Edward
Bartender
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From what I heard (hearsay albeit) the Section D specifically was used to squash a series of stories in the 1950, referring to the a certain highly placed person. The implied threat being that any paper that dared publish would never receive official briefings again.
It's certainly true that a paper which ddn't respect the arrangement could find itself excluded from it, though in terms of legal consequences, the Official Secrets Act would have been the one cited if they wre thratened with court.
Doctor Who. The Time Meddler, Part Four. I love vintage DW; they do almost everything with the plot instead of effects.
If only Steven Moffat had taken note of that....
"The Girl From Little Egypt," a landmark episode of The Fugitive from Christmas Eve 1963. Kimble is knocked down by a young woman in her car, and while delirious mutters out his real name and details of his wife's murder. The girl, Pamela Tiffin, realizes he's innocent -- as she puts it, "People don't usually lie when they're delirious" -- and takes him in to let him recover, and to give herself something to think about other than her affair with a married man (Ed Nelson). The important thing is that we get long flashbacks: showing how Kimble and his wife Helen lost their child in childbirth, how the loss eroded their relationship (she refused to adopt), and more. Neatly done.
I've only seen the Ford film version from 1993(?), but I must track down the original. It sounds like it was much darker - and deeper - in its content than would be much equivalent networked television today.
I just watched Pertwee's first Spearhead form Space. Wonderful stuff. The new Dr Who's aren't spooky enough. Yes, they had to use plots rather than effects because there's only so much you could do with silver foil and cardboard in those days.
RTD, whatever his flaws, certainly brought in the spooky element in a lot of places, but in recent years the show has certainlyh suffered from Moffat's decision that because "it is a children's show", he was gonig to turn it into the sort of show that middle class parents want their hildren to watch, rather than the sort of show children actually want to watch, and which Who had classically been.
One of the channels here is showing the entire run of the 1990s SciFi TV show Babylon 5. I watched it when it was originally shown and it has held up pretty well. Strong characters and plot lines throughout the show. The show isn't as slick as Star Trek:The Next Generation, DS9 and others, but I always felt more in tune with the B5 world than the world of TNG. Probably because it is bleaker than the world of Star Trek and its dumb 'oh aren't us humans so darn great' ethos. And, as a bonus, no stupid Klingons or smarty pants Wesley Crusher! B5 covers a lot of the same issues as Star Trek (Religion, racial tensions, politics etc etc) but in a much less sugar coated fashion.
The plotlines and stories are interesting, especially the gradual decline of Earth as its government becomes less enlightened and slides into totalitarianism and the eventual war for the universe by two ancient civilisations sucking in younger civilisations such as the Earth. Strong human leads but also strong alien characters such as G'Kar, Londo and Delenn. You can keep your dumb Picard / Q verbal fisticuffs. Give me Londo and G'Kar any day.
When I watched the first couple of episodes, I remember finding it a bit Battlestar Galactica by comparison to Trek (this long before BSG's hip, modern reworking), but I stuck with it and it grew on me. They distinguished it nicely from the Trek universe by embracing a darker feel. I had the feeling that it was also deliberately targetting an audience who didn't care for Star Trek's 'moralising' which was, at least in the early days of TNG, sometimes rather heavy-handed. I would argue that it was also notable in that it was one of the first, big television franchises of its ilk which set out with a very specific story arc, aiming at a finite number of seasons, and carried that arc through. This is more common in television nowdays, I think, than it was then (when big shows generally kept going as long as the ratings stayed high, or as long as those who called the shots at the studio or the key cast wanted them to), but I remember it being quite a revolutionary concept at the time.