Review From The Past: The Secret Service

(Parts of this borrowed from a very close friend of mine who remains pseudonymous)

In the 1969 series The Secret Service, Father Stanley Unwin is a middle-aged Model-T driving priest who moonlights as a spy, or more specifically a counter-spy stopping various foreigners and criminals from doing bad stuff to British commercial interests. This Gerry Anderson series mixed puppets and live action.

So the usual things to happen are; Father Stanley Unwin's first response is to shrink Matthew, he uses Stanley Unwinese (a made up language demonstrated in this scene from a Carry On film) to get out of difficult situations, his Model T Ford, Gabriel drives across Westminster bridge and B.I.S.H.O.P (British Intelligence Service Headquarters Operation Priest) gives them an unlikely task.

As an example, I've put together some sort of review for my notes for the episode School For Spies. In this episode, foreigners have created a school which trains spies to blend into English society by pretending to be priests, but rather than answering to BISHOP, they're lead by the evil Archdeacon. One of them gives themselves away by preferring pop music to hymns. As is often the case, Father Unwin smuggles Matthew into the bad guys headquarters in his briefcase, but they fail to check his luggage. Trailer

For some reason this wasn't picked up for a second series, which left Gerry Anderson free for his next project UFO.

The Secret Origin Of Heckler And Kochk

Like all superheroes movie review bloggers, Heckler and Kochk have an origin story. Sadly it isn't that local news outlets, hearing of our wit, charm, and encyclopedic knowledge of the last 100 years of film, drove a truck full of money up to the entrance to our movie-lair[1] and begged us to send them the least of our thoughts on sci-fi and whatever else came to mind in receipt of which they would toss bundles of banknotes in our direction. Until now the true story has remained a mystery but now I can reveal it.

It was, unless I'm very much mistaken, Thursday 10 April this year. According to my notes we dined on Chinese take-away and pink fizzy wine. We watched two episodes of Star Maidens, the film Slither, three episodes of the Secret Service and one of Buck Rogers (the 30s version).

Frankly, looking at that list, I'm surprised we came out alive, let alone formed a blogging partnership. We may have been celebrating as we had finally finished both the Secret Service and Star Maidens that night, and decided to recount our experiences for others so they wouldn't have to sit through them. Hence: We Watch Bad Sci-Fi So You Don't Have To.

As for Heckler and Kochk, we took those names in honour of the Wheelsey Police Department, who, when confronted with the fact that Grant Grant has turned into an invincible squid beast who mutilates cattle, open up their gun locker to reveal a whole set of mismatched guns rather than the rack of identical weapons we're taught to expect. Our attempts to identify them included the "other" H&K and someone blurted out "Heckler and Kochk - We Watch Bad Sci-Fi So You Don't Have To."

We spell Kochk differently to avoid search engine results for people looking for gun who can spell, and also because it amuses Heckler. He likes knob jokes.

Heckler tells the story differently, but he's wrong, or at least wronger than me.

[1] Heckler's flat. I note that it is a basement flat, or secret bunker as Heckler prefers to call it.

Backdated Posts

Wew have plenty of other painful sci-fi to review here. The two series we finished before stratuing up this blog were;

Star Maidens - a 1970s social commentary on sexism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Trrsh8X0G8

and

The Secret Service - a half live action, half puppet based sci-fi spy thriller with the best theme tune in living memory!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOnWzmlRdfs (bear with it - it's worth it)

Reviews to follow!

Heckler