An interesting though flawed attempt to subvert and ring the changes on the television spy thriller, and it's a pity that only two episodes still exist in their original colour. For the first time, at least in the UK, the leading protagonist is a woman, Patricia Cutts' Charlotte 'Lottie' Dean, who controls a group of specialist agents under the guise of running a documentary film unit. She recruits veteran operator Hawksworth (Anthony Ainley) a public school educated sociopath and ruthless killer in the right cause. Then there's Veronica Carlson's Wallis (Wal) who reads Tolstoy and Schopenhauer, but seems too dim to realize what Lottie's business really is. This is typical of a series that revels in contradictions and is determined to confound the expectations of viewers throughout.
Perhaps one idea was to parody that branch of spy action and adventure from Bulldog Drummond through Bond to The Avengers that had been derided by a few critics as 'snobbery with violence' words that sum up Hawksworth to the hilt. The second episode, Alfred Shaughnessy's The Executioners, with an in-form Andre Morell as the head of a group of reactionaries who kidnap public figures they hold to be degenerate, is a partial parody of Sapper's Drummond yarn The Black Gang. That is until Wallis turns up as a sexy nun. Though it doesn't quite work there's a surreal madness worthy of The Avengers. On the other hand Lies and Dolls from the same author, with a wacky start of Lottie and Hawksworth receiving instructions from a myna bird only to become involved in a grim story of people-smuggling, doesn't succeed at all. Only Roy Clarke who wrote five shows, including the two best, Romance On Wheels in which the two agents accompany a group of Summer Wine types on a mini-bus to Eastern Europe to discover how enemy spies are being infiltrated through a lonely-hearts group, and Rev Counter, a lunatic story of a clergyman behind a group of terrorists intent on liberating the Isle of Wight from English tyranny, really gets the formula right and it would perhaps have been better if he had been the sole writer.
I liked Patricia Cutts as the no-nonsense Lottie, though this was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that she was to take her own life a few years later. Spyder's Web is no forgotten masterpiece, but providing you are prepared to take whatever it throws at you, can still provide rewarding viewing.
