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Tonight I have mostly been watching...
Jun. 10th, 2011 02:50 amSpyder's Web.
Which was a very strange and charming series of which I only ever saw a couple of episodes the first time around (in 1972, this would have been) and which I'd been looking for sporadically, as with many other gems from the past, and had assumed was gone forever. Lo and behold, Network DVD found a copy somewhere and now it's out on shiny disc.
The premise is the usual--top secret agency, outside the government, beyond the police, just past the gas works and turn left at the King's Head, doing all the dirty jobs the real spies won't touch--but there's slightly more self-mockery to this version even than there was in The Avengers or Jason King (whose picture adorns one of the main sets). Spyder is run from a tiny office, and masquerades as "Arachnid Films," a small-time production company mostly making documentaries and training films for business. Patricia Cutts, who shortly after this joined the cast of Coronation Street and later sadly took her own life, plays the leader of the gang, Lottie Dean, and comes over as a sort of slightly more glamorous Hetty Wainthropp, if Hetty were a master spy and not a detective--by which I mean she comes over as a sort of lucky beginner, cheerfully improvising, and it only dawns on one gradually that she's known what she was doing from the start. But the real star, in my view, is Anthony Ainley, who plays Clive Hawkesworth, Lottie's second, as a sort of cut-price wannabe Bulldog Drummond, constantly undercutting his own pose of ice-cold suavity by not having enough change to pay for the tea, or being delayed because his precious Lagonda has broken down yet again. This continual deflation robs Hawkesworth's ultra-colonialist rabid Tory views of much of their sting; he's clearly a character who no longer has a world to inhabit, if he ever did, and must make the best he can of this one. Veronica Carlson, who swooned over Christopher Lee in Dracula has Risen From The Grave, plays Wallis Ackroyd, Lottie's PA in the film business, and undercuts her own Hammer-babe image by reading Tolstoy and Schopenhauer in her spare time, and the regular cast is completed by Roger Lloyd Pack, looking very young and vaguely extraterrestrial, as cameraman Albert.
One of the main writers of the series, which only ran one season, was Roy Clarke, who went on to create Last Of The Summer Wine among other classics, and in many of his episodes you can spot his characteristic touches of comedy. I've seen five episodes so far, and I think this is definitely going to bear repeated watching. It's obviously nonsense, if you want to look at it that way, but it's the kind of nonsense I like.
Which was a very strange and charming series of which I only ever saw a couple of episodes the first time around (in 1972, this would have been) and which I'd been looking for sporadically, as with many other gems from the past, and had assumed was gone forever. Lo and behold, Network DVD found a copy somewhere and now it's out on shiny disc.
The premise is the usual--top secret agency, outside the government, beyond the police, just past the gas works and turn left at the King's Head, doing all the dirty jobs the real spies won't touch--but there's slightly more self-mockery to this version even than there was in The Avengers or Jason King (whose picture adorns one of the main sets). Spyder is run from a tiny office, and masquerades as "Arachnid Films," a small-time production company mostly making documentaries and training films for business. Patricia Cutts, who shortly after this joined the cast of Coronation Street and later sadly took her own life, plays the leader of the gang, Lottie Dean, and comes over as a sort of slightly more glamorous Hetty Wainthropp, if Hetty were a master spy and not a detective--by which I mean she comes over as a sort of lucky beginner, cheerfully improvising, and it only dawns on one gradually that she's known what she was doing from the start. But the real star, in my view, is Anthony Ainley, who plays Clive Hawkesworth, Lottie's second, as a sort of cut-price wannabe Bulldog Drummond, constantly undercutting his own pose of ice-cold suavity by not having enough change to pay for the tea, or being delayed because his precious Lagonda has broken down yet again. This continual deflation robs Hawkesworth's ultra-colonialist rabid Tory views of much of their sting; he's clearly a character who no longer has a world to inhabit, if he ever did, and must make the best he can of this one. Veronica Carlson, who swooned over Christopher Lee in Dracula has Risen From The Grave, plays Wallis Ackroyd, Lottie's PA in the film business, and undercuts her own Hammer-babe image by reading Tolstoy and Schopenhauer in her spare time, and the regular cast is completed by Roger Lloyd Pack, looking very young and vaguely extraterrestrial, as cameraman Albert.
One of the main writers of the series, which only ran one season, was Roy Clarke, who went on to create Last Of The Summer Wine among other classics, and in many of his episodes you can spot his characteristic touches of comedy. I've seen five episodes so far, and I think this is definitely going to bear repeated watching. It's obviously nonsense, if you want to look at it that way, but it's the kind of nonsense I like.