Some readers may recall from previous outings with me that I am not a native of sunny Australia, but rather an import from Darkest Usastan. My early life didn’t feature a whole lot of television, either, so while growing up I was aware of a whole lot of lacunae in my pop culture literacy – and becoming a Mutant Reviewer gives me the perfect excuse to rectify that.

Simply put: I’m using my Mutant status as an excuse to catch up on the stuff everybody else watched as a kid while my crazed hippie parents took my sister and I on some kind of neo-Luddite odyssey into the wilds of Far North Queensland with the snakes and the jellyfish and the spiders and all the rest of the Great Australian Outback.

One of the things I missed was a show called The Persuaders! (not my exclamation point) which featured Roger Moore – fresh from his run as The Saint, which I expect I’ll get around to watching at some time – and Tony Curtis, who was, well, Tony Curtis.

(Gahh. It just occurred to me I may well be writing for a generation of people who know neither Curtis nor Moore. When does pop culture start becoming history? How old am I, anyhow? Angst! Existential dread!)

Sod it. Look, once upon a time Roger Moore was so big that they let him be James Bond for a whole bunch of movies after Sean Connery got tired of it. And Tony Curtis was… well, he was Tony Curtis, and that meant a hell of a lot in the fifties and the sixties. You want more? Go look them up on some reputable website, for the love of mud. Whadda we look like? Wikibloodypedia?

Anyway. The Persuaders! turned out to be a bit of a lark. Curtis and Moore play a couple of uber-rich playboy types who get brought together by a retired judge to do some off-the-books crimefighting. Really, the justification is paper-thin, and the entire show is nothing more than a chance to let the two lads swan about England and Southern France, exchanging manly banter, driving nifty cars, and hanging out with gorgeous sixties/seventies girls.

Viewed through the lens of modern sensibilities, it’s all a bit cringeworthy. I mean, here’s a couple of overprivileged middle-aged white rich guys trotting about the place in expensive clothes and expensive cars, tossing glib one-liners back and forth while making the world a safer place for… uhhh… overprivileged white rich guys, by and large. You’re not gonna find a whole lot of diversity or social commentary or even self-awareness here. The bad guys are cads and villains of the proper sort, hatching complicated plots to assassinate Prime Ministers or Really Important Industrialists, while our two good guys are suave, charming, and never short of a quip or a quid – and despite both of them being well into their forties at the time of filming, there’s any number of nubile young ladies lining up to slip into sixties bikinis and hang off the arms of our heroes.

Honestly, there’s not a lot of point to raking over individual episodes or plotlines. The Persuaders! got one series of 24 episodes, and they blur amiably into one another in much the same manner that Roger Moore’s screen characters do. (Hey, let’s be honest. Roger Moore was never exactly Royal Shakespeare material.) The thing to do with this series is just kick back and relax. If you’re old enough, watching Moore as Lord Brett Sinclair and Curtis as oil-baron Danny Wilde zooming about the scenery in their Aston Martin and Ferrari Dino (respectively) will be an entertaining reminder of less socially conscious times. And if you’re more modern in your sensibilities, consider the show as a kind of time capsule: an amiable, amusing museum piece depicting a world that never was, no matter how much we may have fantasized about it at the time.

In short: fast cars, pretty women, smooth, suave, wealthy heroes, some fisticuffs, a bit of gunplay, and a decent sprinkling of light comedy, one-liners and manly rivalry/bromance. What’s not to like? There’s any amount of media about the place now that will properly raise your consciousness, depict the deadly inequity inherent to the existing social paradigm, expose the privilege of the few and reveal the true burdens of the unheralded many…

… but to hell with all that. Ultimately, The Persuaders! is a piece of fluff – an amusing fantasy, and as such no more nor less worthy than any other piece of simple escapism. My advice, as someone who has learned to be Australian: get the stick out of your arse for a while, and have a bit of fun. The Persuaders! can help with that.