The Guardians: Part 7 - This is Quarmby
In this episode the resistance group Quarmby once again ramp up their effort to sabotage the status quo by hijacking broadcasts to criticise the regime and set up a protest to get everyone to turn up late for work by five minutes. It feels curiously contemporary because of course these are exactly hot subjects in terms of what we would now call misinformation and disinformation on social media and in news media. This is particularly of relevance because some of the broadcasts talk about rigged elections. The episode shows the problems of information to extend from the top to the bottom of society, including things being kept from the Prime Minister.
The political subject for this episode is therefore about intelligence, misinformation, propaganda and the control of 'the masses'. The techniques used to identify the location of the broadcasts are very much in line with the preoccupation with technology seen in so much contemporary television, and you can see something similar in many a TV show of the time (I think there are episodes of The Professionals and possibly The Sweeney off hand, which reflect very much the same subject).
Brilliantly, the show makes a connection with the TV licence detector vans used at the time to detect households watching TV without a licence so that a fine could be imposed. In the sixties and seventies there were some very Big Brother public service announcements used to indicate that they could tell when you were changing your socks and would be straight on to you. What the show does brilliantly is turn the existing repute of these vans round to have the PM say that far from merely collecting data on TV viewing, they were actually used to collect other intelligence on the population, brilliantly building on a real thing. In fact of course there have also been ongoing rumours that these vans were actually completely empty and were merely used for the fear and to transport the inspectors who visited homes without licenses who were the actual means of finding out who was watching TV without a licence. As far as I can tell the actual evidence is inconclusive and suggests that at various times and places some vans had technology to detect TV viewing and at others they were used to transport the inspectors.
I'm a bit ambivalent about the five-minutes-late protest because it suggests it was merely to demonstrate that Quarmby could get the populace to do things: I really don't think getting the entire population to turn up five minutes late would bring the country to its knees.
In another slight change of consistency, this episode misses out all the human interest and is much more purely political in its discussion.
The chief problem with this episode is that while the Quarmby group are intended to be resisting an illegitimate, oppressive regime, the broadcasts are rather reminiscent of Lord Haw-Haw's wartime misinformation broadcasts, which makes it quite confusing. This can tend to increase the viewer's sympathy for the unelected ruling regime! Similarly the Guardians' black uniforms are also quite reminiscent of Lord Haw-Haw as well as Oswald Mosley, so it can get a bit confusing.
Otherwise my other main criticism is one I have made before, that it simply isn't possible to fill an hour long episode with action and so this one comes across as a bit talky.
Have some contemporary TV licence films to set the fearsome tone:
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