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'Bugs'. You've had the article and now you get the sales pitch. This series was made by the BBC in the mid to late nineties. It has probably made it to countries which show British TV but is probably unknown to American readers. It's stories revolved around a quasi-secret government organisation tasked to track down and stop high-tech crime. The tone of the series was started from the first episode ('Out of the Hive') and had villainess Elena Bajic killing one of the 'Bugs' team and making a pretty good go at finishing one or two others. From thereon in there was a steady stream of female adversarys for the Bugs team to tackle, each showing that beauty, brains and danger sometime walk hand in hand.
For those of you who missed the dedicated 'Bugs' article (it was on the old Archive Page) I have included some vidcaps from the original article. The program run for three series and given this short run there was an enormously high proportion of female villains, often high powered businesswomen who were more than prepared to show their darker side when their fiendish plans were threatened. Brian Clemens was a consultant on the series and his work with 'The Avengers' filters through.
'First Wave'. Here is a new one to these pages. There was an old Quinn Martin series called 'The Invaders' and featured one man's crusade against an invading alien force. 'First Wave' follows the same kind of synopsis. Cade Foster (Sebastian Spence) is picked out by the aliens to test humanities ability to handle extreme adversity. However they push him a bit too far and he soon becomes mankind's best hope to defeat an alien invasion which Nostradamus predicted would come in three waves. The female aliens are invariably sexy and gorgeous and to make things even better from the femme fatale point of view, in Season 3 Cade Foster is aided by a female resistance leader Jordan Radcliffe (Traci Elizabeth Lords showing she can act if she wants to) who is taken over by the persona of the supreme alien leader. Little watched but good solid sci-fi none the less.
'ITC Television'. I thought I just had to include a non sci-fi type series and I thought it should have been one from the ITC stable. The problem was I couldn't decide which one so I cheated and lumped them all together. ITC were an independent television production company who during the 1960's and 1970's gave us entertainment like 'The Saint', 'Randall and Hopkirk Deceased', 'The Protectors', 'The Persuaders' and countless others. The stories ranged from traditional detective to the more quirky but often there was a lady pulling the strings on the criminal activities contained within the script.
There are numerous other high (and not so high) quality TV shows which could have featured here but space is limited. Others which spring to mind include 'V', 'Blake's 7', 'Diagnosis Murder', 'Magnum', 'Max Monroe - Loose Canon', 'Jake and the Fatman' and even stuff like 'Murder She Wrote'. Most of these series are now finished and I await the next batch with eager anticipation though they seem a long while getting through. Maybe they don't write them like they used to?
