TV Cream

Radio 4: The Programmes

Psychedelic Spy, The

AUSTIN POWERS-purloined tongue-in-cheek pastiche of all things sixties, agenty and secret, with Harry Palmer/Philip MacAlpine/Modesty Blaise-esque creation Billy Hindle carrying out subterfugal counterplotting in a lost world of thickly-accented Eastern Bloc defectors, shadowy men from ‘The Ministry’, jetsetting vacational paradises with a sinister twist, globby one-pill-makes-you-larger ‘bad trip’ hallucinations and Byrds-derived episode titles, underscored with wry postmodernist bemoaning of Vietnam and Charles Manson bringing about the end of the ‘sixties’. Performed by a virtual who’s who of refugees from the genuine article including Ed Bishop, Gerald Harper, Joanna Lumley and Charles Gray.

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