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
