'Bugs' is an anachronism now, an example of 1990s style adventurous science fiction televisual nonsense, but it's still good if you look at it from the right angle, squint, and can connect to some naive part of your mind. Since that's a significant strength here at the QM, 'Bugs' is considered to be fun, as a matter of course. Also, the theme music is awesome. Truly awesome.
This really is a goofy show, partly derived from the mind of Brian 'The Avengers' Clemens, and one which is roughly contemporaneous with another dippy show known as 'Crime Traveller'. Apparently, it was a good time for inventivity. Ah, happy days... The central conceit is that intelligence operative Beckett is framed and drummed out of his agency, and inadvertently teams up with a gadget expert called Roz and a daredevil lunatic known only as Ed in order to clear his name. Then, after the dust has settled, they set up a high-technology security consultancy (Gizmos) and get into a sequence of capers, mainly dealing with strains of eccentric crimes and dippy scientists not dreamt of for decades. Sadly, the actors didn't then and still don't exist to enable full vintage kookiness but they had a good go!
Season one is distinct from the following three years of the show, as the Gizmos trios are operating independently, instead of under the auspices of a governmental agency. As a result, the dangers are daftly diverse and partly follow as a consequence of how incompetent our three protagonists frequently are at the outset of each story! Good grief, people, you call yourselves experts?! And what about your morals? Huh? Over the course of ten episodes, we get experimental (and toxic) seaweed food, electromagnetic pulse weapons, remote control airplane heists, stealth cars, bank frauds involving submarines, explosive new alloys, and performance enhancing drugs. It's a full set of then novelties, and the show is often remarkably prescient. And goofy, with extremely erratic writing and performances. Also, there are loads of really old computers, hurrah!
It's fun when it's good, and very odd when it's bad. Jesse Birdsall is stern, Jaye Griffiths is lovely and sparky, and Craig McLachlan is charismatic. The standout episodes from these ten are the deliciously dippy finale 'Pulse', and the genuinely scary 'All Under Control'. In fact, as soon as the opening to 'Pulse' was reviewed this week, I remembered just how much the villain stuck in my mind for years. What a nasty bloke. Boo. Hiss.
Ultimately, season one of 'Bugs' is dumb adventure with gadgets. What's not to like? Oh, you don't like the terrible humour sequences at the end? Sigh. I don't know you.
O.
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