From the Avengers to the Sandbaggers

I’ve been watching The Avengers (the spy series) for entertainment and rewatching the Sandbaggers for research, and it struck me: if someone had just these two data points, they might reasonably wonder just what the hell happened to Britain between the late sixties and the late seventies.

For those who might be unfamiliar with either or both of these programs, they are two very different spy stories that ran in Britain. I had seen both shows before, but never so close together to make the dissonance seem so jarring.

The Avengers is entirely episodic. Each episode (from the period I’m watching) involves John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diane Rigg) defeat ridiculous villains usually modeled around some very British institution, a boy’s school or umbrella salesmen gone wrong or something. Steed is the perfectly mannered British gentlemen and Peel kicks ass all while wearing a jumpsuit. It’s all champagne and swagger.

The Sandbaggers has story arcs, most of which are fairly depressing. Neil Burnside (Roy Mardsen) is the head of a special operations subbranch of British Intelligence. The story revolves much more around the bureaucracy and operational planning than the missions itself. Burnside often says, “There are no James Bonds in this business.” There are no spies like Steed or Peel, and there are no campy, goofy villains. The bad guys in the Sandbaggers are deadly serious foreign agents and often worse, the bumbling and often uncaring aristocrats that have authority over Burnside and his Sandbaggers. In one particularly effective episode we watch a Sandbagger suffering alone from a gunshot wound in a dingy Bulgarian hotel room juxtaposed with scenes from the aristocratic masters dining in their dinner jackets and being waited on by footmen like it’s still Downton Abbey times.   

So what happened in the years between? I’m sure someone has thoroughly studied the period and can provide better context. I’d like to know.

If one knew nothing else, they could tell that it still is the same country. The actors speak the same language, with more or less the same accents. The clothing styles aren’t that far removed. There’s even the occasional man in a bowler in the crowd shots in the Sandbaggers. But something has definitely changed. The mad capped campy spy show had given way to this dour espionage show. Sandbaggers is great, in many ways I prefer it to Avengers, and yet I can’t help but think with these two datapoints it seems like the world had lost what innocence and youthful joy it had left.

I’m cherry picking data of course. There are examples of dour spy stories being told in Britain in the 60s. Le Carre had been writing and getting adapted before the Avengers even first aired, and it’s not like the Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a laugh a minute groovy romp. On the camp side James Bond films were plenty of goofy fun. Perhaps the amalgam of campy and serious, The Prisoner had also run at the same time as the seasons of the Avengers I’ve been watching.

But I still feel like there’s something there. I’m sure there’s probably a pretty good history of late 20th century Britain out there with a solid summary of what actually occurred to trigger this shift.

In scifi, Blake’s 7 was running at the same time as Sandbaggers. Written by Terry Nation, the same writer who created the Daleks for Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 was in many ways the antithesis of Star Trek. Whereas Star Trek was optimistic, Blake’s 7 saw the worst in humanity and the Federation in Blake’s 7 is a tyrannical regime hell bent on controlling people while operating under the visage of a free society. In many ways Star Trek (the original series) is to Blake’s 7 as The Avengers is to The Sandbaggers.

Even Doctor Who had clearly left the swinging 60s of the Troughton/Pertwee eras and had entered the absurdist Tom Baker years with Douglas Adams writing and working as script supervisor. The Tom Baker years are still fun, but the humor and wit is a little more pointed at those who are in charge: “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common - they don’t change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing.”

It’s clearly not just television. Looking at just one British band, compare the Syd Barrett Pink Floyd to the Roger Waters Wish You Were Here/Animals/The Wall Pink Floyd. The lyrical switch from “I know a mouse who hasn’t got a house I don’t know why I call him Gerald” to “just another sad old man, all alone, dying of cancer” is enough to make you really wonder what has happened in the decade between. The history of Pink Floyd, losing Syd Barrett for example, explains much of the shift, but I still think there’s something more, some loss of hope between the decades that helps explain the transition to the very maudlin.

Again, I wonder if there’s a good text on what shifted in British society during this period. I’m fascinated by these periods of change, especially when they don’t occur from some overtly massive cause such as warfare or plague or mass upheaval. It seems like theres a pronounced enough change that it would be hard to blame on the inflation rate or some such thing. Hopefully there’s a book out there that can compare such things but with the context required to adequately explain it.