The Sandbaggers Collection Set 1 |  | Actors: Roy Marsden, Ray Lonnen, Jerome Willis, Bob Sherman, Alan MacNaughton
Studio: Bfs Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: $59.98
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Rating:  27 reviews
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 3
Running Time: 364 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.1
MPN: BFSD91044D
ISBN: 0773310444
UPC: 066805910449
EAN: 9780773310445
Release Date: August 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Studio: Bfs Ent & Multimedia Limi Release Date: 08/21/2001
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
 The Greatest Television Series About The Intelligence Services Ever Made... July 8, 2009
darklordzden (Australia)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Five stars doesn't do it justice.
This is a full ten point five stars out of a possible five.
Created by formal naval intelligence officer, Ian Mackintosh, and broadcast on the UK's ITV channel between September 1978 and July 1980, "The Sandbaggers" set a precedent for television spy dramas that, in my opinion at least, has never been surpassed.
Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) is the director of operations (D-OPS) of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (a thinly disguised analogue of "MI6" - the real life security services department given purview to counter threats to national security from outside the UK). Burnside is the head of a team of highly trained covert intelligence officers, nicknamed "Sandbaggers", whose job it is to undertake missions of a politically sensitive nature ranging from securing the successful defection of players from "the other side" through to coercion, rescues and even assassination; to "sandbag" in the colloquial English vernacular has a dual meaning - it means to "stonewall", "hide" or "deceive through the means of deception, obfuscation or omission" and it also means to "shore up the defences" or "protect from harm" - in these capacities the three man team certainly live up to both interpretations of their given title.
However, if you think you're in for the usual cod-James-Bond antics, let me assure that this series is a far more complex, adult and subtle examination of what it is to be a spy. The entire onus of this series is on the machinations of the players in the corridors of power rather than on the details of the missions themselves. The detail with which Mackintosh renders the Machiavellian goings on between the foreign office, the cabinet, parliament and domestic and foreign intelligence services, as well as his frankly stunning insight into the hierarchy of the British intelligence community has led many to wonder - myself included - whether we were actually being treated to a privileged insider's view from a man who had actually been a player in John Le Carre's legendary "circus" himself. Mackintosh's mysterious disappearance part way through the writing of the third series have led many to conclude that maybe he let on more than was wise. I recommend the excellent wikipedia entry on this mysterious author for those who are interested in the notion of government conspiracies.
Being that this was a television production made in 1978 by a UK television channel (there were only three at the time), the majority of these stories are shot on video tape in studio bound sets with only the odd filmed insert here and there. I implore you not to let the low production values put you off though. Pound for pound, this is one of the most intelligent, well-acted and frankly breath-takingly brilliant series ever to drip out of the cathode ray tube. Roy Marsden is by turns touching, terrifying and tenacious as the steely Neil Burnside - a man so completely devoted to and controlled by his job that he virtually lives in his office on a diet of Coca-Cola (he can't risk being drunk), cigarettes and dossiers. Similarly Ray Lonnen's turn as Willy Caine, the veteran "Sandbagger 1", is a masterclass in quiet understatement. Bar Rupert Everett, Lonnen really is the greatest Bond that we never had. British soap fans should also keep an eye out for a turn by gay activist and current Member of the European Parliament, Michael Cashman, in the second and third series.
Two final recommendations for those who are interested:
1) If you possess a multi-region DVD player, I suggest that you save yourself a few dollars and pick up Network's excellent compendium boxed set of all three series on Amazon.co.uk (it will cost you substantially less than buying the three series individually on Amazon.com). After all, who doesn't need to save a few bucks in these cash-strapped times?
2) If you read comic books, and any of the above sounds remotely familiar, a certain Greg Rucka used this series as the template for his brilliant "Queen And Country" comics and novels. By his own admission, Rucka considers "Queen And Country" to be a sequel to this most spectacular of Television dramas.
If you want James Bond, go to the library. September 6, 2008
Dr. M. W. Jackson (Sydney, Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The best line in all the episodes is in the first one, titled "First Principles'"
The odious Neil Burnside flies to Oslo only to rebuke his Norwegian colleague face-to-face with a sort, sharp lecture delivered at the boarding gate of the airplane on what it takes to succeed in the Cold War. Burnside says the Norwegians must learn more about intelligence works and that takes time. His Norwegian counterpart protests that there was no time and action was necessary. Action was taken and it ended disastrously. Burnside replies, "If you want James Bond, go to the library."
If you want success then do the hard, boring, endless, tedious, and detailed work of preparation. Read maps, study weather patterns, train and train again, learn languages, stockpile equipment that may never be used, argue over budgets to do these tasks, guard against cost-cutting pressures, consider every possible and few impossible alternatives, and then start over. Most of all jealously preserve the capacity to take action, and more insidious and constant threat again the capacity to act is the office politics of any large organization, the competition for resources, for recognition, for promotion, for one's ideas, and son on.
That brief dialogue sets the theme for most of the rest of the Sandbaggers where the focus is first on securing the Sandbaggers in the dangerous and ruthless world of Whitehall, where it makes sense to send assassins economy class on long international flights and expect them to do the killing efficiently and secretly and return economy class. One of Burnside's recurrent fights is over budget for exactly such needs as first class travel for the Sandbaggers who do the killing. (There is no point in hiding behind metaphors like "dirty work" or "heavy lifting" because mostly the Sandbaggers kill. If anything less than murder was required, someone else could do it.
Anyone working in an organization knows all of this to be true, and "The Sandbaggers" is on this score one of the most realistic television programs ever made. It is all about budget most of the time.
 Better than Tinker Tailor? July 17, 2008
Jack Rice (California, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There's Shubert's Unfinished Symphony, Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Last Tycoon, and Eisentein's unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy. And now there's the unfinished Sandbaggers. This is really a shame and the reason I give it four stars instead of five. Surely the producers could have figured out how to wrap up the series from notes or pitches from creator Ian Mackintosh, before his untimely disappearance. Maybe with a routine series the producers would be justified in walking away, but The Sandbaggers is such a superior work, that not finishing it seems inexcusable.
The series has good production values for late 70s UK television (though I wish they could have found a more exciting remote location than Malta). The video quality holds up quite well on my big-screen -- close-ups are striking.
Speaking of close-ups, the faces of the regulars are a delight, from the sardonic Burnside to the priggish Peele to the two steely "Cs" to Sandbagger #1 Willie Cain. A testament to the series quality is that although much of the action takes place indoors and in the same offices, one never feels closed-in, because the drama is in the relationships between the characters. But this doesn't mean soap opera. The issues, though sometimes personal, have to do with the work, and the excitement and the frustrations of the work are splendidly conveyed by superior acting and intelligent dialog.
This miniseries begs for repeat viewing, and repeat viewing is our only consolation for the realization that, unless some genius resurrects it, The Sandbaggers will remain an unfinished masterpiece of the spy genre.
The Real Deal In Espionage June 24, 2008
K. Boullosa
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Sandbaggers", the early 1980s cult hit written by Ian MacKintosh, is to TV espionage shows what Breguet is to watches: fantastically well put together, and intended for the few rather than the many. The charismatic Roy Marsden, who later brought PD James's detective, Adam Dalgliesh, to life, is even more impressive here as Neil Burnside, Director of Operations (D-Ops) of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (or MI-6 as it's known today), during the Cold War years. Burnside's primary function is to lead the "Sandbaggers", a three-man team of operatives trained to deal covertly with delicate international crises that the public might only hear about if the operation goes wrong.
The mood created is one of drab offices, endless paperwork, and frustratingly timid, bean-counting bureaucrats, rather than of Aston-Martins, Birettas, and black American Express cards. In the Sandbaggers' world, it is planning, research, and analysis that makes the difference between surviving (or not) an operation, not high-end weaponry.
Neil Burnside, caustic, autocratic, and capable of outright cruelty, is nevertheless totally dedicated to the service, to maintaining the primacy of western democracy in a dangerously shifting world, and to the welfare of his team. Divorced and a recovering alcoholic, Burnside lives and breathes his work, and when he loses a Sandbagger to an operation gone wrong, his agony and guilt are intense. Burnside isn't lovable, but as portrayed by Roy Marsden, he is heavily burdened and endlessly fascinating, especially when risking his neck to circumvent questionable decisions by his superiors, who view him as too independent, even if highly efficient.
Many Americans will find this series too "talky", but it's precisely its "talkiness" that has the ring of truth about it - most intelligence work IS drudgery and analysis, not high-action car chases. The talk revolves around political issues and covert operations across the globe, and has the feel of an authentic glimpse into the mindset of the Cold War era. The series is not without action: a terrorist hijacking, a dangerous rescue of a wounded American spy as a favor to the CIA, the disastrous capture of the team's only female Sandbagger in East Berlin. . .it's just that these events punctuate rather than fill these wonderfully written shows.
Marsden's Burnside leads the show, but the supporting cast of Sandbaggers and bureaucrats, Foreign Office staffers, secretaries, KGB officers, and CIA operatives with whom Burnside maintains a "special relationship", are all terrfic. Getting to know them better and better from one episode to the next, watching Burnside and the Sandbaggers get themselves into and out of tense situations, and most of all enjoying the extremely adult, well-written dialogue, is a tremendous pleasure matched by few television series of my experience.
The strange and, to date unsolved, disappearance of Ian MacKintosh, creator of "The Sandbaggers" and himself a former intelligence officer, put paid, as it were, to the series after only three seasons, with about six episodes to each season. I'm thankful to have these on DVD, but how I wish Mr. MacKintosh had stuck around awhile longer and provided us with at least one more season!
Sandbaggers November 13, 2007
Richard Cunningham (United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If John Le Carre is poetry, this is prose. Terrence Rafferty, a critic for the New York Times called it, "the best spy series in television history."[wikipedia] Enough said!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
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