QUICKSAND

I was watching some old telly the other morning (don’t I always?) and, because what I was watching was an adventure series made in the 1960s, at one point our hero ended up in a jungle, presumably because, in those days, there was a standing jungle set on the studio backlot, and, at one time or another, every series had to spend some time there and come up with a story that gave them a reason to be there, even if the show, and the characters in it never had any real reason to ever go on to land, let alone anywhere near to an actual (or artificial) jungle.

Rather naturally, because these things just had to happen in sixties adventure series, our hero and whomsoever he (because it generally was a “he” back then) happened to be with at the time came upon a patch of quicksand in that very jungle, and, as sure as eggs is eggs, one or other of them had to spend a certain amount of time being rescued from it, presumably so that we would remember this later on when the villain of the week was dispatched into it after fleeing from (or perhaps during) the inevitable punch-up with our hero towards the end of our fifty minute tale.

The pattern is very simple, and no doubt very familiar to anyone who was brought up, like I was, on this kind of fare. Someone in the hero’s party, usually the woman or the second banana (whose contract isn’t quite so good as the other lead actors is) runs “unexpectedly” headlong into a patch of the stuff and has to shout for help. Her (or his) much wiser companion approaches with much more caution, and then has to mount some kind of a rescue involving either ropes, or vines or some other handy implement, or by lying as flat as they can in order to reach out an outstretched arm for our soggy victim to hang on to as they are dragged to safety.

Daisy Duke from "The Dukes of Hazzard"
falls into some quicksand whilst wearing
a bikini... Now, what are the chances of that...?

If the person in the quicksand is a woman in need of a good rescuing, and happens to be wearing the kind of clothing that, when wet, reveals the very attributes that she was no doubt cast in the part because of having, or preferable is wearing very little clothing at all because she is the ubiquitous “beautiful native girl with the oh-so-Hollywood smile”, so much the better.

For a moment I felt rather nostalgic, when I saw this televisual golden moment because, despite this being a staple ingredient of pretty much every show I used to watch when I was a new potato, I don’t think I’ve seen a good old-fashioned quicksand sequence in years. Well, not unless you count the one in the latest, belated, “Indiana Jones” film and that doesn’t really count as they had a proper movie budget and were really just trying to make a “snake” joke.

Of course, nowadays with the development of pin sharp freeze frames and high definition TV sets, you can see that the quicksand is really just bits of cork floating in a studio built puddle and so the effect is somewhat diminished, but, as a way of creating true jeopardy and opportunities for displaying acts of heroism in a jungle setting, or just filling up some screen time without really advancing the wafer-thin plot, there really was little to beat it.

I do miss those simpler times when shows were not weighed down with complicated story arcs and all the problems could be solved by an unconvincing sock to the jaw of a stuntman that vaguely resembled the week’s villain. Modern adventure series seem to have become so obsessed with not being able to be accused of being slightly cheesy hokum or too much like the old cinema adventure serials that they very quickly get wrapped up in some portentous mythology, or some self-indulgent self-importance which really stops them from either being as much fun as they used to be, or confuses the occasional or irregular viewer so much that they don’t come back.

I rather miss those simple old shows like they used to churn out at Pinewood for ITC back in the 1960s and 1970s. They might indeed look simplistic, sexist and a little cheesy to modern audiences, but they were made with passion and flair by people who really knew what their audiences wanted, and writers who knew how to tell thrilling stories in fifty minutes without anyone needing to have seen the previous five years to have the slightest hope of understanding what the heck was going on, and I suspect that is why they are still so fondly remembered by so many people all these years later. The family could all sit down and enjoy those shows and know that they were going to be entertained and that no-one in the room was likely to get upset or disturbed or be made to feel uncomfortable by anything that unfolded during that hour.

It was nice too, in a kind of reassuring way, that you could be pretty certain that the very same particular problems, sometimes on the very same sets were going to beset whichever hero you were following this week, just as they had the “other fellow” the week before. I do think that some of those ITC screenwriters were not above merely crossing out a “Simon Templar” and inserting a “McGill” into the very same script and resubmitting it to another production team. After all, who would ever find out? Unless, of course, future TV channels started running retrospectives that meant that “Man in Suitcase” might run on the very same night as “The Saint,” but that would never happen in a million years, would it…?

Not that it really matters. As long as you could be sure that the moment you saw a white Jaguar motor car, the brakes were going to be tampered with and the car was going to be flying off that very familiar cliff at any moment, or that the stock footage of the alligators meant a fight in a swamp was coming along, you felt reassured and safe, because you knew where you were with those shows. You could safely invest yourself in those characters knowing that, no matter what the odds were against them, they were bound to win through in the end, and none of your heroes was likely to get unexpectedly blown to smithereens before the credits rolled. Well, not unless it was all a cunning ruse to reveal who the real villain was, at any rate.

I did start to wonder for a while as to whether the phenomenon of “quicksand” was merely a figment of some long-forgotten Hollywood adventure serial scriptwriter’s imagination that had simply become accepted as fact because of the amount of repetition. In other words, people saw patches of quicksand so often in films that they believed that it must be a true phenomenon, even though it didn’t really exist. Naturally, a swift search around on the internet proved me wrong about that theory (in at least as much as anything researched on the internet can be regarded as being true at any rate) and showed me that quicksand is actually a real and rather dangerous presence in the lives of a great many people across the world, which only goes to show that we do need our real heroes just as much as we need our fictional ones.