Danger UXB negotiates two
production house styles. The early successes of Euston Films could be
characterised as concentrating on the underbelly of society:
criminals and the police who pursued them with dubious methods. In
contrast John Hawkesworth, co-creator, producer and lead writer of
Danger UXB, was conservative by reputation and just as
interested in the upper echelons of stratified British society as the
lower ones. This was seen in his previous series Upstairs
Downstairs for LWT and The Duchess of Duke Street for the
BBC. This formula didn't preclude social mobility, with dramatic
tension being extracted from cross-class liaisons and the
accumulation of wealth and status by outsiders.
Danger UXB is something of a
barracks
Upstairs Downstairs, with its cross-cutting between
barrack room and officers' mess. The series' low-intensity character
arcs, burning fiercely in a climactic episode, recall
Upstairs
Downstairs too. That concerning the brittle insecurity of
Major/Captain 'Fanny' Francis is perhaps the most successful. It
casts, possibly somewhat against type, Kenneth Farrington then best
known to audiences for a long on-off stint in
Coronation Street,
and more recently a regular in
Emmerdale. Francis's obsession
with discipline is the barely disguised sadism of a self-hating man
and his enthusiasm for reviving pre-war regimental mess dinners a
sign of his retreat from the realities of the world as well as his
hatred of Ash, transferred from the officer whom Francis blames for
the end of his marriage. It's not the wisdom of the hierarchy which
resolves the crisis, but Ash pulling strings through Susan's father
Dr Gillespie. The episode displays a respect for human beings but a
cynicism towards the ability of established structures and those
educated through them to manage the ongoing crisis, a sentiment as
appropriate to Britain in 1979 as in 1941.
Another more specific borrowing from
Upstairs Downstairs is the presence of nightclub and music
hall sequences in occasional episodes. There was little room for
niche television in the three-channel era, when programmes had to
build a broad audiences. Consequently there's singing and dancing
from Micky and her colleagues in 'The Silver Lining' and 'Butterfly
Winter'. A further indication is the appearance of variety artiste
Sapper Binns, played by real-life variety artiste
Bryan
Burdon in 'Butterfly Winter' and 'The Pier',
which seem to have been made as part of the same block. 'Butterfly
Winter' just happens to include a sequence filmed presumably in
Chipping Norton Theatre (given where the relevant exteriors are shot)
where Burdon/Binns can do his act. Not only is the sequence
nostalgic for an audience which could remember pre-television
variety, it draws on Burdon's own pedigree, his father being Albert
Burdon, a star of music hall most associated (I learn from Louis
Barfe's
Turned Out Nice Again) with the slosh-spreading
wallpapering routine. Binns's stagecraft, specifically his knowledge
of theatrical mechanics, is presented as an asset to the company and
he becomes, perhaps, Hawkesworth's tribute to the multi-skilled
theatrical turns of his early career.
Binns only appears in two episodes,
both directed by Douglas Camfield and presumably made as one block.
The disappearance and reintroduction of regular characters without
explanation was part of the reality of television production at the
time, but is used to give an impression of the realities of war
service and wartime lives, as people are transferred in and out of
the unit with little notice, or husbands are unexpectedly invalided
back to otherwise-entangled wives. It also helps suggest the passage
of time. As in Upstairs Downstairs, the series had an internal
chronology mapped onto the historical chronology of the period
covered, but was not presented so rigidly that it could not be
retroactively revised should a second series have been commissioned.
The series was launched in ITV's
listings magazine,
TV Times, with features concentrating on
the experiences of the real bomb disposal squads of nearly forty
years before.
Danger UXB was promoted as a drama with a public
service mission, restoring an obscured part of the war to public
memory. This complemented one of the themes of the early episodes,
the early publicity given to the skills of the anti-explosive squads
in the press, which gave way to silence when it was realised that the
increasingly complex charges were designed with the intention of
killing trained personnel. The first
TV Times article provided
a diagram of a typical excavation shaft and images of several types
of wartime German bomb, accompanied by lurid headlines such as 'Your
guide to a deadly war game' and 'Rain of death that fell on Britain'.
The second article, 'The men who had only 10 weeks to live' was
accompanied by a photograph showing Anthony Andrews in the company of
four real-life bomb disposal men and related some of their
experiences, in some cases pointing out that these tales would be
fictionalised for
Danger UXB. Coverage for the rest of the
series was restricted to the occasional photograph on the listings
page, aggravated by the end of the run by a printing strike which led
to
TV Times being published in an abbreviated form with fewer
credits.
Press reaction to Danger UXB
seems to have been cautious. Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian (9
January 1979) thought it "not... an important series" fixed
on "nostalgia and noise". Banks-Smith did however note the
appeal of Anthony Andrews as a leading man, "one of those golden
lads with sensitive mouths", and the Daily Mirror also
remarked upon Andrews's emergence as part of a new trend in male lead
towards "The new, gentle man", contrasting him with the
"aggressive virility" of Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins in
The Professionals and likening Andrews to Patrick Ryecart of
My Son, My Son (21 May 1979). Andrews continued to be raised
by Mirror writers as a point of comparison with later male
leads that year, such as the "mean, powerful and ruthless"
John Duttine in The Mallens (who was careful to emphasise that
in real life he vacuumed the carpet and helped with the cooking) (31
July 1979). The Mirror's coverage also promoted Danger
UXB's public service credentials, not only through a profile of
John Hawkesworth as 'TV's Past Master' (5 February 1979) but
reporting how the episode 'Butterfly Winter' had led a Brighton man
to realise he had put a butterfly bomb in his daughter's toy
cupboard. (15 March 1979). This followed the defusing of another
butterfly bomb in a bedroom in Rainham in Kent (The Guardian,
14 March 1979).
With a large cast, high production
values - with at least one explosion required a week - the assumption
that
Danger UXB was too expensive for ITV to recommission has
a ring of truth. Though dismissed as a "potboiler" by one
television historian, the juxtapostion of lectures on bomb
engineering every few episodes with the continuing rollercoaster love
lives of the male protagonists, together with a sense that the series
is consciously revising the collective memory of the Second World War
in Britain, encourages curiosity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that
there was at some stage thought of a second series, and there was
even a
Danger UXB annual published later in 1979. However,
associate producer Christopher Neame's memoir
A Take on British TV
Drama: Stories from the Golden Years (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow,
2004) makes no mention of a second series, instead moving on to
preparations for the next Euston-Hawkesworth collaboration
The
Flame Trees of Thika, then pausing to note that the
thirteen-episode run of
Danger UXB would have had a longer and
more profitable life had it been made in 35mm colour film as wished
by the creative team, rather than the 16mm imposed upon it as a
budgetary measure.
Danger UXB was assumed to be still fresh in
the public imagination when the
Daily Mirror profiled Judy
Geeson under the headline 'Blonde bombshell on a short fuse' on 21
July and on 30 October when it ran a news story about Anthony
Andrews, but the latter was leaving the UK to seek work in the USA
following the indefinite postponement of
Brideshead Revisited.
Compared to other Euston Films series
of the time,
Danger UXB was not an overwhelming ratings
success. Only four episodes made it into the top twenty, episodes
five, nine, twelve and thirteen. The latter did well, with 16.05
million viewers, only 600,000 viewers behind
Coronation Street,
boosted perhaps by the heavy promotion given to Thames's Michael
Crawford sitcom
Chalk and Cheese which ran in the half-hour
8pm slot for the last two weeks of
Danger UXB's run. Its
series format masked serial elements (as Neame notes in his book) and
if the difficult shoot he recounts prevented it from becoming a
Thames/Euston banker, then as it stands it occupies a transitional
space between Euston's long-running series such as
The Sweeney
and
Minder, and the format which other Euston projects of the
time (such as
Out and perhaps also
Quatermass) were
exploring, the self-contained 'television novel'.
Danger UXB is available on DVD from Network.
