Season 10 - Danger UXB (1989-1981)
Danger UXB is about a bomb disposal unit during World War II created by the late great John Hawkesworth. The show goes into the danger and minutiae of dismantling a bomb and making it safe. The unit are constantly having to figure out the insidious new ways the Nazis have invented to create the most damage and to make bombs almost impossible to defuse. This even includes the introduction of the dreaded Butterfly Bomb. Now, I'm not saying that I could 100% disarm a bomb after watching this series, but I think I'm definitely in with a chance. Which is actually rather useful because they are still finding UXBs to this day. Not that I'd want to. Watching this show was stressful enough without having real world implications. The show starts with Anthony Andrews as Brian Ash, a man with no experience put in charge of bomb disposal. Which means that we the viewer get to follow him into this world that basically meant your life expectancy was measured in days. The problem with Brian Ash and therefore Anthony Andrews is he's too boring. He's your general romantic hero lead. The blue-eyed blonde haired boy who the women swoon over. In fact he's soon having a romance Susan Mount, the married daughter of boffin Doctor Gillespie who is a specialist in bomb fuses. Their romance is the definition of milquetoast. You don't care because you actually feel that deep down they probably don't care. It's too contrived and trope heavy. Which means, of course, she has a husband who's a codebreaker, who suffers mental breaks and whom she has to see to. Eventually he dies and that means they can be together and in the only moment of their relationship I approve of, she realizes he loves his men and the thrill of defusing a bomb more than he'll ever love her and that's where the series ends. Suck it Susan. Suck it! Because it's the men who make this show. 347 Section, 97 Company is made up of the best of the best in British character actors but Robert Pugh, George Innes, and Kenneth Cranham all deserve a special shout-out. Especially Kenneth Cranham. When I watched this show it happened to coincide with Kenneth Cranham being in everything I was watching. I don't know how he was so ubiquitous, but there he was on the stupidly renamed C.B. Strike, then popping up on the final season of Doc Martin, then on Inspector Morse and Pollyanna, even the nearly unwatchable Reilly: Ace of Spies. I was viewing shows spanning fifty years of British television in no particular order and there he was. There he always was. And he was always fabulous. His character of Lance Corporal Jack Salt was more interesting in one minute of screen time than Brian Ash was for the entire series. He had a wife up north but was conflicted and worried about the safety of this woman whom he'd met. Everything keeps compounding on him, even where he's home on leave and his house, with his wife inside, explodes before his very eyes. He's eventually taken out by a Butterfly Bomb in what I view as suicide by cop. He had so much trauma and that gave us viewers someone to root for. We wanted him to suceed. But, when you're not sure if you'll live another minute every minute is precious. If there's anything this series imparted to us, it was this. Oh, and that Nazis are evil. All Nazis are evil. There are no exceptions. They take delight in creating killing machines. If you're on the side of the Nazis YOU are a baddie.
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