The Sandbaggers
| The Sandbaggers | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Genre | Espionage |
| Created by | Ian Mackintosh |
| Developed by | Ian Mackintosh |
| Starring |
Roy Marsden Richard Vernon Ray Lonnen Alan MacNaughtan Elizabeth Bennett Jerome Willis Bob Sherman Diane Keen Dennis Burgess Michael Cashman |
| Theme music composer | Roy Budd |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 3 |
| No. of episodes | 20 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | David Cunliffe |
| Producer(s) | Michael Ferguson |
| Running time | approx. 50 minutes |
| Production company(s) | Yorkshire Television |
| Release | |
| Original network | ITV |
| Original release | 18 September 1978 – 28 July 1980 |
The Sandbaggers is a British television drama series about men and women on the front lines of the Cold War. Set contemporaneously with its original broadcast on ITV in 1978 and 1980, The Sandbaggers examines the effect of the espionage game on the personal and professional lives of British and American intelligence specialists.
The protagonist is Neil D. Burnside (played by Roy Marsden), Director of Operations in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6, although the name "MI6" is never uttered in the series). Burnside oversees, among others, a small, elite group of British intelligence officers: the Special Operations Section nicknamed the "Sandbaggers". This group is composed of highly trained officers whose work includes dangerous missions that tend to be politically sensitive or especially vital, such as escorting defectors across borders, carrying out assassinations (sandbagging), or rescuing other operatives who are in trouble behind the Iron Curtain.
In the series, the Central Intelligence Agency and SIS have a co-operative agreement to share intelligence. The Sandbaggers depicts SIS as so under-funded that it has become dependent on the CIA. Burnside consequently goes to great lengths to preserve the "Special Relationship" between the CIA and SIS—most notably in the episode of the same name. The personal price he pays in that episode sparks an obsession with the safety of his Sandbaggers and the survival of the special section in subsequent episodes, contributing to Burnside's gradual psychological unravelling and the series' unresolved cliffhanger ending.
The Sandbaggers was created by Ian Mackintosh, a Scottish former naval officer turned television writer, who had previously achieved success with the acclaimed Warship BBC television series. He wrote all the episodes of the first two series. However, during the shooting of the third series in July 1979, Mackintosh and his girlfriend, a British Airways stewardess, were declared lost at sea after their single-engine aircraft mysteriously went missing over the Pacific Ocean near Alaska following a radioed call for help. Some of the details surrounding their disappearance have caused speculation about what actually occurred, including their stop at an abandoned United States Air Force base and the fact that the plane happened to crash in the one small area that was not covered by either US or USSR radar.
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