Holdfast wrote:
Bugs simply never felt big/grand enough. They tried very hard: using the then-new Canary Wharf as a backdrop to give everything a modern feel, using a lot of the new Fiats of the era (Puntos, Bravas, etc) which then looked a bit more curvy/organic/different to most older cars of that era, faster pacing than usual from the BBC of the day, and lots of attempts to give everything a cool edge. But it needed more money to really flesh out the Bugs world and so permit the stories to be told in a bigger, grander way rather than having to shoot around set constraints. Could have been really great. Still fun though.
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While it hurt itself in places in fleshing out ambitious stories, with a setting that felt a bit untapped (I get the impression that
Bugs was set in an alternative reality 2000s, explaining the oddly dated tech alongside sci-fi tech, with a different geopolitical landscape: the Soviet Union folded much earlier or perhaps not existed at all, with the Eastern Alliance in its place that in turn collapsed, China is not a factor and there's a better developed UK economy, etc) at least
Bugs generally looked like it was made in the mid to late 1990s: Ros' yellow Toyota (?) wouldn't look out of place today and Canary Wharf/Isle of Dogs was a wise choice for location shooting (it looked good in
Primeval as well).
I've seen
Crime Traveller's trailer and the opening ten minutes of it on YouTube, and it gives the overwhelming impression of being broadcast in 1987 instead of 1997 (the undercover cops using giant walkie talkies, the location shooting around a train station and shopping mall built in the 1970s, the greyish cinematography, Chloe Annett's hair and Michael French's pastel green shirt heavily reinforced that).