Review for The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs - The Complete Series

Introduction

C’mon! Everyone knows that David Jason played the greatest secret agent in the world. Of course, everyone is wrong, at least about the identity of that secret agent. You might be forgiven for thinking that I mean Danger Mouse, who with his trusty sidekick Penfold would defeat the fiendish plans of Baron Silas Greenback time and again. Ten years before David Jason would don the mantle of the cyclopean rodent spy, he played the actual greatest secret agent in the world, Edgar Briggs for a thirteen episode run of The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs on London Weekend Television. Indeed, I hadn’t heard of it either, and for good reason, as of all the comedy shows that got repeated to infinity back in the seventies and eighties, this is one show that never really got much of an exposure after its initial broadcast. It took a tantalising press release from Network to get me requesting the check discs to see what this early David Jason vehicle was like.


Edgar Briggs is the ultimate secret agent. He’s highly capable, suave, sophisticated, quick-witted, ruthless, and devoted to Queen and country, and he’s feared by his enemies. That’s in his own head. His enemies do fear him though, albeit for the same reason as his allies, as Edgar Briggs is a walking calamity, causing chaos and mayhem wherever he goes. You might wonder why such a man has achieved, and maintains an important position at the SIS. The fact of the matter is that despite his countless flaws, Edgar Briggs manages to get results, even if it is just success through serendipitous ineptitude.


Thirteen episodes of The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs are presented across two discs from Network.

Disc 1
1. The Assassin
2. The Defector
3. The Leak
4. The Escape Route
5. The Abduction
6. The Exchange

Disc 2
7. The Courier
8. The Traitor
9. The K.G.B.
10. The Drawing
11. The President
12. The Appointment
13. The Contact

Picture

The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs gets a 4:3 regular transfer which does the job, adequately bringing across a seventies sitcom that very much looks its age. That means videotape quality interior shots, and outside broadcast quality exteriors. There is the occasional telltale glitch, but by and large the image is stable, clear and sharp, and the seventies colours haven’t faded too much. You get the LWT logo at the start of each episode, and the ad bumpers. As you would expect from a show that hasn’t seen too many repeats, there’s little sign of age or damage, and it’s all very watchable.

Sound

You get the basic DD 2.0 English treatment here, reflecting the original mono source. Unfortunately there isn’t a subtitle track, but as this was from period when people enunciated on television, it isn’t missed as much. The audio reflects the tape quality of the period, with the odd moments of hiss and hum, but by and large it’s an agreeable listening experience, with the dialogue clear throughout, while the theme music tries to give it the full 007, but falls short into repetitive monotony.

Extras

The discs boot up straight to the main menu, leaving the logos and copyright screens for after the final episode on each disc has ended. It’s a simple static menu for each disc, simply listing the episodes as well as a play all option.

The sole extra is on disc 1, and is a 5:31 slideshow gallery featuring production and promotional stills from the show.


There’s an Easter Egg of sorts. You can’t access them directly, and you can’t skip back to them, but you can rewind to find that prior to the start of each episode with the LWT logo, the discs have the production slate for each episode and a countdown clock to the start of the first take. These last about 20 seconds each time, and if you’re lucky, you can pick up a bit of banter from the actors in the background as a production bod reads out what’s written on each slate.

Conclusion

Wander over to IMDB, and take a look at their understandably sparse page on The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs, and you’ll find the sole item of trivia regarding the series to be a snippet stating that when ITV wanted to repeat the show, David Jason demurred, believing his performance to be too raw. As with all facts on the Internet, it’s one to be taken with a pinch of salt, but there are other, more pertinent reasons why The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs might not have been repeated, one being that it’s not all that great.


Of course the main reason might be that in this day and age that sees Pharrell and Robin Thicke lose a wodge of cash to the estate of Marvin Gaye, Blake Edwards might have had a thing to say about Edgar Briggs. This show wanted to be The Pink Panther in all but accent. Edgar Briggs may have the received pronunciation of the era, and he may be a secret service agent instead of a policeman, but he is Jacques Clouseau in nearly every other respect. The first episode even sets his wife Jennifer up as a Kato character, sneaking up on him with a karate chop, before wisely forgetting that aspect in later episodes. But Edgar Briggs has the penchant for poor disguise, the chaotic idiocy, the clumsiness, the ability to drive all around him to distraction, and the innate belief in his superiority that Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had. Back in the early seventies when this show was made, the Pink Panther movies were some of the biggest comedies around, and it’s easy to see why producers would have liked to emulate that success. It’s just that Edgar Briggs is a little too close for legal comfort.


The second thing is that the scripts are poor. The comedy is juvenile, infantile even, with simplistic jokes, woeful wordplay, and unbelievable daftness, that were it not for the cigarettes and pipes that would give OFCOM a conniption, Edgar Briggs would be better aimed at the CITV audience. That’s coupled with poor direction and editing, which sees most of the verbal jokes lost in the pacing, with the requisite pauses for breath, not there for the punchlines to register. Clouseau could be infantile in his witticisms and observations, but the movies would at least give them time for the viewers to elicit a painful groan before moving on. The Edgar Briggs episodes are too quickly paced to let this happen, and so the jokes are really wasted. The IMDB may say that David Jason wasn’t happy with his performance, but how much of that is down to the editing is another matter.


What redeems this show is the slapstick, the physical comedy. When it comes to David Jason and slapstick, you’ll immediately think of ‘that’ scene in Only Fools and Horses, Del, Trigger, the bar ‘Nice and cool!’ If that is all you’ve seen, or Granville dodging the cash register in Open All Hours, then The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs will come as a revelation. You won’t believe just how physical a comedian David Jason was in this show. He’s up there with the best of the silent comedians, and he puts himself through some serious pain, ridiculous pratfalls, and classic slapstick in order to get a laugh or two, and it really does work. He’s channelling Chaplin and Keaton in his performance, and where the rest of the show left me flat, I was invariably breathless with laughter at his antics. I had no idea he was such an accomplished clown. I may wince at the jokes in the show, shake my head at the poor scripts, but I will re-watch the show for the hat and tea gag, the window-cleaning stunt, the Mr Bean-esque tie in the filing cabinet, and much, much more.


Despite how poor it is in nearly every other respect, the physical comedy in The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs is enough to have me laughing through each episode, and I just can’t say that about any comedy being made today.