#sandbaggers

[mariocki]

RIP Christopher Benjamin (27.12.1934 - 15.1.2025)

"That was another reason, in a way, that I decided to give [stage acting] up, because I was getting a bit - a bit dicey with the lines. People sort of wrote down, quite often, the things I said... instead of the things I should have said. They were known as my bloopers: 'Benjamin bloopers'. Some of my inventions were very good, I must admit. My feeling was, if I dried, I had to say something - and so that something was something that amused the rest of the cast considerably, quite often."

[runawoof]

I still love him so much

[beehivian]

Having one-sided beef is so embarrassing. Yeah we only talked once and I've been praying for your downfall ever since and you probably don't even remember me!!!

[hockeyplayerstories]

(Fun fact; I’m pretty small myself so sometimes my coworkers do this to me too 😅 what can I say, I’m pretty huggable 🥰)

🤣

[genotama]

i could listen to tuukka rask talk all day

[anditendshowyoudexpect]

Sch., after six years of watching the show: hehe, you did ask the KGB to send you a bird, Willy... wait, was that actually foreshadowing?

aw bless

[look-a-ghost]

Like the castle in its corner In a medieval game I foresee terrible trouble And I stay here just the same

I am in my unhinged era where I listen to music and the lyrics make me think about my Sandbaggers blorbos

This is Willie Caine’s song

[hoagster]

Sandbagger Stimboard!!!

X/X/X X/X/X X/X/X

[downthetubes]

Keith Page’s Alternative TV Viewing

Finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worth watching on modern television, comic artist and writer Keith Page finds it more interesting to go back to the dramas of the 1960s through to the 1980s

Finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worth watching on modern television, comic artist and writer Keith Page – creator of The Adventures of Charlotte Corday, Strawjack and Hancock – The Lad Himself, with Stephen Walsh – finds it more interesting to go back to the dramas of the 1960s through to the 1980s.  “There was a far wider selection of themes, sharp scripts and no ‘agendas’ or…

[thispunforhire]

Can I recommend getting into TV shows from the 70s and 80s? There's a lot of good stuff and also it can't really get cancelled suddenly.

I know there are people on here who like MASH and Columbo, and I think there's also a Magnum PI fandom, but I think Miami Vice is ripe for the Tumblr treatment.

Here are a few others:

Wiseguy: An FBI agent goes undercover in various organizations to bring them down. An early pioneer in the use of story arcs in television.

Crime Story: A team of Chicago cops work to take down a rising criminal mastermind in 1960s Chicago and Las Vegas

China Beach: Inspired by the memoir of an army nurse in Vietnam, this is something of a spiritual successor to MASH, leaning harder on the drama while also being very experimental in the form of the show. (Tour of Duty is a more straightforward Vietnam series which also examines the culture of the time)

Gangsters: A British series set in the underworld of Birmingham. Takes pains to show the multicultural nature as well as extreme racism of the city at the time.

The Sandbaggers: an espionage series which explores the effect of cold war spycraft on the people who have to carry it out. Masterfully written, with an eye to realism rather than action, and with well written female characters throughout.

The Onedin Line: An epic series about the career of a 19th century shipping magnate, from ship's master to Captain of industry. As with The Sandbaggers, the female roles are well written and given opportunities to work towards their own goals.

[lvrhughes]

Sandbagger | T. Zegras

pairing: Trevor Zegras x gn!reader

warnings: none?

summary: Trevor invited you to the sandbagger golf video

word count: 0.7k

not my gif!

“You can sit in the cart the entire time, please baby?” Trevor’s begging and whining had been constant for two days now, pleading for you to come to golf with Cole and the others for sandbagger. 

“Why though? Trev, you know I don’t like golf as much as you.”

“Because you’re my very pretty lover and I need to show you off?” You rolled his eyes at his reasoning yet nodded your head, a squeal erupting from Trevor before he spun you around. 

“Trevor!” 

It was like the minute you had made it to the course, he was jumping with enthusiasm, running laps around everyone else. Cole too, running with them, as if they’d hadn’t been playing together most of the summer. 

“Would you just stop, for a minute please?” You asked as the boy ran a circle around you, pausing at your words, stopping just in front of you. “Thank you.” You grinned, pulling your arms around his shoulders, pressing a short kiss to his lips. 

He was quick to chase for more, leaning further into you, pushing his lips back against your before you could fully pull away. 

The game began shortly, you settling in the cart, squished in between the two boys. Trevor’s arm wrapping around your shoulders in the cart as he drove, gently rubbing. 

As expected you got to stay put in the cart most of the day, only coming out occasionally to stretch. Or at least that was the plan until you walked up behind Trevor to hug him. 

“Hi baby” He grinned, turning to place a kiss on your temple, his arms sliding around your waist. 

“Hi Trev” You grinned back, leaning for a kiss, him complying quickly. 

“You know,” He had a smirk on his face, a light tone to his words, “You look so good today, I don’t think anyone would notice if we just slipped off.” He teased, his hands dropping lower on your body. 

His words earning a smack to his arm, his hand quickly moving back up your body. 

“Trevor no!” His laugh covering the field in the moment, striking Cole’s attention. 

“What are you two talking about?” 

“Nothing.” you were quick to push at the same time Trevor answered honestly. “Trevor!” you yelled, hiding in his chest as Cole laughed at his answer. 

“What’re you hiding for? this is the man who admitted to being called the cock today!” Trevor returned, brushing your hair out of your face so you’d look at him. 

You laughed at his point, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. He was quick to chase again, his hand pushed against your back to keep you against him while he leaned to you again. 

“Hey, being called the cock is a compliment!” You heard Cole argue while trevor kissed you, your hands threading through his hair.

“Ew, get a room!” Those words from Cole gathered the attention of the others around, earning laughs and another flushed face from you as you push trevor back and hid in his chest. 

“That’s what we were trying to do!” He grinned, his hand rubbing circles on your back as you buried further into his chest. 

“Go finish your golf game, I’ll be in the cart.” You whispered, walking back to the cart quickly, pulling out your phone as a distraction. 

The rest of the game went without hitch, Trevor only whispering ideas to you within the cart now, Cole ever present to say no. 

Needless to say, Trevor was happy to head home, tired from the game. Not letting you leave the cart before keeping you pressed against the seat with a kiss and a whisper of what he’d do when you’re home. 

“Trevor! Be good!” You laughed back at him, clinging to him as he got out of the cart, using him to get out as well .

“Oh come on, he’s been doing this all day!” Cole’s complaint was agreed by the others, making Trevor laugh and you to playfully smack his chest. His arms encircled your waist while he led you out to the car, yelling a goodbye to everyone as you left. 

“So, my plan when we get home?” He encouraged once in the car, leaning over to kiss your lips before leaning back with a yawn. 

“How about, we watch a movie, cuddle on the couch, and I’ll run my hands through your hair like you like instead?” You countered, running your hand through his hair to further your point as his eyes closed at the contact. 

“Mhm, like the plan.” He mumbled, nodding along with you before starting the car to head home.

[mariocki]

New Scotland Yard: Prove It (2.5, LWT, 1972)

"Tell me about the wounded man, Slee."

"Yes, well, local talent. He owns three car lots and a laundrette. He's done quite well for himself, considering."

"Considering what?"

"He started life shooting other people's knees off."

"That's a grammar school education for you."

"Mmm. PTI in the army, jacked it in and sold his muscle to the highest bidder."

"Form?"

"Usual: GBH, malicious wounding with a weapon, assault occasioning bodily harm, demanding with menaces. Clean for the last four years."

"Now a respectable businessman."

"Scum. Handmade suits, two daughters at the local convent, but still scum."

[runawoof]

I love him so much

Neil Burnside, from The Sandbaggers

(not sure if I prefer the version with or without background so I’m uploading both)

[rowdyhughesy]

Swing and miss ✰ Trevor Zegras

Trevor Zegras masterlist

Cockyrookie masterlist

spittinchiclets

liked by: biznasty, trevorzegras and others

spittinchiclets: Ask and you shall receive! On this episode of sandbagger we’re playing against everyone’s favourite couple, Y/N “bizzy” Bissonette and Trevor Zegras! Let the father vs daughter competition begin🏌🏻‍♂️😤

biznasty: I’m so scared…not

→ yn.bizzy: that’s what a loser would say

user1: FINALLY

trevorzegras: 🤭

colecaufield: I feel replaced

→ yn.bizzy: zeggy would never cdog

→ trevorzegras: maybe just a tiny bit

→ colecaufield: WHAT

user2: I’ve never been more pumped to watch golf anything, but I’m only here for bizzy

→ yn.bizzy: ur making me blush pookie

→ user2: omg I love you

→ yn.bizzy: not as much as I LOVE YOU😙

yn.bizzy: next stop world golf domination😇

ryanwhitney6: lets play some golf

user3: its official, Bizzy is my idol and god. All hail Bizzy

→ trevorzegras: amen to that

load comments…

liked by: _alexturcotte, lhughes_06 and others

tagged: trevorzegras, biznasty, ryanwhitney6

yn.bizzy: I kicked some old man ass, had some birdie juice, kissed a hottie and went home 🏌🏻‍♀️ what did you do? This weekend

trevorzegras: made out w a total smoke show and killed my father in law at golf

→ yn.bizzy: sounds like a fun time😎

→ biznasty: I don’t agree with the you killing me at golf OR calling my kid a smoke show

→ yn.bizzy: cry about it in therapy then

user1: Bizzy is so unserious I’m living for it

→ _alexturcotte: she’s never been serious a day in her life

→ yn.bizzy: serious? Never heard about it? Doesn’t exist in my vocabulary

jackhughes: chirping like it’s her day job

→ yn.bizzy: I’d be a billionaire by now if that was the case, somebody hire me🙂‍↕️

user2: I don’t know wether I’m in love w her or terrified?

→ user3: it’s how most people feel at first

→ jamiedrysdale: I was scared of her the first three weeks of knowing her

→ yn.bizzy: now he loves me! I grow on people🥰

→ biznasty: yeah like a disease

→ yn.bizzy: what if this was my 13th reason?

→ trevorzegras: don’t make me a single dad I’m too young for that kind of responsibility

[notasapleasure]

No spoilers, not a review of s2, just a nice summary of the show's influences that points to beats I don't think people always appreciate.

It’s not just that the supporting cast is overwhelmingly British and Irish; the themes and style are deeply influenced by shows including the classic drama Edge of Darkness (1985), The Sandbaggers (1978-80), and Harry’s Game (1982). Those were marked by an intense focus on political oppression, the costs and ironies of espionage, and the tense state of the nation. It is very easy to imagine Andor screening on ITV in the 1980s—with roughly 2 percent of the budget and a quarter of the episodes. British political drama was particularly shaped by both the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the 1984-85 miners’ strike. During the former, the violence was not confined to Belfast; the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaign hit the British mainland repeatedly. There are still vanishingly few trash cans in British train stations, since they were removed for fear of explosives. Along with the violence came appalling miscarriages of justice by a police force that took an Irish accent as proof of guilt. During the miners’ strike, meanwhile, the British state employed policing tactics honed in Northern Ireland and Hong Kong at home. Clashes between miners and police turned into full-blown battles. Police spies went deep undercover within radical groups, including having relationships and children with activists. Both of these struggles inform Andor. The planet where the first season’s action starts and finishes, Ferrix, borrows its industrial culture from Britain’s mining towns—down to the role of a ceremonial colliery band. The uneasy occupation of Ferrix by imperial forces and street-level warnings of approaching troops are drawn from Belfast.

It was paywalled for me, so here'e the full piece:

The Empire has always been British. Ever since the first Star Wars, the villains have had stereotypically upper-class British accents. (Darth Vader is the chief exception; actor David Prowse’s rural West Country accent was overdubbed with the rich tones of James Earl Jones.) Yet many of the good guys have also been British—unsurprising for a franchise that from the start was principally filmed in the United Kingdom and drew much of its original inspiration from World War II movies depicting heroic British pilots and commandos.

But the Disney+ show Andor, which begins its second (and final) season on Tuesday, frames a galaxy far, far away in an entirely different form of Britishness: the leftist political dramas made during the Margaret Thatcher years.

Andor is a political thriller about living under a fascist state—one built on casual brutality, quota-driven slave labor, the destruction of minority culture, and the needs of endless war. It’s a vision of the Empire as a genuinely terrifying force, not as faceless drones with terrible aim. Death is frequent and not clean: Characters are hanged, electrocuted, crushed by sliding cargo, and stabbed in back alleys.

The series traces the political evolution of its eponymous main character, portrayed by Diego Luna, who first played the character in 2016’s Rogue One. In Rogue One, by largely the same creative team, Cassian Andor is an experienced rebel operative; in Andor, which starts five years earlier, he begins as an apolitical thief before being drawn into the nascent rebellion.

But the resistance here isn’t made up of the cleanly heroic fighter pilots of the Star Wars movies. It’s frayed, paranoid, and morally compromised, ready to sacrifice its own soldiers to avoid blowing a key intelligence source or to provoke the Empire into murdering civilians to drive the cause forward. In a critical monologue, the rebel organizer (played by Stellan Skarsgaard) spells out the cost of the struggle: “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.”

It is both incredible and mildly ridiculous that this show exists in the same universe as lightsabers and Ewoks. A peculiar thing happens with franchises as gigantic as Star Wars and its fellow member of the Disney entertainment juggernaut, the Marvel Cinematic Universe: The sheer number of movies and shows allows unexpected experimentation with genre and theme. Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, Black Panther tackled Black militancy and Afrofuturism, WandaVision was a metafictional passage through U.S. sitcom history. Star Wars’ The Mandalorian is a science-fiction Western, while The Acolyte is a detective story.

Andor is largely the creation of American writer and director Tony Gilroy, who has been involved with several fine thriller movies, such as Michael Clayton and the Bourne franchise. But rather than just drawing on these thrillers, the new series traces its influences to the tense, political British TV series and movies of the 1970s to 1990s.

It’s not just that the supporting cast is overwhelmingly British and Irish; the themes and style are deeply influenced by shows including the classic drama Edge of Darkness (1985), The Sandbaggers (1978-80), and Harry’s Game (1982). Those were marked by an intense focus on political oppression, the costs and ironies of espionage, and the tense state of the nation. It is very easy to imagine Andor screening on ITV in the 1980s—with roughly 2 percent of the budget and a quarter of the episodes.

British political drama was particularly shaped by both the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the 1984-85 miners’ strike. During the former, the violence was not confined to Belfast; the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaign hit the British mainland repeatedly. There are still vanishingly few trash cans in British train stations, since they were removed for fear of explosives. Along with the violence came appalling miscarriages of justice by a police force that took an Irish accent as proof of guilt.

During the miners’ strike, meanwhile, the British state employed policing tactics honed in Northern Ireland and Hong Kong at home. Clashes between miners and police turned into full-blown battles. Police spies went deep undercover within radical groups, including having relationships and children with activists.

Both of these struggles inform Andor. The planet where the first season’s action starts and finishes, Ferrix, borrows its industrial culture from Britain’s mining towns—down to the role of a ceremonial colliery band. The uneasy occupation of Ferrix by imperial forces and street-level warnings of approaching troops are drawn from Belfast.

A key moment of tension in Andor turns, as often in Northern Ireland, on a parade and a funeral. A long prison riot sequence is inspired in part by In the Name of the Father (1993), a film about the Guildford Four, who were wrongly convicted of pub bombings in the 1970s. In a scene evocative of anti-colonial violence from Belfast to Gaza, a boy mourning a murdered father builds a bomb whose throwing will spark a riot and massacre.

The U.K. is not, of course, the only influence. There is a strong Latin American subcurrent, from Andor’s childhood among an Indigenous-coded village destroyed by mining to the scenes of broken torture victims in improvised secret police cells. There are visible influences from resistance films including The Battle of Algiers and Army of Shadows.

The show’s structure is also a far cry from the quest narrative of the Star Wars movies. Multiple plot strands are wound together in the fashion of a state-of-the-nation novel; a series of three-episode arcs focused around Andor himself is mixed with ongoing threads of domination and resistance that span social classes. There are dozens of characters; even small roles have a richness and realism to them.

As Senator Mon Mothma, Genevieve O’Reilly transforms a background character first encountered in Return of the Jedi (one of just four women with speaking roles in the first movies) into a woman feeling the walls close around her as she poses as a political irritant but secretly funds militants. O’Reilly has played the character in numerous other Star Wars works, but this is the first time she has been given the opportunity to show off what she can really do as an actor. Mon Mothma’s husband is a recognizably upper-class London type in the mold of Boris Johnson, complaining that her liberal causes, unlike his “fun” imperial friends, make everything so “boring and sad.”

Like the dystopian film Brazil or Alan Moore’s original V for Vendetta comic series, Andor spends plenty of time inside the bureaucracy of fascism. The Empire is vicious and petty—and overstretched, guarding its slave labor facilities with too few soldiers, building its own doom with needless cruelty. In one of the show’s finest ironies, Andor is arrested and imprisoned not for the heist of an imperial armory he’s just committed but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a local cop is in a bad mood and the Empire needs prison camp labor to build its weapons.

The show humanizes imperial agents, from rent-a-cops and prison guards to secret police, without forgiving them. It begins with the killing of two corporate enforcers, petty bullies trying to run a shakedown on Andor himself. In a regular adventure drama, their deaths would be a way to show the coolness of the action hero; here, one dies accidentally, and the other pleads desperately for his life before the protagonist shoots him in desperation.

When we first meet Denise Gough’s secret police officer, to take another example, she’s a clever and determined woman struggling with uncooperative colleagues and institutional sexism. But as we see, she’s also a sadistic torturer, and even her earlier achievements are recast when we come to realize what “exceeding quota” in her sector actually means.

The other chief imperial viewpoint character is Syril Karn, played by one of the rare American actors in the show, Kyle Soller, and a creation of genius. He is a go-getter deputy police inspector in a self-tailored uniform surrounded by colleagues who just want to eat noodles and finish their shifts; his storyline is simultaneously hilarious, pathetic, and menacing.

I don’t know what will happen in the second season of this incredible show, which is dropping in three-episode blocks over four weeks. The creators may not have expected a story of lawless fascism to be quite so relevant to a U.S. audience. We know the end of this story, both for the character of Andor and for the ultimate victory of the resistance. But we don’t know the costs paid on the way.

[scotianostra]

Alan McNaughton, the Scottish actor was born March 4th, 1920 in Bearsden.

He was educated at The Glasgow Academy, trained at RADA, and graduated in 1940 with the Bancroft Gold Medal

A very talented , but underrated actor, most of his work was in the theatre playing at The Old Vic and on Broadway, he also appeared on TV playing barristers, public servants, scientists and officers, he played four different parts in Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, over it’s original run of 5 years in the 60′s.

He also appeared in shows like The Sandbaggers; To Serve Them All My Days and A Very British Coup, as well as Kavanagh QC, Soldier, Soldier and an episode of Hamish Macbeth

He died of cancer on 29th August 2002, aged 82.