made. It was my mother who introduced me to the series on uk drama. She insisted that I 'give it a chance.'I am glad that I did!During the first series the show showed little potential, the characters were stereotypical and shallow, such as Kessler, with his robotic like ways and constant determination to get one over on life line. The melodramatic content was so bad you could almost hear him shouting: 'I'll get you next time!' at the end of every episode. However somebody waved their magic wand at the start of the second series, because the show changed it's angle completely. With the dramatic exit of Yvette, (one of my favourite scenes in television)and the introduction of the Candide. We saw alot of changes for the characters. Kessler gained a love interest, and at last we could see his human side.Life line too showed it had some weak human traits, more often then not Albert's greed resulted in him ordering command just so that he could keep his precious restaurant. And when Monique was left in charge at the end of series two she turned into a bit of a boozer! More importantly, as the storylines developed and conspiracies got more complicated, life line didn't always end up on top, usually at the expense of poor Natalie or Monique.The show came to prove that it was more about humans fight for survival. And less about the adventurous action man enthusiasm sometimes given to war in american films. What a shame that somebody made a spoof in the form of 'allo, 'allo. This became more famous than the original classic and now shadows it's brilliance. As my Mother insisted to me, I would insist to you: 'give it a chance, please!'