ZERO SUM

I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while now but somehow we’ve never quite got there.

“What” I hear you wonder “Is the old fool blathering on about now?”

Well, bear with me and I’ll tell you.

I’ve been waiting, relatively patiently I feel, and for quite some considerable time I might add, for the counter that counts the page views to this blog to have a “Zero Day” on which it fails to shift one single digit, so that I could officially declare the whole thing dead and buried and finally get to move on to those trickily abstract “other things” that lurk so naggingly in the back of my mind.

Life, of course, is never that simple, and, of course, when you’ve got over a thousand bits of nonsense rattling around in the archives, I suppose it’s fairly likely that some random thought or other that you once had will draw the attention of some passing online searcher-bot at some point during the average day, no matter how briefly.

Such robots have always been drawn to the word “post” I’ve found, and they seem to have an extraordinary obsession with the idea of Penguin Biscuit jokes, so unless I go back and erase whichever of my musings once contained those words in their titles, I suspect that the Zero Sum Game is still unlikely to occur for a while at least which is, I suppose, quietly gratifying in some small way.

That said, it’s also rather interesting (well, I say “interesting” but you know what I mean) for me to discover that, give or take a couple of hundred viewings or so, these humble pages are almost equally as popular when I write nothing as they ever were when I was slogging my heart out trying to add some of my nonsenses on an almost daily basis.

There’s something, I feel, to be learned there…

So, in a last ditch attempt to finally frighten the last of the search-bots away, I thought that, given that I found myself with the opportunity for a day or two, I might as well write something for a couple of mornings, if only to bing the numbers down.

So far, it seems to be working quite well.

So, I’ll dredge another dull little anecdote from the dark recesses of my day, and see if I can finally put it all out of our collective misery.

Yesterday evening, I suddenly found myself with an extra hour to spare before making the trek to the station for my nightly rendezvous, and, as is sometimes my way, instead of leaping towards the keyboard in a whirlpool of creative frenzy, I found myself idly perusing the DVD shelves where, to my surprise, I found an old “Best of ITC” collection that I must have ordered once upon a long ago and never actually got around to watching.

Well, to be honest, at least three of the episodes were already likely to be in other sets I already had, so I probably unwrapped it one lunchtime when I was working from home, watched most of the groovy title sequences, put it on the shelf to gather dust, and almost completely forgot that it was there.

Anyway, almost at random, I picked out the episode of “Department S” and what a crackingly entertaining forty-odd minutes of television it turned out to be. Honestly, despite expecting it to be a whole load of cheesy nonsense, I found that I really, really enjoyed it. Heck, it even had Anthony Hopkins in it as the guest star of the week and that was jolly unexpected, I can tell you.

It was kind of like “The ‘X’ Files” but twenty years ahead of its time and with kipper ties, and, I imagine (because I’m really NOT going to buy the entire series) that having three leads did mean that they could alternate the storylines around one or other of them as each episode required. Naturally, this being made in the sixties, the female lead got to wear miniskirts and do rather a lot of filing, but it was quite remarkable for having a black character as the head of this mysterious government department (I presume that the “S” stood for “Strange”) that handled all of the weird cases and kooky stuff that the CIA, Special Branch and Interpol found far too baffling.

Back in the sixties, “Department S” only lasted one year and, because he became the “break out” star and (believe it or not) something of a “sex symbol” the character of Jason King, played by Peter Wyngarde, got an eponymous spin-off series which was much the same format only less so, and was eventually consigned to the dustbin of TV legends, and the groovy theme tune added to a hundred compilation CDs.

Sometimes you happen upon a format for a TV show and think “What on earth were they thinking making that?” but I reckon, in my own weird and wonderful kind of a way, that “Department S” might be one of those shows very worth looking at for a bit of a resurrection.

It had a great theme tune, too, by the way.