For the first time since I was a kid, I’ve been watching “The Sandbaggers”, a late 1970s UK spy series of the Le Carré school**. I remembered my family finding it brilliant but bleak. Yeah, that’s about right!
You know though, I didn’t remember the treatment of female spy in the first season.
Obviously I remember her, since as a little girl I noticed whenever girls got to take an active part in such stories. In fact the one episode I remember vividly tragically involves her. Knowing what is coming is a shadow I didn’t deal with the first time.
Because it was the 1970s the fact a woman is an agent being an issue was to be expected, but what startles me is the focus. Both where she was training and now in her new job, her sexuality is very much the topic of much speculation and rumor. Apparently not being overtly sexually available has made everyone debate whether she is a lesbian or “frigid”!
Ok, so she isn’t fooling around in training or on the job…so? Are they equally concerned about whether the men are having casual sex? Why should her not being involved with coworkers mean that everyone starts making assumptions?
Anyway, sparks fly between her and the lead protagonist***….her boss. Yes, we are talking the beginnings of a romance with the boss. A boss that then goes to the in house shrink that reviewed her for the job, and demands the doc answer all his questions about her sexual “problems” and sexual history!!
Geez!
But still' gotta admit…credible. Especially in the context of the times.
When I was young none of that made an impression. Maybe it was because I was young, or maybe it just was the culture of the times. Whatever, the wrongness of a boss getting involved with someone he controls the very life of, AND everyone finding a woman not having a love life a cause for consternation doesn’t seem to have occurred to me.
Anyway, I don’t think this stuff will be an issue after the next episode. Errr…that’s sort of spoiler I guess. With only three agents at a time in the division, being made in the late seventies and trying to be realistic, and only about 13 more episodes…women end up being thin on the ground. (I think. It’s been a long, long time.)
It’s still a very good (in a depressing sense! LOL) vintage spy series.
**I usually think that spy fiction exists on a Bond-Le Carré spectrum. Le Carré tries to be realistic, with office combat that treats human lives as pawns, while Bond goes for heroic action fantasy.
*** Protagonist instead of hero. This kind of spy fiction doesn’t do heroes, and in his case that’s especially so. Seriously. See what boss does when one of his agents, traumatized by having to kill a colleague, announces he is going to quit and get married. YIKES!! It’s bad guy territory.
