Sunday 26 May 2019

The Saint Goes Fishing

The Sporting Chance is, without doubt, the most sexist episode of the Saint I've seen so far. Usually, he seems respectful of women, and seems comfortable around women professionals. In this episode, though, he starts off with his usual piece to camera about how women are entering every workplace and sitting on bar stools alongside the men - but there's one place that women do not follow men, and that's the fishing trip.
The setting is a hunting lodge in Ontario, and the plot involves a scientist who has defected to the West but is now being blackmailed to return to the East.
The bad guys are doing this under the cover of a logging company, where the Saint chats to the innocent secretary - who wears glasses.
He says the cliché line - "you look prettier without your glasses", and makes it worse by adding later that she doesn't really need her glasses anyway.
All of this is a pity, because one of the bad guys, Derren Nesbitt who played the Russian sea plane pilot, is great fun, and seems to be channelling Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Derren Nesbitt later appeared in The Blue Max and Where Eagles Dare, as Major Von Happen.

In the next episode I saw, the Miracle Tea Party, the Saint was back to being respectful of women's abilities, recruiting Aunt Hattie, an older lady who was a keen bird photographer, to take photos of customers at a chemist's shop at the heart of the spying ring he was investigating. Aunt Hattie was played by Fabia Drake, who was best known as a Shakespearean actress.

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