The Spying Game
It is 1972 in a sepia coloured England. Everything is black and white, or beige. In a Lancastrian mill town there is an infant school built by the Victorians; all granite and high ceilings and heavy wooden desks, the ones with little inkwells at the top right hand side, and a groove to hold your pen and pencils. A relic from when children were taught to read and write, rather than emote and play on Facebook. In this dreary classroom there is a dreary teacher. We shall call him Mr. Dreary. Mr. Dreary is a dull man with no great gift for inspiring. He has given the children an hour of personal reading time, probably as an excuse for doing nothing himself. One of the children is a thin, pale nine-year-old boy intently reading…something. Mr. Dreary is for some reason, intrigued perhaps because it is not the inevitable comic or Ladybird book. He comes over and asks the child what he is reading. It is Len Deighton’s “The Ipcress File”.
“It’s just plain ordinary spy, sir”, says the child, and resumes reading, although he is a bit puzzled by what the lady spy and the man spy are actually doing to each other in that hotel room…
Mr. Dreary wanders off, perplexed by this strange child. The nine-year-old is of course, your humble scribe, and I remember it like it was yesterday, although it does come back to me in black and white.
What reminded me is a chat I had with our landlord Petunia this week. I was suggesting a post on cop dramas of the 70’s but it’s already been covered brilliantly by Moor Larkin. Anyway, Petunia suggested I should write something about our home-grown crime dramas – “Dixon of Dock Green”, “Softly, Softly” and “Z Cars”, for example. There was only one problem about that: I couldn’t remember a great deal about them, save that “Softly, Softly” was very well acted. Clearly, I was not very interested in Bobbies nabbing a few pearly kings and queens or driving round Skelmersdale in a Ford Zephyr.
What did I remember? Well, one thing is the British spy drama. It seems I was developing at an early age an agenda which involved a profound attraction to secrecy, duplicity, extreme violence and sex. When it comes to the British “spy” drama on TV, I am going to use the term quite loosely. What I remember as the original and best is “Callan” played by the late great Edward Woodward. I remember it as coming on a Sunday night. It was created by author James Mitchell (who went on to write and create “When the Boat Comes In”, as I now learn). I know a little of the “back story” of Callan, because I once read one of the Callan novels; I think it was “A Red File for Callan.”
Callan’s back story was this. He had been trained as a Commando, and seen service in some foreign war. Anyway, as is often the way, after leaving the services, he found himself unemployable and in trouble with the law. He ended up in prison where, as a basically good bloke, he got on the wrong side of the prison hard man and his gang, who decided to do him over. They put him in the prison hospital for sure, but he put them in there with him. He was released on parole to the care of “the Section”, the secret government operation which deals with malcontents and, from the State’s point of view, undesirable, by killing them where necessary. I was too young to understand the psychology of the show. I just remember the iconic starting credits with a close up of a swinging bare light bulb in an obviously dingy cellar (evoking just the sort of place where a ruthless, unauthorised interrogation would take place) which started the credits. Here it is now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDdSWjpPJDg
Now I can analyse the show a bit. There are certain classic tropes which appeal to the British sensibilities; so much so that I might suggest that watching “Callan” might be a prerequisite for the British citizenship thing. Callan is working class, unlike his fellow operative, the vile snobby psychopath Toby Meres, brilliantly played by Anthony Valentine in the series. Callan is unpretentious. He is intelligent and thoughtful; we know he has a love of military history and likes model soldiers. In the first classic episode he plays a war game using model soldiers with a rich and powerful foreign villain, the target of his mission, and displays a detailed knowledge of the Crimean War; he also wins the game. He is taciturn, and he is uncomfortable with women and emotions. He is a reluctant warrior, being coerced to do his job. He works for a ruthless Patrician figure (“Hunter”) and questions his tasks, and is thus the “little man” who is being used by “The System”. He is also hard as nails. All of these are qualities which, I suggest, endeared him to the Great British Public. Indeed, we can maybe see some parallels with the Harry Palmer character in “The Ipcress File”, “Funeral in Berlin” and “Billion Dollar Brain”. He is a reluctant warrior too; he would rather run away from a fight than tough it out not because he’s weak, but because he’s just sensible.
Veering off topic slightly, but prompted by the memory of Michael Caine’s performances as Palmer, there are also some similarities with Michael Caine’s character in the superb 1971 movie, “Get Carter” – though his character dressed better.
So “Callan” might tell us something about ourselves, but the show also told us something about the 1960’s and 70’s. We had hippies and whatnot, and I think Glam Rock would have been on the rise, so how did such a downbeat show and taciturn, buttoned up character resonate? I once heard it said that “Swinging London” was a mirage. It was merely a cadre of less than a thousand hedonists. The rest of us were still drinking our halves of Watney’s Red Barrel and eating fish and chips whilst watching “A Family at War” in black and white. I think there is something to this. In “Get Carter”, when Caine’s character arrives in Newcastle from “The Smoke” he doesn’t go to a dazzling nightclub filled with “groovy” people singing “This is the Age of Aquarius”. He walks into a huge “boozer” full of smoke and heavily drinking Geordie pensioners in a city that hasn’t changed much since the 1930’s.
Later on the 70’s, Yorkshire Television produced the very watchable “The Sandbaggers”, following the fortunes of what is in essence the Secret Intelligence Service. Roy Marsden was excellent at the Director of Operations, Neil Burnside, and we get a bit of social context too, because we find a service which is fraying around the edges, short of money and dependant on the Americans. This is Britain at the end of the 70’s, declining, stressed. One of the reasons the series was good was that operatives – “Sandbaggers” – got killed off, so there was a real sense of jeopardy. It was also watchable because they recruited a female Sandbagger, played by the delectable Diane Keene, an actress who lit up the 70’s in shows like “The Cuckoo Waltz”. And autumn 1979 brought us perhaps one of the BBC’s greatest productions, the dramatization John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. That is a series which I have recently revisited, and it was indeed superbly written and acted. As a social record of late 1970’s Britain it is again profound: Britain is a dreary place, meetings are dreary, and fashions are awful. Everybody smokes. Food is boring and stodgy. There are no cookery programmes. There is no decent wine. If people do drink it is gin and tonic or beer or tea.
Our landlord did drop “The Professionals” into the conversation. Great stuff: not strictly of the “spy” genre, but still socially significant. Now we are heading towards a Thatcherite society, all get and go and up for a bit of retail therapy. Callan’s opening credits are the swinging light bulb in a basement; the boys from CI5 announce themselves by their ownership of, respectively, a Ford Capri 3.0 and RS2000, and driving them aggressively through piles of cardboard boxes. No stuffy office politics there, then. Callan would not have approved. He would have got the bus. But he was the best.
And finally, on another note, I like to find things that are a bit peaceful and reflective for a Sunday. I stumbled across this on YouTube: music by Mike Oldfield and vocals by some woman called Tarja Turunan. Apparently she’s a soprano (not one of those Sopranos) who likes to do a bit of Goth and metal stuff, but this is a rather lovely tune in parts, I thought. I liked some parts of the video, some I wasn’t really sure of. Have a good Sunday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pKyTWe-gRs
Gildas The Monk
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October 11, 2015 at 9:29 am -
Callan would not have approved. He would have got the bus.
That remark made me smile. Yes he would have. But I see no mention of ‘Lonely’?…not that Callan would have wanted to travel on public transport with him nor have been in any kind of enclosed space with him.
Your School day memory also tugged a chord, I had a similar experience in a victorian Norfolk Church Endowed Primary but being later it was ‘The Odessa File’ and my teacher was used to having 10 year olds with adult ‘reading ages’. Half the class couldn’t tie their own shoe laces but drove a mean tractor, however the few ‘furriners’ in the class (whose parents had cruelly dragged them from Civilisation to Norfolk) all had IQ’s above average….at least that’s how i remember it.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:46 am -
You are, of course, correct, BD. Lonely was an essential part of the Callan motif – “his one friend, with personal hygiene issues” was phrase in the back of my mind. But was trying to get a lot in, and I edited that out. Lonely was brilliant. 2 fine actors making for exceptional drama. I might add a follow up: doing some digging for this post, I discovered that Edward Woodward had a small role in “La Femme Nikita” as La Femme’s father. I didn’t know that: seems appropriate. Also I recall this. As with many actors, He never made much money from TV or theatre. Sometime back in the day he did some work for a young director/producer who was doing some experimental “action” project in London. It involved getting cold and running around a warehouse for a weekend. The project came to nothing and he never got paid, but he never complained. Many years later on, that director was given control of a big budget UD TV programme. It was called “The Equalizer” and there was only one man he wanted for the role: Woodward. It made him very well off. I like that.
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October 11, 2015 at 7:10 pm -
Callan’s department did have access to a handful of suitably depressing-looking cars and in late episodes Lonely had been hired as a department driver and given a cab to drive. Of course he was forever disobeying orders and picking up fares for extra money.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:41 am -
Britain is a dreary place, meetings are dreary, and fashions are awful. Everybody smokes. Food is boring and stodgy. There are no cookery programmes. There is no decent wine. If people do drink it is gin and tonic or beer or tea.
Once gave The Bestes Frau In The World an insight to the Grey Cardigan Britain of my childhood by forcing her to watch both series of ‘ Bird Of Prey’ ( which cries out from it’s lonely grave for a post on this blog) with the brilliant Richard Griffiths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72BeosFHRbI -
October 11, 2015 at 9:43 am -
What a great actor Edward Woodward was. I remember first seeing “Callan” not long after he played Guy Crouchback in the Beeb’s adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. I couldn’t believe it was the same actor.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:53 am -
Thank you Gildas, for your trip down Memory Lane.
Raised on a diet of Dixon of Dock Green (and Highway Patrol), Callan was a breath of fresh air.
Certainly the opening sequence was emotive. As TBG reminds us – the ‘Lonely’ characterisation was, as far as my remaining functioning grey cells recall, unique at that time.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:57 am -
As TBG reminds us – the ‘Lonely’ characterisation was, as far as my remaining functioning grey cells recall, unique at that time.
and would be, no doubt, illegal today….it being OFFENSIVE to ridicule any survivor of BO.
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October 11, 2015 at 10:08 am -
Funnily enough, being off work for a month I bought the Callan box set a week ago. Very watchable, great acting. Don’t forget ‘Liz’ played by Lisa Langdon, a fab creation of beauty and complexity. The plots are often quite ridiculous tbh. In one episode Callan gets a thing going with an ex-Foreign Secretary’s widow who is later shot dead by the bad guys. Weird but Wonderful.
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October 11, 2015 at 10:34 am -
Surprised that you felt it necessary to remind us of the days when we were actually allowed to light our homes….
Still at least they shot the bulb…
Best place for it.
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October 11, 2015 at 11:18 am -
At least shattering an incandescent light bulb is benign to the environment.
Break a modern Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb and after the room has been evacuated & ventilated, a full Chemical & Biological Warfare protection suit is advisable for the resultant clean up operation:
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October 11, 2015 at 11:13 am -
October 11, 2015 at 11:25 am -
Some kind soul has uploaded in 3 parts, the original Callan “Magnum for Schneider”
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=callan+magnum+for+schneider
There are many 20+ other Callan episodes available too.
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October 11, 2015 at 2:09 pm -
I vaguely remember Dangerman with Patrick McGoogan (probably spelled wrong.) There seemed to be very few actors to play villains in those days. The same ones kept coming round.
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October 11, 2015 at 2:34 pm -
Callan? Way past my bedtime, and no TV’s in bedrooms back then.
“I once heard it said that “Swinging London” was a mirage. It was merely a cadre of less than a thousand hedonists.” If that, Gildas.
But add a couple of ‘journalists’ with an editor looking for something to sensationalise and Shock! Horror! Outrage! Yawn…….
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October 11, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
Not sure about your taste in music, though.
What’s wrong with a bit of Henry Purcell?
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October 11, 2015 at 4:12 pm -
I thought the music was OK, didn’t much like the video though. It looked like somebody’s (very) soft porn fantasy; I found myself hoping that poor girl was wearing a vest underneath the netties – it must have been cold in those mountains!
For quiet and reflective, I like this: https://youtu.be/TLxv_g_zQkY (Yes, it *is* from a video game soundtrack!)
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October 11, 2015 at 7:25 pm -
Thank you Gildas for the reminder of the grittiness of Callan; and the grime of Get Carter too. Never tired of watching it.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:02 pm -
October 11, 2015 at 9:36 pm -
Callan was one of those iconic programmes of the period. One of my other favourites was Public Eye, another down at heel, rather dreary picture of life here in the 70’s.
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October 11, 2015 at 9:44 pm -
I meant to add that one of my earliest recollections of “cop” series was “No Hiding Place” with Chief Inspector Lockhart. Another was something that featured cases introduced by Edgar Lustgarten.
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October 11, 2015 at 10:29 pm -
I remember an Armchair Theatre play called “A Magnum For Schneider” which featured Edward Woodward as Callan. He was recruited to assassinate a suspect German criminal. The introduction to a really great series.
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October 11, 2015 at 10:46 pm -
Maybe there were ‘BBC people’ and ‘ITV people’.
Edward Woodward was an ITV person. He looks like, sounds like and acts like a wimp. Totally unconvincing as any spy, policeman or man of action.
Michael Caine is Michael Caine. He looks like Michael Caine and sounds like Michael Caine. I have never met Michael Caine or anyone like Michael Caine. Michael Caine might make a convincing Michael Caine but no-one else.I liked Rupert Davies playing Maigret and, Ewan Solon playing his side-kick, Lucas. Bernard Archer as Colonel Oreste Pinto in Spycatcher, I especially liked. ITV was only good for The Avengers, but only the Emma Peel/Tara King ones.
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