A place could not be thinner for such an undertaking

[sovay]

I did not approve of concluding our break-fast to discover that David McCallum had died. I saw him first in The Great Escape (1963), which always seemed to be playing somewhere in my childhood. My brother was almost named Ilya until my father remonstrated with my mother that their children would sound like a Russian vaudeville act. Every headline I've seen mentions The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and NCIS (2003–), but he will always look to me like something even more enigmatic than a slim, blond-mopped Russian agent, because at least Kuryakin was human. In the same way that Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) left its final assignment suspended in stars and narrative, I imagine McCallum like Steel disappearing out of time like a video cut, itself the kind of ghost that would have fit seamlessly into his medium atomic weight's store of exasperation with the human carelessness of time and its traces, our deliberate preservation of lost moments that opens up cracks in the world as flimsy as a filmstrip and as engulfing as centuries, but these deaths twenty-four times a second are the only way I have ever known him, even when he was alive, like every actor trailing roles behind him like freeze-frames. I will find a new one for his memory. I assume the integrity of time is pretty much a dead loss in our TV.

Comments

[cyphomandra]

Oh no! I hadn’t heard. I encountered Sapphire & Steel as a teenager; it played late at night and I would sneak through the house to watch it illicitly and then equally secretly phone a friend after each episode to analyse it in detail. Such haunting, beautiful television, with its precise but dreamlike logic, and he and Lumley made it work so well.

[sovay]

Oh no! I hadn’t heard.

I'm sorry!

*hugs*

I encountered Sapphire & Steel as a teenager; it played late at night and I would sneak through the house to watch it illicitly and then equally secretly phone a friend after each episode to analyse it in detail.

What a wonderful way to watch the show. Like the pair of you were solving it in secret from time, too.

Such haunting, beautiful television, with its precise but dreamlike logic, and he and Lumley made it work so well.

They did. It is still unusual for me to like the main characters of any narrative so much. The nonhumanness was such an important part of it, but the actors had to be able to carry it off and they made it look like just the way they were.