Flying Near the Sun
- Article 3 of 13
- Off the Telly, March 2006
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In a more conventional children's drama, the child's strand would now take priority and Rutherford would follow Martin's lead as the boy continued his investigations. But Icarus takes a bold decision and argues the point that no matter how smart you are, the bad guys aren't going to be nice to you just because you're a kid ... and there's not much you can do as a kid anyway. Martin has been drugged up to the eyeballs and run through so much hypnosis and mind games that even the idea of leaving the school grounds terrifies him. It's left to Rutherford to liberate Martin and Sue to a safe house, where Martin meets Farley, his former tutor, who is still being held by Rutherford's colleagues.
Farley convinces Martin to return to Falconleigh where he meets the man behind the Icarus Foundation: the Nobel Prize winner Edward Froehlich, who the world believes died during World War II. He's been using the foundation to look after prodigies like himself, building up more and more power and money until he can find someone as gifted as he was - someone with the intellect to create a quark bomb, a weapon powerful enough to destroy continents rather than just cities. With that final weapon, he believes he can force the superpowers to turn away from their abuses in a world run by scientists for everyone's good. Martin refuses, leaving Froehlich to be picked up by Rutherford and the police.
Even today, Codename: Icarus is impressive and has dated little. For the most part, it also manages to maintain its adult sensibilities throughout the show. Martin, with his Northern working class roots and hobby of bird-watching, owes much to Ken Loach's Kes and should be the obvious hero in a children's drama. Yet he isn't an especially likeable character: he's arrogant, mean, treats his new friend Sue with disdain and slowly degenerates into a pale wreck as he's subjected to more and more of Falconleigh's mind games.
This forces the viewer to empathise with the personable Rutherford, who is the real hero of the piece. Rutherford, whose spy work consists mainly of low-key meetings with various other spies, would be perfectly happy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which the BBC adapted two years earlier. It's only during the final episode that any trace of hoary spy clichés creep in, with spymasters talking about "spiders in their web".
The most adult theme is its discussion of the nature of scientific genius, a discussion mostly wasted on children yet ultimately the show's raison d'être. Martin's intellect is presented as a gift almost from God that cannot be wasted - "A tiny glimmer of light in a great darkness". He has to act according to the rules of the gift or else it will be taken from him. Froehlich is presented as a warning, an example of what would happen to Martin if he breaks this rule: after twisting his research to prevent the Nazis from building their own nuclear weapon, he discovers he's lost his gift. "Science is the truth," Froehlich realises too late.
The story ends surprisingly undramatically given the build up, with Martin's decision to use his gift the way it intends: "I want to use science to make men free."
In contrast to other shows of the time and indeed those that followed, Codename: Icarus was leagues ahead in maturity. Post-Icarus, the BBC once again took refuge in children's novels and child-focused dramas as the main way to deal with mature subjects, but by the end of the decade had decided to follow ITV and use fantasy and science-fiction to once again dabble with adult themes.
Russell T Davies' Dark Season (1991) fell cleanly into the same camp as The Tomorrow People and Scooby Doo, with gangs of children investigating mysterious goings-on at their school. But its inclusion of helpful teacher Mrs Maitland (Bridget Forsyth) and lesbian neo-Nazis lifted it above the standard children's fare into the realm of young adults.
Davies' Century Falls (1993), however, was too adult for children and too childish for adults. While it went into even darker, more adult territory, its overly complex plot was way above the heads of most grown-ups as well as children, and its teenage leads were as unsympathetic as the village of villainous pensioners.
It was ITV that came closer to the mark with mature drama during the '80s. Thames Television's 1984 show Chocky was the nearest in tone to Icarus but had many of the flaws that would have taken Icarus down a far less adult path.
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