Danger UXB (British TV Mini-Series)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C+     Episodes: B-

 

 

British Mini-Series take on a variety of subjects, but Danger UXB (1978) is unusual in that it covers those in World War II who risked their lives everyday to defuse bombs and save countless lives.  From the Impact font credits, you might expect something like The Avengers or A Sir Lew Grade adventure show, but this is a much more serious drama.

 

Anthony Andrews is Brian Ash, a soldier who gets transferred into the subdivision of British Intelligence that deals with bombs, a new threat thanks to The Axis Powers.  He reluctantly begins to take part, and then begins to excel in his work.  This 13-part saga includes the following episodes:

 

1)     Dead Man’s Shoe’s

2)     Unsung Heroes

3)     Just Like A Woman

4)     Cast Iron Killer

5)     The Silver Lining

6)     The Quiet Weekend

7)     Digging Out

8)     Bad Company

9)     Seventeen Seconds To Glory

10)  Butterfly Winter

11)  Dead Letter

12)  The Pier

13)  With Love From Adolph

 

The series has several writers and directors, including legendary British director Roy Ward Baker.  The writing is decent and directing consistent, but the series does not know whether it is a drama, history piece or even melodramatic soap opera at times.  Maybe it was about demographics and getting a wider female audience, but the show is ambitious, yet the result is somewhat choppy and sometimes a bit predictable.  If its style is trying to sell itself as the real-life version of a Lew Grade show, that is condescending and an insult to all those great shows.  There had been a move in late 1970s TV to bash such genre series, not knowing how good they had it.

 

The cast here is solid, though, including more known actors like Judy Geeson as Susan and Iain Cuthbertson as Doctor Gillespie.  The romance subplot could have been integrated more cleverly, but even back then, this never clicked for me.  However, Danger UXB was a critically acclaimed hit, and if it was not influential, it was at least contributing to the end of a golden era of quality TV from England as their literate programming held on for a few more years and the action series died out.  If you have not seen it, it is worth a look.

 

This A&E set form the Thames catalog is also solid, offering decent transfers of the 1.33 X 1 full screen images as shot by cinematographer Norman Langley.  There is a gray-like look without the too-common color desaturation we see to death these days, but one that is still color rich and deep in gray scale and black.  The original monophonic sound has been upgraded a bit in this simple Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix, which certainly sounds better than the show used to.  Simon Park’s music is sparse, but it helps, while the sound upgrade makes the episodes more involving.  The only extra is an episode of The History Channel Suicide Missions series entitled “Bomb Squad” that runs under an hour, but covers more overexposed stories than new ones.  Though this DVD set was issued for 2005, this show is from 2000, so the segment on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing without the events of 9/11 noted is very awkward.  It still makes sense to add this as an extra, but robotics and magnetic imaging technology are changing everyday, assuring that all people working in the filed of bomb deactivation will have better and better success.  It is the kind of success unimaginable at the time Danger UXB was on the air, so the series serves as an important time capsule more than ever as we become inundated with more and more technology.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo