This short-lived quality action drama series deserved a better fate, but sadly suffered for being either 10 years too early or 15 years too late. Its heritage is the classic UK commercial TV action shows of the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Avengers or the Professionals, cross-bred with the classic espionage world of Deighton and le Carre and updated for the touchy-feely mid-1990s. The result was a show with gun-toting super-cops tumbling away from exploding cars, who still worried about missing their daughter's birthday, while thin-lipped middle-aged men made tough decisions, compromised their principles, and regretted necessary betrayals. Too late to surf the original wave of home-grown action classics and over before it could enjoy the current curious renewed popularity of the slick spy caper, it's my sad duty to report Bodyguards was a better show than many of them. It might suffer now because it relies quite heavily on the tensions and narrative conventions of cold war spy fiction, but somewhere there's a pilot movie and six 50 minute episodes of a more intelligent than average TV show which deserves a DVD release.
