After the Power Game...
THE SANDBAGGERS (YORKSHIRE TV 1978-1980)
Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen) and Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) discuss an imminent death
First broadcast on 18 September 1978, THE SANDBAGGERS stars Roy Marsden as Neil Burnside, director of a small team inside the British Secret Intelligence Service, deployed undercover in hostile situations. It may seem that this series strays far away from the realms of THE POWER GAME but, in many ways, Burnside was a Wilder with a license to kill.
The Sandbaggers was created by Ian MacKintosh, a former Royal Navy officer who had co-created the 1970's BBC series Warship in a bid to aid recruitment to the modern hi-tech Navy. Warship ran from 1973 to 1977 with MacKintosh's scripts recognised for combining documentary realism with compelling characters. In 1976, MacKintosh retired from the Navy and joined Yorkshire Television as a writer/producer on comedy-thriller Wilde Alliance (starring John Stride and Julia Foster) and Thundercloud, a comedy about a World War 2 naval station starring James Cosmo and John Fraser.
With The Sandbaggers, MacKintosh teamed up with producer/director Michael Ferguson to return to his roots of taut drama with documentary realism. MacKintosh described it as, "concerned in the main with the triumphs and failures of SIS headquarters, the power struggles within SIS itself, and the uses and abuses of its power." The basic set-up is very much in the vein of The Power Game. Neil Burnside, Director of Operations (or "D.Ops"), runs the secret operations of the SIS and is the link between field agents and management. A grammar school graduate, former officer in the Special Boat Service and an ex-Sandbagger, Burnside has risen through merit rather than the "old school tie".
Burnside is often in opposition to Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis), deputy director of the SIS. A former head of the Hong Kong section, Peele is irritated by Burnside's uncompromising nature and is determined to make him acknowledge procedures. Peele is also irritated by Burnside's relationship with his former father-in-law. Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan McNaughtan) is the Foreign Office Permanent Under Secretary of State - the Senior Civil Servant in charge of the SIS. Neither Wellingham or Burnside is above short-circuiting the lines of communication when they need a favour. Finally, Sir James Greenley (Richard Vernon) is "C", the Director General of the SIS.
Despite being a career diplomat, Greenley is only a few months into his charge of SIS, and is shocked to learn the political realities in the episode, A Proper Function of Government. Burnside has proposed the assassination of an African leader who has had a British journalist executed. The Prime Minister rules out the assassination of any head of state on moral grounds. But then Burnside discovers that the Government's chief scientific advisor is in Vienna about to defect to Russia. He is ordered to send a Sandbagger to bring him back. Wellingham adds that if the scientist kicks up a fuss and tries to claim asylum, they are authorised to kill him. Greenley protests that, "The Prime Minister assured me the taking of human life was abhorrent to him." Burnside responds, "Perhaps you've misunderstood, Sir. We can't knock over a lunatic who's murdering every day. But a man who threatens the Government's future, and the jobs and perks that go with it. Not only authority to assassinate but instant authority."
Towards the end of the second series, Burnside learns that Greenley is due to retire early on health grounds, and the front-runner to succeed him as "C" is John Tower-Gibbs (Dennis Burgess) an old enemy. With echoes of The Power Game episode The New Minister, Burnside cynically mounts an operation to push Peele as a candidate for the new "C" in the expectation that he will be easier to manipulate. Unsurprisingly, Wellingham sees through Burnside's tactics and Tower-Gibbs is installed.
If Peele, Wellingham and "C" reflect the Merle's and Revidges who opposed Wilder, Burnside's Don Henderson is Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen). If you can imagine Don Henderson being a former paratrooper sergeant. As Sandbagger One, Caine is head of the Special Operations Section and "his initial loyalty is to Burnside, not necessarily SIS in its corporate self." However, Caine is also unafraid to challenge Burnside, telling him he hopes he can live with his actions at the end of Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
In that episode, Burnside had gone to ruthless lengths to ensure that an agent with "mission twitch" did not resign.In some ways it echoes the Plane Makers episode A Question of Priorities where Wilder tries to persuade the wife of an aircraft designer to stop her husband resigning for a better job in America. Except that even Wilder is constrained by moral and legal considerations. Whereas Burnside can do "whatever it takes" to stop the agent resigning. From the very first episode, Burnside is in full Wilder mode, shouting reprimands down the phone to the duty officer on the operations desk ("He needed his breakfast...my head." the officer tells a colleague). Unlike Wilder, Burnside's marriage has already collapsed, and he spends most of his waking hours in the office. Where Wilder depended on the ultra-efficient Miss Lingard, Burnside is served by dedicated service secretaries: Diane Lawler (Elizabeth Bennett) in the first two series and Marianne Straker (Sue Holderness) in the third. It is Marianne who finally pulls Burnside up when his single-mindedness becomes self-destructive. The episode Who Needs Enemies was written by Charles Gidley Wheeler, a former navy officer who had also contributed to Warship and Thundercloud.
Peele has used the results of Burnside's latest medical examination to convince "C" that the "stressed" Burnside should be moved from the role of "D.Ops". "He's secretive, devious and deceitful and is beginning to wield far too much power in this building for my liking." Peele suggests replacing him with Dalgetty (David Robb), the smooth new Director of Intelligence and shifting Burnside out to Head of Station in Lisbon. Marianne Straker confronts the desolate Burnside as rumours of the move emerge. "I've liked the job because although you pretend you're made of steel it's quite obvious that in fact you aren't. The things that you regard as signs of strength are actually the symptoms of weakness. You're frightened of the effects of alcohol so you don't drink.You're frightened of emotional commitment so you live a life like a monk. And because you're frightened of failure you drive yourself harder than is necessary or useful. And the result? You've become difficult to work with. People avoid contact with you because they're beginning to be afraid of you. And you're getting left out in the cold. You see people when they go into this office, but I see them when they go out. You can't live like that. Something has to give."
In the end, a chastened Burnside does manage to turn events to his advantage, mainly because Willie Caine uncovers some hidden evidence in his favour. While Burnside often managed a Wilder-style last-minute victory, it was not as regularly as in The Power Game. The cynical, downbeat nature of the espionage background meant that, While Burnside usually triumphed against his internal rivals, he could not be so sure of a victory against the opposition.
It goes without saying that much of the success of The Sandbaggers comes from Roy Marsden's performance as Burnside. If he is a "Wilder", it's very much the Wilder of The Plane Makers where you believed that the jobs of 20,000 men depended on his actions. Burnside is ambitious, and ruthless, but you believe there is still a moral motivation behind it. Some of Burnside's speeches are in the Wilder vein, but given a unique delivery by Marsden. It's fair enough to say that if they had taken some of Wilder's dialogue and given it to Marsden, it would have come out sounding more like Burnside than Wilder.
The series had two genuine links with The Plane Makers (Richard Vernon and Jerome Willis had both appeared in The Plane Makers and Willis had been a fellow student of Patrick Wymark's at the Old Vic Theatre School). And, of course, Ray Lonnen had played Chris Roney MP in The Chicken Run episode of The Power Game. However, The Sandbaggers generally showed how far TV had moved on since the final series of The Power Game.