The Guardians

The Guardians is a LWT TV series from 1971 with an interesting premise. In the near future of the 1980s, England (and, as it turns out if you pay attention to a single line of dialogue in episode seven, the rest of the United Kingdom) has been taken over by a private army called "The Guardians" to stop it falling to the Communists. Democratic elections, free speech and trade unions have been banned, and a puppet government has been installed with the Guardians acting as their secret police force, a sort of cross between the Nazi SS and the Nazi Gestapo.

I have to assume that all this makes Ed Straker's job of defending the 1980s from alien invasion even more difficult.

Over the course of the first few episodes we find out about this world and are introduced to the main characters, all of whom know at least one other main character but none of whom meet all of the others even by the end of the series. We get to see the perspectives of both the government and the resistance movement "Quarmby", the former through the eyes of the Puppet Prime Minister Sir Timothy Hobson (Cyril "White Guardian" Luckham - do you think that was deliberate?) and his Puppetmaster Cabinet Secretary Norman (Derek "Largo from Shadow" Smith).

The resistance are at first represented by Secret Communist Tom Weston (John Collin) until he supposedly gets killed off in part two - although in part six it turns out he's not actually dead - after which the focus turns to Eccentric Psychiatrist

Dr Benedict (David "not as good a Watson as Edward Hardwicke" Burke), who is secretly recruiting his promising patients for Quarmby.

The series stays strong through its middle episodes largely thanks to the contributions from several dependable character actors making one-off guest appearances. These include Dinsdale "Matthew Earp" Landen as a Mad Scientist - if the Guardians are Nazis then he is their Mengele, with as little regard for mannys as for his animal test subjects.

Richard Vernon plays the former head of SIS (called upon for advice when the Guardians prove unable to cope with the growing menace of Quarmby), a very similar character to C from The Sandbaggers, whom he would not play until seven years later.

Anthony "Oliver Lacon" Bate is not quite as good as either of those two when he appears as a Surprisingly Middle Class Communist, but he still has some good moments. As does Peter "Kenneth Bligh" Barkworth, playing a Carefully Calculating Assassin whose plan gets undone by chance.

Probably the best guest actor is Graham "Lord Nimon, it is I, Soldeed!" Crowden as The Dirtiest Man in the World. Although seemingly beginning as a comic relief character, a tramp used as a disposable pawn by both Quarmby and the Guardians, he turns out to be quite a bit cleverer than either side realise and ends up outwitting them both.

Not all uses of comedy characters work so well, sadly. What should have been a turning point for the character of Dr Benedict - the first time he is called upon to have to kill to protect his Quarmby identity - is utterly undermined by the manny he kills being a bumbling, sub-Clouseau incompetent private detective, who only uncovered his resistance activities by mistaik.

Despite having some excellent individual episodes, the series as a whole suffers by not having one strong central character, and from the decision to present neither Guardians nor Rebels as sympathetic. While it is understandable that they did not want to make terrorists likable given real world contemporary events (though this did not of course stop Blakes 7, which had the advantage of being set in a far future Federation not a near future Britain, or Secret Army, which had the much more black-and-white setting of WW2 Belgium under the Actual Nazis), this has the effect of lessening the horrors of the Guardians' police state - we hear about some of their atrocities but we cannot, due to the nature of light entertainment television drama, see them.

Sadly, the concluding episodes cannot do justice to the setting that had been created and built up over the preceding installments. Narrowing the focus in on the main characters as their own individual stories reach their respective crisis points, the series loses sight of what made it so interesting to begin with - the world, the alternative reality it had created. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that it may have run out of money because the final two parts are set almost entirely in studio sets we had already seen, and feature hardly any actors beyond the regular cast.