Menace Unseen
Taking a break from The Prisoner to do an impressionistic post about this 1988 mini-series: don’t worry, I will get back to The Village and the Soviet Union.
This show is available on the internet. As far as I know it hasn’t had a commercial release in its original English language. That said, as always I’m fascinated by the amount of input a show’s IMDB page gets. In this case it has short summaries of each episode and two user reviews (one of which is by someone who hasn’t seen it since initial broadcast), and a number of illustrations. This usually means a show has a small fan club who are enthusiastic but it may never get that much traction. It looks like it got commercial releases abroad because VHS covers have been uploaded, in French (Virus Mortel), Italian (Amenaza Invisible) and ?Swedish (Hemlig Kod), but searching for these titles hasn’t produced a huge fan base.
It is also one of those shows that has the disadvantage that the first thing people tend to say about it is that it stars Ian Ogilvie. We all know that a big name can make or break a TV series but I think Ogilvie has rather overshadowed the series. For example when you search for Menace Unseen one of the first results you get is a contemporary interview from Radio Times all about Ian Ogilvie and very little about Menace Unseen. This is unfortunate because this mini-series is well worth watching.
The summary of the plot is eminently simple: Ogilvie plays Duncan Free, whose business partner, Robert Shriving, is unexpectedly killed by an exploding computer. Free has never known a computer blow up in this way and so is suspicious about what has actually happened. He has a look at his partner’s home office andto my delight he takes away two 5” floppy disks that he think have the explanation of what happened to his partner. His investigations uncover a conspiracy of very powerful people who are stealing people’s data from computers.
So it’s immediately apparent that there is a strong conspiracy element to the plot, but there is an undercurrent about technology. There are repeated reflections about the way information technology has revolutionised the world already and the risks this can pose to people’s information. I have read online that everything in the show could actually have been done by the computer technology of the time, and I’m no expert, but I’m a bit sceptical that the computer surveillance depicted here could actually have been carried out in the eighties. The moral questions around the developing information technology are also brought up again and again: specifically the way the technology itself is amoral. I don’t want you to get the idea that this show is in any way stuffy or prim, but it’s clearly a warning about the ways technology could be used.
In fact at this distance of time one of the most charming aspects is the completely eighties milieu. We are transported to Yuppie London of the eighties. The shirts are striped, the offices are gleaming, the flats are in warehouses, and the cars are for their style rather than utility. This is actually one of the most stylish shows I can think of, but then I love everything eighties. Then there is the eighties technology. At one point the computer expert Free calls on to hack into the floppy disks prints off the menus on a dot matrix printer and puts them in his briefcase with a yellow Walkman. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a 5” floppy. Towards the end we see this mammoth contemporary mainframe computer...honestly this show was made at the exact right time for its subject matter and for its technology.
There is a criticism online of the show, that it ends inconclusively: it is clear that the conspiracy is still ongoing and it is not revealed what individuals are behind it. I really think that this is the intended effect of the show: the people stealing people’s information are clearly shady unnamed people with a lot of power and resources, and it fits this agenda perfectly that nobody is named and we are left with the conspiracy ongoing.
Unfortunately the rather nebulous focus of the series and excursions into philosophy about freedom, technology, civil rights and power, makes for a rather meandering plotline, which I think is a more valid criticism. If you’re looking for a straightforward mystery, this isn’t it. Probably the plot could have been a 90 minute film with minimal excursions, but the aim here is much more comprehensive and the milieu much more lush.
You will gather that I like this series very much, and indeed I do, in fact so much that I think you should watch it.
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