Although it’s a little late in the season, I feel bound to praise a television series resurrected from the 1960’s, namely
The Invaders, currently showing on Legend channel between 6 and 7 pm, every weekday evening. It stars Roy Thinnes as chief character David Vincent, an architect (of course) who happens upon a flying saucer landing (or taking off) on a country lane, one night. Vincent soon uncovers a plot from theses invaders (from a “dying planet” as the persistently urgent voiceover keeps reminding us) to take over Earth. And David Vincent makes it his mission to stop them, trying to determine where and who the enemies are, not easy because
they look just like
us (no little green men here). And we are with him all the way as he helter-skelters across an eerie, permanently sunlit landscape of pastel-hued modernistic buildings, an endless supply of tail-finned vehicles at his command. Ah, Vincent/Thinnes; with his groomed and Brilliantined hair, suave suits and shiny shoes, he is very much a Sixties’ man, a Bond-alike gallant only shooting the non-humans when it is safe to do so, whereupon each one dissolves into a red mist. In a cold war, post-Commie US era, that colour makes political and symbolic sense. The series also serves as an expose of technology so outdated, it borders on steampunk, and what glorious hokum it is, each episode a complete story, yet part of a continuous narrative. It does raise the question though: whatever happened to Roy Thinnes? Well, he went on to star in a number of TV series from the 1960’s into the 1980’s and, at 87, is still with us. Long may Roy Thinnes live.
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