Time to go undercover. https://twitter.com/Vetarnias/status/1383284709258502148

Instead of watching "Fairly Secret Army", I did "A Very British Coup", a mini-series from 1988. (I've never read the 1982 book.) Even though unrelated to FSA, it's contemporary and can be said to inhabit the same fevered ideological universe, but at the other end of the spectrum.

Unlike "Fairly Secret Army", it's set in an alternate Britain where a far-left Labour leader takes power and is actively sabotaged from within, by his own staff, aided by the Americans and a rabid press magnate. (Imagine if Corbyn had won and you get the idea, I suppose.)

In the climax, the prime minister is blackmailed into resigning based on fabricated evidence of bribery benefiting him, but instead he decides to force a new election while calling for a public inquiry. At the end, there are obvious hints of a reactionary coup d'état unfolding.

The plot itself never strays far into outlandish situations - on the whole it remains perfectly believable - but I have several reservations about aesthetic decisions. The disjointed approach, rapid cutting and emphasis on close-ups serve it well, once one gets used to them.

I can appreciate the faux-cinéma vérité finish that the creators went for. However, it also seems rushed; at three hours, one can imagine it being double the length without its outstaying its welcome. There is a certain verve to it, but parts of it are also very dated.

Anyway, I brought this up because it's exactly the kind of universe where the likes of the protagonists of "Fairly Secret Army" would have leaped into action - especially towards the end. It's an interesting primer before moving on to that series.

It's also worth pointing out that "Fairly Secret Army" is a semi-spinoff of "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin", by the same creator, David Nobbs, with Geoffrey Palmer playing the same character (under another name). It concluded just a few months before Thatcher took power.

The name change was because "Perrin" was produced by the BBC, which was interested in a spin-off. Yet the powers-that-be got cold feet due to the controversial subject matter, and asked Nobbs to dilute the politics. He did; they complained it was too diluted and incomprehensible.

The project was shelved and was subsequently revived by Channel 4, a new non-BBC channel that was just two years old when the show first aired in 1984. Due to the change in broadcaster, Nobbs could not retain the original character's name and instead created a carbon copy of him.

Freed from any potential vestiges from "Perrin", Nobbs changed his character's name from a rather nondescript Jimmy Anderson to a magnificent Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott, a down-on-his-luck recently retired army major who struggled to return and adapt to civilian life.

I have finished season one, and it's definitely a mixed bag: it oscillates between darkly serious commentary and near-slapstick farce, and runs the gamut from still biting satire to the gratuitously offensive. Some of the most caustic parts would never get past the radar today:

Season 1 has little in the way of a story arc. A dejected Truscott is talked out of suicide by an old army contact, Captain Beamish. After learning Beamish had inherited money, he comes up with a plan to create a paramilitary militia operating out of Beamish's dilapidated estate.

They loathe each other. Truscott says: "Friendship turns to betrayal. Love withers into indifference. Hatred lasts. You and I can have a perfect working relationship. Never have any illusions about each other so never be disappointed. Never trust each other so never be deceived."

In addition, Truscott falls in love with Beamish's sister, who lives with her brother and who had in fact inherited the estate itself. In subsequent episodes, they struggle through recruitment, financing, maintaining a front (a granola health shop) and keeping the band together.

Given the subject matter, there are plenty of unsavory touches along the way, like Truscott trying to recruit an old army contact into the organization, only to storm out upon learning that he is gay; or a black man getting beaten up (by mistake as he was a contact of the group).

As a sitcom, it absolutely had to tread very lightly indeed. Truscott's group had to remain utterly inept throughout, so as to remain harmless (e.g. they secured illicit firearms but were issued the wrong ammunition so they never came to using them), or else the comedy was dead.

Thus the cast of characters, besides those named above, remained buffoonish for the most part: an old mercenary tired of fighting who eagerly wants to run the granola shop, another who pretends to have one leg for image reasons, an old sergeant major and his concubine.

Also two young hoodlums who are running short in the smarts department. ("We're looking for people with convictions," Truscott says. To which he gets the reply: "Oh, we've got plenty of them, mate.") In the last episode of season one, the group falls apart and disbands. The End?

Of course not, because there is a second season. Nobbs is still writing, but Robert Young was replaced as director by Roy Ward Baker (who used to have a distinguished film career - notably "A Night to Remember", the best Titanic film - before turning to TV later in his career).

It's now 1986 and a new location to revive the militia has to be found, as the estate where the first season had been filmed had meanwhile been torn down. The show solves the continuity problem by having Major Truscott's militia secure a stash of explosives... you guess the rest.

Season 2 sees a pivot of Truscott's group away from paramilitary resistance, and towards infiltration and intelligence gathering. It gains a name that makes it pass for a private security agency, boasting of hundreds of operatives it doesn't have. It also refines its ideology:

The setting of the first season was untenable anyway. The show was not set in an alternate-universe version of Britain where a radical wing of the Labour Party held sway, it's indicated in the first episode that Truscott would have been 14 in 1945, and 53 now, so it's the 1980s.

"A Very British Coup", for its part, was set in the near future, but obviously drawing on the same material as "Fairly Secret Army": the turmoil that surrounded Harold Wilson in the 1970s. But in Truscott's universe it's all about preparedness, for "when the balloon goes up".

Not only is Truscott's world evidently one where Thatcher and Co. are in charge (though never named), it's also one in which, in the first season at least, no political friction exists to speak of (there's no mention of the IRA, for instance). It's all very genteel - too much so.

At least it does not pretend to exist in a vacuum, like the worst example I can think of ("Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.", a military sitcom from 1964 to 1969 that *never* mentions Vietnam), but keep in mind that Truscott runs a far-right paramilitary group. We know what those can do.

And it's not because the creators are somehow sympathetic to their ideology. Nobbs evidently hated the blighters. But on another level he's also sympathetic to Truscott as a person. He likely concluded that Truscott could only remain relatable if he never succeeded in his plans.

From there the question was how to juggle between pathos and farce, eliciting sympathy for Truscott but never for, um, Truscottism itself, without glossing over its tenets but also not risking making everybody involved unpalatable, and avoiding the stagnation of constant failure.

One way out would have been to have Truscott fail in a series of outlandish schemes where the viewer knew theu would end in failure, but kept watching to find out what would go wrong *this time* for the situation to remain exactly as it was at the beginning of the episode.

The thing with "Gilligan's Island, but with fascists" is that even failure can involve collateral damage. The premise "Truscott fails to carry out a terrorist plot" is still no laughing matter just because he failed to carry it out as a result of the most outlandish of reasons.

I doubt that even the blackest of comedy approaches would have succeeded in maintaining such a sitcom for very long. There are limits to what one can do on TV, especially in that format, and in the 1980s there was no way the medium had the same artistic respect as film had.

The show found a way out of that dilemma in the second season: First, by putting the guns away exemplified by Truscott's remark cited above of now emphasizing the political over the military. Second, by building the season's arc around a mysterious government figure hiring them.

So now Truscott's organization, instead of potentially committing crimes against the government (bad!), now can potentially commit crimes *for* the government (good!), but only as long as they're not caught - otherwise nobody will acknowledge knowing them.

What was a rather risky and uneven social satire in season one in effect became a political satire in season two. Once, the group was reduced to begging for money from wealthy sympathizers, but now it had received the unofficial sanction of the legitimate government of the land.

Truscott's organization is contacted to infiltrate a leftist cell that had been rumoured to plan some sort of action, led by a known radical called "the Cobra". Truscott, still recovering from amnesia after the explosion, accepts the mission and decides to infiltrate it himself.

As evidence of the official connections of their new employer, Truscott's organization is provided with a decommissioned military base as its new headquarters. The infiltration goes ahead; but as one can guess, things do not go as smoothly as Truscott would like to believe.

Stylistically, the second season is far less reminiscent of, e.g. "Dad's Army" (though there is no laugh track here), than it resembles a French farce. Another way of putting it is that a show named after a dramatic series on the resistance in WWII ended up like "'Allo! 'Allo!".

Truscott thinks his infiltration job is going well, except that everybody else in the leftist cell realizes right away what he is up to. He is much older than they are. He talks in the stereotypical manner of a reactionary's idea of leftist discourse. And then there is this:

Truscott's son with his ex-wife (whom Harry never forgave for running off with an Italian) is under no illusions as to his father's real politics (though it's mentioned later that the son once met with Beamish, years before who had told him Harry was "too right-wing to be true").

Meanwhile, Truscott starts sleeping with an attractive member of the cell to extract information from her (while she is under orders to feed him false intelligence by pretending to talk in her sleep). And then... Beamish's sister Nancy turns up to infiltrate the cell too.

Nancy, still very much in love with Truscott (who had left her waiting at the church on the day of their planned wedding because he was busy tailing "the Cobra"), soon discovers what is the real situation in the cell. She also gets to deliver the best one-liner of the series:

Truscott is fed information that the group is planning to steal missiles at a military base on a certain day. He relays it to his underlings. His troops show up at the location designed as hippies, promptly get arrested, then get told by police there are no missiles there anyway.

Meanwhile Truscott is held hostage and is revealed the real plan, in which he's going to be implicated: to launch a cyber attack on sensitive computer networks in the UK (a pretty sharp touch for 1986). But he succeeds in escaping, albeit by the most humiliating of methods.

All he succeeds in doing is to get himself arrested. At first he fails to be taken seriously, but then he persuades the police to contact the government agent who had hired him. The plan is exposed. The authorities march on the leftist cell. Harry has failed his way to success.

Right-wing papers call him a hero. He grants TV interviews. New recruits pour in. Truscottism takes off. On the day of his re-scheduled wedding, the mysterious agent appears again. There's more work. The last shot is of their car driving past a gate before a close-up on Big Ben.

Wisely, the series ended there. If you could build a sitcom (with caution) around a hapless inoffensive right-wing extremist, there was no way to laugh at Truscott from the moment he became successful (except, perhaps, among those who shared his ideology, but let's not go there).

Already the second season appears to have realized that the threat of physical violence of the first season (rarely realized, but implied in every episode) was a dead end, especially if aimed against the government or carried out without its approval (again, constantly implied).

The second season found a way to diffuse the insular toxic potency of the first season - which was a dead end, already demonstrated by the group all but disbanding in the last episode - into (given the context of the time) a larger critique of Thatcherism, which gave it new life.

The moment Truscott became successful, however, the danger was that the series could turn into an apologia of this same Thatcherism it evidently opposed. It would be impossible to laugh at a Truscott who was no longer a hapless inept amateur but now a man of power and influence.

Hence the bitter happy ending that is perfect for a series on this subject: a personal victory for Truscott, who has now found his purpose in life, but also an ideological victory for what he represents and those he serves. The apex of the satire marks the end of the sitcom.

Unlike "Perrin" (which not only has had sequels but even a remake), "Fairly Secret Army" fell into obscurity and as far as I know is not available on home video. I can understand why. It is definitely a product of its time and trying to bring it about today is simply unthinkable.

Nevertheless, despite its failings - of which there are a few but not to the point of bringing down the entire series - it definitely deserves to be better known. At its best, it features sparkling exchanges by Nobbs filled to the brim with the wit for which he has been known.

I can't do justice to how well Geoffrey Palmer, who died last November, succeeded in bringing Truscott to life, with a good supporting cast. And it's worth mentioning the memorable music by the renowned composer Michael Nyman. I might as well end this thread with the credits: