"I was absolutely delighted that those shows have been preserved"
About this Quote
There is something quietly radical in being "absolutely delighted" about preservation, not performance. Patrick Macnee isnt praising the shows as art so much as celebrating their survival. For an actor whose career ran through an era when television was treated as disposable - taped over, mishandled, lost to rights limbo - the emotion lands as relief: a small victory over the medium's built-in amnesia.
The wording does a lot of work. "Those shows" keeps it modest, almost offhand, as if the speaker is resisting self-mythology. Yet the intensity of "absolutely delighted" leaks pride without sounding vain. Macnee frames the achievement as collective and archival rather than personal, sidestepping the ego trap actors can fall into when talking about legacy. Its a canny public posture: grateful, not grand.
Context matters because Macnee's fame is inseparable from series television's early global moment, when programs could become cultural passports but still vanish materially. To be preserved is to remain legible to future audiences, not just as nostalgia, but as evidence: of craft, of style, of what a certain kind of British cool looked like on screen. The subtext is about control over memory. Preservation means the work cant be rewritten by hearsay, recut into anecdotes, or reduced to a meme. It can be watched, rewatched, and argued with - which is the closest thing to immortality TV offers.
The wording does a lot of work. "Those shows" keeps it modest, almost offhand, as if the speaker is resisting self-mythology. Yet the intensity of "absolutely delighted" leaks pride without sounding vain. Macnee frames the achievement as collective and archival rather than personal, sidestepping the ego trap actors can fall into when talking about legacy. Its a canny public posture: grateful, not grand.
Context matters because Macnee's fame is inseparable from series television's early global moment, when programs could become cultural passports but still vanish materially. To be preserved is to remain legible to future audiences, not just as nostalgia, but as evidence: of craft, of style, of what a certain kind of British cool looked like on screen. The subtext is about control over memory. Preservation means the work cant be rewritten by hearsay, recut into anecdotes, or reduced to a meme. It can be watched, rewatched, and argued with - which is the closest thing to immortality TV offers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|
More Quotes by Patrick
Add to List

