After 3 days of battling a particularly nasty flu virus, I reluctantly emerged bleary-eyed and bunged up, from a mountain of sweaty bed linen, tissues and nasal spray bottles, after my fever broke (and the hot water bottle sprung a leak).

After cursing the second-rate nature of all British domestic goods, I managed to drag my carcass downstairs and park it on the couch. Su was watching some episodes of the original 1967 series of Mission: Impossible so I tried to take my mind off my spiraling temperature and wet socks (the hot water bottle was across my feet when it leaked) and tried to tune in to the episode plots.

And a number of questions popped into my mind…

1. Why does the IMF team leader Jim Phelps not seem to understand the concept of security? He goes to all the trouble of driving bloody miles to pick up a dossier and listen to a taped message (which then self-destructs), only to return home and browse through an operatives dossier which is forever lying open on his coffee table?
2. On a related point, why does he need to browse the dossier of IMF members at all? He picks the same ones every week!
3. Why are the soldiers and police in every eastern-bloc country dressed like SS officers with red insignia?
4. Why does all eastern European architecture look like shots from a Bavarian tourist brochure?
5. Why are all the road and signs in English with funny foreign accents? (e.g. a warehouse in east Germany was signposted “Warehouz”. The same Warehouse in a south American country was signposted: “el Warehouso”)
6. Where did the producers find so many blue-eyed Arabs?
7. Why does Jim Phelps – a supposed master of disguise – think that a brown goatee beard (which clashes violently with his grey/silver hair) makes him unrecognisable?

and while I was pondering these, I also thought:-

• Does Barney the technical guy ever get tired of being stuffed into cramped, sweaty, airless craw spaces, in order to work some technical magic in totally unreasonable timescales?
• How come the bodybuilding dude can fool the villains by simply changing costume (e.g. from soldier to telephone engineer) and nobody notices?

…which led me to the big one:-

How do the IMF team manage to avoid life’s X-factor?

In their world the roads are always clear of traffic, the phone is always manned (and answered after the 1st ring), the bar is always open and the chef is always in the kitchen. No-one gets an unexpected cold or dose of the flu, or gets food poisoning. They never get radio signal interference or run out of gas. Barney never drops the critical piece of glass he’s pulled off the wall in order to drill holes or install something clever. The Femme Fatale never forgets where she left her knickers the night before.

If anyone out there can figure these out, I’d sure like to hear from ya…

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