Da na naaa, da-na, na!

Once upon a time, children, there were only three TV channels. (Actually, progress back and you can logically say there were once only two, then only one ... but, with Channel 4 finally appearing when I was 17, for the bulk of my childhood there were only three.) And as the amount of TV actually worth watching over any 24 hour period has stayed pretty well constant, it follows there was a lot more worth watching on those three than you will find on any of the 1001 channels now available.

And few things were worth watching more than The Professionals. You have to understand the ritual to appreciate this fully. I was at a boarding school; TV was rationed to the weekends only. (Plus the weekday Nine O’Clock News if you were a sixth former, or Not the Nine O’Clock News for everyone by special permission.) The Professionals was on Saturday evenings, usually after some ghastly sporty drivel like Rugby Special. So you staked out your chair in the TV room at least 30 minutes early (=30 minutes of ghastly sporty drivel to tolerate, but it was worth it). If you were junior enough that you were only up because of the extended Saturday evening bedtime, you got into your pyjamas and dressing gown first.

And CI5’s finest burst onto our screens: Bodie (tall, taciturn, the cool one) and Doyle (slim, edgy, obviously embarrassed by the whole business but then never dreaming he would one day be a high court judge). Ah, me. Forty five minutes of Ford Capris screeching around the suburbs of London. Testosterone charged manly beating up of bad guys. Flirting with birds who actually seem to turned on when men with bubble perms call them “luv”. And let’s not forget the civil liberties routinely trampled into the dust in ways that would make DCI Gene Hunt green with envy.

Happy, happy days.

All brought back by watching an episode on ITV4 last night. (See, I didn’t say that the quality of modern day channels had declined per se – just that it’s spread much more thinly.) I must have seen this first time round because I remembered a couple of lines. Bodie and Doyle, having collected a valuable antique desk for their boss (what else would you do with a pair of highly trained killers on your payroll during a slack period?) inadvertently spook a couple of kidnappers, leading to an exciting car chase in a Ford Cortina taking turns on two wheels with an antique desk on the roofrack. The inevitable happens and jokes are made about “she’s lost her drawers”. A hostage situation ensues, leading to the discovery of industrial espionage at an armaments firm.

“But we have the highest possible security!” barks the firm’s CEO. “All our top secret documents are stored in this safe!” Points at safe. “And I have the only key!” Produces key. Bodie takes key, sniffs it, smells plasticine. The key has been copied! Oh noes!

A few years ago one of the satellite channels tried to do a Next Generation job with The New Professionals, which I never saw but I gather it never took off beyond a single season. Well, no, some things are sui generis and can never be repeated. If we want ethically dubious intelligence work today, we have Spooks. If we want blokes running around a lot and beating people up we have Life on Mars, but to get past the modern audience it has to have a key character who thinks that the beating people up bit might not be strictly necessary. That’s what makes The Professionals so special. It’s a time capsule, a product of a time when you could have both ethically dubious intelligence work and blokes running around etc. and you could get away with it.

Yes, The Professionals belongs to the time that begat it, as does Martin Shaw’s perm, which is believed to have eloped with Tom Baker’s hair into a parallel universe with enough dimensions to contain them both. But last night made me remember why those 30 minutes of Rugby Special were so worth it.