An in – depth study of bomb disposal

Press, 10 August 1979, Page 11

An in - depth study of bomb disposal

“Danger UXB” (TV2, Wednesday) is another new series based on the smash-hit musical, “The Second World War.” Purportedly the story of one unit of a British bomb-disposal company, it is in fact a thinly-dis-guised attack on the efficiency of the German ar-

maments industry: very few of the bombs dropped cm London in the first episode were depicted as actually exploding, and those that didn’t were clearly made of plywood and could be rendered even more harmless than they already were by a simple but boring process involving a lot of sweating and stif f-upper-lipping and glose-ups of watches and finally a little twist with a tin-opener thing and straight into Bruce For. svth and that infuriating cheese advert again.

Not that it was possible to watch without just a teeny feeling that the television set was about to explode; they can’t run a series > about defusing bombs without shredding the odd actor now and again to give it authenticity, and, since most of the action seems to take place in various craters containing bombs, we can look forward to a series in which supporting actor after supporting actor gets splattered all over the script while the main characters soldier on with just a scratch or two — rather along the lines of “Wings." Perhaps that’s what they mean by a bit part.

The main role of Brian Ash, a young Royal Engineers officer, is played with his usual woodenness by Anthony Andrews, who has either had a lobotomy or is very skilled at portraying the typical product of an English public school, an ideal chap to pop into a hole with a ticking bomb. The cast has the usual

characters that have become mandatory in stories about “The Second World War”: cockneys with fags always hanging from their lips who make cups of tea all the time and make jokes about death, but actually have a heart of gold; private soldiers who have a chip on

their shoulders about young officers and complain about them a lot, but actually have a heart of gold; gruff, weatherbeaten sergeants who brpok no familiarity with gruff cockneys with fags and private soldiers with Chips on their shoulders and who regard publicschool officers as a bit wet, but actually have a heart of gold-

“Danger UXB” hardly justified the digging of a s 1 i t-trench in the Bremworth, but it was tense enough as series about bomb-disposal squads go. The series also confined the bout of handkypanky that seems to have become an integral part of British productions these days — “Pennies from Heaven,” the superb, odd story of a song-sheet seller in that other longrunning show, “The Depression of the Nineteenthirties,”' also refuses to let an episode go by without some sort of dirty deed. If we are going to have this sort of explicit sex beamed into our living rooms, it seems only right that the people responsible for it give us some warning. I always seem to be out making a cup of tea when it happens.

By

JOHN COLLINS