As the seventies began, things were already starting to look bleak for Britain and as the decade wore on, increased industrial unrest, soaring levels of unemployment, runaway inflation and the continuing Troubles in Northern Ireland all added to a growing sense of unease and despair. The youthful optimism and idealism of the 1960s was being rudely replaced by the realities of economic fragility, political ineptitude and a growing sense of hopelessness. Vincent Tilsley and Rex Firkin’s thirteen part political thriller The Guardians caught the growing mood of uncertainty perfectly. Too well perhaps – as the decade progressed and gave way to the eighties and all its social and political problems, the series seemed to fade from the collective memory. Perhaps it was just too close to home, too prescient for its own good. A DVD release by the ever-busy Network in 2010 revealed a still impressive – if over long and rather talky – drama that seems as worryingly relevant now as when it was first shown in the summer of 1971.
Britain in the 1980s. Economic chaos has led to a coup that has swept aside democracy (“a form of group suicide”) and replaced it with n autocratic dictatorship notionally led by the Prime Minister Sir Timothy Hobson (Cyril Luckham). It quickly becomes clear that the real power lies with a shadowy figure known initially only as “The General” and his army of “Guardians of the Realm”, a paramilitary force that has replaced the police and is gradually eroding away the armed forces. Known more popularly as The Guardians of simply The Gs, the force dresses in Nazi-style uniforms, patrols the streets armed to the teeth and metes out violent punishment to anyone who breaks the increasingly draconian rules.
Standing against them are the Communists (who The Guardians fear are trying to infiltrate them) and a ragtag but growing group of revolutionaries known as Quarmby (after their barely seen leader) who are trying to goad the authorities into ever greater acts of repression and violence so that the masses will finally have enough and rise up against them.
The scripts, written by Tilsley, Hugh Whitemore and John Bowen among others, cannily avoid the trap of painting everything in broad strokes of black and white. Both sides have moderates and extremists, both sides are quick to violence and both are happy to manipulate the population to their own ends. There are no absolutes in this dystopia – all sides are as bad as each other leaving the general public – who notably are rarely seen – with no-one to side with them.
It’s a bleak portrait of the misuse of power, one in which the notional “bad guys” express doubts and concerns about what they’re doing and the notional “good guys” are all too ready to use the tactics of the hated oppressor if they suit their ends. The resistance are a fragmented lot, riven by divisions and at times no better than the hated Guardians. This is heady stuff and in 1971 nothing quite like it had been tried before. Indeed it was so provocative that it was shown in all areas of the ITV network except that served by Ulster Television – it was felt that with the ongoing Troubles, a tale of revolution, violence and government oppression would do nothing but stir up even more trouble. It didn’t really help that the name for the Irish police – Garda Síochána – translates into “Guardians of the Peace”…
Performances among the large ensemble cast are variable but Cyril Luckham (his prime minister agonises over what his government has become), Gwyneth Powell (the future headmistress Mrs McCloskey in popular school drama Grange Hill (1978-2008)) as the traumatised wife of a Guardian captain, Robin Ellis as an undercover Guardian agent trying to winkle out Commie infiltrators and Derek Smith as The General’s mouthpiece, bullying the prime minister and ruthlessly shutting down any attempts to ask awkward questions (like what have The Guardians done with the country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons that they spirited away some time earlier?) are all extremely good.
There’s humour among the paranoia and political machinations, much of it as black as night though odd incidentals raise a smile or two – a news broadcast for example reveals that the famous leaning tower of Pisa has finally collapsed, and prisoners are kept docile and well-behaved by liberal use of cannabis.
The series touches on a wide range of topics that remain as much a concern today as they did then. Long moral debates are presented over the thorny issues of European federalism, capital punishment, the morality of political assassination and the fragile state of democracy and therein lies the series’ most pressing problem. It’s all worthy stuff but the endless yakking tends to slow everything down and there’s no real sense of urgency, no real suggestion that the revolution is growing apace. Philosophical debate sdo not good drama make.
But that’s a measure of the show’s ambition – it doesn’t quite work and reducing those lengthy conversations could have brought the episode count down to a more manageable level, but one cant fault it for trying. The Guardians was broadcast in that jewel of the British prime time crown, the Saturday night slot and it was a brave and daring move to present something as challenging and daring s this in a slot usually reserved for frothy light entertainment. It was a bold, possibly foolish, move and it found it hard to maintain its audience over three long months. Action scenes are few and far between and typically underfunded though things pick up as the series progresses and lies, deceptions and assumed identities are all revealed.
Tilsley had written a couple of episodes of that most paranoid of British television shows, The Prisoner (1967-1968) (Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling and The Chimes of Big Ben) and the influence of Patrick McGoohan’s magnificent achievement are all over The Guardians. The BBC tried their hand at the theme of a Nineteen Eighty-Four style dystopian future with the Wilfred Greatorex’s similarly inclined 1990 (1977-1978) with Edward Woodward as a journalist seeking to expose the tyrannical Public Control Department of the Home Office as they seek to once again oppress the people of Britain.
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