Too much of everything

Just perfect...

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The Sandbaggers was created by Ian Mackintosh, the theme music is by Roy Budd and it stars Roy Marsden, Ray Lonnen, Diane Keen,Jerome Willis ,Richard Vernon, Elizabeth Bennett, Bob Sherman and Alan MacNaughton.If you like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People, then this is another spy series that is a must see. The Sandbaggers is an absorbing, gritty and gripping series filled with superb performances and engrossing story lines.Neil Burnside(Roy Marsden)is a member of the British Intelligence Service and the head of a team of agents known as Sandbaggers. Burnside is regularly at odds with his superiors, particularly Sir Geoffrey Wellingham(Alan MacNaughton),the Permanent Undersecretary of State who is also Burnside's former father in law. Burnside has the loyalty and friendship of his top agent Willie Caine(Ray Lonnen)and his secretary Diane Lawler(Elizabeth Bennett). Burnside's team also regularly work with London based C.I.A station chief Jeff Ross(Bob Sherman).Diane Keen is memorable as Laura Dickens, the only woman on Burnside's team, what happens to her in the season 1 episode The Special Relationship is tragic and deeply affects Burnside.The series follows the various missions of the agents, it also shows that sometimes you have to play dirty to get the results you want. This is a well written series and is one that forces you to pay close attention as every piece of dialogue is important, if you don't pay attention you'll miss key information.Unfortunately this was cancelled after three seasons because the creator Ian Macintosh was killed in a plane crash along with his girlfriend and a pilot in Alaska. It was felt that the writing quality might not be as good without him so it was cancelled, which is a great shame because this is a superb series.

The best line in all the episodes is in the first one, titled "First Principles." The odious Neil Burnside flies to Oslo only to rebuke his Norwegian colleague face-to-face with a short, sharp lecture delivered at the boarding gate of the airplane, brusk and aggressive as Burnside nearly always is, on what it takes to succeed in the Cold War. Burnside says the Norwegians must learn more about how intelligence works and that takestime. His Norwegian counterpart protests that there was no time and action was necessary. Action was taken and it ended disastrously. "If you want James Bond, go to the library," Burnside replies. Hasty action gets good agents killed as it did in this case. If you want success then do the hard, boring, endless, tedious, and detailed work of preparation. Read maps, study weather patterns, train and train again, learn languages, stockpile equipment that may never be used, argue over budgets to do these tasks, guard against cost-cutting pressures, consider every possible and few impossible alternatives, and then start over. Most of all jealously preserve the capacity to take action from the most insidious and constant threat against the capacity to act and that is the office politics of any large organization, the competition for resources, for recognition, for promotion, for one's ideas, and so on.That brief dialogue sets the theme for most of the rest of the Sandbaggers where the focus is first on securing the Sandbaggers in the dangerous and ruthless world of Whitehall. In Whitehall it makes sense to send assassins economy class on long international flights and expect them to do the killing efficiently and secretly and return economy class. That is far cheaper. One of Burnside's recurrent fights is over budget for exactly such needs as first class travel for the Sandbaggers who do the killing. (There is no point in hiding behind metaphors like "dirty work" or "heavy lifting" because mostly the Sandbaggers kill. If anything less than murder was required, someone else could do it.) Anyone working in an organization knows all of this to be true, and "The Sandbaggers" is on this score one of the most realistic television programs ever made. It is all about budget most of the time.

This is one of those series, you think you know and when you get to the end you realize, you missed something important.This is a series which has many layers, in most cases something is missed and you feel you need to watch it again see how it was missed.This is not a James Bond style series. It is centred around the head of the special ops of the British secret service. On the surface it appears to be about the politics of running a department. Even though it was filmed in the 70's, it holds up well. This is not to say it does not show. This could be a distraction for anybody wanting the slick production of present day.It is well written, the acting does not get in the way of the stories, the characters are believable.I watched the series again recently and it left me wanting more TV of this quality. I highly recommend this series.

I can't remember how I managed to stumble across this series a good many years ago now, but somehow - and I still haven't been able to work out just how - it managed to hook me almost instantly. There is so much subterfuge, nasty, backroom dealings and internal politics going on and plain intrigue that it hardly matters that there's almost no real action in this series. Virtually everything goes on in the offices of the Sandbagger unit and there's not even very much outdoor camera work, so I suspect this series was made on an incredibly cheap budget, but the scripts are good, the plots are believable, the acting is excellent when you consider that these guys are spies who are not meant to betray too much emotion, and the tension is constant. Good British psychological drama.