Starring Roy Marsden who would later find fame as ITV's face of the cerebral sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, this was seven hours of raw in-your-face cold war action. As far as the plots go it is pretty run of the mill stuff, lots of talk about double-dealing by the KGB and snarls of 'this could ruin the special relationship!'. In that respect, TTSS beats it hands down. To be fair though the BBC had excellent source material in the original novel and, one would presume, a significantly larger budget.
So, thirty five years on, was it worth revisiting the world of The Sandbaggers? On balance I think the answer is yes. I have gone back to some series of this vintage and barely made it through the first episode. Here, however, we have characters that although dated and somewhat caricatured are still interesting. After a while you start to care about Neil Burnside (Marsden) and the way he leads his team of spooks, the titular 'Sandbaggers'.
That word 'spooks' is an interesting one. Watching this brought to mind very much the relatively recent series of that name, I think they are closer relations than TTSS. This is darker than some of the other drama of the period - take Bergerac for example which came along a few years later.
Some of the production values are frankly shocking to view today, not least because at the time there would never have been any thought of it being watched on a vast widescreen television. The cuts between location and studio are clunky but do not detract from the enjoyment.
Where The Sandbaggers starts to get interesting is in its ambition. I have already mentioned that they budget seems to have been limited and that it was made by Yorkshire Television. Neither of these things stopped the creation of an ambitiously international show. The first series features action in London, Vienna, the Kola Peninsula, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Cyprus among other exotic spots. It seems pretty likely that the London scenes were filmed there, but for the rest they simply used what they had around them (and a little stock footage).
The relatively eagle-eyed will be able to spot that Yorkshire in general and Leeds in particular were utilised for all the location work. A particularly quaint example comes as our sandbagger is chasing down a terrorist in Gibraltar with an RPG trained on a vital flight out of the airport. We cut between shots of the fiend holding his weapon and an obvious stock shot of a plane taxiing and then taking off. Panning back to what looks suspiciously like a quarry in the Dales, a horde of policeman dressed in outcasts from an amateur production of the Pirates of Penzance appear to apprehend the villain just as he was about to fire. The stock-shot flight then jets off into the sunshine.
Meetings with a representative of 'the cousins' take place in a park. That would usually be St James's Park in London, but this one is suspiciously hilly, could it perhaps be Roundhay instead? Sometimes they haven't even made an effort. 'Limassol' was clearly Emmerdale with some cardboard numberplates on vaguely foreign looking cars.
Yorkshire have form for this in some truly dire 'comedies', cansider this;
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The highlight was the choice of location for 'East Berlin' in the final episode of the series though. I won't reveal it here, but will delight anyone who lived in Leeds in the seventies or the preceding few decades.
Even without the jolt of recognition from some of the locations, this would still have been a worthwhile watch. I have series two and three (there were no more owing to the unfortunate demise of the writer and creator) and will be watching them even more carefully.
