Entertainment News Article | Reuters.co.uk
Czech television viewers are about to be exposed to a similarly shocking turnaround, when a well-known communist-era Czech television detective returns to the screens and is revealed to have been a mole for the West all along.

Major Jan Zeman, the star of a series filmed in the 1970s, used to stop would-be defectors slipping through the Iron Curtain. But in a planned new film, "Mayor Zeman Returns", audiences will learn he was a double agent and will see him help the CIA foil a terrorist plot in Prague.

When Czech TV decided to screen all the episodes of Major Zeman again in the late 1990s it caused quite a bit of controversy. The 1970s-80s TV film series provided relentless propaganda combined with high-octane entertainment over 30 episodes which saw Zeman grow from a simple policeman in the border areas foiling nefarious plans of would be emigrants and unreconstituted nazis in the 40s (first episode situated in 1945) and early 50s to involvement in high politics in the 1968 communist reform fiasco and international espionage in the 70s (last episode situated in 1973). Above everything else, though, Major Zeman was genuinely great entertainment popular with many people and despised for that by those who claimed (justifiably) that entertainment was just sugarcoating for a dose of lies about the opponents of communism (although there were a few apolitical episodes as well). A famous episode about the members of an underground rock band (modelled after the Czech cult band 'Plastic People of the Universe') portrayed them as amoral drug addicts who stop at nothing during their plan for the kidnapping of a plane to get to West Germany (see here for photos).

It will be interesting to follow the path of this planned reimagining of the whole series and reactions to it? Is just a simple attempt to follow on a successful francise? Or is Czech TV trying to legitimize a valuable asset in its archives? Or even, is a new propaganda (the plot device is a terrorist plot after all) simply trying to replace the old?

To get a feel for the show, try http://www.majorzeman.cz.