From ‘pop’ nostalgia to millennial modernity: Bugs as an ‘Avengers for the 1990s’

Abstract

This article examines the 1990s adventure series Bugs (1995–99), whilst also exploring broader transformations in British television thrillers and nostalgic programming. First, I position the series’ origin as a response to the popularity of 1960s adventure series repeats on the BBC in the 1990s. I argue, that the nostalgic impulse of Bugs itself did not manifest in visual terms, as in more conventional 1960s pastiches, but was instead at a narrative level. The series dispensed with contemporaneous trends towards more psychologised characters and serialised narratives in favour of a self-consciously ‘retro’ rejection of ‘depth’. Yet I also explore other ways in which it adapted the adventure series for the 1990s. These included reworking the spy agency as a small business enterprise for the ‘dotcom’ age, reinventing alienating surveillance technology as the user-friendly gadget, glamorizing neo-liberalism through exoticizing London’s redeveloped Docklands, and presenting terrorism as a leading existential threat for the post-Cold War era. I argue that whilst Bugs represented a dead end for an ‘innocent’ model of nostalgic drama, through many of the latter characteristics it stands as an unacknowledged influence on a later generation of stylish, issue-led ‘War on Terror’ thriller series.

‘Seeing a conspiracy around every corner’: Paranoia as procedural in Tony Marchant’s The Whistleblowers (2007)

“…After overseeing the development of series such as Spooks , Neame departed his BBC position to become managing director of Carnival Films, the independent company primarily responsible for the British side of The Grid ’s production. Carnival had been founded in 1978 (originally as Picture Partnership Productions) and many of its best-known productions had been in the terrain of ITV period-set drama, most notably Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–2004) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993), although it had previously experienced success in the contemporary thriller with the family spy-fi series Bugs (1995–1999) (Oldham, 2018). In his new role, Neame spoke of making Carnival into a ‘big player’ alongside Kudos Film & Television, the ‘super-indie’ responsible for Spooks and Hustle (Holmwood, 2006), whilst also noting ITV’s desire to ‘catch up’ with the BBC in commissioning ‘sophisticated modernising dramas’ (Keighron, 2006).…”