Hacker Cinema
The Professionals
1977 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Brian Clemens
The lives of Bodie and Doyle, top agents for Britain's CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), and their controller, George Cowley. The mandate of CI5 was to fight terrorism and similar high-profile crimes. Cowley, a hard ex-MI5 operative, hand-picked each of his men. Bodie is a cynical ex-SAS paratrooper and mercenary whose nature ran to controlled violence, while his partner, Doyle, comes to CI5 from the regular police force, and is more of an open minded liberal. Their relationship is often contentious, but they are the top men in their field, and the ones to whom Cowley always assigned to the toughest cases.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Wow, this really ties in to a lot of things. Victorian terraced houses. The reshaping of London by the Luftwaffe. the emptying out of postwar London especially the East End, resulting in that particular derelict look of a lot of the TV and film of the 70s (e.g. The Professionals). An eccentric refusenik in the final un-demolished house. Nineties "cool britannia" art. Concrete brutalism. Art funding vs social services. Local councils and planning schemes.
Even the KLF get a mention.
See also the Bermondsey Tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandela_Way_T-34_Tank
Is there a place here for Blake's Seven, (esp the early episodes) and of course Tom Baker's Dr Who incarnation? Incidentally, for those who didn't know, Douglas Adams wrote some classic episodes and was script editor (head writer) on Dr Who for at least a season or so.
And I think Dad's Army remains a classic, about the Home Guard in WWII, with some of the finest comic actors.
There's even a case to be made for The Sweeney and the Professionals which dealt with grittier more modern reality stories, darker sides of law and intelligence enforcement which is often glossed over in the modern glitzier procedurals.
Aha, and though maybe it was largely in the 80s, how about Minder?
Do you by any chance know that old British TV series "The Professionals"? I understand English pretty well and I even lived in UK for 2.5 years but for some reason this TV show is really difficult to understand for me - half of the time I cannot figure out what they are saying and I do not know why. Is it some local dialect or something?