#callanblogging

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Patrick Mower really is no sort of replacement for Anthony Valentine, who's very much the leading man of Callanblr. It's not necessarily Mower's fault, but Valentine played a sociopathic public schoolboy who was equally happy playing cat's cradle or physically torturing someone, whereas one of Mower's first outings had him being beaten up by a Frenchman.

All that being said, I think we all must concede that your cliched spy outfit:

is by now completely played out, and most right-thinking people will agree with me that it should give way to whatever the fuck it is Mower has going on during field work:

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

On the one hand, it's a bit of a reach to say that Callan could very easily be wedged into the same universe as The Magnus Protocol. On the other hand:

Government department with poorly defined remit

...which is headquartered in the scrottiest basement HMG had available

Major characters literally called 'Hunter' and 'Lonely' (the latter actually played by a man named Hunter)

Class consciousness presented in an easily digestible way for our American friends

Main character subjected to horrible torments, incl. but not lim. to torture, brainwashing, and the residual guilt of what he does as a day job

Only onscreen relationships are hetero, despite the obvious actual orientation of everyone present

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

The other thing about Callan is that there's a shocking amount of tits in it - nipples an' all - for any program on 60s/70s terrestrial television. They're exclusively in the form of centrefolds that working-class characters have decorated their rooms with, but even so. Also, I'm pretty sure Edward Woodward got in an only slightly elided 'fucking' at one point.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

You'd think 'black militants send a hit squad after a thinly disguised Enoch Powell' would at least be a fun plot, wouldn't you? As it is, Callan manages not merely to make this boring, but so tonally misjudged that the Major from Fawlty Towers surely did more to improve race relations - butchered versions of Shylock's 'Hath not a Jew eyes?' speech can be twisted into making the speaker look a tit surprisingly easily, and when this is interspersed with plaintive pleas of "gizza job" it mainly seems like the writers had certain talking points they had to hit and didn't really care how it was done. Even without the laughable '70s depiction of black Britons it's a genuinely incomprehensible episode (the M-equivalent goes to a party at Enoch's house while knowing there's a hit out on him), to the point that I suspect it was originally a two-parter that was condensed down into a single episode, possibly by a blind non-English-speaker.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

A scene from hardboiled spy serial Callan I'm surprised hasn't been done more since - high-stakes quick-cutting tabletop wargaming. (The quasi-stop-motion here, admittedly, is dreadful, but the episode as a whole seems to have been filmed and edited very quickly, with multiple actors' stumbles on their lines left in the finished product.) The Big Bang Theory and The IT Crowd might have done something like this, but as a joke, not as homosocial bonding between men with careers.