collapsedsquid:

I’m convinced there’s some sort of Deep Class Meaning to these 60s and 70s British espionage TV shows, The Avengers, Danger Man, The Saint, The Prisoner.  I just can’t figure out what it is.

I think the consensus view is that the whole period British spy thing - they and James Bond  - were sort of a postimperial dreaming, where the world was still a gameboard for competent operatives of some sort of autonomous British agency. And then John le Carré sort of dirtied it up the same way Peckinpah and others dirtied up the American mytho-genre with the revisionist Western