Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s

Bibliography

POPULAR TELEVISION GENRES General Editor: James Chapman Television is the dominant mass entertainment medium of the modern age. Yet, while popular genres in film have received much attention, their television equivalents have remained relatively unknown and unexplored. Popular Television Genres is an exciting new series of original studies that aims to explore the lineage and taxonomies of fictional drama in television worldwide. Written by experts in the field, each book in the series focuses on a particular genre or cycle of popular television, exploring its origins and evolution, examining its representation of cultural myths and archetypes and analysing its critical and popular reception. The approach will be methodologically broad, balancing the textual analysis of narrative with the need to place popular television in its cultural and historical contexts. Intended for use on television and media studies courses, Popular Television Genres will provide informed and accessible reading for scholars, students and general readers alike.

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For Jeffrey Richards Scholar, mentor, friend

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SAINTS AND AVENGERS British Adventure Series of the 1960s

James Chapman

I.B.Tauris Publishers LONDON • NEW YORK

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Published in 2002 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY10010 Copyright © James Chapman, 2002 The right of James Chapman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1 86064 753 7 hardback ISBN 1 86064 754 5 paperback A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Project Management by Steve Tribe, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Preface

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Acknowledgements

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Abbreviations Introduction

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1. Dirty Work: Danger Man

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2. Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Avengers

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3. The English Knight Errant: The Saint

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4. Swinging Britain: Adam Adamant Lives!

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5. Have Gun, Will Travel: Man in a Suitcase

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6. Return from Shangri-La: The Champions

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7. The Marie Celeste: Department S

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8. The Ghostly Detectives: Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

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9. The Bohemian Touch: Jason King

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10. The Special Relationship: The Persuaders!

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations

1. Danger Man (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 2. Danger Man (Flashbacks © Carlton International Media Ltd). 3. Danger Man (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 4. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 5. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 6. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 7. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 8. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 9. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 10. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 11. The Avengers (Flashbacks © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 12. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd).

26 33 47 60 64 65 69 76 78 80 82 85

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Saints and Avengers 13. The Avengers (Flashbacks © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 14. The Avengers (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd). 15. The Saint (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 16. The Saint (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 17. The Saint (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 18. Adam Adamant Lives! (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © BBC Worldwide Enterprises). 19. The Champions (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 20. Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 21. Jason King (BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd). 22. The Persuaders! (Flashbacks © Carlton International Media Ltd).

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Preface

There are good reasons for writing this book beyond my affection for the British adventure series of the 1960s and the opportunity, welcome though it is, to indulge my infatuation with Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg. The academic rationale behind this book stems from the dearth of scholarly interest in popular television genres in general and in the adventure series in particular. Other than David Buxton’s pioneering From The Avengers to Miami Vice and monographs by Toby Miller on The Avengers and Chris Gregory on The Prisoner, British adventure series of the sixties and early seventies have hitherto been beyond the pale of academic respectability. Those works mentioned above, moreover, are written very much from the theory-driven perspective of cultural studies, whereas my own approach is that of a cultural historian, exploring the contexts of production and reception as well as the narrative ideologies and generic characteristics of the series themselves. While I have no axe to grind with the cultural studies scholars, it is my contention that the importance of the adventure series both in British television history and in British popular culture more generally is related to the specific historical circumstances of the 1960s. The demise of the genre in the 1970s is evidence of this contention. The aim of this study, therefore, is to make the case for that sixties generation of Saints and Avengers to be regarded as legitimate objects of historical inquiry.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to all those friends and colleagues who have helped to make the twin processes of researching and writing this book over the past two years so pleasurable. Philippa Brewster, my editor at I.B.Tauris, has supported the book and the larger project of which it is part ever since I first ‘pitched’ it to her over lunch at the Museum Café early in 1999. Tony Aldgate, Steve Chibnall and Thomas Ribbits all provided invaluable assistance by loaning various primary source materials. Alma Hales kindly assisted in arranging for the loan of the surviving episodes of Adam Adamant Lives! from the BBC Television Archives. Susan Burnett read drafts of individual chapters; her rigorous comments on the introduction, especially, have been of enormous value in helping me clarify my own position in the relatively new field of television studies. My colleagues in the History Department of the Open University have ensured that I temper my enthusiasm for popular culture with the scholarly rigour demanded of a professional historian, while the many participants in seminars held by the Sixties Research Group have provided a discerning sounding board for some of my more imaginative interpretations. Arthur Marwick’s indefatigable researches into the sixties continue to provide a solid bedrock of historical scholarship; my own work, more modest in its scope, reinforces his argument that the sixties were a time when British popular culture enjoyed unprecedented prestige and influence. Whilst acknowledging these intellectual debts, however, I should emphasise that I alone am responsible for any faults, flaws, errors or omissions that readers may detect.

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Saints and Avengers Like all historians, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those archivists and librarians who help to facilitate research and deal so efficiently and patiently with the researcher’s enquiries. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the staff of the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham Park, especially Susan Knowles and Julie Snelling, the British Film Institute Library and the Open Univesity Library. The costs of research were partially offset by the Open University Arts Faculty Research Committee, a small beacon of light in the financial gloom currently affecting research in British universities. Photographic illustrations were provided by Flashbacks and BFI Stills, Posters and Designs. My acknowledgements to the copyright holders: BBC Worldwide for the still from Adam Adamant Lives!, Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd for stills from The Avengers and Carlton International Media Ltd for stills from Danger Man, The Saint, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jason King and The Persuaders!. While every reasonable effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions, we invite the parties concerned to contact the publishers in the event of any oversight or incorrect attribution. A special note of thanks, as ever, to my parents, who must sometimes have wondered why at various times I have had them recording hours upon hours of television series. I hope this book justifies my claim that all those videotapes of The Avengers were essential research materials. This book is dedicated to Jeffrey Richards. It was through working with Jeffrey that I came to realise the possibility of taking popular culture seriously without theorising it into abstraction. Of all the intellectual debts I owe, this is the greatest.

Bibliography

Abbreviations

ABC Associated Broadcasting Corporation (Britain) ABC American Broadcasting Company (US network) ATV Associated Television (Britain) BFI

British Film Institute

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CBS Columbia Broadcasting System (US network) ITC

Independent Television Corporation (Britain)

ITV

Independent Television (Britain)

LWT London Weekend Television (Britain) MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer NBC National Broadcasting Company (US network) WAC Written Archives Centre (BBC)

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Introduction

Introduction

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wo secret agents – one a bowler-hatted, umbrella-wielding Old Etonian, the other a trendy young woman with a penchant for black leather and martial arts – are Britain’s last line of defence against the nefarious schemes of diabolical criminal masterminds (The Avengers). A debonair international playboy with a permanently raised eyebrow travels the world offering a helping hand to damsels in distress (The Saint). A Victorian gentleman crime-fighter, frozen alive at the turn of the century, is resurrected in ‘Swinging London’ (Adam Adamant Lives!). Three secret agents return from Tibet with superhuman powers (The Champions). Members of a top-secret international organisation are called in to solve bizarre and perplexing mysteries (Department S). The ghost of a dead private detective returns from beyond the grave to solve his own murder (Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)). A celebrated crime novelist and playboy with highly eccentric fashion sense finds real life mirroring his own books (Jason King). A sophisticated English aristocrat and an American self-made millionaire team up to fight criminals the law cannot touch (The Persuaders!). One of the most distinctive features on the landscape of British television during the 1960s and early 1970s was the prominence of series featuring secret agents, gentleman detectives and all manner of flamboyant and unusual crime-fighters. One commentator remarked in the autumn of 1962 – coincidentally also the time when the first James Bond film Dr No was released in British cinemas – that ‘the undercover men are thicker on the ground than ever this season’. The same critic pointed out how all these series tried to differentiate their protagonists from others of the same stable. ‘Extraordinary

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Saints and Avengers attempts are made to establish separate identities for them,’ wrote Peter Black; ‘elaborate biographies, couched in a weirdly serio-comic style, the fruit of hours of earnest script conferences, flutter on to my desk.’1 The roll-call of spies, sleuths and private eyes called into service for British television is long and distinguished: The Four Just Men, The Third Man, Interpol Calling, Danger Man, Jango, Top Secret, Spy-Catcher, The Planemakers, The Avengers, Ghost Squad, The Odd Man, The Saint, Man of the World, The Sentimental Agent, Zero One, Public Eye, The Mask of Janus, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Baron, The Prisoner, Man in a Suitcase, The Man in Room 17, Sexton Blake, Virgin of the Secret Service, The Champions, Department S, Paul Temple, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jason King, The Persuaders!, The Protectors and The Adventurer all came and went (some of them quicker than others) between 1959 and 1974. While many of these series have faded into obscurity, a number of them remain ‘cult’ classics which are not only remembered fondly by their original fans but also win new aficionados through repeats on cable television and release on video cassette. Yet despite the prominence of secret agents and other assorted crime-fighters in the generic profile of popular television during the 1960s, these series have received scant attention beyond the realms of the cult television fan culture. A conventional map of British television in the 1960s would privilege serious drama such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play, topical magazine programmes such as Panorama and Monitor, cutting-edge satire such as That Was The Week That Was and socially aware comedy such as Till Death Us Do Part. It would be a map shaped by the contours of social realism (in both drama and comedy) and by the still prevalent Reithian principle of public service broadcasting. It would be a map which, if it found any space at all for popular genre fictions, would almost certainly limit it to a select few series such as Z Cars (regarded as bringing a new realism to the police drama) and Doctor Who (arguably the most influential fantasy series in television history, but even then one that was characterised by moral and philosophical issues in a manner not entirely dissimilar to serious drama). The secret agent and crimefighter series, however, remain an unmapped territory, unexplored by television cartographers and known only to a few bold explorers who have ventured beyond the map of social realism and the public service ethos. The retrospective cult appeal of The Avengers or The Prisoner might just earn those series a place near the edge of the map, but it is unlikely there would be any space at all for the majority of the others listed above.2 Why have this sixties generation of Saints and Avengers yet to find their place in the canon of respectable television history? Film studies has brought

Introduction popular genres such as the western, the gangster film, the musical, the horror film and the science-fiction film within the bounds of academic respectability, but their television equivalents remain, for the most part, left out in the cold. There are three broad reasons why popular television series (as opposed to serials or single plays) have been marginalised in the writing of television history. The first of these is the privileging by most television critics and historians of the traditional concepts of ‘realism’ and ‘quality’ in assessing television drama. In this respect the writing of television history has exhibited much the same critical preferences as the writing of cinema history. British television drama has been acclaimed for two outstanding traditions: social realist docu-dramas (what, for want of a convenient label, might be termed the Cathy Come Home paradigm) and handsomely mounted serialisations of classic literature (what, similarly, might be termed the Pride and Prejudice paradigm). In contrast, popular genres such as the detective or thriller series have all too often been dismissed as imitations of American television lacking the social realist import or the literary pedigree seen as the hallmark of the ‘best’ (meaning the most critically respectable) British television. It is significant, moreover, that when popular genre series have attracted some measure of critical acclaim they have almost invariably done so not on the basis of their own generic characteristics but through their perceived relationship to either the realist tradition (as is the case with Z Cars and more recent police series like The Cops) or the quality literary adaptation (exemplified by the vogue for ‘heritage’ detective series, such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, which adhere closely to the original stories and are characterised by their highly detailed period mise en scène). In contrast, the contemporary secret agent and crime-fighter series of the 1960s, most of which make no pretence of realism nor possess any literary pedigree at all, fall outside these paradigms.3 A second reason for the marginalisation of popular genre series has to do with the nature of television authorship. Whereas in film studies theories of authorship have privileged the director as the most significant creative influence in the filmmaking process, television has been regarded predominantly as a writers’ medium rather than a directors’ medium. This has been especially apparent in work on British television, due in large measure to the strong literary bias within British culture as a whole. Thus there is an approach to television history that privileges particular writers who are acclaimed for their outstanding and innovative work, usually in writing serials or single dramas that stand apart from the generic norms of popular television. Undoubtedly the foremost television ‘auteur’ in Britain is the late

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Saints and Avengers Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective, Lipstick on Your Collar, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus), though others would include Alan Bennett (An Englishman Abroad, Talking Heads) and Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH). In contrast, writers who specialise in genre fictions, and especially in genres such as the thriller and science-fiction (Brian Clemens, Philip Levene, Roger Marshall, Terry Nation, Dennis Spooner, Tony Williamson) have generally been dismissed as mere hacks.4 A third reason for the lack of critical attention afforded the thriller series, or indeed almost any type of episodic fiction, is the nature of the format. Unlike the serial (which features a continuing story over a set number of episodes) or the single play (a now virtually defunct form of drama that has been all but replaced by the made-for-television film), the series form resists conventional methods of filmic or literary analysis due to the necessarily repetitive and formulaic nature of each self-contained episode. The episodic series represents the reductio ad absurdum of generic entertainment patterns: once the characters and situations have been established then only minimal variation is possible within each episode. The series form therefore relies upon highly standardised narrative conventions, plotting and characterisation. This degree of predictability was a bugbear for critics, for whom the familiarity of the series form quickly bred contempt. ‘Most of television is unvaried, predictable and unimaginative,’ said the respected Milton Shulman, television critic of the Evening Standard, in 1970. His views, which were broadly representative of his fellow critics, provide a revealing insight into prevailing attitudes towards popular television: The routine fodder of the chuckle box deliberately aims at familiarity for its major appeal. If a formula works, don’t change it; if someone else has a popular idea, copy it; if someone offers you something really different, throw it out. That is how most TV executives think. . . . Critics, therefore, faced with the daunting sameness and repetitiveness of the average light entertainment series tend to avoid talking about them. It is not only an essential self-protective measure to avoid galloping infantilism, but the task of trying to apply critical standards to most of this mindless pap is like attempting to assess the aesthetic quality of blotting paper.5

Shulman’s outburst was inspired by having watched Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), which he considered was so bad it exhibited ‘a contempt for the public’, but his comments applied to popular television in general and would surely have found sympathy among other critics who habitually derided the efforts of television producers to wring the changes on familiar genres. His

Introduction opinion of television audiences, moreover (‘The mass public – docile, comatose, undemanding – have been conditioned to sit in their armchairs without moving, only rarely daring such an individualistic act as changing channels or switching the set off, and absorbing without protest the enervating visual opium of the box’), echoes the views of the Frankfurt School intellectuals who despised the standardised nature of all mass-produced popular culture and held its consumers to be no more than passive dupes who accepted uncritically all they were served up in the name of entertainment.6 The intellectual snobbery that is inherent both in the work of the Frankfurt School and in the opinions of critics like Shulman presents a huge obstacle for the study of popular television. Fortunately, this type of snobbery is gradually becoming less prevalent than it has been in the past. Some more recent commentators have displayed their willingness to accept genre series on their own terms rather than judging them by the same criteria as serials or single plays. Umberto Eco, using the methods of structuralist analysis that he had previously applied to the novels of Ian Fleming, argued that the formulaic narratives of television series, rather than revealing their paucity of imagination, actually provided the source of viewer pleasure that accounted for their popularity. ‘With a series one believes one is enjoying the novelty of the story (which is always the same) while in fact one is enjoying it because of the recurrence of a narrative scheme that remains constant,’ he observed. He suggested, furthermore, that ‘[t]he series consoles us. . . because it rewards our ability to foresee: we are happy because we discover our ability to guess what will happen.’7 Indeed, extending Eco’s point, it could be argued that it is reassuring for the viewer to be able to predict the outcome, especially in those television series where a hero-figure (Captain Kirk, Marshal Dillon, Simon Templar, Xena, or whoever) faces a test of his or her abilities and attributes. If the viewer is able to predict that ‘good’ will triumph over ‘evil’, for instance, then it affirms the viewer’s faith in the value systems and moral codes which the hero represents. Chris Gregory, furthermore, suggests that ‘this convention of predictability is not necessarily a limitation, but merely a conventional dramatic framework no more restrictive than, say, the limitations imposed on the novel in the nineteenth century’.8 Just as many of the now canonical Victorian novels were written for monthly magazine serialisation, with each instalment written to order, so too the television series is regulated by external constraints which make standardisation not merely desirable but in fact essential. For one thing, standardisation is a means of streamlining production and reducing costs: television series are produced to much tighter schedules and budgets than

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Saints and Avengers films made for cinema release. And for another thing, television broadcast schedules determine the length of each episode, which generally have to fit into one-hour or half-hour time slots, and, in the case of commercial television, must have regular breaks for advertisements. The standardised narratives of television series, therefore, are the inevitable consequence of a number of industrial and economic determinants. The norms of television production had become well established by the early 1960s, with the episodic series the dominant form of fictional entertainment. This had not always been the case. The earliest form of television fiction was the single play, regarded as the ‘natural’ form of television because the small screen was seen as a more intimate medium than either theatre or cinema and thus offered scope for the exploration of human emotions.9 The 1950s are regarded, in hindsight, as a ‘golden age’ of live television drama both in Britain and in the United States. This golden age was short-lived. The arrival of video recording technology (the first Ampex machines were in service with the US television networks by the end of 1956) signalled a shift to recorded drama. Although some critics regretted the loss of immediacy and spontaneity this entailed, recorded drama was preferable from the point of view of the television networks as it could be repeated without the necessity for restaging the play all over again. By the late 1950s, however, the episodic series was the norm for popular television both in Britain and in America. The two most prominent American television genres of the late 1950s and early 1960s were the western (Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, Maverick, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Tales of Wells Fargo, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wanted – Dead or Alive, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, Rawhide, The Rifleman, The Westerner, The Virginian) and the police/detective series, the latter split into the two distinct lineages of the ‘cop’ series (Dragnet, The Naked City, The Untouchables, The FBI) and the ‘private eye’ series (77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside 6). The western and police/detective series have much in common: both present a relatively straightforward Manichean view of the world divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and both are predominantly ‘law and order’ narratives. The police/detective series was also an early staple of British television, where the ‘Scotland Yard’ tradition was represented by the BBC’s Fabian of the Yard (1954) and ITV’s Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1955) – both half-hour episodic series made, like their American counterparts, on film. The pioneers of television film production in Britain in the late 1950s were the Americans Harry and Edward Danziger who specialised in cheaply-made crime and thriller series (Mark Saber, The Vice, The Man from Interpol) for the ITV network.

Introduction The most successful genre of British television during the late 1950s, however, was the cycle of costume swashbucklers produced during the early years of ITV. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–59), starring Richard Greene, was produced by Sapphire Films for Associated Television (ATV), one of the companies that held regional franchises as part of the independent television network. The most significant thing about The Adventures of Robin Hood was that it was sold to American television where it was successfully shown in syndication for many years. It was reported in December 1955 that the sale of the filmed series to America ‘has brought to England a million and a quarter dollars – nearly half a million pounds’.10 The Adventures of Robin Hood was followed in quick succession by The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Ivanhoe, The Adventures of William Tell, Sword of Freedom and Sir Francis Drake. All these half-hour series were made on film with a view to international sales, and ATV became the first British television company to set up its own international distribution arm. The managing director of both ATV and its subsidiary Independent Television Corporation (ITC) was Lew Grade, a flamboyant, cigar-smoking entrepreneur and former theatrical agent who cast himself in the mould of the ‘movie moguls’ of Hollywood. Yet despite the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the adoption of film methods in Britain lagged behind America and proceeded at an uneven pace. At a time when film had become the preferred mode of production for American television, the leading British film industry trade journal Kine Weekly was reporting that ‘1960 saw the virtual cessation of large-scale tv film production. Only ITC made a series and several pilots . . . while independent companies interested in the field became fewer and fewer’.11 The ITC series being referred to was Danger Man, the first of the new vogue for secret agent action dramas that would dominate Grade’s international production strategy for the next decade. By 1965, however, the same journal could report ‘a vast new enthusiasm for tv film production’ in the wake of Grade’s ‘decisive victory in selling three tv film series to the US networks’.12 The three series concerned were Danger Man, The Saint and The Baron. Grade’s successes notwithstanding, however, shooting on videotape rather than film remained the norm for British television. The differences between the formats – economic, technological and aesthetic – were significant determining factors on the style and nature of British television series. Shooting on videotape was cheaper than film, but, in the early days of video recording, it was also more cumbersome and more limiting. When videotape arrived in Britain in the late 1950s (the ITV company Associated-Rediffusion

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Saints and Avengers was the first in Britain to acquire an Ampex machine in 1958) the technology did not yet exist to edit it, meaning that a video recording had to be done, to all intents and purposes, ‘live’. The aesthetics of live television and video recording, therefore, were initially very similar. In 1959, however, technicians worked out a method of cutting and splicing videotape – a discovery that Denis Forman, an executive at Granada Television, described as ‘rather more important than the invention of sliced bread’ – and shortly afterwards electronic editing of videotape became possible. Even so there was some resistance to the changes, which did not immediately result in a fundamentally different style of television. ‘This advance in technology was not altogether welcome to managements,’ Forman recalled. ‘Rules were set down – shows must be recorded in real time, edits must be authorised by a member of the board, there may be only two edits in a show, three edits, six edits, and as the months went by a show may take no more than 50% more time than it did when it was being transmitted live.’13 Videotaped programmes of the early 1960s, therefore, are characterised by relatively long takes and by a preponderence of interior shots (film would be used for outdoor sequences and then edited in to the show). The use of multiple cameras as the decade progressed allowed greater freedom for directors, while further technological developments, including the introduction of a second-generation Ampex that could record in colour in 1965, meant the limitations of video were gradually overcome. Live television drama had all but disappeared by the end of the decade, while by the 1970s videotape had become so versatile that it could do almost everything film could, including outdoor shooting (through mobile cameras) and special effects (in which field the BBC’s Doctor Who, produced on tape since its inception in 1963, led the field). The longest-running secret agent series of the 1960s, The Avengers, is paradigmatic of these technological and aesthetic developments in that it encompassed all three modes of production (live performance, videotape and film) during its history. Of the 161 episodes of The Avengers, nine were broadcast live, 69 were recorded on videotape and 83 were shot on film; the filmed episodes, furthermore, included 26 monochrome and 57 in colour. The videotaped episodes were recorded in ‘real time’ and reshooting was evidently not a standard policy as there are occasions when the actors fluff their lines or can clearly be seen to be add-libbing. Thus there are remnants of the tradition of live television even in those episodes recorded on tape. The budget for the first series in 1961 (which included live and videotaped episodes) was £3500 per episode, rising to £4500 for the second series in 1962–63 and £6000 for the third series in 1963–64.14 The visual style of the

Introduction videotaped episodes is determined by a preponderence of interior shots and close ups. When The Avengers switched to film in 1965, the result was a more polished and sumptuous visual style and more exterior sequences. Julian Wintle, who was brought in to supervise the filmed episodes, was firmly of the opinion that film was preferable to videotape: ‘Tape is very restricting. We could never have done most of the stories we are now making if we had been confined to TV cameras and tape-recording.’15 But film was also more expensive: colour filmed episodes of The Avengers cost between £35,000 and £40,000 each. It is necessary to understand the technological and economic determinants involved in television production in order to place popular genres within their proper historical and cultural contexts. The limitations of early video recording technology predisposed certain genres towards film. The costume swashbuckler and the contemporary adventure series, both of which include elaborately staged outdoor action sequences and chases, obviously inclined more towards film production methods. This in turn opened up the possibility of accessing the American market, where film production was the norm. As Milton Shulman observed: ‘The American public is conditioned to the pace, the production polish, the range of locations, [and] the sound recording quality that only a story made on celluloid can give.’16 The international ambitions of British television, and of Lew Grade’s ITC especially, have significant implications for the study of its generic products. One of the themes of this book is the way in which popular television contributed to what might be termed the economic and cultural export of ‘Britishness’. The 1960s, as Arthur Marwick observes, were a decade when ‘British popular culture enjoyed unprecedented prestige and influence’.17 Both contemporaries and historians have identified a renaissance in British popular culture during the 1960s following the long hangover of the Second World War which had lasted well into the post-war years. It was a renaissance led by pop music, but which also encompassed developments in fashion, art, photography and film, giving rise to a range of new and often highly innovative forms of cultural expression. The massive success of the British-made James Bond films was one highly visible symptom of the international prestige enjoyed by British popular culture, while the impact made by the Beatles when they first toured America in 1964 was of such proportions that commentators were soon talking of a ‘British invasion’. British commentators, predictably, were enthusiastic about the international success achieved by home-grown television series. The economic benefits of selling series to overseas markets was a recurring theme in the

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Saints and Avengers trade press. When the first series of Danger Man was sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for example, Kine Weekly described the sale as ‘one of the best deals yet achieved’ for British television.18 The most important overseas market, of course, was America, and in this regard 1965 was something of an annus mirabilis for British producers. In October of that year Grade announced that the sale of three of his series to the American networks – Danger Man to CBS, The Saint to NBC and The Baron to ABC – would net a total of $10 million. The trade press trumpeted it as nothing less than ‘the most significant breakthrough for British tv film production in the history of the industry’.19 In his autobiography Grade was keen to stress that ‘my relationship with all three major American networks was very strong’.20 Grade’s success was followed by news that episodes of The Avengers, produced by another ITV company Associated British Corporation, had been bought by the ABC network. Howard Thomas, Managing Director of Associated British, predicted a bright future for British television: ‘We feel the economics and creative demands of the medium are fast making television essentially international, with exceptional opportunities for advancement in the quality and appeal of British programmes and co-productions for export to the United States and the rest of the world.’21 The Avengers was to be the first British series screened on primetime network television in the USA (the other series had been bought primarily as schedule fillers) and, pound for pound, was probably the most profitable television export of the decade. The total income generated from all the ITC-produced series, however, was to make Lew Grade the main beneficiary of British television’s export drive. By the mid-1960s ITC was ‘the biggest and fastest-growing film organisation in the United Kingdom’: its foreign earnings amounted to $10.5 million in 1965 and $15 million in 1966.22 While it would be wise to lodge a few caveats regarding the sale of British series to America in particular – the sums of money paid by the American networks were relatively modest in their own terms and the various options were not always taken up if viewing figures were disappointing – there is no doubt that the income they generated was a welcome boost to the flagging British economy. ‘From a national standpoint, it means that TV finally will be making an important contribution to our balance of payments problem and doing something significant for the export drive,’ Shulman declared, a view that was shared in other quarters.23 Grade himself was knighted in 1968 (a peerage followed in 1976) and ATV was twice presented (in 1967 and 1969) with the Queen’s Award to Industry for its export achievements. However, the international profile of British television in the 1960s should not be judged solely in economic terms. As well as exporting commodities,

Introduction British television was also exporting values and ideologies. This is what I refer to as the cultural export of Britishness. The secret agent and crimefighter series are notable for their representation of certain characters and archetypes that are rooted in British culture and tradition. As one commentator remarked: ‘The Saint is not only one of our biggest dollar earners, but a glossy tourist board advertisement for the gin and tonic Englishman on whom the sun never sets’.24 Shulman, too, approved of the export of British values: ‘The fact that these very British characters in stories that suit the taste of the British public have finally broken into the American market in a big way is a major development in the TV world.’25 The significance of these 1960s television series in the representation of British national identity cannot be overestimated. Hitherto the dominant medium for the representation (indeed for the construction) of national identity in the twentieth century had been the cinema. This was no longer the case, however, by the 1960s. ‘By the late 1960s,’ Jeffrey Richards rightly observes, ‘television had definitively taken over from the cinema as the mass medium and it is to television thenceforth that we must look for projections of the national image.’26 This inevitably begs questions, of course, as to precisely what images of the British character and British values were being represented. There were some who disputed that the sixties adventure series had much to do with Britishness at all. One of the charges frequently levelled against ITC’s television fictions was that they compromised their British values by imitating the style of American television. Dennis Spooner, who was involved in many of these series as writer or script editor, recalled: During the Sixties I was bitterly attacked by somebody who said: ‘Look! There’s Spooner sitting at Elstree pandering to the Americans’. I wrote him a letter saying: ‘You’re quite wrong. I’m pandering to the Japanese and the Germans and everybody.’ ITC was basically an exporting company. We were earning foreign currency. We got the Queen’s Award to Industry. It’s no good trying to sell a locomotive in America if you insist on building it for the gauge of track that’s relevant in Britain. I don’t see why people get upset when you do the same thing in television.27

It would be fair to say that some series made more concessions to American tastes than others. The Baron, Man in a Suitcase, The Champions and Department S, for instance, all imported American actors for starring roles. Paradoxically, these series were less successful in America than those, such as The Saint and The Avengers, which had remained insistently British in casting and content. While British critics resented the Americanisation of

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Saints and Avengers British television, however, overseas commentators regarded these series as indisputably British. The secret agent adventure series of the 1960s share much in common with the James Bond films, which also projected a particular image of British national identity to audiences around the world.28 It would be entirely misleading, of course, to suggest that the success of the Bond films was the sole reason for the high profile enjoyed by fictional secret agents on British television. Danger Man, which began in 1960, and The Avengers, which began in 1961, both pre-dated the cinematic incarnation of James Bond, while The Saint, which starred a future James Bond actor, Roger Moore, premiered on British television a week before the first Bond film was released. Nevertheless, the Bond films were undeniably very influential. The glut of secret agent dramas came in the wake of the first Bond films, and even those series which had started earlier modified their formats in response, to some extent at least, to Bond. The style of the Bond films influenced filmed television, especially in the fast editing of the action sequences and in the vogue for ‘teaser’ sequences preceeding the main titles. The most significant points of comparison, however, are to be found in the narrative ideologies of the Bond films and the television secret agent adventures. The Bond films, beginning at the moment when the process of decolonisation was accelerating, can be seen as national fantasies in which the decline of British power never took place. They present a world in which the Pax Britannica still operates and Britain assumes the role of a world power. Similar assumptions about British power and prestige on the world stage can be detected in popular television. As Shulman observed: Although Britain’s power position is declining, it is heartening to see that every week foreign nations still go to incredible lengths to steal our military secrets, undermine our industrial potential or subvert our interests abroad. . . . An added fillip to the national image will be the fact that no foreign saboteur or subversive can match the cunning, the courage, the dexterity, the ingenuity, the wit or the insouciance of the British agent, counter-spy or private eye.29

It is ironic, indeed, that spy narratives should be such a prominent component of British film and television culture at a time when the reputation of the British intelligence services, still reeling from the Burgess and Maclean affair of 1951, was further undermined by the embarrassing cases of Soviet moles Kim Philby and George Blake. Not all the series discussed in this book are strictly speaking spy or secret agent narratives. While Danger Man, The Avengers, The Champions and

Introduction Department S all feature protagonists who may be described as secret agents in so far as they are empowered by national or international security organisations to counter the activities of enemy spies and saboteurs, the protagonists of The Saint, Adam Adamant Lives!, Man in a Suitcase and The Persuaders! are independent troubleshooters and crime-fighters who become involved either on their own or on others’ behalf (though even so these series all feature episodes where the protagonists are employed by some official agency). None of the series included here belong to the lineage of the police/detective series, as none of their protagonists are policemen or policewomen, though Man in a Suitcase and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) can be placed within the private-eye genre. The difficulty of classifying these series in conventional generic terms is aptly illustrated by the critic who described The Avengers as ‘farcical melodrama’, echoing another critic who had been so dumbfounded by the first Bond film that he thought it could best be labelled ‘a bizarre comedy melodrama’.30 Some series, furthermore, include trappings of sciencefiction (The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!) and fantasy (The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)). The label ‘telefantasy’ has gained currency in the discourse of cult television fan cultures as a cross-generic term that includes any type of series that is not determined by the conventional dramatic notions of psychological realism.31 But while seven of the ten series I have selected for case studies could reasonably be described as telefantasy (The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S, Jason King, The Persuaders!), there are still three (Danger Man, The Saint, Man in a Suitcase) in which psychologically-oriented plot motivation remains in the ascendancy. I prefer the label ‘adventure series’ as one that is flexible enough to include the slightly different generic regimes which regulate the secret agent, crime-fighter and private-eye narratives. The adventure series is characterised not by cerebral detective work in the tradition of the classical detective story, but rather by an emphasis on action and suspense. The adventure thriller had been a staple genre of British cinema since the 1930s, but it was not until the 1960s that it emerged as a mainstream television genre.32 David Buxton has suggested another way of conceptualising popular television of the 1960s which cuts across generic and national boundaries. He posits a difference between, on the one hand, what he terms the ‘human nature series’ which is driven by social, moral and existential themes, and, on the other hand, the ‘pop series’ in which style and design take precedence over content. Buxton suggests that the ‘human nature series’ may encompass different genres, including crime (The Untouchables, The FBI), western

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Saints and Avengers (Gunsmoke, Bonanza) and science-fiction (The Invaders, Star Trek). The narrative ideologies of these series are concerned with finding consensual and morally justifiable resolutions to social problems and conflicts. The ‘pop series’, in contrast, is a product of the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and revolves around the themes of modernity and consumerism. The spy/secret agent genre became ‘the dominant fictional form of the pop ethic’, with ‘pop texts’ in different media including the Bond films, the books, comic strip and film of Modesty Blaise and television series such as Danger Man, The Prisoner, The Avengers and, to take an American example, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. ‘Inextricably linked to patriotism and the overcoming of class divisions,’ Buxton writes, ‘the spy genre becomes additionally coded with discourses pertaining to tourism, conspicuous consumption and sexual pleasure, an ideal terrain on which to confront and explore the tension between duty to a higher authority (the state) and the individualism produced by the new consumer culture.’33 Buxton’s definition of the ‘pop series’ is extremely useful. Certainly there is evidence from the reaction of contemporaries that some adventure series were seen as privileging style over content. The foregrounding of artefacts of consumer culture, for example, is reflected in the frequency with which critics compared them to advertising. These comparisons were not meant to be complimentary. ‘The Saint is glossy British rubbish with Roger Moore, who looks like an ad for after-shave’, wrote Philip Purser, while Peter Black remarked contemptuously that the protagonists of The Champions ‘reproduced the look of brimming health and lightness of step of the characters in the commercials when they’ve got hold of the right laxative or hair shampoo’.34 This attitude is summed up perfectly by George Melly’s verdict on The Avengers: ‘It made the commercial break seem terribly honest.’35 As important as these ‘pop’ elements are to the British adventure series, however, they should not exclude other analytical frameworks. For one thing, the discourses of ‘pop’ are unevenly represented in different series: they are prominent in The Avengers, apparent but not dominant in The Saint, hardly evident at all in Man in a Suitcase. And, for another thing, the adventure series of the 1960s also form part of a generic lineage that predates the emergence of ‘pop’. The Saint was based on a character invented in the 1930s, and other television series, too, harked back to a tradition of British gentlemen heroes that had earlier been represented by characters such as Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of these series, indeed, are the strategies they employ for containing the social and cultural forces of the 1960s within the terms

Introduction of a tradition of generic representation that has much deeper historical roots. My approach in this book follows the same method of cultural-historical analysis that I have previously applied to the James Bond films.36 My case studies of the ten series are concerned with identifying their generic codes and conventions, analysing their narrative structures and ideologies, discussing their formal and stylistic properties, examining their representations of class and gender and considering their critical and popular reception. The case studies have been chosen both for their richness as cultural artefacts in their own right and to reflect which series are accessible to the general reader (with the exception of Adam Adamant Lives!, the sole BBC series included, all these series are available on home video). My sources, in addition to episodes of the series themselves, include production documents, scripts, publicity materials, trade papers and newspaper and magazine reviews. The latter are interesting not only because they often highlight differences between the reactions of critics and audiences, but also because they offer an illuminating insight into a critical discourse that has consistently proved unable to find evaluative criteria appropriate to nonrealist forms of representation. The adventure series has for too long been ridiculed by television critics; it is time to redress the balance.

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Saints and Avengers

1 Dirty Work

Danger Man

D

anger Man was the first and, in the opinion of many commentators, the best of the British secret agent adventure series of the 1960s. As the television critic of the Guardian remarked: ‘[John] Drake was the first of the two-fisted British tele-agents, and is still by far the best man in a punch-up on either channel.’1 Danger Man received good notices from the critics, became a major overseas money-earner for Lew Grade’s ITC and made Patrick McGoohan into an international television star. Its success marked a decisive shift away from the costume swashbucklers that hitherto had been British television’s most exportable commodity in favour of the contemporary crimefighter whose adventures were located recognisably in the present rather than in an imagined past. In contrast to the more fantastic and parodic series that were to follow later in the decade, Danger Man was characterised by its relative realism and seriousness – a trait which probably accounts for its favourable critical reception. Its popularity has endured, and, if not quite matching the cult status of The Avengers or of McGoohan’s later series The Prisoner, David Buxton nevertheless calculates that ‘Danger Man has rarely been absent from the world’s television screens since 1965’.2 The production history of Danger Man falls neatly into two periods: a continuous first series of 39 half-hour episodes originally broadcast between the autumn of 1960 and the spring of 1961; and an intermittent second series of 45 one-hour-episodes, broadcast in batches between 1964 and 1967. All

Dirty Work the episodes were in monochrome, except for the final two hour-length episodes. It was in its hour-long format that Danger Man was sold to the American CBS network in 1965 (it was retitled Secret Agent for the USA) and these episodes are now the most familiar. Buxton, for example, is referring to the later episodes when he describes Danger Man as ‘a classic pop series’.3 The differences between the half-hour and one-hour episodes, and the threeyear production hiatus between them, makes it difficult to generalise about the style and nature of the series overall. The two distinct phases of Danger Man require separate analysis in their own right. It would be disingenuous to assume that the later episodes were qualitatively better than the earlier ones simply because they were longer: the first series needs to be seen within the context of the norms of television production in 1960, which were different from those of the mid-1960s. There is ample evidence, indeed, to suggest that the early Danger Man met the highest standards of television film production at the time. Kine Weekly’s television correspondent Tony Gruner, for example, praised ‘the high quality of production values, tempo and acting ability associated with the series’. ‘Seeing it for the second time, my view was confirmed that here is the best British TV series ever made,’ he declared. ‘McGoohan, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the cast and also any other tv film leading man, reveals what a good actor can do with average material.’4 And it was not only the British critical fraternity who found the series polished and exciting entertainment. Variety, the American trade paper which also kept a watchful eye on British television, echoed its British counterpart to the effect that the series ‘had professional values and an excitement that should ensure it a high rating’ and compared it favourably with its American counterparts: ‘With a few more ounces of sweat put into the script, Danger Man should easily match the best of its kind from the US imports.’5 Danger Man was admired, therefore, for its level of production values and for its quality as entertainment, if less so for its scripts and storylines. The polished and professional style of Danger Man was due in large measure to the production personnel involved in making it, most of whom had worked in the British film industry. It was natural that television should turn to experienced directors and technicians for the production of filmed series that required to be made to the highest professional standards if they were going to prove attractive to overseas buyers. Although television was still regarded as an upstart newcomer by some film industry personnel, it also provided a ready source of employment when feature film work began to dry up in the 1960s. Whereas in the United States television was often a

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Saints and Avengers training ground for future film directors, in Britain it became the refuge of journeyman professionals whose careers had stagnated or were even in decline. Ralph Smart, who devised and produced the series, had worked as a writer and editor during the 1930s before graduating to directing in the late 1940s. Before embarking on Danger Man he had produced the television series The Invisible Man (1958–59) and Interpol Calling (1959–60) – both for ATV – and thus was well versed in the techniques of television film production. Smart wrote or co-wrote 26 of the 39 half-hour episodes – as well as directing two – and his was probably the most significant influence on the style and content of the series. The other directors employed during the first series had all directed feature films – Julian Amyes, Terry Bishop, Anthony Bushell, Clive Donner, Charles Frend, Seth Holt, C.M. PenningtonRichards, Peter Graham Scott, Michael Truman – with the sole exception of Patrick McGoohan himself who directed one episode (‘Vacation’). Danger Man did provide a training ground for one future director in that John Schlesinger, soon to achieve critical acclaim with films including A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar and Darling, was in charge of the second unit responsible for filming outdoor sequences. Interiors were shot at the MGM British Studio at Borehamwood near Elstree (not to be confused with Elstree Studios, owned by the Associated British Picture Corporation, where most ITC adventure series were to be made). Peter Graham Scott explained how Danger Man took advantage of the studio’s existing facilities: Because the studio had a vast stock of old feature film sets, scripts had to be tailored to fit whatever was available. A meeting between Drake and his furtive associate would suddenly be arranged in a nunnery chapel, or a Hapsburg [sic] ballroom – because it was there. Every story had to have one garden/forest/jungle studio exterior because MGM had a famous gardener’s greenhouse full of exotic plants. (Minimal real exteriors were covered by a second unit with doubles by the brilliant unknown John Schlesinger – who could complain?)6

While the directors and technicians were mostly recruits from the British film industry, the writers were an eclectic mix of film and television people from both sides of the Atlantic. The film veterans were represented by British screenwriter Jack Whittingham (whose credits included Q Planes and I Believe in You) and American Jo Eisinger (Gilda, Night and the City), while a younger generation of writers who had learned their trade in television was represented by Brian Clemens and Ian Stuart Black. Clemens, who had cut his teeth writing scripts for the Danziger brothers in the late 1950s and who is credited

Dirty Work as co-writer on nine of the early episodes, was to be one of the most prolific television writers of the decade and would be associated especially with The Avengers, which began mid-way through the first series of Danger Man. While Danger Man is now seen as the first in a lineage of new-style secret agent adventures produced by British television in the 1960s, its first series, especially, drew upon certain conventions and archetypes that were already established by the late 1950s. The series has a Janus-like quality: on the one hand looking back to the format of late 1950s television series, on the other hand anticipating the more modern ‘pop’ style of the 1960s. Danger Man was certainly not the first cloak-and-dagger series set against an international background. The production season of 1959–60 had seen a vogue for international investigators and troubleshooters whose adventures took place in various foreign locations: Interpol Calling, The Third Man, The Four Just Men and, to include an American example, International Detective, were all half-hour episodic fictions with a contemporary and international flavour. International Detective, for example, was purportedly based on the case files of the William J. Burns International Detective Agency and starred Arthur Fleming as investigator Ken Franklin, while Interpol Calling starred Charles Korvin as Inspector Paul Durval of Interpol. Although these two series belonged to the police/detective genre rather than to the spy/secret agent genre, their content is similar enough to suggest that, when it began in 1960, Danger Man represented a variation on an already successful formula rather than marking the beginning of an entirely new trend. The Third Man and The Four Just Men belong to a different lineage of thriller fiction, namely the freelance troubleshooters and crime-fighters who work independently of any official agency. Although produced by different companies, there are numerous parallels between the two series. Both ran for a total of 39 half-hour episodes in 1959–60 (it was standard practice for series episodes to be made in multiples of thirteen); both were inspired by media other than television; and both were Anglo-American co-productions – a strategy followed, with varying degrees of success, by both the BBC and ITV in the late 1950s. The BBC had entered into partnership with the American company National Telefilm Associates to produce The Third Man. Borrowing only its title and the name of its protagonist from Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film, The Third Man starred Michael Rennie as Harry Lime, a wealthy international troubleshooter who became involved in various intrigues.7 The series was not the success that either partner had hoped, and the BBC abandoned television film production for the immediate future.8 The corporation put its faith, instead, in Maigret, having secured the television

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Saints and Avengers rights from author Georges Simenon, starring Rupert Davies as the pipesmoking Parisian detective in 51 videotaped episodes. Maigret was firmly in the tradition of the classical detective mystery rather than the adventure series. Lew Grade’s ATV had more experience of co-production, having secured American investment in its costume swashbucklers since the mid-1950s. Sidney Cole was the producer of several of these series for Sapphire Films. He recalled: ‘Sapphire Film Productions was a US production and distribution company, collaborating with Lew Grade . . . Hannah Weinstein, the Executive Producer, came over to the UK, trying to set something up.’9 Cole, an alumnus of Ealing Studios, produced both The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Four Just Men. The Four Just Men was derived from Edgar Wallace’s novel of the same name which had already been filmed twice for the cinema (in 1921 and 1939). Its international ambitions were apparent in its casting: Jack Hawkins (British), Dan Dailey (American), Richard Conte (American) and Vittorio De Sica (Italian) were the four protagonists who, after the scenesetting first instalment, alternated between episodes. With its narrative of independently wealthy troubleshooters being brought together by an authority figure (Anthony Bushell played the mysterious Colonel Bacon in the first episode), The Four Just Men belongs to the same generic lineage as Grade’s later (and much more expensive) series The Persuaders!. Cole would later act as producer for the one-hour episodes of Danger Man as well as supervising the mid-1960s ITC series Man in a Suitcase. However, while Danger Man and its successors were made with an eye on the international market, Grade also abandoned the strategy of co-production after The Four Just Men. In generic terms Danger Man can be situated half-way between the police/ detective genre (Interpol Calling, International Detective) and the wealthy international troubleshooter (The Four Just Men, The Third Man) in the sense that its protagonist is legitimised through working for an official agency but acts autonomously while on assignments. The boundary between the spy/ secret agent genre and the police/detective genre is fluid and not always sharply defined, but in general the spy/secret agent narrative is characterised by its subject matter which involves all manner of cloak-and-dagger intrigue (spying, sabotage, espionage, counter-espionage, theft of state or industrial secrets, political assassination) whereas the police/detective narrative focuses on the process of investigation and the solving of crimes (which may not have anything to do with spying or espionage). The spy/secret agent thriller, moreover, generally involves the uncovering of a conspiracy plot that threatens the security of the state or its relations with other states.

Dirty Work The spy thriller is a well established genre in British popular fiction. The first recognisable spy stories appeared in the late nineteenth century and by the early twentieth century the genre had partially displaced the imperial adventure story as the foremost popular reading matter. The first modern spy story is generally held to be Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903) which caused a sensation upon publication for its suggestion that Germany was preparing to invade Britain’s vulnerable east coast. The genre enjoyed great popularity during and after the Great War in the novels of John Buchan and ‘Sapper’ (pen name of former army officer Herman Cyril McNeile) and continued to flourish during the 1930s, when Graham Greene and Eric Ambler used the genre as an anti-fascist allegory, and into the 1950s and 1960s, when Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton relocated the genre in the ideological context of the Cold War, with the spy becoming Britain’s (and the West’s) first line of defence against the creeping menace of Soviet Communism. The spy thriller had made the transition to the cinema during the 1930s when filmmakers turned to adaptations of Buchan (The 39 Steps), W. Somerset Maugham (Secret Agent), Edgar Wallace (The Four Just Men) and Sapper (numerous Bulldog Drummond films were made in Britain and in Hollywood). Following a cycle of anti-communist thrillers in the early years of the Cold War (High Treason, Secret People, State Secret) the spy thriller was less prominent in British cinema during the 1950s, when it was confined mostly to supporting features, before experiencing a revival in the 1960s following the success of the James Bond films. Most academic work on the spy thriller has focused on its literary form. In his book Cover Stories, Michael Denning identifies two distinct lineages within the spy novel. On the one hand there are ‘those that we might call magical thrillers where there is a clear contest between Good and Evil with a virtuous hero defeating an alien and evil villain’, and on the other hand there are ‘those that we might call existential thrillers which play on a dialectic of good and evil overdetermined by moral dilemmas, by moves from innocence to experience, and by identity crises, the discovery in the double agent that the self may be evil’.10 This difference might also be described as that between ‘sensational’ and ‘realist’ spy thrillers. The ‘magical’ or ‘sensational’ thriller is based on narratives of action and pursuit, requiring physical courage and endurance on the part of the hero who uncovers the conspiracy and defeats the villain. This lineage is exemplified by the novels of Buchan, Sapper and Fleming, characterised by their fast-moving plots, larger-than-life villains and hair’s-breadth escapes. In contrast, the ‘existential’ or ‘realist’ thriller explores the moral ambiguities and uncertainties of the spying game and

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Saints and Avengers questions the values of patriotism and duty that are so prominent in the sensational thriller. This lineage is exemplified by the novels of Greene and Ambler, with their tales of innocent protagonists caught up in events beyond their control, and by those of le Carré and Deighton, with their ‘mole-hunt’ narratives which uncover treachery and deceit within the intelligence services themselves. The realist credentials of this school were reinforced by the revelation of real-life Soviet moles and double agents in British Intelligence such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in the early 1950s and Harold ‘Kim’ Philby and George Blake in the 1960s, while the arrest and trial of five Soviet spies working in the naval weapons research base at Portland in 1961 highlighted that the threat to national security posited in the spy thriller also existed in real life. These two lineages, while arising from the literary spy thriller, can also be identified in film and television incarnations of the genre. In the 1960s, especially, there was a clear distinction between the two traditions. In the cinema the sensational thriller was represented pre-eminently by the James Bond films and their imitators (Matt Helm and Derek Flint from Hollywood and a sixties reincarnation of Bulldog Drummond in Britain), while the realist thriller was represented by adaptations of le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Deadly Affair) and Deighton (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain). On television the sensational thriller would dominate in Britain (The Avengers, The Champions, Department S) and in America (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Mission: Impossible), though the realist thriller would also find an outlet in Britain (Man in a Suitcase, Callan). ‘As the decade wore on,’ David Buxton writes, ‘the spy genre fissured into two distinct forms; on the one hand, the “ultrarealist” genre made popular by John le Carré in which unglamorous, shadowy characters went about their business in a morally ambiguous world; on the other, playboys who carried out vague missions in tourist playgrounds against secret international organisations’. Buxton considers that Danger Man’s protagonist John Drake ‘is somewhere between both genres’, though with the qualification that ‘his reliance on bugging and camera devices points towards the realist spy genre which tends to a moral equivalence of all secret services’.11 Another dichotomy within the spy thriller, and one that cuts across the sensational and realist lineages, is the distinction between the ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’ hero. The amateur, a protagonist who becomes involved in the spying game by accident, was the most common type in early thriller fiction. There are different types of amateur hero – the debonair clubland

Dirty Work gentlemen found in Buchan (Richard Hannay) and Sapper (Bulldog Drummond), instinctively patriotic and combative, are at some remove from the bewildered protagonists of Ambler (language teacher Joseph Vadassy in Epitaph for a Spy, the engineer Graham in Journey into Fear) who are the most reluctant of spies – but what they all have in common is that they are not professional secret agents. The likes of Hannay and Drummond, especially, regard fighting foreign spies and anarchists as a form of sport and their attitudes reflect the public school ethos of ‘playing the game’. The amateur was displaced after the Second World War by the figure of the professional secret agent who is employed by an official agency. While there are earlier incarnations of the professional agent – Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, for example, appeared in 1928 – it was during the Cold War that the agent in the service of the state became the dominant archetype. Again, however, the professional secret agent is found in both sensational and realist thrillers: Fleming’s James Bond and le Carré’s George Smiley are both professionals, but while the former takes on megalomaniac master criminals such as Dr No and Goldfinger, the latter is concerned with uncovering traitors and spies at home. The professional secret agent possesses ideological legitimacy in that his actions are sanctioned by authority – James Bond, for example, has a ‘licence to kill’ – but he also has a great deal of autonomy in how he carries out his investigations and might even use extra-legal measures to achieve his objectives. Danger Man belongs to the lineage of the professional secret agent thriller. This is made explicit in the voice-over narration that is heard over the title sequence of the half-hour episodes: ‘Every government has its secret service branch. America: CIA. France: Deuxième Bureau. England: MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job – well, that’s when they usually call on me, or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake. John Drake.’12 Thus the series identifies its protagonist as a professional secret agent and provides him with the ideological legitimacy of working for an official organisation. It was in this regard that Danger Man differentiated itself from series such as The Third Man and The Four Just Men, whose protagonists had belonged to the amateur tradition. Drake reports to several authority figures, including the American Colonel Keller (Lionel Murton) and a British civil servant-type called Hardy (Richard Wattis), and his assignments are generally concerned with protecting Anglo-American interests. It has been suggested that Danger Man was inspired, to some extent, by Ian Fleming’s James Bond. There is some credence to this notion. The Bond novels, beginning with Casino Royale in 1953, were increasing in popularity

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Saints and Avengers in the late 1950s, when they were published in paperback (the original hardbacks had been something less than the runaway bestsellers often assumed). In their cultural studies analysis of the Bond phenomenon, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott identify 1957 – the year in which From Russia, With Love was serialised in the Daily Express and when a James Bond strip cartoon began in the same newspaper – as ‘the first stage in the transformation of Bond from a character within a set of fictional texts into a household name’.13 Fleming had been interested in transferring his hero to television: several of the short stories that comprised For Your Eyes Only had started life as treatments for television episodes. There are obviously certain parallels between Danger Man and James Bond, not least in the ideological role the hero performs. Although Bond works for the British Secret Service, he is often called upon to protect the geopolitical interests of the North Atlantic allies. Bennett and Woollacott suggest that ‘Bond can be read as a hero of the NATO alliance’ in so far as his allies include the American and French secret services and ‘the villain’s conspiracy is usually directed against the West as a whole’.14 It could be argued, furthermore, that making John Drake a special agent for NATO was part of an economic strategy in that Danger Man was more likely to be bought by television networks in other countries if its protagonist was detached from a purely British context and instead served the interests of international security. That said, however, there are also important differences between the Bond character and John Drake. While Drake is clearly cast within the tradition of patriotic, square-jawed heroes, he is a more moral and serious character than Bond and certainly does not exhibit the same sexual licentiousness. This was due in large measure to the influence of Patrick McGoohan, an Americanborn actor who hitherto had appeared mostly in supporting roles in British films. McGoohan disliked the Bond character, whom he felt was too immoral in his behaviour, and insisted that his interpretation of John Drake was closer to the real thing: ‘Some of his [Bond’s] encounters with the opposite sex are not really fit for a family audience . . . Drake is a more serious character. Much closer to what a real agent should be. And he never gets emotionally involved with a woman.’15 ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, producer of the Bond films, revealed that McGoohan had been considered for them but was deemed unsuitable because ‘he was strongly religious, and was uneasy about sex and violence’.16 Buxton suggests that the highly moral tone that McGoohan took in publicity interviews was a deliberate strategy ‘perhaps to compensate for the anxiety aroused by the secret agent’s individualism’.17 Whether the characterisation of Drake was due entirely to McGoohan’s own moral

Dirty Work principles, or whether, as would seem likely, it was also due to the necessity of toning down the ‘snobbery-with-violence’ aspect of the spy thriller to make it suitable for television, the result was that Drake exhibited some important differences from Bond. In certain respects, indeed, Drake owes as much to the Hannay-Drummond type as he does to Bond, even though he belongs to the professional lineage rather than the amateur tradition. The series’ publicity described the Drake/McGoohan persona in terms that recall the public school ethos of honourable conduct and fair play: Pat McGoohan is an actor who likes his fights planned to the last punch. He hates to win against overwhelming odds unless he deserves to do so. He insists on brawling like a gentleman. . . . For as McGoohan wends his knightly way across the world, seeking out villainy, his fists will be as virtuous as his cause. Those who fall before him will have been clobbered with a fairness which will make the Queensbury Rules look almost criminal.18

This outlook is closer in spirit to the world of Hannay and Drummond, with their insistence on ‘playing the game’, than it is to the ruthless pragmatism of Bond, who fights by any means, fair or foul. Drake’s attitude towards women, furthermore, recalls the chaste and sexless Hannay and Drummond (whose marriages removed the possibility of extraneous romantic interest) and is the complete opposite of the aggressive sexuality of Bond. If Bond is a hedonist, then Drake is a puritan; and if Bond can be interpreted as a modernising hero whose values and attitudes are in tune with the times in which he was created, then Drake is a more old-fashioned character who belongs in spirit to an earlier generation of gentleman heroes. His very name, indeed, recalls Sir Francis Drake, with all its connotations of patriotism, duty and chivalry. That said, however, internal evidence from the early episodes indicates that Drake’s nationality is American, though he is capable of impersonating the old-school-tie Englishman to a tee. The first series of Danger Man has Drake acting as a roving troubleshooter for NATO who is dispatched to various corners of the world when trouble threatens. The most frequent destinations are Latin American states or Caribbean islands (San Pablo, Calvados), Eastern Europe and the Balkans (Boravia, Malvania), the Middle East (Medai, El Dura) and Central Africa (Bassaland), all fictitious and invoked through an artful mix of stock footage from film libraries, back projections and studio sets. The use of fictitious locations is a conventional device in the thriller and adventure genres, though occasionally in Danger Man the locations are real places (India, Hong Kong).

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Saints and Avengers

1. The shadowy, noirish world of Danger Man is perfectly captured in this scene from the first episode ‘View from the Villa’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

For all its imagined geography, however, Danger Man is set against the background of real geopolitical tensions. It revolves around two geopolitical axes – between East and West (the Cold War axis), and between developed and underdeveloped countries (the Third World axis) – and conspiracies are clearly informed by international politics and events. There are references in individual episodes, for example, to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 (‘The Key’) and African decolonisation (‘Deadline’), and while the identity of the Communist bloc states and Third World dictatorships may be thinly disguised behind fictitious names it is not difficult to identify which countries and regimes they might really be. The one enemy identified without any cloak of fiction is Red China, which was to be a sinister presence in the background of other ITC adventure series (The Saint, The Champions) as well as in the Bond films (Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice).

Dirty Work The narratives and conspiracies of Danger Man are drawn mostly from the realist lineage of the spy thriller. Plots involving traitors, defectors and deceptions predominate in those episodes informed by Cold War tensions as Drake is called upon to protect Anglo-American interests from the activities of ‘the other side’. In ‘The Sisters’, for example, he is sent to the East European city of Slavosk to bring to the West a young woman who had begged for asylum at the British embassy. Gerda Sandor claims to be the younger sister of Nadia Sandor, ‘a young woman of exceptional scientific reputation’, who has defected to the West and is being interrogated by British Intelligence. The British suspect Nadia of being a mole and plan to use her sister to unmask her, but it turns out that Gerda is the real impostor, a double agent sent to discredit Nadia, whose defection is genuine. Drake uses an elaborate bluff to reveal the truth and Gerda is deported back behind the Iron Curtain where she faces punishment and possibly even death for her failure. The human cost of the Cold War is also explored in ‘The Key’. Drake is sent to investigate security leaks from the American embassy in Vienna. Suspicion falls on Logan, an embassy security official and former agent, but it turns out to be Logan’s Hungarian wife who has been reading documents without his knowledge and passing on the information via her contact and lover. Logan’s life is shattered when he realises the extent of his wife’s betrayal, which is both political and sexual, and Drake is left with a bitter taste in his mouth: ‘Other people’s dirty work,’ he muses in a closing voice-over. ‘Someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to, I suppose.’ A recurring theme in the early episodes, again reflecting geopolitical realities, is the tension between the United States and its Latin American/ Caribbean neighbours. Drake is all too frequently called upon to intervene in the internal politics of Spanish-speaking islands in the Caribbean. In ‘Colonel Rodriguez’, he facilitates the release of an American journalist arrested on trumped-up spying charges on the island of Montique by blackmailing the Chief of Police with evidence that he had supported both sides during the recent revolution. The opening voice-over narration hints strongly at the real identity of the island: Drake: If you want to be a dictator first find a hungry people. Tell them you will shoot their oppressors and fill their bellies. With enough guns and enthusiasm it is not difficult to fulfil the first half of your promise. And when the excitement is over and they find that they are still hungry, and you are liable to be shot yourself, it is definite you must persuade your ungrateful followers that there are new scapegoats that stand between them

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Saints and Avengers and two square meals a day. And where do you find your scapegoats? Minority groups and foreigners, of course. Who cares what happens to them?

It is not difficult to identify which country had recently seen one dictator replaced by another: in December 1958 the right-wing military dictator of Cuba, General Fulgencio Batistá, had been forced to flee, only for a leftwing political dictatorship to be established by Fidel Castro. The United States, which had initially supported Castro, soon turned against him when he looked instead for support to China and the Soviet Union and proclaimed himself a ‘Marxist-Leninist’. Increasing tension between the United States and Cuba led to the Bay of Pigs incident of April 1961 – an abortive invasion by Cuban exiles backed by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and from there to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when it was discovered that Soviet nuclear missiles were being installed in Cuba. Drake acts as an instrument of US foreign policy by protecting American interests south of the border. The country of San Pablo, which features several times in the series, is a fledgling democracy threatened with revolution. In ‘Josetta’, Drake’s assignment is explained thus: ‘An insidious whispering campaign in San Pablo had rumoured that my government was involved in the death of the rising young patriot, Senator Inguez. That he had been shot in the presence of his blind sister excited the imagination of the public – so much so that it stirred them to anti-American riots, even to besieging our embassy.’ Drake exposes the real assassin and helps the Chief of Police to foil a plot by the army to establish a military dictatorship. Drake is back in San Pablo in ‘An Affair of State’, this time investigating the suspicious death of an American economic expert who had uncovered a plot by the Minister of Finance to defraud the US Treasury. The economic dependence of Latin America on the United States is referred to throughout (‘You have come to lend us money, señor? Then I must not waste your time,’ a passport official says to Drake), thus legitimising American influence in the region and intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. However, Drake’s assignments are not always tied so closely to national political interests. In some episodes he is motivated by more general humanitarian concerns. In ‘The Blue Veil’ he is sent to find evidence against slave traffickers in the Middle East: ‘Word had reached the United Nations consul that the age-old bartering in human lives was flourishing behind the great wastes of the Arabian desert’. The episode asserts unequivocally the moral supremacy of western culture over the Arab world: ‘The cities of that remote land are not touched by modern civilisation. They are a feudal society,

Dirty Work still living in the Middle Ages.’ In this regard Drake is an instrument for the imposition of western values and politics onto other societies and cultures. But Drake’s humanitarianism is not necessarily always endorsed by his organisation. In ‘Position of Trust’ he is moved to expose the Middle Eastern drugs trade when he discovers that the daughter of an old friend has become a heroin addict. On this occasion he acts independently, telling his official contact: ‘You’re hamstrung politically, but you know that I sometimes do things which are, let us say, just a little unorthodox. Now if I get caught, it’s entirely my lookout, but I promise you that I won’t embarrass Uncle Sam.’ He travels to the Middle Eastern state of El Dura where the sale of opium is controlled secretly by the government and blackmails a minor government official – a British civil servant who stayed on in El Dura after its independence – into providing the documents that will establish the regime’s complicity in the drug trade. The moral imperative underlying Danger Man is another characteristic of the realist spy thriller. Drake’s own sense of what is morally justifiable sometimes causes him to question the nature of his profession. One of the recurring themes of the professional secret agent thriller is the agent’s reluctance to kill in cold blood – an existential dilemma explored in Secret Agent (1936), Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories, and even found in some of the more sensational thrillers, including the James Bond novels.19 This theme underlies the Danger Man episode ‘Time To Kill’ in which Drake is assigned to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin who has killed with impunity in Europe and America. Drake is uneasy about the job: Colonel Keller: Look, I don’t care how you do it, Drake, but this guy’s got to be eliminated. Drake: I’m sorry, colonel, it’s not me you want. What you want is a hired assassin. Keller: Have you ever met Professor Barkov? [He shows Drake a photograph of the most recent victim, an elderly man] . . . Telescopic sights and a silencer. The old man never had a chance. Leave Vogler alive and this sort of thing’s going to go on happening. Drake: Colonel, I’ll take your assignment, but I won’t do your dirty work. I’ll bring him back alive if I possibly can. Keller: Suit yourself, it amounts to the same thing. They’ll execute him here. Drake: That’s not my business.

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Saints and Avengers The suggestion here is that assassination is morally justified when it is carried out by ‘our’ side and when the target is himself a professional killer. Drake’s attack of conscience distances him not only from the cold-blooded Vogler but also from his own boss, who has no time for such moral niceties and who, in any case, does not have to do the dirty work himself. Drake travels to Austria where Vogler is known to be on a hunting expedition with several associates, but finds himself encumbered with a holidaying Swedish schoolteacher who stumbles upon him by accident. She is horrified when she realises what Drake intends to do, causing Drake to have to justify himself in terms that recall Keller’s: ‘Miss Orin, you teach your children to live in peace. But there are some men who just thrive on hate, Miss Orin. They make a profession out of war. There aren’t many but they’re dangerous and they have to be stopped.’ Thus Drake accepts that killing Vogler is justified, even though he does not like having to do it. At the crucial moment that Drake has Vogler in his telescopic sight, however, he cannot bring himself to pull the trigger – a situation that recalls Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male in which the protagonist has Hitler in his sights – and his position is then given away by the woman who smashes his rifle with a rock. Drake’s inability to kill in cold blood differentiates him from Vogler, who at the beginning of the episode was shown in an identical situation and who had no compunction about shooting to kill. Finally, Drake and Vogler face each other in a physical confrontation, a fight to the death, and Vogler is killed when the rifle he and Drake are struggling over goes off. The political tensions and moral dilemmas informing the first series of Danger Man were still present when it returned in a new hour-long format in 1964. There is no obvious reason for the three-year hiatus other than those involved in the production were busy with other projects. McGoohan had made a number of films (Life for Ruth, The Quare Fellow, Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow) without quite making the breakthrough to first-rank stardom and was no doubt happy to resume the role that would make him the highestpaid actor on British television. New personnel were brought into the production team. Sidney Cole took over as producer from Ralph Smart (who continued to receive a prominent screen credit as the series’ creator), while George Markstein, a former journalist and thriller writer (author of The Goering Testament, amongst others), joined the team as script editor in 1965. It is the script editor who has as much creative influence on a television series as anyone, even more so than the producer, in that it is his role to define the parameters of the series, to devise its writers’ guide (known in the television industry as the ‘bible’) and to commission and approve individual scripts.

Dirty Work The one-hour episodes included scripts from writers new to the series (Philip Broadley, Norman Hudis, Donald Johnson, David Stone) and employed the services of additional directors with film experience (Don Chaffey, Charles Crichton, Robert Day, Philip Leacock, Peter Yates). The production base of the series now alternated between Borehamwood and Shepperton Studios. The one-hour format was fast becoming the norm for television action/ adventure series by the mid-1960s. ‘In common with other thriller skeins, Danger Man has doubled its running time so that it fits the fashionable 60minute length,’ Variety noted approvingly.20 Critics were divided over its entertainment value in comparison to other adventure series. That Danger Man took itself more seriously than most examples of its genre is evident in Variety’s observation that it ‘operates on a slightly higher mental level than The Saint’.21 Maurice Wiggin, television critic of the Sunday Times, clearly preferred his thrillers to be straight-laced and serious. ‘I never subscribed to the modish cult of The Avengers, which always seemed just that bit dafter than even escapism demands, but I was a fond and foolish follower of Danger Man which was straightforward dream-fodder with its own dreamy logic,’ he wrote at the outset of the 1965–66 season. That said, however, Wiggin believed that the quality of scripts had not improved with the longer episodes and that Danger Man already showed signs of deterioration: ‘It used to be better of its kind than The Saint, but future scripts will have to be wound up much tighter if it is to compete on level terms.’22 American response was mixed when some of the one-hour episodes were broadcast, under the title Secret Agent, as a mid-season replacement by CBS in 1965. One trade critic dismissed it as ‘an import from Britain’s ITC which tries to cut it in the James Bond league but fails . . . It was dullsville, badly in need of style and some fresh gambits.’23 This was not a universal view, however, for another correspondent wrote: ‘It’s by no means a dull series and, given exposure in a time-slot that doesn’t overwhelm it because of what’s opposite, it should make a respectable audience impact’.24 It was shown on Saturday evenings at the same time as the ‘Saturday Night Movie’ on rival network NBC, but even so it was successful enough in the ratings to return in the winter schedules. Danger Man/Secret Agent had the advantage of being available for American television at a time when the secret agent craze, spurred by the success of the James Bond films, was sweeping the country. The first two Bond films, Dr No and From Russia With Love, had been treated as little more than double-feature fare by distributor United Artists, but Goldfinger, which had a predominantly American setting, was chosen as the company’s major Christmas release in 1964 and its success provoked a wave

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Saints and Avengers of ‘Bondmania’ throughout 1965 that matched the previous year’s ‘Beatlemania’ and reached a peak with the release of Thunderball at the end of 1965.25 American television, always alert to popular cultural trends, responded to the success of the Bond films with its own cycle of secret agent series, including The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (NBC 1964–68), I Spy (NBC 1965–67), Get Smart (NBC 1965–69) and Mission: Impossible (CBS 1966– 73). It seems likely that CBS saw Danger Man/Secret Agent as a useful stopgap until its own ratings winner Mission: Impossible began its 168-episode run in 1966. The influence of the Bond films can be seen in the fact that the US network recorded its own theme for Secret Agent, sung by Johnny Rivers, which one critic remarked was ‘obviously patterned after the Goldfinger thematic’.26 Danger Man’s strategy in the face of the increasingly parodic secret agent series that proliferated in the mid-1960s was to remain insistently serious in both its content and its characterisation. There were some changes to the format of the revamped series. Drake now worked for the British Secret Service – specifically for a department known as ‘M.9’ – and had become to all intents and purposes a British rather than an American hero. The series’ publicity suggested that the character had mellowed slightly: ‘Drake now finds himself more emotionally involved with the other characters. Maturity has given him a greater depth of understanding. He rebels against some of his assignments. He doesn’t really want to do them because he sympathises with the underdog.’ The publicity, indeed, insisted upon talking about Drake as if he were a real person, applying conventional dramatic notions of psychological realism to the character’s make-up: ‘Drake realises that he is getting older and is not yet married. Women are no longer deliberately out of his life, potentially dangerous to his own happiness and way of life. He regards them with more personal interest and understanding.’27 That said, however, McGoohan remained adamant there would be no gratuitous sex or violence. He was keen to distance his characterisation from the cinematic incarnation of James Bond: I don’t like violence, and you will notice that Drake always fences round violence. He is not an anti-law hero like Bond. I mean, take away from Bond his women and his experience with a menu, and there is not much left. Bond is a not-so-good guy. Drake really is a good guy. And that’s why – if you can imagine it – Drake would always beat Bond in a fight.28

It was the absence of any romantic interest in Danger Man that, some believed, accounted for its continued success in the face of competition from other adventure series. ‘Drake never kisses the girls, something which has endeared

Dirty Work

2. John Drake remained indifferent to the charms of feminine company, even Francesca Annis, here in the episode ‘That’s Two of Us, Sorry’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

him to the hearts of children everywhere, especially boys who grimace and wipe their mouths at kissing heroes like “the Saint” or smooching spies such as U.N.C.L.E.’s Napoleon Solo,’ remarked Stanley Reynolds of the Guardian. ‘There is also a theory,’ he added, ‘that the unkissable Drake appeals to mature women because he is apparently faithful to them and doesn’t spoil himself on the ladies of the episodes, who, it must be noted, are usually no better than they should be.’29 While the new Danger Man was to maintain its protagonist’s somewhat remote attitude towards women, one area where it undoubtedly was influenced by the Bond films was the way in which technology was recruited to the spy’s cause more prominently than before. One of the traits of the cinematic Bond was his use of gadgets, some of which were reasonably plausible (such as the

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Saints and Avengers attaché case with concealed knives and a tear gas cartridge in From Russia With Love), while others were downright fantastic (the famous Aston Martin in Goldfinger which came complete with an ejector seat for unwanted passengers). The influence of the Bond films can be detected in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., whose protagonists had special guns and radio transmitters in their silver fountain pens. In the new Danger Man Drake was to use a variety of spy gadgets, including a miniature tape recorder in a cigarette box, a transmitter in an electric shaver, a hypodermic needle in a wristwatch, a microphone in an umbrella and cufflinks containing enough explosive to blow open a locked door. These gadgets are obviously standard issue in the British Secret Service: in one episode (‘The Mercenaries’) the identity of another agent is revealed when he is shown in possession of gadgets Drake had used in other episodes. There are direct parallels with the Bond films: when Drake sweeps his room with an electronic bug detector (‘The Affair at Castelevara’) it duplicates exactly a scene in From Russia With Love where Bond has a similar device. David Buxton sees this interest in gadgetry as an indicator of Danger Man’s ‘pop’ aesthetic. This is especially evident in the prominence accorded to electronic surveillance equipment: ‘In its pop strategy of refusing to reduce discourse to the expression of a human nature, the voice is often disembodied, processed by tape recorders, television screens and assorted listening devices.’30 If technology threatens to become more important than human behaviour, so too does fashion, another example of how the ‘pop’ series privileges style over content, designed surfaces over psychological motivation. The one-hour episodes of Danger Man include a credit which states: ‘Clothes created by members of the Fashion House Group of London’. There is a sense in which the secret agent has become a male model whose clothes and accessories are as important as his job. Maurice Wiggin, for one, felt this detracted from the series’ narrative drive: ‘Patrick McGoohan has the necessary qualities in abundance, but the script must employ him more purposefully: wandering about indoors, wearing that brutal little snap-brim leather hat like a model, doesn’t advance the cause.’31 Yet for all its veneer of ‘pop’ accessories, the narrative ideologies of Danger Man remain rooted in real political tensions and global anxieties. Danger Man does not embrace the ‘pop’ aesthetic to the same degree as, say, The Avengers. It is split between the characteristics of the ‘human nature’ series on the one hand and the ‘pop’ series on the other. ‘The unusual ideological density comes from the complexity of its project, its forceful integration of the pop elements described above within the terms of the dominant ideology of service and patriotism,’

Dirty Work Buxton writes. ‘Pop irony and moral seriousness are constantly in tension, the signs of consumption and technology straining against more traditional values.’32 The later Danger Man exemplifies in full measure the themes that Michael Denning identifies at the heart of the spy thriller. ‘Its subject is global politics: the Empire, fascism, communism, the Cold War, terrorism,’ Denning writes of the literary genre; ‘. . . the spy thriller narrates the crises and contradictions in ideologies of nation and Empire and of class and gender’.33 In relocating Drake from NATO to the British Secret Service, Danger Man explores the crises and contradictions that affected Britain’s world power status in the 1960s. This was a time when Britain’s role on the world stage was being redefined by politicians both at home and abroad. The debâcle of the Suez Crisis in 1956, occasioned by the Egyptian government’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, was a dramatic demonstration that Britain was no longer in a position to enforce its strategic interests through military force: the era of British gunboat diplomacy was at an end. Suez also effectively signalled the end of Britain as an imperial superpower. The process of decolonisation, which had begun with the partition of India in 1947, gathered pace in the late 1950s and early 1960s with independence for Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), Tanganyika (1961), Uganda (1962), Jamaica (1962), Trinidad and Tobago (1962), Malaya (1963), Kenya (1963), Gambia (1963), Zambia (1964), Malta (1964), Singapore (1965) and Barbados (1966). At the same time as the retreat from empire, however, Britain’s relations with Europe were uncertain: applications from successive Conservative and Labour governments to join the Common Market (in 1961 and 1967) were vetoed by French President Charles De Gaulle. Excluded from Europe and with her empire dismantled, by the mid-1960s Britain seemed to have little role to play on the world stage beyond that of a junior ally of the United States. Danger Man is infused with a sense of anxiety over Britain’s place in the world. One of the prominent narrative ideologies of the series is the sort of progressive colonialism associated with the government of Harold Macmillan (1957–63) that presided over much of the decolonisation process. Thus Britain is shown as a responsible post-imperial power which accepts the fact of geopolitical change but which also assumes responsibility for protecting political stability and democratic government in the newly-independent former colonies. Episodes frequently involve conspiracies designed to undermine post-colonial governments, usually from Blimpish reactionaries unable to come to terms with decolonisation. In ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ (1964) Drake is in India on the trail of an enemy agent. Major Khan of the Indian police

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Saints and Avengers agrees to help Drake find his man (‘An Indian national in his own country. However, I won’t dwell on that’) if, in return, Drake will look into the suspicious death of an assistant to the retired Colonel Blakely (‘Flotsam left over from the British Raj’). Drake discovers that Colonel Blakely is involved in the theft of armaments specifications from the Indian Defence Ministry that he passes on to the Chinese. A senior official in the Indian civil service, Chopra, is also implicated (‘I’d never have believed it of him,’ declares the Indian Minister of Defence. ‘I’ve known him for thirty years. We worked together for independence. The most surprising people become traitors.’) In ‘The Galloping Major’ (1964) Drake responds to a request from an emergent African state for assistance with security precautions following the attempted assassination of the prime minister. The (unnamed) country is one year on from independence and is facing its first general election. In this instance the plot to overthrow the democratic government has been hatched by the opposition leader Dr Manudu, with backing from the Soviet bloc, in conjunction with a Belgian financier, Lasalle. The conspiracy therefore represents an unholy alliance between communism and big business, while in defeating the conspirators Drake reasserts the supremacy of the (Britishwritten) democratic constitution. This conclusion represents a quaint reversal of political realities: many of the former colonies (Ghana, Zambia, Uganda) quickly overturned their democratic constitutions and became one-party states ruled by military dictators. Other episodes make direct references to Britain’s decline. In ‘Yesterday’s Enemies’ (1964) Drake is sent to the Lebanon on the trail of a renegade British agent who has set up his own intelligence network after being dismissed as unreliable. The episode is replete with references to the changing international climate. Attala, head of the Lebanese secret service, tells Drake that ‘[y]our country is ten years behind’, while Archer, the discredited agent, explains the economic and strategic interests at stake in the region: ‘One day the oil here will run out. The country that controls the world’s oil will dominate the world, and it won’t be England.’ Archer plans to sell the secrets of his intelligence network to the highest bidder, which will enable one power to establish its presence in the area, and thus control the oil reserves. Again the episode responds to geopolitical realities. Even in the wake of Suez, Britain had acted vigorously ‘to show the world that it still retained great-power status in its old Middle Eastern domain’.34 Airborne troops had been sent to oilrich Jordan at the request of King Hussein in 1958 and a military presence was maintained at Aden, though it was the US Seventh Fleet, rather than the Royal Navy, that was sent to Beirut in 1958 under the terms of the Eisenhower

Dirty Work Doctrine which pledged military assistance to nations in the Middle East threatened by communism. Yet despite her decline as an imperial power, Britain is still in the forefront of the Cold War. Numerous episodes of Danger Man are informed by standard tropes of Cold War fiction, with tales of spy rings and defectors. The blackmail of British overseas diplomats is a favourite device that occurs in several episodes, including ‘The Mirror’s New’ (1964) and ‘The Black Book’ (1964). A variation on this theme is found in ‘The Professionals’ (1965). Drake travels to Czechoslovakia in the guise of a diplomat to investigate the disappearance of a British agent, who it turns out has been caught in a ‘honey trap’ by the shadowy Milos. It is said that Milos ‘has something to do with cultural relations’, which in this case involves using attractive women to seduce and blackmail westerners. The use of blackmail and sex traps has long been a standard ploy in the secret intelligence war and the incidents suggested in Danger Man would have seemed plausible in the context of the times. The scandal that brought about the resignation of Secretary of State for War John Profumo in 1963, for example, involved a teenage prostitute (Christine Keeler) who was sharing sexual favours with Profumo and a Soviet naval attaché (Yevgeny Ivanov), while in 1968 it was revealed that the KGB tried to blackmail the British ambassador in Moscow with compromising photographs of him with a Russian maid.35 However, the reasons for betrayal are not always personal indiscretions. In ‘It’s Up to the Lady’ (1964) Drake investigates the disappearance of a senior civil servant, Sir Charles Glover, tracing him to a village on the Greek-Albanian border where, it transpires, he is preparing to defect to China. In this instance the defection is motivated by genuine idealism, though in the event Sir Charles is persuaded to return to England when he realises that his wife is unwilling to go with him. The episode also exemplifies how Danger Man resorts to the conventions of psychological realism to resolve its ideological dilemma: in the end the love of a good woman (an Englishwoman, naturally) has more to offer Sir Charles than a foreign political system. However, the Cold War is not always a straightforward ideological divide between East and West. There are several occasions in Danger Man when the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is blurred by practical realities and uneasy compromises. The Cold War becomes a morally ambiguous terrain in which each side accepts the existence of the other – without an enemy, after all, a secret service has no rationale for its own existence. In ‘Fair Exchange’ (1964) Drake is forced into an uneasy alliance with the East German authorities to prevent the assassination of Pohlmann, one of their senior government officials. A former British agent, Lisa Lanzic, had once been

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Saints and Avengers captured and tortured by Pohlmann, then the Chief of Secret Police. Lisa has escaped from a mental hospital in England and has made her way to East Germany with the intention of killing Pohlmann. The British government wants to avoid a diplomatic incident, but Drake finds that his mission is complicated by the machiavellian Colonel Borg, who would be only too happy to see his rival Pohlmann killed by a British agent. The personal motivation of the agent is here at odds with the interests of the state; despite his sympathy for Lisa, Drake has to ensure that she does not succeed. It is this sense of moral ambiguity that distinguishes Danger Man from most other secret agent series and asserts its credentials within the realist lineage of the spy thriller: the theme of collusion between Britain and the Eastern bloc, for example, was also explored in Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (1964) and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). The later Danger Man, therefore, still revolves around the geopolitical axes of the Cold War and the Third World. These themes are combined in ‘Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet’ (1965) in which a Third World threat to the bipolar system of the Cold War actually brings about an unofficial Anglo-Soviet alliance in order to preserve the status quo. When an English scientist employed by an atomic weapons research establishment disappears with his wife, it is suspected they might be defecting. Drake follows the trail to Haiti. At the time Haiti was ruled by ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, whose regime maintained its power through a mixture of voodoo superstition and brutal police enforcers. ‘The people who live out here are savages – ignorant and superstitious. They still pratice voodoo,’ Drake’s mulatto contact tells him. Drake’s investigations lead him to a highsecurity semi-military installation in the jungle run by Dessiles, a mine-owner and engineer. He discovers the body of a European man who turns out to be a Russian atomic scientist and learns that the man’s ‘widow’ is in fact Major Nicola Tarosova of Soviet Intelligence, who, like the British, believed their man had defected. Drake and Nicola pool their information and discover that the scientists had been kidnapped and have been made to work on an atomic bomb by Dessiles. Dessiles, moreover, is working for a radical West African politician N’Dias who makes his intentions clear: N’Dias: We have representatives in every African country. I know we’re not acknowledged by any governments – we never were – but with the bomb at our disposal we could force their hands. China has it. We understand that Indonesia will soon have it. How long are we Africans to be deprived of it? . . .We must have it. Until we do we are the potential blackmail victims of every nuclear power.

Dirty Work The threat arises, therefore, from the desire of the Third World to play international power politics alongside the existing nuclear powers. Neither East nor West is prepared to accept the realignment of the balance of power that this would entail and therefore find it in their joint interests to work together against the common threat. The successful combination of Drake and Nicola anticipates the narrative strategy of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) in which Roger Moore’s Bond teams up with a female KGB agent to defeat a threat to both East and West. The politics of Third World resentment, alluded to here, was to be a major theme of another ITC secret agent series, The Champions. One of the notable features of the later Danger Man is that, even more so than the first series, it is located within an identifiable political context. ‘The Affair at Castelevara’ (1965) may be set in an unnamed Hispanic country a generation after a bloody civil war, but it takes little imagination to recognise that it is meant to be Spain under General Franco. The convoluted plot involves a political prisoner, Ramon Torres, who has been sentenced to death by the military regime, and General Ventura, the Minister of Justice, who fought on the opposite side to Torres during the civil war. Torres is to be executed because he had shot some of Ventura’s captured soldiers, but this act was in retaliation for the murder of women and children by Ventura. Drake learns that a cine film of ‘the Castelevara atrocity’ was made by a cameraman, now an elderly cinema projectionist, and realises that it could be used to buy Torres’ freedom. But the politics of revolution are ambiguous and treacherous. Torres’ associates El Ferro and Mañuel intend to kill him if he escapes from jail (‘They do not want Ramon to live. They would prefer him to be a dead martyr’), while the British ambassador Sir Duncan Hallett, a diplomat of the old school, hands the negative of the incriminating film over to Ventura in order to avoid a diplomatic incident (‘Let sleeping dogs lie. There’s far too much of this sort of thing nowadays. Even my own government not so long ago . . .’) The British, therefore, are complicit in the maintenance of a military regime that uses terror and repression to maintain its power. Again Danger Man might be seen as responding to political reality: the de facto acceptance of Franco’s regime. On this occasion, however, Drake has the wherewithal to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion: he has a positive copy of the film which he smuggles to London and can use, as intended, to buy Torres’ freedom. Ventura, in order to save face, arranges Torres’ ‘escape’ from prison. The regime remains in power, but the rebel leader is able to continue his fight for freedom. While intervention in the domestic affairs of foreign countries continues to be legitimised, however, Danger Man also responds to problems closer to

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Saints and Avengers home. Drake polices not only external threats from foreign spies and saboteurs but also internal threats from disaffected sections of British society. Buxton identifies two sources of internal threat, one the result of unregulated private enterprise (which could almost be described as a form of proto-Thatcherism), the other emanating from reactionaries who cannot accept social change. The former threat is exemplified in an episode such as ‘The Battle of the Cameras’ (1964) in which a man known as Kent is suspected, in the words of Drake’s American contact, of ‘buying and selling our latest technical developments like they were candy in a drug store’. Kent, who poses as a respectable businessman, does indeed deal in stolen information; and, in a neat visual metaphor, his duplicitous nature is suggested by the leather mask that he wears over half of his face to disguise acid disfiguration. In ‘The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove’ (1965) a fixed roulette wheel is the means for paying off a factory owner who passes on industrial secrets. The motivation is greed, pure and simple. The episode takes on an added significance in that Drake, who is suffering from hallucinations following a car crash, is implicated in the conspiracy. He apparently has gambling debts at the casino, which the crooked manager Alexander uses to attempt blackmail. Alexander makes no secret of his desire to enjoy the high life: ‘Despite all this luxury, I’m a very poor man . . . For a long time I’ve been looking for a way of breaking free and standing on my own feet. I want to spend the rest of my life in an atmosphere of independence.’ Alexander, a Balkan immigrant, wants to insinuate himself into the English upper classes and has adopted an expensive lifestyle that he cannot support; he sees blackmail as a shortcut to wealth and thus to social advancement. The theme of buying into the English class system is a recurrent one in later episodes of Danger Man: the threat here is posed by an alliance of new money and old aristocracy. In ‘The Hunting Party’ (1966) Drake investigates a security leak from a Cabinet meeting that leads him to the Swiss country home of Basil and Claudia Jordan. Basil is a product of the English public school and class system: educated at Eton and Oxford, he has never worked for a living and spends all his time engaged in the leisure pursuits of the upper classes (clay-pigeon shooting and racing model cars). Claudia is an heiress (‘one of the richest women in the world’) whose wealth comes from new money (she inherited ‘the Wormsley chemical fortune’) and who suspects everyone of trying to get their hands on it. Yet this combination of privilege and nouveaux riche wealth is fragile: their outwardly cordial relations conceal a loveless marriage and Basil feels humiliated by not having money of his own. Therefore he has hatched a scheme to make his own fortune: inviting

Dirty Work government ministers and senior civil servants for a weekend’s shooting, Basil drugs and hypnotises them into revealing secrets that he sells to Zepos, a Greek spy. Drake infiltrates the Jordans’ house by taking the place of their new butler and uncovers the conspiracy. His parting shot to the unpleasant Claudia Jordan as her husband is taken away by the Swiss police is delivered with relish: ‘The hunting season is over. I regret that you’ll be dining alone this evening, madam, and for some considerable time.’ The impulse to buy into the class system also comes from outside the national culture. Villains who are both vulgar nouveaux riche and foreign are amongst the most reprehensible in Danger Man’s complex web of class and racial identities. In ‘No Marks for Servility’ (1965) this type is represented by an obnoxious foreign property tycoon, Bernares, who acts as ‘financial adviser to the Zaibek government’ and has used his position to extort and blackmail the poor population of his country. Bernares is another example of the unpleasant nouveaux riche (‘A vulgarian – always affects a great display of wealth’) and Drake takes an immediate dislike to him even before they have met (‘I’d like to have a go at him!’). Just to prove what a despicable rat he is, Bernares also intimidates his English wife through violence. Bernares’ weakness, however, is snobbery, and when he is invited to stay at Lady Fielding’s Roman villa he cannot resist the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the English upper classes. Bernares does not realise that a trap is being laid for him. On arrival at the villa he immediately tries to assert his power over Lady Fielding’s butler – impersonated by Drake – and reveals himself as the boorish and unpleasant type that he is (‘I expect you’ve been used to having things all your own way around here . . . From now on we’ll do things my way.’) Drake, who is playing a role, has to accept Bernares’ taunts: Bernares: How would you assess yourself as a servant, Drake? Would you say you’re a good servant? . . . I asked you a question, Drake . . . As a servant? A servant is a person who gives service, who is servile. You get no marks for servility, Drake. Drake: How would you like your whisky, sir? Bernares: Fifty-fifty. I cannot understand a man wanting to do a job for which he has no aptitude. Drake: Will that be all, sir? Bernares: No, Drake, that will not be all. I said fifty-fifty. You’ve drowned it – pour me another one.

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Saints and Avengers Drake: Yes sir. Bernares: You’d like to throw that glass in my face, wouldn’t you Drake? Why don’t you? Do you know, Drake, I really believe I’m beginning to teach you the meaning of servility.

Drake is barely able to conceal his anger at Bernares: the agent breaks a glass in his hand to control his anger. When Helen Bernares takes Drake’s hand to dress it, she is accused of ‘holding hands with the help’ by her husband who proceeds to beat her again for her imagined infidelity. Bernares gets his come-uppance when he tries to involve Armstrong, a prominent banker, in an illegal arms deal; when Armstrong refuses Bernares reveals his true colours by kidnapping the banker’s daughter. Drake is on hand to effect a rescue, symbolically saving two Englishwomen – Judy Armstrong and Helen Bernares – from this thoroughly despicable foreigner. Perhaps the most dangerous threat to society, however, comes from those classes at home who have been unable to adapt to social and political change. Buxton describes these as ‘the old aristocracy and the high bourgeoisie, reactionary classes which refuse to accept the welfare state’.36 Here Danger Man exemplifies what was to become a familiar trope in the British adventure series: The Avengers, The Saint and The Persuaders! were all to feature narratives in which die-hard reactionaries alienated by democracy and modernisation conspire to overthrow the elected government and impose authoritarian rule. It is in these episodes that Danger Man deviates from the lineage of the realist thriller; the private armies and secret societies that feature in these conspiracies belong more to the world of the sensational thriller. In ‘Such Men Are Dangerous’ (1965) Drake impersonates a paid assassin in order to infiltrate a paramilitary organisation run by a man known as ‘the General’ who is plotting a coup d’etat in order to impose his own rule: The General: Our order is international. It stands for discipline and for the moral order that derives from discipline. Most people are honest and simple, but they are by nature incapable of deciding their own destiny. They have to be guided. They must eventually be led along the paths that our order lays down . . . Meanwhile, the so-called democratic leaders claim to guide the people. They deceive the people into thinking they are idealists, but in fact they are nothing but corrupt and decadent demagogues. What they call democracy is merely a weakening of moral fibre. Such men are dangerous. Such men must be removed.

The rhetoric of ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ and the suggestion that democracy is

Dirty Work ‘corrupt’ and ‘decadent’ is clearly meant to be equated with fascism. Fascism was an international political movement whose advocates preached an extreme nationalism, hatred of socialism, contempt for democracy, admiration for military-style discipline and obedience to a charismatic leader. Unlike communism, seen as a genuine threat to western democracy during the Cold War, and which tended therefore to be presented as a serious danger in the spy thriller, fascism as an international force had been defeated during the Second World War and could be treated in sensational terms because it no longer represented a serious threat. In Britain, certainly, the fascist creed had minimal support: Oswald Mosley, the charismatic ex-leader of the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s, lost his deposit when he fought the parliamentary seat of Kensington North in the 1959 general election and was unsuccessful again when standing for Shoreditch and Finsbury in 1966, and while the racist politics of the National Front attracted much attention following its formation in 1967, its active membership has always remained very small. If the threats to Britain come from extremists both at home and abroad, then what is the nature of the Britain that Drake seeks to defend? In line with the axiom that the best observers of national cultures are often outsiders, this question can perhaps best be answered by considering what foreign enemies make of Britain and the British in Danger Man. The famous episode ‘Colony Three’ (1965) provides an extremely useful example in this respect. The British Secret Service is puzzled that of the 750 British men and women believed to have defected to the Eastern bloc since the end of the Second World War, four hundred of them were people of no obvious importance (clerks, teachers, tradesmen, labourers) who were not engaged in sensitive or secret work. An employment agency is known to be the front for the defections and so Drake takes the place of the next man due to take up a job ‘over there’, a Citizen’s Advice Bureau employee called Fuller. Drake/Fuller is spirited behind the Iron Curtain along with two others: Janet, a librarian, who thinks she is going to visit her boyfriend, and Randall, an engineer who has been offered a better job. A long train journey deposits them at a station called ‘Hamden’ where they are met by an English policeman who escorts them to a village populated by Britons of all classes and professions. These are the people who have supposedly defected, but who are actually taking part in a project to assimilate communist spies (the village is located somewhere in a Slavic country) into English culture. The purpose of the village is explained by its director Donovan and deputy director Richardson (everyone in the village has an English name):

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Saints and Avengers Richardson: Geography is a matter of physical illusion. Lines on a map, words on a signpost. It’s this that gives a place its identity. After all, you are where you recognise yourself to be. Mr Donovan says that all countries are countries of the mind. Donovan: Hamden is an induction centre for our intelligence agents. They come here to acclimatise themselves before being sent to work overseas. Randall: In plain English it’s a school for spies. Donovan: And you think there are no spy schools in Britain? Randall: Well, of course there are. Donovan: But not so effective. In this village we transform our agents into Englishmen. When our students arrive here they already speak excellent English. But here they learn to live like Englishmen. When they leave at the end of three years, they are Englishmen. Indistinguishable from yourselves.

As well as their training in chemistry (‘Explosives, industrial espionage – that sort of thing’) and resisting interrogation (‘It’s surprising what the human body can endure when it has to’), agents are given lectures in capitalism (‘How can a man who can talk about the stock market be anything but a trueblue capitalist?’). Drake/Fuller is assigned to the same job he had at home, as are Janet and (much to his disappointment) Randall. Drake soon learns that no-one ever leaves the village, which is 300 miles from anywhere else; it turns out that Janet’s boyfriend was killed when he tried to do so and Janet has been lured there to take his place. So what are the defining characteristics of this ‘little England’ created behind the Iron Curtain? The first point to note is that Britain and England are seen as being the same thing, reflecting the tendency of foreigners (and, perhaps, of the English themselves) to equate the two. It is a society based on a rigid class system in which everyone knows their place: the village squire is ‘Sir’ Anthony Denby (a former Foreign Office mandarin who went missing years ago) whose wife ‘Lady’ Denby hosts polite cocktail parties. It is also a society that is full of contradictions: ‘We must absorb your curious little customs: drive on the left, politics on the right; animals in the home, children safely in boarding school; hate privilege, suck up to the privileged; have money, despise the rich.’ The purpose of Hamden is to create agents who are ‘more English than the English’, which seems to mean people who are ineffably

Dirty Work polite and courteous, doffing their hats, opening doors for ladies, and constantly apologising to all and sundry for the most trivial breach of etiquette. It is, in short, an image of England as it is popularly supposed to be rather than as it necessarily is. The fly in the ointment turns out to be Randall, an English communist who was a veteran of the International Brigade from the Spanish Civil War and then served in the Special Air Service during the Second World War, and who has left England to get away from the sort of class society that Hamden represents. Randall reacts adversely to the supercilious politeness of everyone he meets and takes a particular dislike to Drake/Fuller, his roommate, who goes about his work as instructed (‘Keeping up with the management! You’re good at jumping. It wouldn’t take you long to be a corporal in anybody’s army.’) Randall represents a different type of Englishness, the blunt, abrasive, working-class bulldog who instinctively resists attempts to make him conform. The village authorities cannot understand this attitude: Donovan: He’s a man of spirit. But like many English communists it’s shaken him up, coming out here. His reaction is to become very English, very independent. Drake: It’s the same thing.

Englishness is thus equated with independence: the essential characteristic of the English is their nonconformity. This is paralleled in a subplot within the episode: the Communist Party authorities in this East European state are jealous of the autonomy enjoyed by Hamden. When it is discovered that Drake is a British agent, Donovan insists that the village must come first: ‘If anything happens in the village, Section One will be down to investigate. They’d come down in force and they’d never leave. They’ve always resented our independence – they’ve been trying to get their hands on this project since it started.’ Thus Drake is allowed to leave, and, surviving an attempt to kill him on the train, returns home. Most commentators have interpreted the episode as a rehearsal for The Prisoner: the opening sequence in which a photograph of Drake/Fuller is stamped and filed, the village as an experiment in social control (‘Once people enter Colony Three, they cease to exist’) and the chilling conclusion in which the innocent Janet is left to her fate: Drake: There’s nothing we can do about the girl, I suppose? The Admiral: Of course not. We’ve never even heard of her.

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Saints and Avengers But other interpretations are possible. Buxton argues that the episode ‘should not be reduced to its Cold War framework’ and suggests that Hamden ‘is also intended to invoke the new towns in England itself, also an unacceptable form of social engineering’.37 Hamden is completely standardised and compartmentalised (‘I think you’ll find everything here. Forms, government pamphlets – our London embassy ordered in bulk from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office’). Its Englishness is diminished by the insistence on order and planning (‘The plan of our village is simple . . . The commercial centre is over there, and here is the library; behind it is the school.’) The ‘new towns’ that were built in Britain after the Second World War were represented pre-eminently by Milton Keynes, an urban environment totally unlike anywhere else in the country and which, as Arthur Marwick points out, ‘was much criticised for its “rabbit-hutch” housing and for the obvious segregation of its different classes of housing estates’.38 Suitably for a genre in which questions of national identity are a prominent theme, Danger Man constantly explores the meaning of what it is to be British or English. This is explored through the character of the central protagonist. Although Drake has all the qualities of the traditional English gentleman hero – patriotic, courageous, chivalrous, fair-minded and honourable – he also has a certain non-English quality that is referred to frequently. ‘It is hard to believe that you are an Englishman,’ a woman tells Drake when he compliments her on her beauty (‘Sting in the Tail’, 1965) – the assumption being that an Englishman would never be so direct – while in ‘The Battle of the Cameras’ the villain’s mistress Martine describes Drake as being ‘British – in a way. And yet in another way quite unBritish.’ This uncertainty about Drake’s national identity involves more than just the casting of an Americanborn actor of Irish descent. As the James Bond films illustrated, through the casting of the very Scottish Sean Connery, a ‘celtic’ actor has certain advantages in detaching the protagonist from a class-bound English persona and converting him into a more modern ‘classless’ character for the international market. It is here that John Drake is significantly different from the very English heroes of other adventure series such as John Steed (The Avengers) or Simon Templar (The Saint) whose personae are redolent of upperclass values and attitudes. The alien and ‘unBritish’ qualities of Drake are due more to the sense that the gentlemanly exterior cannot quite conceal the tough and ruthless character of the professional secret agent. The suggestion that the secret agent has a dangerous edge that is somehow alien to traditional notions of Britishness also occurs in the James Bond novels.39 It was McGoohan’s performance, nevertheless, that attracted most plaudits

Dirty Work

3. Patrick McGoohan as John Drake. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

from the critics. ‘The assurance of Patrick McGoohan remains the skein’s overriding asset, for he fills out the conventionally heroic postures of Drake with a sort of brooding authority, a fetching reserve, that gives him an added touch of mystery,’ Variety remarked on the occasion of the series’ penultimate episode.40 Stanley Reynolds agreed that the main strength of the series was the appeal of its protagonist: [I]t is Drake’s complex character that is the biggest draw. Each week he seems to show a different facet; sometimes crassly hardboiled, sometimes

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Saints and Avengers sentimental about old chums who’ve come down with a deadly case of the double agent, sometimes stricken by pangs of conscience. Added to this, Drake is the sort of agent who is a dab-hand at impersonation. This gives McGoohan scope to play all sorts of parts (drunken newspaper reporter, drunken author down on his luck, drunken playboy, or sober mild-mannered businessman, sober mild-mannered teacher, or sober mild-mannered tourist).41

Again asserting the series’ claim to a sort of realism, albeit perhaps unwittingly, one viewer wrote to the TV Times with the observation that ‘Patrick McGoohan is one of the few actors who actually looks and sounds like a spy’.42 The conclusion of Danger Man was unusual. The series went into colour for its final two episodes and then ceased production; many of the production personnel went straight into The Prisoner. These two episodes – ‘Koroshi’ and ‘Shinda Shima’ (both 1967) – abandoned the existential and realist characteristics of most other Danger Man stories in favour of narratives that borrowed directly from the sensational lineage of the thriller. In ‘Koroshi’ Drake arrives in Tokyo to investigate the death of an M.9 agent and uncovers an ancient cult dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Its leader Sanders, an Englishman, declares: ‘We dedicate ourselves to the restoration of leadership born to lead, to the past spirit of chivalry, to death as the instrument of our policy that government by the people shall perish from the earth.’ Although its leader is killed, the secret society is revived in ‘Shinda Shima’ and Drake has to infiltrate its headquarters on an island off the Japanese coast. The episode has many similarities to the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice (a film of the same name, bearing hardly any resemblance to the book, was released in 1967) with its secret murder cult and coastal location. Drake discovers that the secret brotherhood has displaced a community of pearl fishermen from their home and enlists the fishermen’s assistance in destroying the organisation once and for all. The two episodes were shown as a feature film in some countries under the title Koroshi – a strategy probably inspired by the success of the theatrical release of double episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as feature films. If the final two episodes suggested a change of direction for Danger Man, it was not immediately apparent what that direction would be. Although McGoohan was known to be working on a new series, it was unclear initially whether it was another series of Danger Man or something entirely different. ‘I understand we are to say goodbye to this freewheeling agent,’ wrote Stanley

Dirty Work Reynolds. ‘In the series after this one he is to undergo yet another metamorphosis, not in nationality this time but in character, turning into something more psychological and sinister.’43 McGoohan formed his own production company, Everyman Films, to make The Prisoner for ITC, bringing with him many members of the Danger Man production team including script editor George Markstein, directors Don Chaffey and Peter Graham Scott, art director Jack Shampan and director of photography Brendan J. Stafford. The Prisoner was made under conditions of unusual secrecy at Borehamwood and on location at Portmeirion – a model village situated on the Welsh coast, designed by architect Clough Williams-Ellis, which had been used in the very first Danger Man episode ‘View from the Villa’. While it was in production the press was full of speculation. Kine Weekly heralded it as ‘an entirely new type of British series’ and, contradicting itself, described The Prisoner both as being about ‘a Danger Man character who wants to leave the secret agent business’ and as having ‘nothing in common with anything that ITC or McGoohan has ever done before’.44 The Prisoner, which was broadcast in 1967–68 and ran for only 17 episodes, is surely the most enigmatic television series ever made and one whose meaning continues to be debated by cultists and academicians alike.45 While there is no textual evidence that the unnamed protagonist of The Prisoner is meant to be Danger Man’s John Drake – indeed, McGoohan himself has asserted that they are entirely different characters – nevertheless there are sufficient points of similarity between the two series to make a comparison between them worthwhile. The Prisoner centres on a secret agent who resigns angrily from his job and is then abducted and held in a mysterious Village where the authorities try to make him reveal the reason for his resignation. Each episode revolves around the same two gambits: while ‘Number Two’, the nominal authority-figure of the Village who changes in every episode, sets in motion a scheme to uncover the reasons for his resignation, the central protagonist, known as ‘Number Six’, hatches a plan to escape from the Village; the result is a perpetual stalemate in which neither Number Two nor Number Six ever achieves his objective. Debates over the meaning of The Prisoner might be likened to a quest for some televisual Holy Grail as commentators attempt to find a definitive answer to the question ‘what is it about?’ The series has been interpreted, variously, as a modern morality play, as a complex social and political satire, as a deconstruction of the conventions of genre, and as a bizarre comedy that plays an elaborate joke on critics and audiences alike. The most obvious thematic link between The Prisoner and Danger Man is the impossibility of

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Saints and Avengers the professional secret agent having a personal or private life outside the secret service, a theme that recurs in much spy fiction. The Prisoner might be interpreted, moreover, as an allegory of McGoohan’s own frustration at being trapped in the role of a secret agent and wishing to broaden his range as a dramatic actor. Yet there is so much ambiguity in The Prisoner that it ultimately resists being reduced to a single meaning; indeed, it encourages multiple and alternative readings, a tendency perpetuated by its own fan culture and by the multiplicity of academic and journalistic works devoted to the series. Whereas Danger Man can be located within recognisable ideological and geopolitical coordinates, The Prisoner defies such classification. The location of the Village is uncertain and the identity of those who run it is never revealed. To the extent that it denies any sense of ideological certainty (Number Six’s inquisitors might equally be his own side, the other side or some unknown third party), The Prisoner is difficult to place within the secret agent genre. It straddles the sensational and realist lineages of the thriller, for, while the situation itself appears quite fantastic, episodes revolve around the sort of narratives of deception and bluff that characterise the realist thriller. What The Prisoner does exemplify in full measure is the sense of paranoia that underpins the thriller: nobody is to be trusted, the protagonist is persecuted by the authorities, and the Village itself represents a form of totalitarianism and social control. Contemporaries did not know what to make of The Prisoner. When it began it was welcomed as a bold and innovative experiment that offered a different entertainment pattern from the formulaic norms of popular television. Maurice Wiggin felt that it succeeded in its aim ‘to provide a fresh and fetching entertainment with that desirable split-level quality – well managed, sophisticated physical action, beautifully photographed, plus an unobtrusive suggestion of philosophical depth’, and Peter Knight regarded it as ‘no ordinary run-of-the-mill pulp thriller but a stylish, sophisticated, polished production which goes on where The Avengers leaves off’.46 Yet the series’ refusal to provide conventional dramatic resolutions or to answer the questions it posed soon turned opinion against it. ‘ATV’s The Prisoner, mercifully laid to rest this weekend, was an awful warning of what can happen when gimmickry and camera technique for its own sake take over from creative thinking,’ Richard Last declared after the final episode was broadcast, while Peter Knight revised his initially favourable response by concluding that ‘despite all the production gloss, sophisticated writing and fine acting, the lasting impression was of a heap of hokum carried off with all the smoothness of a confidence trick’.47 It was not only critics who felt cheated by the lack of

Dirty Work resolution: ATV’s telephone switchboard was jammed by viewers complaining about the unresolved ending of the final episode. It is the ambiguity of The Prisoner that accounts in large measure for its continued fascination within cult television circles. Like The Avengers, another series that enjoys a devoted fan following, The Prisoner has its own unique and highly distinctive style. Its very uniqueness, however, makes The Prisoner something of a dead end in generic terms. There is nothing else quite like it: the nearest comparison would perhaps be the American series Twin Peaks (1990), which similarly had a limited lifespan, ended on a note of unresolved narrative ambiguity, and was also largely the brainchild of one guiding intelligence (David Lynch) who enjoyed the sort of creative control that McGoohan did with The Prisoner. For all the cult appeal of The Prisoner, however, it was the more prosaic and less ambitious Danger Man that proved, in the long term, more influential upon popular television. The success of Danger Man determined Lew Grade’s international production strategy for the next decade and turned the secret agent adventure series into a prominent vehicle for the economic and cultural export of Britishness.

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2 Is There Honey Still For Tea?

The Avengers

T

he Avengers was the longest running of the secret agent adventure series of the 1960s. It ran on British television from 1961 to 1969, totalling 161 episodes in six production seasons. It was also among the most successful internationally: at the height of its popularity in the late 1960s the series was seen by an estimated 30 million viewers in seventy different countries, with its foreign sales revenues amounting to over £5 million.1 When it was sold to the American Broadcasting Company in 1965, The Avengers became the first British series to be shown on primetime network television in the United States. Yet for all its international popularity, The Avengers remains the most quintessentially English of the cycle of sixties adventure series. In this sense it differs from other successful series such as Danger Man and The Saint which were sold abroad on the basis of their internationalism, with plots that took their cosmopolitan heroes on adventures around the world. In contrast, Howard Thomas, Managing Director of ABC Television, believed that ‘the really significant factor in the success of The Avengers is that the series is one hundred per cent British in conception, content, casting and style’.2 Brian Clemens, the scriptwriter who more than anyone else was responsible for the direction the series took, similarly explained its appeal in terms of its Englishness. ‘It was a never-never world,’ he said. ‘It’s the England of “Is there honey still for tea?” that people imagine existed even if it didn’t.’3

Is There Honey Still for Tea? Like so many long-running television series, The Avengers evolved as it underwent various technological and stylistic changes, moving as it did from videotape to film, and from monochrome to colour. These changes impacted upon the style of the series, which began as a tough crime thriller but later developed into a much more fantastic and outlandish series in which conventional notions of psychological realism were displaced by an emphasis on bizarre storylines, eccentric characterisations and excessive stylisation. It is in this later form that The Avengers is now celebrated within its own fan culture. The ‘classic’ period of The Avengers is usually taken to date from 1965, when the series had settled into its own unique style of genre parody that was witty, sophisticated and often downright kinky. Academic commentators, too, have tended to focus on this period of the series. For Steve Chibnall, the appeal of The Avengers is to be found in ‘its casual style, its self-conscious sense of absurdity and its fascination with genres’. ‘In the adventures of [John] Steed and [Emma] Peel,’ he continues, ‘any pretensions to realistic drama are firmly submerged beneath humour and pastiche. Things are never to be taken too seriously.’4 For David Buxton, The Avengers is an exemplar of the ‘pop’ series in which style has become more important than content. He sees it as marking a decisive shift away from the ‘human nature’ series in which the drama was underpinned by a degree of psychological realism. The Avengers, in contrast, was completely detached from the real world. ‘The Avengers is a more rigorously “pop” series than Danger Man, whose “pop” elements were still enclosed within a framework of existential anxiety and political dilemmas,’ Buxton writes. ‘Foregrounding the pop obsession with designed surfaces, The Avengers eliminates all trace of human nature from its content.’5 The comments by Chibnall and Buxton exemplify the critical and theoretical paradigms apparent in writing on The Avengers, which, of all the series under consideration here, has attracted most attention. Typically The Avengers is placed within the discourses of ‘camp’, ‘pop’ and ‘postmodernism’, with analysis focusing on its narrative strategies of parody and pastiche, its self-consciousness and its foregrounding of style over content and of form over ideology.6 Yet these paradigms arise principally from analysis of the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers, and do not apply to most of the pre-1965 episodes (almost half the entire series) when The Avengers still had pretensions to being a straight thriller. A thoroughgoing analysis of The Avengers’ place in the generic lineages of popular television, therefore, must take into account the origins and early history of the series, as well as considering the processes through which it was transformed from a straight thriller to a parody which

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Saints and Avengers foregrounded its own absurdity and in which generic conventions would be turned on their heads. What this demonstrates is that certain long-running television series, like the genres to which they belong, are not static entities, permanently fixed to one pattern, but instead are in a constant state of flux, subject to variation and change. In which generic lineages, therefore, can The Avengers be situated? Two possibilities are suggested by the series’ own publicity discourse. According to an official history of The Avengers: ‘The programme was designed as a one-hour thriller series with a tongue-in-cheek slant, combining toughness with humour and sophistication in the style made popular by the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming.’7 Given that the series’ own publicity material identifies these particular generic antecedents, it will be useful to consider the characteristics of the Hitchcock thriller and the Bond novels to ascertain the extent to which they may also be identified in The Avengers. Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘master of suspense’, had specialised in the psychological thriller ever since he came to prominence with The Lodger in 1926. What the publicity notes are more likely referring to, however, are the celebrated spy thrillers that Hitchcock made, first in Britain in the 1930s (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes) and subsequently in Hollywood (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Notorious, a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest). These films were characterised by their fast-moving narratives, by the unusual situations in which their protagonists found themselves and by their combination of suspense and humour. Hitchcock was claimed as an auteur by French and later Anglo-American film theorists due to the thematic and stylistic motifs that recurred consistently throughout his work. His films were seen to express Hitchcock’s own world-view, based on an acute sense of paranoia, phobia, obsession and guilt, all intricately bound within the mechanics of film language which used subjective narrational techniques to identify the point of view of the spectator with the point of view of the protagonist. The act of looking is central to his films, while the idea of spying becomes both a motif and a metaphor. The Avengers shares several common features with the Hitchcock thriller, the most significant of which is what film theorist Peter Wollen refers to as ‘the proximity of the chaos world’.8 The thriller genre as a whole, and the Hitchcock thriller in particular, posits the notion that the forces of chaos and anarchy threaten at any moment to erupt from beneath the ‘thin protection of civilisation’.9 Spy rings and enemy agents hide behind innocuous façades such as a dentist’s surgery or a chapel

Is There Honey Still for Tea? (The Man Who Knew Too Much), while danger lurks in everyday locations such as a music hall (The 39 Steps) or a train (The Lady Vanishes). Wollen argues that Hitchcock’s films open ‘with some banal events from ordinary, normal life’ and then follow the protagonists as they are ‘plunged into an anti-world of chaos and disorder, a monstrous world in which normal categories shift abruptly and disconcertingly’.10 The thriller narrative begins with the disruption (usually violent) of normality by the forces of chaos. The thriller protagonist then descends into the ‘chaos world’ to uncover and defeat the conspiracy, which threatens to undermine social and/or political stability. The thriller plot follows the processes by which the conspiracy is defeated and the status quo is restored. The Avengers is also predicated on the proximity of the ‘chaos world’ which threatens at every turn to undermine the social and political order. Individual episodes would begin with a disruption (a murder, a theft, a disappearance, or some peculiar unexplained happening). Secret agent John Steed, played throughout the series by Patrick Macnee, and his partner of the moment would then be called in to investigate and would unravel whatever conspiracy lay behind the crime. While not every episode of The Avengers was strictly speaking a spy story in the sense of subject matter that dealt with espionage or counter-espionage, the conspiracy plots did nevertheless fall outside the territory of the more conventional police or private eye series. ‘Our leading characters are essentially undercover,’ the series’ first producer, Leonard White, impressed upon his team of writers. ‘They are not private or public detectives. Any story which follows this pattern is not right for us.’11 The nature of the conspiracy plots in The Avengers changed noticeably over the course of the series: the mad scientists and diabolical masterminds who were such a prominent feature of the later period were absent in earlier episodes, which focused on rather more down-to-earth villainy. Yet there were some common features throughout. With only a small handful of exceptions, episodes were set in England (usually in London or the Home Counties) and the conspiracy was most often a home-grown affair. There was also a recurring motif that even the most familiar locations or innocent surroundings could be a façade which concealed some deadly plot or treacherous conspiracy. External appearances were seldom as they seemed, while the status quo was continually threatened by anarchists, spies and saboteurs. The most obvious link between The Avengers and the James Bond novels is that they both privileged the figure of the professional secret agent. This is not to say that the Bond character was in any way a model for John Steed. Patrick Macnee recalled that he was advised to read the Bond novels but

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Saints and Avengers that, like Patrick McGoohan, he found them ‘extremely unpleasant’. ‘Consequently,’ he said, ‘I took the veneer of Bond for Steed, without using the core. What I left out were the words “licence to kill”. Steed had no licence to kill.’12 Nevertheless, in making its hero a professional secret agent, The Avengers, like Danger Man, was differentiating itself from the tradition of the talented amateur that had been such a central motif of English spy fiction. While John Steed was characterised as a gentleman of independent means, his undercover work was a professional activity rather than a personal crusade – a trait which differentiates Steed, and John Drake, from Simon Templar, protagonist of The Saint. The spy thriller is one of the most strictly regulated and coded of all genres. In his celebrated and ground-breaking structuralist analysis of the Bond stories, Umberto Eco used the metaphor of a game of chess to explain their narrative structure. He argued that the construction of all the stories followed the same ‘rules’ and could be understood in terms of different ‘pieces’ (characters) making a series of expected ‘moves’: Bond is given an assignment by M; Bond gives first check to the villain, or vice-versa; Bond meets the heroine and seduces her; Bond and the heroine are captured by the villain; the villain tortures Bond; Bond conquers the villain and possesses the heroine; and so on. ‘The reader’s pleasure,’ Eco wrote, ‘consists of finding himself immersed in a game of which he knows the pieces and the rules – and perhaps the outcome – drawing pleasure simply from the minimal variations by which the victor realises his objective.’13 It was through analysis of the narrative structures, Eco believed, that the ideologies underlying the stories could be identified. Thus he identified within the Bond stories a series of overlapping binary oppositions: oppositions between characters (Bond/M, Bond/villain, Bond/girl), between ideologies (Soviet Union/ Free World, England/non-Anglo Saxon countries) and between different values (duty/ sacrifice, loyalty/ disloyalty, luxury/discomfort, excess/moderation). The problem with structuralist analysis is that it tends to become reductive; taken to the extreme it can seem to suggest that if all narratives are based on the same structures then ultimately there is only one narrative. This may be the case for the Ian Fleming Bond stories, which are a relatively small corpus of texts (twelve novels and eight short stories). Even so, as Eco admits, there are certain stories which do not fit into his schematic and which are therefore marginalised as being atypical.14 The extent to which television genres may be reduced to a set of absolute conventions varies from one series to another. Here it is instructive to compare The Avengers with the American series Mission: Impossible, which ran on the CBS network between 1966 and 1973.

Is There Honey Still for Tea? Mission: Impossible featured an ‘Impossible Missions Force’ that was charged by the US government with undertaking hazardous assignments that could not be officially recognised. It provides a textbook case for structuralist analysis in that every episode not only follows the same set of narrative conventions, but does so in precisely the same order: the leader of the IMF is presented with a mission by an unknown voice on a tape; he assembles his team and briefs them; an elaborate deception is plotted to discredit an enemy; the deception is put into practice with members of the IMF team playing out their assigned roles; an unforeseen circumstance jeopardises the deception but is averted through improvisation; the deception is completed successfully, whereupon the IMF team packs up and leaves. This formula was adhered to rigidly throughout 168 episodes (and throughout a further 35 episodes of an Australian-produced revival of the series in 1988–90). It was a minimalist strategy: plot was reduced to a series of ‘moves’, characters were virtual ciphers with no personality beyond the roles they assumed, while the underlying legitimacy of their actions was never questioned. In contrast, The Avengers would make a much less fruitful subject for structuralist analysis, firstly because it never followed such an absolutely rigid set of narrative conventions and secondly because in its later form it delighted in subverting the ‘rules’ of genre and in confounding the audience’s expectations. This is not to say there are no underlying structures in The Avengers – it is possible to identify oppositions such as order/chaos, tradition/modernity, anarchy/technocracy, Englishness/otherness – but rather that the narrative patterns through which those structures are articulated vary between episodes. The Avengers was initiated by Sydney Newman, Head of Drama at ABC Television. Newman was a Canadian whose early experience had been in documentary, working with John Grierson at the National Film Board of Canada during the Second World War before becoming Director of Features and Outside Broadcasts at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1953. In 1958 he came to Britain and became supervising producer of ABC’s Armchair Theatre, where he concentrated on contemporary drama that bore comparison to the ‘kitchen sink’ theatre and cinema of the time through its focus on working-class characters and social problems. The Avengers was conceived partly to counterbalance the success of these realist dramas. According to Brian Clemens, Newman provided the title of the series, but nothing else. ‘I don’t know what the hell it means,’ Newman allegedly told him, ‘but it’s a good title, so now go and write something to go with it.’15 The Avengers was intended as a replacement for another ABC crime drama, Police Surgeon, which had been broadcast in the autumn of 1960. Police

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Saints and Avengers Surgeon, which ran for 13 half-hour episodes, had been an amalgam of two of the most popular generic forms on television, the medical drama (exemplified at the time by ATV’s Emergency Ward 10) and the police series (represented pre-eminently by the BBC’s Dixon of Dock Green). With its combination of ‘cops and docs’, Police Surgeon can be regarded as a forerunner of the successful medical examiner/police series of the 1990s such as Dangerfield and Silent Witness. It had starred Ian Hendry as Dr Geoffrey Brent, the police surgeon of the title, who was called in to attend to the victims of crime and invariably found clues the police had missed. Although Police Surgeon was not especially successful in its own right – Clemens called it ‘a terrible series’, while Newman thought it was ‘pretty good’ but accepted that ‘it somehow didn’t take off’ – Hendry himself was popular with viewers and attracted much fan mail. Newman was ‘determined to exploit Hendry’s qualities in a one-hour series, as a character who was honourable and had great physical dexterity’. He decided, also, that ‘[i]t would be a fun series that would get away from the realism of Police Surgeon (something which my major series Armchair Theatre was noted for)’ and that the format should be ‘an action adventure-thriller with a sense of humour’.16 The Avengers was originally to have been a direct follow-up to Police Surgeon, with the same producer, Leonard White, and Hendry reprising the same character. In November 1960, however, White issued a memorandum to the effect that ‘[a] new name is being found for Hendry’s character’ and that ‘The Avengers will now have absolutely nothing to do with Police Surgeon’.17 Hendry’s character became Dr David Keel, a GP whose fiancée is murdered by drug smugglers at the beginning of the first episode when she unwittingly opens a package of heroin delivered to his surgery by mistake. Keel sets out to avenge her death, and is joined in his mission by John Steed, a shadowy secret agent figure. Having tracked down the gang responsible, Keel teams up with Steed in the fight against organised crime. Originally, therefore, The Avengers was conceived within the traditional mode of psychological realism in that it set up a motivation for Keel, its main protagonist. ‘Keel will be a kind of extended version of the police surgeon, because he will be more directly involved with fighting crime,’ Hendry observed.18 While the doctor was compassionate and ‘serves as the conscience of the team’, Steed was a more cynical and ruthless character, a professional undercover agent whose employers at first remained a mystery. Critics were initially unimpressed. One of Variety’s British correspondents thought it ‘B-picture stuff at its B. . .est’ and complained that it contained ‘most of the clichés that clutter the supporting-picture genre’. The reviewer

Is There Honey Still for Tea? conceded, nevertheless, that ‘the whole thing had a technical polish that effectively glossed up the machine-belt goings on’. Another observer felt that the opening story ‘made a patchy impression’, largely because ‘it failed to establish convincing motivation for the central character, and the careful realism of its settings and dialog [sic] threw into relief the trumped-up machinations of the plotting’. The theme music by jazz musician Johnny Dankworth was considered ‘monotonous’, though the direction was ‘sharp and crisp’.19 The first series of The Avengers ran throughout 1961 and comprised 26 episodes, of which nine were transmitted live and seventeen were recorded on videotape. The series was broadcast weekly for the first nine episodes and fortnightly thereafter. Unfortunately, few of the early videotaped episodes survived the junking process that short-sighted economies in the television industry inflicted upon much of its output from this period. However, scripts and ABC’s plot synopses show that most of the time Keel and Steed were involved with such humdrum crimes as counterfeiting, diamond smuggling, kidnapping and blackmail. Macnee suggested that the early episodes were influenced by the American series New York Confidential and recalled that they mostly consisted of ‘two men in dirty macs going around looking macho and being buddies’. Although the producers continually asserted that The Avengers was not a private eye series, to begin with it did borrow visually from the iconography of that genre as Keel and Steed both dressed in the belted trenchcoats that had been de rigeur for the movie private eye ever since Humphrey Bogart had played Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946). In some episodes a ‘control’ character was introduced in the form of ‘One Ten’ (Douglas Muir) who gave Steed assignments and passed on information, a narrative device which also served to provide him with the official legitimacy that is a prerequisite for the professional secret agent story. The earliest surviving episode, ‘The Frighteners’, gives some idea of the style of the series at this point. Steed and Keel investigate an extortion racket run by a criminal boss known as ‘The Deacon’. It is a dark, noirish thriller featuring seedy underworld locations and villains with a nice line in slang dialogue (‘I’m out on ticket, see? One lumber on me present form an’ I’ll be eatin’ porridge till it’s comin’ out of me flippin’ ears’). The technological limitations of video recording and the confined studio setting actually work to the episode’s advantage in enhancing the sense of claustrophobia that characterises the urban thriller: the visuals are dominated by close-ups, interiors and night-time shots. There are a few exterior shots on film, mostly daytime street scenes around Covent Garden used as linking sequences and

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4. The original Avengers: John Steed (Patrick Macnee, left) and Dr David Keel (Ian Hendry) are the trench-coated crime-fighters on the streets of London. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

for local colour. There is a pervading sense of thick-ear melodrama due to the casual violence of the episode: one victim of the Deacon’s gang is slashed with a razor, while his assailant sustains a broken neck in a tussle. This latter incident allowed the introduction of a medical sub-plot which the writers (in this case Berkeley Mather, coincidentally also co-scenarist of the first James Bond film, Dr No) used as a narrative device to justify Keel’s presence in the story (‘You’ve fractured a vertebra. You move that head, you’re dead!’). Still at an early stage in the series’ history, the episode is at pains to remind viewers that Keel and Steed are not policemen or conventional detectives, and in so doing contrives to include a reference to Hendry’s previous role as they attend to an injured party:

Is There Honey Still for Tea? Steed: Doctor, we’ll take him to your surgery. Keel: What for? Steed: It’s quieter there. Keel: Well I’d like to keep it that way. Steed: That’s precisely my point. This is a private patient – that’s why I brought you along. Give the police surgeon the night off, follow me?

Although some of the characteristic Avengers features are already present in ‘The Frighteners’, including Steed’s trademark rolled umbrella, the episode differs from later instalments in several important respects. For one thing, there is no clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. The Deacon is hired by unscrupulous businessman Sir Thomas Weller to put ‘the real frighteners’ on the man who is courting his daughter. When Weller has a change of heart and turns informer the gang is arrested, but the Deacon vows to get his revenge (‘Tell Sir Thomas he hasn’t heard the last of us – we can always get at him from the inside’). Weller’s suspicions of the would-be suitor are justified, however, when he is revealed as a philanderer and serial adulterer. Steed is shown to have a number of street informants, including a Covent Garden flower-seller and a West Indian bus driver. Working-class characters were rarely to be found in later Avengers episodes, even in such small roles, while black characters appeared only very occasionally throughout the series. The Keel-Steed team lasted throughout the first series of The Avengers, whereupon a strike by the actors’ union Equity brought a temporary halt to the show. Hendry decided to leave to pursue his film career (though he did return to play a different character in an episode of The New Avengers in 1976). For the second series in 1962–63, the character of Steed was promoted from co-star to leading role and, at the suggestion of Sydney Newman, was reinvented to become a debonair man-about-town, a gentleman of independent means with expensive tastes in food and clothes. His appearance was smartened up: out went the trenchcoat and in came the tailored suits, jackets, brocade waistcoats and hats (usually a bowler, though sometimes a trilby or homburg) that became indelibly associated with the character. The distinctive prop of an umbrella, that Steed carried at all times, was inspired by Ralph Richardson’s performance as a secret agent in the film Q Planes (1939). Steed became something of a dandy, ‘a modern day Beau Brummel’ according to the publicity material, though still with a tough and occasionally ruthless streak.

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Saints and Avengers The changes to the characterisation of Steed were not purely cosmetic. They can be seen as part of a process through which The Avengers differentiated itself from other television series and affirmed its own place in the generic lineages of popular fiction. The new, sartorially elegant Steed removed the character from any association with the hard-boiled private eyes of American television. Instead, he belongs to the tradition of English gentlemen heroes portrayed on screen by the likes of Ronald Colman, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard and David Niven. These actors represented a type of masculinity that had no need for aggressive displays of machismo, men of charm and good manners who nevertheless possessed nerves of steel: the iron fist concealed beneath the velvet glove. Steed’s name is redolent of solid, dependable values (‘a trusty steed’). There is a strong sense of class identity to the character who, it was revealed, is ‘the scion of a noble house’ and had served as an army officer during the Second World War. In providing Steed with an aristocratic heritage (albeit that he is the ‘black sheep’ of the family), The Avengers was consciously different from both the modern, classless hero of Danger Man and the down-to-earth detectives of the police series Z Cars, which began its long run on the BBC in 1962. Instead, Steed owes more to the tradition of upper-class sleuths such as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion. ‘Steed’s interest in clothes is a significant irrelevance that links him with the senior detectives mentioned earlier,’ observed Kingsley Amis. ‘He is right at the opposite end of the scale from the wretched Inspector Barlow, who has no life outside the Force at all.’20 The revamped Avengers formula was to allow Steed to call on the services of several different partners. The production rationale for this was that alternating co-stars would allow an overlapping rehearsal/broadcast schedule and enable the series to return to weekly transmission. The first three episodes recorded for the second series continued the medical practitioner theme with the character of Dr Martin King (Jon Rollason), an expedient move to use up remaining scripts written for Ian Hendry. Thereafter Steed’s partner became a woman, with Julie Stevens appearing in six episodes as vivacious nightclub singer Venus Smith and Honor Blackman in the remaining seventeen as Mrs Catherine Gale, a sexy young widow with a PhD in anthropology and a black belt in judo. It was Blackman who made the strongest impact, and her character was retained to partner Macnee throughout the third series in 1963– 64. It was with Blackman’s arrival, and not least due to her character’s penchant for leather clothing, that the popularity of the series really took off. As Christopher Booker observed in his book The Neophiliacs:

Is There Honey Still for Tea? A new craze took over the nation’s Saturday nights, on the commercial channel – a black and violent thriller series, The Avengers, starring a bowlerhatted Old Etonian actor Patrick Macnee and Miss Honor Blackman as a pair of mysterious secret agents. The show aroused particular excitement through Miss Blackman’s ‘kinky’ black leather costumes. And indeed the London-centred craze for ‘kinky’ black boots, ‘kinky’ black raincoats and ‘kinky’ black leather or plastic garments of all kinds raged throughout the autumn.21

As Booker suggests, The Avengers was now becoming something of a popular cultural phenomenon that spawned interest beyond the programme itself. This was most evident in its influence on contemporary fashion design. For the second series, costume designer Michael Whittaker received a screen credit for the ‘Special Wardrobe for Honor Blackman’. For the third series, Blackman’s costumes were designed by Frederick Starke, former director of the London Fashion House, and were previewed at Les Ambassadeurs Club in Park Lane in October 1963. The single ‘Kinky Boots’, recorded by Macnee and Blackman, was a rather more esoteric example of the cultural ephemera spawned by the series.22 The introduction of a female co-star was to alter the nature of The Avengers in a very significant way. One of the claims frequently made on behalf of The Avengers is that it was the first popular television series to provide roles for women who were portrayed as being equal to men. In particular, Blackman’s character of Catherine Gale has been claimed as a feminist heroine. ‘She was the first really emancipated feminist, and I’m quite proud that we did it first,’ Brian Clemens said. Even one academic commentator has described The Avengers as ‘the first network show to present a feminist female lead’.23 While these claims may be something of an exaggeration, there is no denying that Honor Blackman/Catherine Gale was significantly different from the stereotypes of girlfriend or secretary that hitherto had been women’s lot in the television thriller. The notion of feminism expressed in The Avengers was that the heroine should possess intelligence and technical skill as well as sex appeal. This character type is now so familiar in the action thriller genre – represented by the likes of Sigourney Weaver in the Alien films and by the high-kicking martial-arts heroines of the movie version of Charlie’s Angels (2000) – that she has become almost as stereotyped as her dutiful girlfriend and loyal secretary predecessors. The role of Cathy Gale was written as an intelligent and independent woman who was Steed’s professional equal. Her background was fleshed out by publicity material: after a university education

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5. ‘A new craze took over the nation’s Saturday nights’: a publicity shot of Patrick Macnee with trademark props and Honor Blackman in ‘kinky’ black leather. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

Is There Honey Still for Tea?

6. Will they or won’t they? A frisson of sexual tension between John Steed and Cathy Gale. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

she married a Kenyan farmer, who was killed during the Mau Mau rising, after which she returned to university and became an expert anthropologist and photographer. The character was devised as an amalgam of Margaret Mead (social ethnographer), Margaret Bourke-White (renowned Life magazine photographer) and Grace Kelly (cool blonde sex symbol). The relationship between Steed and Mrs Gale was platonic, though not without a frisson of ‘will they/won’t they?’ sexual tension. The aspects of the character that attracted most attention, however, were her clothes and her fighting ability. According to the series’ publicity discourse, these traits positioned both actress and character at the vanguard of modern, liberated femininity: ‘As Cathy Gale, Miss Blackman was way out front of the new international fashion in women who dress and fight like men as well as enjoying the more conventional privileges of emancipation.’24

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Saints and Avengers Stanley Reynolds, television critic of the Guardian, put it slightly differently when he recalled the moment ‘when Honor Blackman strode in, all bosom and black leather, to herald the coming of the Swinging Dolly as her Mrs Gale picked up the villains and threw them about the television studio week after week’.25 Most Cathy Gale episodes, especially in the third series, would feature her engaged in a violent tussle with a male antagonist, whom she would overcome without any need of assistance from Steed. The leather costumes designed for Blackman were originally a practical measure to allow her freedom of movement during the action sequences, but they also added a highly fetishistic dimension to her screen persona that was far removed from the girl-next-door image the actress had portrayed in British films of the 1950s and from her previous sober television role in the 1959 series Probation Officer. The subcultural sexual codes hinted at by Blackman’s leather boots, trousers and jackets were not lost on contemporaries. One critic called her ‘the leather fetishist’s pin-up’, another wrote that ‘she can look after herself, and the viewers’ sado-masochistic fantasies’.26 The style of the series throughout the Macnee-Blackman period was highly distinctive. Still recorded on videotape, The Avengers developed an innovative visual style that differentiated it from other television shows of the time. The ‘house style’ of The Avengers is usually attributed to designers like Peter Bernard, Peter Dowling and David Marshall, and to directors like Jonathan Alwyn, Bill Bain, Peter Hammond, Don Leaver and Kim Mills. The first suggestion that the series was coming to privilege style over content can be seen in a production directive of 1962 which stated: ‘The stories will be set in environments which are exciting and different (scenes set in offices, drawing rooms, flats, are very dull visually) . . . One main and exciting location (atomic energy plant, zoo, brewery, mass-production factory) gives more value than an endless number of small box sets of dull rooms.’27 The budgetary and logistical restrictions on building big studio sets were overcome through a great deal of visual imagination. A scene in a library or bookshop, for example, would be shot through shelves of books, a scene in a pub through a row of bottles, or a scene in a prison through a barred window. The Avengers directors favoured angled shots and low-key lighting, creating a slightly unreal world that was markedly different both from the documentary-like style of Z Cars and from the ‘invisible’ editing of filmed series like The Saint. Indeed, The Avengers during this period might be compared to Hollywood film noir in that it employed a style that was both technologically and aesthetically determined. The preponderance of night-time shots, disorienting lighting and unusual camera angles was due partly to technical limitations and production

Is There Honey Still for Tea? economies, but was also an aesthetic which borrowed some of the visual codes of Expressionism, especially the stark contrasts between light and shadow. It was the perfect visual style for representing the suspense and paranoia of the ‘chaos world’ that the thriller inhabits. As for the content of the series, The Avengers had by now firmly positioned itself within the spy thriller genre. Most of the Macnee-Blackman episodes followed the sort of cloak-and-dagger storylines that were familiar from other secret agent series, including the unmasking of a contract killer (‘Mr Teddy Bear’, 1962), the murder of a diplomatic courier (‘Death Dispatch’, 1962), the theft of a secret formula for rocket fuel (‘Propellant 23’, 1962), the sabotage of a new super-computer vital to Britain’s defence (‘The Big Thinker’, 1962), arms smuggling (‘Bullseye’, 1962), sabotage at a naval research establishment (‘Traitor in Zebra’, 1962), and the infiltration of an international crime syndicate (‘Intercrime’, 1963). Most of these plots belong to the realist lineage of the spy thriller, in the sense that the storylines were not too far-fetched during a period when spy stories featured regularly in the headlines: the Portland Down affair, the defection of Kim Philby and the Profumo scandal. During the third series, however, some episodes veered towards the sensational lineage of the thriller and the plots began ‘leaving the ground a bit’, as Honor Blackman put it. A good example of this trend is ‘November Five’ (1963), in which Steed and Cathy investigate the theft of a nuclear warhead which threatens to be used to destroy London. The conspirator is a disaffected MP who has faked his own death and has accepted an offer from ‘another party’ to destroy the British government. The story bears comparison to the James Bond novel Moonraker with its conspiracy to target a nuclear rocket on London, especially in that the conspirators in both instances are members of the establishment. But whereas Fleming’s villain Sir Hugo Drax turned out to be a fanatical ex-Nazi with a pathological hatred of the English, secretly supported by the Soviet Union, in the Avengers episode the identity of the country or party behind the villain Dyter is never revealed. This plot device exemplified a trend in The Avengers to downplay serious political motivations for conspiracy plots. This strategy is illustrated by an episode such as ‘The Charmers’ (1964), which makes reference to Cold War tensions while distancing itself from the ideological conflicts that the Cold War itself represented. When Winkle, an agent of ‘the other side’, is murdered at his fencing school, Steed assumes it is the work of Winkle’s employers (‘Must be having another purge’) until one of their agents tries to kill him, assuming that Steed had killed Winkle (‘Why do you want to kill me? I always thought we were the best of enemies’). Steed suspects that a third party must

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Saints and Avengers be trying to provoke conflict and proposes an alliance to his opposite number Keller. Keller feigns indignation at the breach of the unwritten rules of the spying game: Keller: If you didn’t kill him, and we didn’t kill him, then that supposes . . . Steed: A third party. An organisation opposed to both of us. Keller: But for what purpose? Steed: Steal secrets, create mayhem, sell to the highest bidder. Keller: But that’s unethical! Outrageous, scandalous! I never heard of anything so dishonest.

The idea of a third party exploiting tensions between the British and the Russians/Soviets (for, although never referred to as such, that is clearly who ‘the other side’ are meant to be) was a device employed in the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963), which had opted to reposition the Cold War narrative of the original Fleming novel. The episode takes for granted the existence of a Russian spy ring in Britain; Steed even knows where their headquarters are. Ironically, at a time when the reality of Soviet penetration of the British intelligence services was becoming only too apparent through the Philby case, ‘The Charmers’ suggests that the Russian intelligence services are under-funded and poorly resourced. The English class system is seen as an obstacle preventing the Russians from carrying out their plans (‘It’s impossible to infiltrate the Horse Guards in this country – our men don’t have the necessary connections,’ Keller tells his superiors), whereas in fact it was the existence of such ‘connections’ that had allowed the Soviets to form the Cambridge spy ring in the 1930s. Ultimately, after the requisite twists and red herrings, it is Keller who is revealed as the conspirator. However, his motivation is not ideological but personal in that he has become disaffected with his superiors (‘They passed me over long enough with their quibbling over expenses and keeping me short of cash. Well, now I’m ready to put their training to good advantage’). Keller had indeed been selling secrets ‘to the highest bidder’, as Steed suspected, and had disposed of Winkle, who had been sent to investigate Keller by his superiors when they suspected something was amiss. Even in those episodes not set against an espionage background, The Avengers tended to distance itself from realistic motivations and from any serious exploration of the psychological make-up of its villains. In ‘Mandrake’ (1964) Steed and Cathy uncover a murder-for-profit conspiracy by a Dr

Is There Honey Still for Tea?

7. Cathy has the drop on villain Keller (Warren Mitchell) in ‘The Charmers’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

Macombie and his associate Hopkins. The victims are poisoned with arsenic, the doctor certifies they died of natural causes, and the bodies are buried in the graveyard of a small parish church in a remote Cornish village where the soil happens to be heavily impregnated with arsenic, thus making any exhumation or post-mortem pointless (writer Roger Marshall got the idea for the story from reading a biography of famed pathologist Sydney Smith). While

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Nor was the profit motive necessarily always a factor. In ‘Brief for Murder’ (1963) two elderly solicitors, brothers Miles and Jasper Lakin, advise clients how to carry out crimes in advance so that, when brought to court, they can provide a watertight defence. Their motivation is not pecuniary – they do not even bother to count the money they are paid when Steed uses their services to ‘murder’ Cathy – but rather for the legal challenge which the cases provide. According to David Buxton, such devices are ‘a pop explanation – psychology has been reduced to ideology, motives are no longer necessary’.28 It was during the Macnee-Blackman period that The Avengers began to develop one of the themes that would feature prominently throughout the series – the machinations of reactionaries unable to come to terms with present-day society. In ‘The Mauritius Penny’ (1962) the murder of a rare stamp dealer leads Steed and Cathy into a conspiracy involving a neo-Nazi movement which uses his shop as a front for importing arms in preparation for a coup. Lord Matterley is the Oswald Mosley-like leader of New Rule whose motive is to restore order and for Britain to reclaim her past greatness: ‘We intend to provide this country with the strong leadership it needs. . . . The basis of our movement is a return to the traditions that have made this country great.’ In ‘The Grandeur That Was Rome’ (1963) baronet Sir Bruno Lucer has an even more ambitious plan: to kill off most of the world’s population with bubonic plague so that he can recreate the Roman Empire and rule as the new Caesar. Villains such as these do not offer the scope for believable psychological motivation. Instead, their megalomania represents in extreme form the forces of chaos that threaten to subvert the social and political order. Such characters were to come increasingly to populate The Avengers in later episodes, anticipating the villains of 1970s Bond films such as Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me) and Drax (Moonraker) whose grandiose conspiracies were intended not to hold the world to ransom but rather to wipe out civilisation as we know it and create a new world order in their own image.

Is There Honey Still for Tea? Another theme that was to feature prominently in The Avengers was that of scientific advancement. In this, the series was responding to contemporary concerns. Arthur Marwick has shown how the discourses of scientific and technological modernity were prominent in political rhetoric in the West at this time. In the United States, President Kennedy referred in his election address to the ‘new frontier’ and promised to overtake the Russians in the space race, while during the British general election campaign of 1964 Harold Wilson spoke of ‘the white heat of science and technology’. ‘All societies, and governments, made much noise about the significance of science and technology,’ Marwick observes; ‘all, equally, showed little sense of what science could achieve, and still less of how to ensure that the maximum benefits were obtained from the immense potential of science and technology.’29 The notion that the British government did not recognise the benefits of science and technology informs the Avengers episode ‘Death of a Batman’ (1963). Steed, astonished to learn that his former army batman Wrightson has left £180,000 in his will, uncovers a link between Wrightson, a draughtsman in civilian life, and merchant bank Teale and Van Doren. Wrightson had been involved in drawing up share certificates, and would pass on his foreknowledge of new share issues to Teale and Van Doren, who made a killing on the Stock Exchange. At first it seems as if Lord Teale, an old school aristocrat, is going to be a typical Avengers representative of a class unable to come to terms with modern life and business practices. His partner Van Doren implies as much: ‘Four generations ago when Dutch know-how was allied to English aristocracy that was all right, but what’s left? An Englishman with a Dutch name and one very faded old school tie.’ However, Teale turns out to be more forwardthinking than he might at first appear, for the companies he invests in are all high technology electronics firms, especially those working in the defence industry. Teale has taken it upon himself to support modern British industry and protect it from foreign takeover: ‘We can help make this country great again and save the world. That’s a reasonable life’s achievement . . . I can’t fight on the battlefield any more, but I can fight on the field of finance.’ Confronted by Steed, Teale asserts that his motive was patriotic, not pecuniary, and that he felt obliged to do it because of the apathy of the government: ‘Somebody had to support them, the country wouldn’t . . . We made very little profit out of this. These men, these scientists and engineers, they’re our only hope, don’t you see that? . . . I’m a patriot, not a traitor.’ Steed is sympathetic, but nevertheless hands the fraudsters over to the authorities.

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Saints and Avengers The suggestion that Britain may be lagging behind other countries technologically indicates that The Avengers had not yet shed all traces of seriousness from its content. Indeed, throughout the Macnee-Blackman period there is something of a tension between relatively serious themes on the one hand and a more light-hearted treatment on the other. This tension becomes explicit in ‘The Nutshell’ (1963), which combines serious and tongue-incheek moments. The episode begins with Steed and Cathy taking tea and biscuits while discussing the issue of nuclear proliferation, a topical subject at a time when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was attracting some 150,000 people to its Aldermaston marches and was organising mass protests in Trafalgar Square: Cathy: You know, it’s an ironic theory of yours, Steed, that arming for World War Three is the sole security against it. Steed: So long as the arms race goes neck and neck. Cathy: I don’t think anyone would dare start another war and risk the reprisal. Steed: Annihilation by return of post. Someone will certainly try. History’s full of people who’ve tried to get away with it. Cathy: You can’t go on arming for ever.

Their discussion rehearses the arguments for and against the nuclear deterrent, but does not (or cannot) offer an answer; Steed ends the discussion by offering Cathy a biscuit. This aside is unrelated to the rest of the episode, which concerns the theft of intelligence secrets from a supposedly impregnable, high-tech government installation. The tongue-in-cheek content of the episode consists of its playful use of acronyms: the government’s underground bunker in the event of nuclear war is known as ‘Nutshell’ (Thermo-Nuclear Underground Target Zone Shelter), its head is referred to as ‘Disco’ (Director of Intelligence, Security and Combined Operations) and the secret document that has been microfilmed by an ingenious thief is codenamed ‘Big Ben’ (Bilateral Infiltration Great Britain and North America). This use of humorous acronyms was a characteristic of the spy spoofs of the 1960s, best exemplified by the American NBC series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (it stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), in which agents Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) were pitted against the criminal organisation THRUSH (it was never clear what it stood for, though it was almost certainly a jokey reference to the common name for vaginal infection), and by the film Carry On Spying

Is There Honey Still for Tea? (1964) in which a group of unlikely recruits faced an enemy known as STENCH (Society for the Total Extermination of Non-Conforming Humans). But while the use of silly acronyms suggests a tongue-in-cheek approach in the manner of the spy spoofs that proliferated during the mid-1960s, elsewhere the episode is keen to assert that spying is a serious business and reverts to Len Deighton territory with a story of internal treachery and a reminder of the human cost of espionage. This is especially so when suspicion falls on Steed, who appears to have arranged for the thief to escape and who is subjected to a rough interrogation by security officer Venner. Venner also reminds Cathy that the spy business is not to be taken lightly: ‘Espionage isn’t a game, Mrs Gale, it’s a war – even in peacetime. There are too many lives lost in too many dark places for anyone to call it a game.’ Thus the episode oscillates between spy spoof and serious thriller without ever quite settling for one form or the other. In the event, it transpires that the theft was part of an elaborate deception plan devised by Steed to flush out the real spy, who turns out to be Venner.30 It is evident that during the Macnee-Blackman period the writers were experimenting with the form and style of the series. While it is difficult to assign authorship to individuals in a collaborative medium such as television, it is possible, nevertheless, to identify recurring themes in the episodes scripted by certain writers. This is most apparent in those by Brian Clemens, undoubtedly the most experimental of the writers, and the one who was to make the most significant contribution to the trajectory of The Avengers. In a short article on Clemens’s television work, Jack Edmund Nolan argues that Clemens ‘has returned time and again to the same devices’ and suggests that his creativity makes him ‘one of the very few refreshing and original voices in this hackneyed medium’.31 Certainly it was Clemens who showed most inclination to stretch the generic boundaries of The Avengers. His ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ (1963) is the earliest example of the series going beyond the territory of the secret agent story and borrowing from other genres, in this instance the horror film. The story has Cathy Gale invited to meet a renowned anthropologist at his remote house in Dartmoor, but on arrival she finds he is not at home. Cathy stays at the house, but soon realises she is not alone as things go bump in the night and a sinister voice calls to her from the darkness. The episode draws on the familiar lady-in-jeopardy variant of the horror genre, bearing particular resemblance to Edgar Wallace’s play The Case of the Frightened Lady, as an unseen enemy attempts, literally, to frighten Cathy to death. On the one hand it includes the expected horror conventions, with its dark Gothic house and terrorised female victim. On the other hand, however,

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Saints and Avengers Clemens experiments with the format, drawing attention to its fictionality by bringing in other characters – a girl claiming to be an actress and a young man claiming to be a film director – who are themselves actors playing out roles rather than ‘real’ people. The mysterious enemy turns out to be a double agent, previously captured by Steed and Cathy, who has recently been released from prison. Clemens evidently liked the story, for he was to rewrite it for Diana Rigg, while similar motifs reoccurred in no less than three other Clemens-scripted episodes.32 How were the Macnee-Blackman episodes received? Although The Avengers by now featured regularly in the top twenty television shows in Britain, critics were unsure about the direction the series was taking. For television critics used to a diet of social realism, the tongue-in-cheek style of The Avengers was difficult to take seriously. Some even went so far as to criticise the series for its lack of realism. ‘The Avengers is easily experienced and easily forgotten; plots may offer opportunities for reaching out and making contact, sentimentally or realistically, with the outside world, but style forbids it,’ wrote Francis Hope in the New Statesman.33 Variety at least recognised that ‘[t]he scripts are conscious parodies of the genre, not expecting to be taken seriously’, but added a caveat to the effect that the ‘[o]nly danger is that the scripts will go overboard for yocks [sic], and the mixture will lose its tension.’34 Similar concerns were expressed by Michael Gower of the Daily Mail at the end of the third series, when Honor Blackman bowed out. ‘Before Steed returns with a new partner,’ he remarked, ‘the choice seems to lie between unearthing writers who can flourish in fantasy and going back to the straight thriller.’35 The Avengers was off the air for eighteen months between March 1964 and October 1965. The long gap was due to a major readjustment of the series’ production strategy. If there was one moment at which The Avengers can be seen to have changed decisively, this was it. In the first instance, it changed technologically in that it went over to film – a decision prompted by the desire to sell the series to one of the American networks. The move to film, moreover, necessitated changes in the series’ production base and personnel. The production of The Avengers was relocated from television studios at Teddington to Elstree Studios, while an experienced film producer was brought in to supervise the series – Julian Wintle, co-founder of Independent Artists whose credits included films such as Tiger Bay (1959) and This Sporting Life (1963). Wintle was chosen, said his widow, because ABC’s Howard Thomas ‘had been impressed by his editing flair, post-production touches, and his reputation for turning out good films on a commercial basis’.36 Wintle

Is There Honey Still for Tea? brought with him a number of colleagues from the film industry, including Albert Fennell, who had produced the horror film The Night of the Eagle (1963) and who became executive producer of the series, and composer Laurie Johnson, who wrote a new theme tune for The Avengers. A team of experienced film directors was recruited, including Roy Ward Baker, Don Chaffey, Charles Crichton, Robert Day, Sidney Hayers, James Hill, Leslie Norman and Don Sharp. Brian Clemens was the one member of the existing Avengers production team whose role was significantly enhanced when he became associate producer and script editor. The change to film inevitably impacted on the style of the series, allowing location shooting and more elaborately staged action and chase sequences. Some commentators rather regretted that the slightly rough-edged style of the videotaped episodes had gone. Variety remarked that ‘[t]here is some loss, in that the earlier series had a certain impromptu air about it that added to the fun’, but conceded that ‘filmed productions promise extra slickness and tighter scenes’.37 For the fifth series, broadcast in 1967, The Avengers also went into colour at the behest of the American ABC network. Ironically, as colour broadcasting across the ITV network did not arrive until November 1969, British audiences who watched ‘The Avengers in color’ [sic] did so at first in black and white. The fourth series also introduced a new heroine. With Honor Blackman having left to play the part of Pussy Galore in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) – her last episode had included a jokey reference to her departure38 – there was a widely publicised search for an actress to replace her. When Elizabeth Shepherd, initially cast as Emma Peel, did not impress television executives after rough cuts of her first episode, the role was recast and Diana Rigg, a young RSC actress with a flair for comedy, stepped in. The name of the character was a pun attributed to press officer Marie Donaldson: the heroine was to have man-appeal, or ‘M’-appeal, thus ‘Emma Peel’. Rigg, at 27, was some twelve years younger than Blackman, and her character, another intelligent and sophisticated widow, was written to reflect this difference. The publicity suggested that ‘Steed and Emma are much more birds of a feather than Steed and Cathy were, and their relationship is warmer and closer’.39 Whereas the relationship between Steed and Mrs Gale had involved verbal byplay of the ‘will they/won’t they?’ variety, with Cathy always rebuffing Steed’s advances, that between Steed and Mrs Peel was more of a ‘will they/ have they?’ with plenty of innuendo that they had. Emma Peel maintained her predecessor’s martial arts ability, though with a preference for karate rather than judo. Her wardrobe was designed by John Bates of fashion house Jean Varon. It was intended to be ‘slightly ahead of current fashions and is

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8. Partners in crime-fighting: Steed and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) were the protagonists of the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

expected to have the same compulsive impact on both men and women as did the Honor Blackman leather outfits’.40 While Rigg/Emma Peel did initially wear tight-fitting black leather bodysuits, she became more associated with short-hemmed frocks, mini-skirts and, in the colour episodes, brightly coloured catsuits (known as ‘Emmapeelers’). Rigg’s persona was that of a modern, sophisticated girl-about-town, a sixties equivalent of the spirited heroines played in Hitchcock’s British films by actresses such as Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps) and Margaret Lockwood (The Lady Vanishes). Male critics were very taken with her physical beauty. Milton Shulman was especially rhapsodic: ‘Diana Rigg, with her long-striding, hockey captain’s

Is There Honey Still for Tea? walk and a face that melts men’s knees, has the kind of bold English beauty that ought to have been immortalised in a John Betjemen poem.’41 The tone of the new series was set by the publicity material, which suggested it was designed to represent a construction of national identity based on a binary of tradition and modernity: The new Avengers formula is set against the background of a tongue-incheek panorama of the picture-postcard Britain illustrated in tourist brochures. Every aspect of British life as it is promoted overseas, from atomstations, bio-chemical plants and modern industry on the one hand to foxhunting, stately homes and Olde Englishe Inne [sic] on the other, is used as a good-humoured counterpoint to the tough and fast-moving adventures of two dedicated Secret Agents, who hide their iron fists beneath the velvet gloves of high living and luxurious sophistication.42

In the terms of its own publicity discourse, therefore, The Avengers combined the themes of high Englishness on the one hand and of technological modernity on the other. This curiously bi-polar image of the England of the 1960s (it is appropriate to speak of England rather than Britain given the content of the series) was clearly not a realistic representation, but rather, as the publicity indicates, a tourist-brochure image designed to promote the cultural export of an idealised notion of Englishness. The England of The Avengers combines the imagined nation of the Ealing comedies, with their fondness for tradition, eccentrics and tea-drinking, with Harold Wilson’s vision of a society representing ‘the white heat of science and technology’. The central protagonists stood for the best aspects of these facets of Englishness. Thus, Steed was described as ‘a highly trained and ruthless professional who cloaks his activities in espionage and counter-espionage behind the façade of a handsome, debonair and witty man-about-town with expensive tastes, an eye for a pretty girl, and various amusing eccentricities of the kind that people overseas find endearing in the British’. While Steed personified the traditional gentleman hero, his new partner was seen as combining femininity and modernity, being described as ‘a willowy, auburn-haired beauty with a sparkling wit, who leads the streamlined life of an emancipated, jet-age woman, dresses in ultra-modern, man-tailored fashions . . . and tackles her opponents with a variety of spectacular fighting techniques from judo and karate to a straight left to the jaw’.43 ‘The new Avengers is self-consciously several degrees more far-fetched than the old,’ one critic remarked at the start of the fourth series.44 It was during the two Macnee-Rigg series – regarded by most fans as the ‘classic’

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9. Emma Peel’s wardrobe was notable for its Pop Art designs, such as her targetmotif beret in ‘The Town of No Return’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

period of The Avengers – that the show became an out-and-out parody. The unusual and unlikely storylines can be seen as a parodic version of the thriller motif of the forces of anarchy and chaos lurking beneath the ‘thin protection of civilisation’. The dangers of invasion and subversion are ever-present as foreign powers attempt to take over the country: a Norfolk village has been

Is There Honey Still for Tea? taken over by enemy agents landed by submarine (‘The Town of No Return’, 1965), a Scottish loch conceals a fleet of human torpedoes (‘Castle De’ath’, 1965), a secret army waits in an underground city hidden in a disused mine (‘The Living Dead’, 1967). The identity of the enemy powers is never revealed, nor the reason for the invasion – the threat to national security has now been reduced to an abstract level completely devoid of political ideology. And nothing is ever as it seems, with conspirators concealed behind seemingly innocuous façades: an up-market marriage bureau is the front for an organisation of assassins (‘The Murder Market’, 1965), a dancing school is really a spy ring (‘Quick-Quick Slow Death’, 1966), a luxury hotel conceals a concentration camp (‘Room Without A View’, 1966) and an exclusive golf club hides a satellite tracking station (‘The Thirteenth Hole’, 1966). With plots like these pointing to the existence of a ‘chaos world’ beneath the veneer of polite society, The Avengers would have seemed paranoid in the extreme, were it not for the fact that Steed and Mrs Peel sailed serenely through their adventures without ever giving the impression they were taking the bizarre happenings at all seriously. The Avengers frequently revolves around the disruption of social harmony by the forces of chaos. The fifth series episode ‘Murdersville’ (1967) is a good case in point. The village of Little Storping-in-the-Swuff is a picture of sleepy tranquillity that would not seem out of place in an Ealing film, but the tranquillity is suddenly and violently disturbed when a man is shot dead outside the pub – though none of the villagers turns a hair. As so often in The Avengers, the façade of olde England hides a deadly secret: the village provides a service whereby people can lure their enemies to Little Storping and kill them with impunity. When Emma Peel arrives to visit a friend who has bought property nearby, she finds he has been murdered and her own life is threatened. The episode again illustrates how The Avengers borrows from other genres, as the narrative of an urban sophisticate (Emma) being pursued and terrorised by murderous yokels (she is imprisoned in a steel chastity belt and nearly drowned on a ducking stool) was a familiar theme from the horror film. Clemens, who wrote ‘Murdersville’, would use this theme in the horror film And Soon the Darkness (1970), which he scripted with Terry Nation and produced with Albert Fennell, and which was directed by former Avengers designer Robert Fuest. The majority of conspiracy plots during the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers are internal rather than external threats. While foreign powers still have their designs upon England, the greatest danger comes from those at home disaffected with society. Typically they are either anarchists (secret societies

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10. In ‘Murdersville’ a sleepy English village is full of danger for Emma Peel. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

seeking to bring about revolution), die-hard reactionaries (old school aristocrats and ex-military types with totalitarian ambitions), or extreme technocrats (mad scientists intent on replacing the human race with machines). ‘Overwhelmingly, The Avengers is concerned with the policing of progress, the management of social change in an age of transition,’ Steve Chibnall observes. ‘The ideologies of conservation and futurism are constantly contrasted in the series.’45 The anarchist threat is exemplified by episodes such as ‘A Sense of History’ and ‘A Touch of Brimstone’ (both 1966). In the former, Steed and Emma investigate the murder of a progressive economist who has devised a plan to combine the economic resources of Europe and bring an end to poverty (‘Europia’). He was killed while on his way to St Bode’s College to meet someone opposed to his plan, the author of an anonymous thesis called ‘Economics and a Sense of History’ in which Steed smells ‘the whiff of jackboots’. They find the college overrun by gangs of marauding students and with bitter arguments raging amongst the dons over the question of

Is There Honey Still for Tea? historical determinism. The chief conspirator turns out to be the fuddy-duddy archivist Grindley who wants to stop the ‘Europia’ plan in order to prove that the course of history can be determined by human agency: ‘We are about to create a historic moment – to change the course of history.’ The conspirators are anarchists in the sense that they have nothing to gain personally but rather seek to disrupt the existing order. In the notorious ‘A Touch of Brimstone’ the Honourable John Cartney (played with camp relish by Peter Wyngarde) is the leader of a modern-day Hellfire Club committed to a ‘plan of anarchy – a coup so outrageous that the whole country will be up in arms’. At first the club’s activities are bizarre practical jokes (a visiting dignitary is given an exploding cigar, a VIP is humiliated with rubber scissors at a ceremonial opening), but they escalate to murder and a plot to blow up the Cabinet, meeting at a country house, with barrels of gunpowder in the cellars. The episode achieved notoriety through Emma’s appearance as the ‘Queen of Sin’ during an orgy. Rigg’s outfit of high-healed leather boots, tight black corset and spiked collar alluded specifically to the fantasy figure of the female dominatrix from pornographic subcultures such as the ‘bondage art’ of John Willie. But although she is visually coded as a dominatrix, it is Emma who is on the receiving end of Cartney’s whip as she fights with him before he falls to his death in the sewer. With its visual references to sado-masochistic pornography, ‘A Touch of Brimstone’ unsurprisingly ran into censorship difficulties with the ITV network; it was not screened in America at all.46 One theme which recurred frequently throughout the series was that of traditionalists who could not adapt to the modern age. The characterisations were so eccentric as to nullify any possibility of interpreting these figures as seriously representing those in sixties Britain who were resistant to change, though there are contemporary resonances in certain episodes. In ‘The Gravediggers’ (1965), for example, Sir Horace Winslip is an eccentric, Ealingesque railway-loving millionaire who longs for the golden age of steam and who is critical of the closure of railway lines at a time when a third of the country’s lines were being axed following the unpopular Beeching Report: ‘The iron horse – magnificent creature. And all being murdered by the motor car. Line after line closing down . . . I hang a wreath for each one.’ Sir Horace supports the Winslip Hospital for Retired and Ailing Railwaymen, where Dr Johnson is secretly working on a device to jam ‘the entire defensive system of the country’. It turns out that Sir Horace has been duped (he thinks the research is to jam motor car engines), but the inescapable suggestion is that his sentimental attachment to the past has enabled a saboteur to come close to achieving his aim. A similar theme surfaces in ‘Death at Bargain Prices’

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11. In the notorious ‘A Touch of Brimstone’ Emma wears dominatrix attire and carries a snake during her masquerade as the ‘Queen of Sin’. Flashbacks © Canal + Image UK Ltd.

(1965). Investigating mysterious goings-on at Pinters, an up-market department store, Steed finds his way into the Department of Discontinued Lines where, among the antique furniture, he meets the store’s owner, Horatio Kane, another traditionalist longing for the past: ‘Discontinued lines. Relics of a bygone age, Steed. A glorious age! Gracious, leisurely, ordered. A machine was a thing of joy then, built to last a man’s lifetime. Now it’s out of date

Is There Honey Still for Tea? before it’s left the assembly line. Out of date – that’s what they say about me.’ However, it turns out that Kane has kidnapped a nuclear fission expert and forced him to build an atomic bomb inside the store. Kane’s motivation is not blackmail so much as revenge: ‘No grasp of modern techniques? Want to see what they think after I’ve turned their modern techniques against them? A demonstration of power!’ In this case, attachment to the past has resulted in megalomania: Kane expects the government to accede to his demand, which is nothing less than handing over the entire country to him. But while resistance to progress is dangerous, so too is progress itself if it remains unchecked. Whereas earlier Avengers episodes had advocated investment in science and technology as the key to securing the nation’s future, the series now suggested that in the wrong hands they could be used for diabolical ends. Again, The Avengers can be seen as responding to contemporary concerns, particularly the ideas expressed by academics such as Theodore Roszak that technocracy (the organisation of society based on principles laid down by technical experts) could all too easily lead to a form of totalitarianism.47 The danger of technocracy taken to the extreme became a prominent theme of the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers. It is exemplified in one of the most famous episodes, ‘The Cybernauts’ (1965). When several leading businessmen are brutally murdered, the trail leads to Dr Armstrong, chairman of United Automation. The wheelchair-bound Armstrong is an automation expert whose headquarters is run entirely by remote control and who believes in the supremacy of machine over man: ‘We human beings are fallible, temperamental, and so often unreliable. The machine, however, is obedient and invariably more competent.’ He thinks the way forward is ‘government by automation’, but Steed suspects that what he covets is ‘an electronic dictatorship’. Armstrong has invented a steel robot, a cybernaut, which is invulnerable to bullets and is controlled by radio waves. Steed is aghast: Steed: Is this your idea of progress? Armstrong: The ultimate in human achievement! Steed: Human? A cybernetic police state! Push button bobbies!

Steed foils the scheme when he manages to set the two existing cybernauts against each other – programmed to kill, the machines are unable to think for themselves. The theme of man-versus-machine (or, more accurately, woman-versusmachine) is rehearsed again in ‘The House That Jack Built’ (1966), a Clemens-

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Saints and Avengers scripted variation on the lady-in-jeopardy theme. Emma is lured to a country house, apparently left to her by an unknown ‘Uncle Jack’. Once inside, she finds herself trapped in a series of corridors which all lead back to the same place. The house is a visual tour de force, combining the traditional accoutrements of a country home (wood panelling, suits of armour, stuffed birds) with science-fiction trappings that could have been taken straight out of Doctor Who (computer banks, monitor screens, a revolving antenna inside a glass orb). It turns out that the house is a trap designed by Professor Keller, an automation expert who had once worked for Knight Industries, a company which Emma Knight (as she then was) took over after her father’s death. Emma had sacked Keller because she did not agree with his philosophy of ‘automation to the ultimate degree, replace man with machine, subjugate him to it’. Keller is already dead, but a recorded message explains the nature of his revenge: Keller: This house is a machine – an indestructible machine, powered by solar energy . . . This machine will last for a thousand years, perhaps forever. An indestructible monument to my ingenuity. And yet the means of your destruction. You see, Mrs Peel, the mind of a machine cannot reason, therefore it cannot lose its reason. That is the machine’s ultimate superiority. Its mind has no breaking point. But your mind has. When the experiment is concluded, the machine will continue to function perfectly, but you, Mrs Peel, will be quite, quite mad.

Keller had planned that Emma would be so driven to insanity by her inability to escape from the house that finally she would kill herself – an eventuality for which he has thoughtfully provided a ‘suicide chamber’ complete with poison gas – but Emma proves the superiority of human ingenuity when she improvises a bomb to drop into the central computer’s master control console and thus cause it to short circuit. In its story of a woman terrorised by a malevolent super-computer, the episode anticipates the science-fiction thriller Demon Seed (1977), while in a more general sense the theme of computers turning against humankind was to be explored in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) and The Forbin Project (1969). The science-fiction trappings of these episodes are suggestive of another generic lineage into which The Avengers might be placed. In the fourth and, especially, fifth series there was a pronounced trend towards science-fiction storylines. Philip Levene, writer of ‘The Cybernauts’, was responsible for most of these, and it is in the Levene-scripted episodes that The Avengers crosses the boundary from the improbable to the scientifically impossible.

Is There Honey Still for Tea?

12. Technology runs amok as Beresford (Peter Cushing) is attacked by his own killing machine in ‘Return of the Cybernauts’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

For example, his ‘Never, Never Say Die’ (1967) involved the mechanical duplication of human beings, while ‘Mission . . . Highly Improbable’ (1967) featured a device capable of miniaturising objects and people. Like Clemens, Levene’s scripts stretched the generic boundaries of The Avengers by drawing on themes and motifs from outside the series. Thus, ‘Man-Eater of Surrey Green’ (1965) trod similar territory to the BBC’s Quatermass serials of the 1950s with its story of a meteorite bringing an extra-terrestrial organism to the earth in the form of seeds which grow into a huge carnivorous plant, while ‘The Hidden Tiger’ (1967) recalls Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) as people are viciously attacked by their pet cats, albeit that unlike the unexplained bird attacks in Hitchcock’s film the cats are controlled by electrophones in their collars and are part of a bid for world domination by the evil Dr Manx. ‘Return of the Cybernauts’ (1967) suggests links to another generic tradition through the casting of Peter Cushing, whose ascetic features

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Saints and Avengers and chilling demeanour were familiar from the Hammer horror films. Cast as Paul Beresford, brother of the cybernauts’ creator, Cushing played a variation on his famous role as Baron Frankenstein, using the cybernauts for revenge in a bid to kill Steed and Emma, just as Frankenstein had used his monstrous creature to destroy his enemies. Like Frankenstein, Beresford is killed by his own creation. It was not just in content that The Avengers had now completely transformed itself. The expensive production values and glossy visual style of the filmed episodes was far removed from the noirish, minimalist mise-en-scène of the videotaped period. The ‘look’ of the colour episodes was dominated by bright, even garish primary colours in set design, art direction and costumes. The effect was still to place The Avengers in its own unreal, fantasy world, but now it was a world that reflected the style of 1960s Pop Art rather than 1940s film noir. The violence that some commentators had detected in earlier episodes was now reduced to the level of a cartoon, with the fight sequences becoming much more stylised. Critics, after overcoming their reservations about the shift towards fantasy, now responded more enthusiastically to the new style of The Avengers. ‘Its characters may get themselves killed, but nothing, not even dying, ever hurts them, for in a more than metaphorical sense they are bloodless,’ remarked Henry Raynor of The Times. ‘Their fighting is almost a form of ballet, for to watch Emma Peel dispose unarmed of two armed assailants was to be transported to another world where elegance and style make nonsense of the laws of probability.’48 Other trends were also becoming apparent. ‘Each year The Avengers becomes less and less a programme and more and more a promotion,’ Philip Purser observed in 1967. ‘That is, the cohesion and persuasiveness of the adventures in which its heroes are involved count for less than their mannerisms, their cars and their clothes.’49 With its foregrounding of signs of expensive consumerism and conspicuous consumption – the cars, clothes and champagne-drinking – The Avengers had become a highly commodified text. This was a characteristic that the series shared with the James Bond films – what might be termed an aesthetic of product placement. The Avengers was reputedly the first television series to employ an ‘exploitation manager’ to sell product placement to companies anxious to have their commodities showcased. This strategy was not entirely gratuitous. Props such as Emma Peel’s sporty Lotus Élan were signifiers of modernity, just as Steed’s vintage green Bentley reinforced the character’s links with other fictional agents such as Bulldog Drummond and the literary James Bond. For the fifth series, Macnee’s clothes were by French designer Pierre Cardin, who received a

Is There Honey Still for Tea? prominent screen credit and whose high-buttoning double-breasted suits added a very contemporary twist to Steed’s traditional English gentleman appearance. The prominence accorded to designer clothes and other expensive consumer items was an integral element of the series’ production strategy. The Avengers was ‘packaged’ to present an image of England as a place of high-living and glamorous sophistication that would appeal to overseas audiences. Yet the consumer culture represented in The Avengers was closely tied to a discourse of class consciousness that maintained traditional social hierarchies. This is very evident in ‘Who’s Who?’ (1967), a Levene-scripted episode that uses a science-fiction plot device to explore the theme of class reversal. A mad scientist has invented a machine that can switch the mental psyche of one person to the body of another. A pair of assassins, Basil and Lola, use the machine to swap bodies with Steed and Emma, their aim being to wipe out a British spy ring known as the ‘floral network’ (their codenames – Tulip, Daffodil, Poppy, Bluebell – match their buttonholes). Although identical to Steed and Emma in appearance, Basil and Lola betray their lower class origins through their uncouth behaviour: ‘Steed has poise, a touch of the aristocrat – you slouch like a peasant,’ Lola chides Basil. The two assassins so enjoy the trappings of the sophisticated lifestyle that they plan on taking up permanent residence. The real Steed, for his part, is shocked less by the growing number of dead bodies he finds – death was treated with casual indifference in the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers – than he is by the vulgar behaviour of the impostor who has guzzled his champagne and chomped his cigars: ‘The last of my forty-seven – and not even chilled! My cigars! He’s been smoking my cigars and he’s bitten the ends off! What sort of fiend are we dealing with!?’ The message is clear: the consumer culture could be appreciated properly only by those with the good taste and breeding to do so. Further changes were made to the cast and production personnel for the sixth and final series in 1968–69. With Diana Rigg following Honor Blackman into ‘Bondage’ to play the heroine of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), a new leading lady was introduced in Linda Thorson, a young Canadian actress fresh from drama school. Thorson’s character of Tara King, a trainee agent who became Steed’s protégé, was a different sort of heroine from her predecessors. She was not the same cool, confident type, but rather a brighteyed, enthusiastic ingénue who sometimes bungled her assignments but whose practical ingenuity would usually see her through. The character’s name was intended to combine a sense of romantic femininity (‘Tara’ was a reference to Gone With the Wind) with patriotism (‘King and Country’). Another regular

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Saints and Avengers

13. Tara King (Linda Thorson) and ‘Mother’ (Patrick Newell) join the team for the sixth and final series of The Avengers. Flashbacks © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

character was created in the person of ‘Mother’ (Patrick Newell), the wheelchair-bound chief of the secret service. There were changes behind the scenes too. Julian Wintle stepped down, though he was still credited as consultant to the series, with former film production manager Gordon L.T. Scott taking over the role of executive producer. Clemens and Fennell, initially out of favour with ABC who thought the series was becoming too far-fetched, were reappointed as producers when the first episodes of the new season were thought not to be up to scratch, while Terry Nation, whose writing credits included Doctor Who, was brought in as script editor. Clemens believed that ‘there were more good, superb scripts in the Linda Thorson series than there were in the Diana Rigg ones, because by that time we had found our way, we were all very confident and we were exploring new avenues’. Robert Fuest added that ‘the whole thing seemed to work in a kind

Is There Honey Still for Tea? of wonderful madness’. Plots were fantastic and utterly ludicrous: villains dabbling in germ warfare unleash a deadly sneezing epidemic (‘You’ll Catch Your Death’, 1968), the patients of an ‘aggresso-therapist’ are brainwashed into carrying out murders (‘My Wildest Dream’, 1969), the director of an astronauts’ training academy plans a programme of interplanetary conquest (‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, 1969), civil servants are tricked into betraying official secrets when affected by a powerful love potion (‘Love All’, 1969) and a band of supposedly dead businessmen wanted for fraud are discovered living in subterranean chambers beneath a funeral parlour (‘Bizarre’, 1969). The Avengers had by now created its own fantasy world in which the incredible and the unusual were treated as if they were commonplace. It represents a shift away from what American dramatist Paddy Chayevsky (writer of Marty) called the ‘marvellous world of the ordinary’ into what might instead be termed the marvellous world of the extraordinary.50 The unique style of The Avengers derived in large measure from its juxtaposition of the normal with the abnormal. One of the recurring motifs of the sixth series, for example, was that Steed would meet Mother in unlikely locations such as a crypt, the middle of a field, a secret room hidden behind a telephone box, or on top of a doubledecker bus that served as Mother’s mobile headquarters. A convention of the secret agent story – the briefing meeting between the agent and his controller – was thus turned into a running joke. And familiar locations were used in unusual ways: the streets of London were made eerie and mysterious when they were filmed with few or no people around, while the tranquillity of leafy country lanes would be disturbed by car chases and gunfights. The ‘wonderful madness’ of The Avengers is perfectly exemplified in the episode ‘Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers . . .’ (1968), which one critic thought was ‘by far the best Avengers story I’ve seen so far’.51 Written by Dennis Spooner as a tribute to the dying art of music hall, the episode features a pair of clowns who are killing off the board members of the Caritol Land and Development Corporation. The murders are presented as if they are music hall routines (one victim is shot with a gun that goes ‘bang’, another slips on a banana skin and another still is catapulted out of a high-rise window when a carpet is pulled from under his feet), while the two clowns perform their stage-exit routine, waving goodbye to the audience, after each appearance. The trail leads Steed and Tara to Vauda Villa, a retirement home for music hall artistes, where they discover Merrie Maxie Martin (played by comedian Jimmy Jewel) and his colleagues taking their instructions from a Punch and Judy show. The climax is a comic fight sequence between Steed and Maxie in which the clown, renowned as

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Saints and Avengers ‘the fastest quick-change artist in the business’, changes costumes for each round. Yet beneath all the silliness, typical Avengers motifs are apparent. Once again there is the theme of villains being unable to adjust to change (‘Maxie’s act was the old style . . . He couldn’t adapt himself to the new,’ says his former gag writer, before being killed beneath a pile of his own discarded jokes). There is a certain irony in the fact that one of the victims is played by John Cleese, one of the new generation of comedians who came to the fore through television (most famously in Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and who represented a new, anarchic style of comedy very different from the familiar routines of music hall. Maxie’s motive is that the development company has bought and shut down a chain of music halls, but it turns out that the mastermind behind the scheme is a member of the Caritol board who wants to destabilise the company, which has been commissioned to build the government’s new nuclear shelter ‘Cupid’ (Cabinet Underground Premises In Depth). Ultimately, therefore, the episode is another espionage story in which a sense of nostalgia is exploited by a saboteur. The Avengers was nothing if not eclectic in its range of storylines, constantly testing the boundaries of genre by borrowing themes and motifs from other sources. ‘Split!’ (1968), written by Clemens, would seem to have been inspired by Curt Siodmark’s novel Donovan’s Brain, filmed in 1953, in which a surgeon keeps alive the brain of an unscrupulous business tycoon. Dr Constantine has kept alive the brain of an enemy agent, Boris Kartovski, whose body is clinically dead having been shot in the heart by Steed five years earlier. Constantine plans to transfer Kartovski’s cunning and field experience into the minds of various operatives of the Ministry of Top Secret Information in order to create moles deep inside the heart of the British intelligence apparatus. ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1969), by Tony Williamson, appears to have been influenced by another ‘cult’ television series of the 1960s, The Prisoner. Visiting her uncle in a country hotel, Tara discovers that he is being held against his will, and, moreover, finds that every attempt she makes to leave herself is prevented by an ‘accident’. Unlike The Prisoner, however, a ‘rational’ explanation is offered for the captivity: Tara’s uncle is a businessman, and one of his employees has arranged for him to be kept out of the way in a bid to take over the business. And ‘Legacy of Death’ (1968), by Terry Nation, is a delirious spoof of The Maltese Falcon, in which a multitude of grotesque villains are all in pursuit of ‘the Falcon Dagger’, which holds the key to a hidden treasure, and which has been left to Steed by an unknown benefactor.52 The eclecticism of The Avengers was not confined to reworking stories and motifs from popular film and television. For example, the mythology of Jack

Is There Honey Still for Tea?

14. Fake Victoriana is prominent in the mise en scène as Tara meets a member of the Gaslight Ghoul Society in ‘Fog.’ BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Canal + Image International (UK) Ltd.

the Ripper is the basis of ‘Fog’ (1969), which is set in a quaintly unrealistic London of cobbled streets, gas lamps and hansom cabs. Steed and Tara investigate when several members of the World Disarmament Committee, meeting in fog-enshrouded London, are slain by a black-cloaked and bearded figure. The murders bear the hallmark of the ‘Gaslight Ghoul’, who carried out a series of gruesome killings in 1888 but was never caught. The suspects come from the Gaslight Ghoul Society, an exclusive club devoted to unravelling the identity of the historic killer. The murderer turns out to be a typical Avengers fanatic, an armaments manufacturer, Travers, who sets out to destroy the disarmament talks because he sees his own livelihood threatened: ‘Those fools want to disarm the world – a bunch of wooden-headed idealists who’d make me as extinct as the dodo! I’m conducting my own fight

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Saints and Avengers for survival!’ What is most interesting about ‘Fog’, however, is the way in which it continuously draws attention to its own artifice. While the sets and costumes recreate the world of the Victorian penny-dreadful, they are shown to be props even within the diegetic world of the episode. Thus, Steed and Tara trace the Ghoul through the theatrical costumers from which he hires his outfit, while Travers uses a fog machine to trap Tara. An awareness of generic conventions and regimes was crucial to The Avengers. This is especially evident in ‘Game’ (1968), which spoofs the entire genre of the secret agent story. A former black marketeer, court-martialled in Germany in 1946, has now assumed a new identity as the wealthy businessman Bristow. He takes revenge on the members of the court martial panel by forcing them to play games he has devised relating to their new professions: if they lose, they die. Thus, a racing driver suffers death-byScalextrix, a business tycoon is killed by a game of snakes and ladders with real snakes, a brigadier is shot by a miniature cannon during a wargame and a university professor is crushed under the weight of words. Whereas Cathy Gale had once been told that ‘espionage isn’t a game’, by this later episode it had become just that – the game of ‘Super Secret Agent’ that Steed, the last intended victim, is forced to play. ‘It’s not particularly complex, but it calls upon all the qualities required of a secret agent – courage, strategy, a certain degree of animal cunning,’ Bristow tells him. ‘And of course embodied in the game is that traditional element of all spy sagas – the damsel in distress.’ Steed has to negotiate a deadly obstacle course (rather like James Bond in Dr No) in order to rescue Tara, who has six minutes before being suffocated by the sand running through a giant hour glass in which she is imprisoned. Tara’s predicament spoofs the convention of the sensational thriller that the villain would devise bizarre and complex death traps – a convention that had reached its apogee in Hollywood serial melodramas, or ‘chapter plays’, and which was experiencing a renaissance in the 1960s through the Bond films and their imitators. The ‘game’ itself reflects the sort of narrative situations that occur in the secret agent story, and which, qua Umberto Eco, are presented as ‘moves’ on a board: ‘You Encounter Fiendish Japanese Wrestler’, ‘You Must Disconnect Time Bomb’, and so on. At the climax Steed is faced with six assailants at six second intervals, but has only one live round in his revolver. His solution is to shoot the glass which imprisons Tara and so release her. This is a move Bristow had not anticipated and which he regards as breaking the rules (‘You cheated!’). If the ‘game’ itself is to be seen as a metaphor for the secret agent story, then the ending is a metaphor for the way in which The Avengers breaks the ‘rules’ of genre.

Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Macnee-Thorson series achieved some of the highest ratings for The Avengers on British television, though critics continued to be divided over its merits as entertainment. ‘Although it has been going on for so long, The Avengers has kept up an amazingly good standard of scripts,’ wrote Daily Mail critic Virginia Ironside. ‘Whether the plot is built around a sinister knitting circle or a creepy dairy that manufactures poisoned milk . . . they’re always gripping and inventive.’53 However, her enthusiasm was not shared by Daily Express critic James Thomas, who felt that the sale of the series to American television had resulted in a dumbing down of its content. ‘It is a moment to reflect on how this series has deteriorated since it became a commercial product aimed at the US market,’ he said after the last Thorson episode. ‘Its subtlety and high sense of humour has long since been ironed out in the quest for dollars.’ He expressed the hope that ‘someone at Thames [sic] will have the courage to bring back sophistication and tell the Americans that they can like it or leave it.’54 In the event, it was the reception of The Avengers in America that decided its fate. The two Diana Rigg series had been well received by critics, with Rigg herself nominated for an Emmy award, and, according to Variety, the series had ‘built a respectable following’ when shown in an evening (10 pm) slot. ‘The Avengers is an adult show in the best sense of that term, requiring as it does a moderate amount of intelligence to follow a fairly complex plot line and some reasonably sophisticated dialog,’ observed the US trade bible.55 The colour Rigg episodes, in particular, were so popular with viewers that the network moved them to a primetime (7.30 pm) slot from January 1968.56 The Thorson episodes were less successful, however, with critics alleging that the relationship between Steed and Tara King did not work as well as that between Steed and Emma Peel. While conceding that ‘Miss Thorson is a pretty dish and an able actress’, Variety felt that ‘[w]ithout the tricky chemistry of the Steed-Peel relationship, the series stands to lose a great deal of the sophistication that so far has parlayed it into a winner’.57 The Thorson series was broadcast in the same primetime slot, but its ratings fell off markedly – a factor generally attributed to its being shown at the same time as the popular Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In – and the American network decided not to buy any more episodes. With the withdrawal of American finance, and lacking the open cheque book of Lew Grade, ABC could not afford to produce the expensive, colour series on its own and thus The Avengers was cancelled in February 1969. However, the series was revived in the mid-1970s as a Franco-British coproduction, supposedly as the result of Macnee and Thorson having appeared

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Saints and Avengers together in a champagne commercial for French television in 1975. The New Avengers, which ran for 26 episodes in 1976–77, was produced by Clemens and Fennell in collaboration with IDTV Productions of Paris. The format was updated to keep it entirely contemporaneous: The New Avengers was as much a product of the 1970s as The Avengers had been of the 1960s. Macnee returned as Steed, now older and, in some episodes, living the life of a country squire on his own stud farm. He now had two partners: a tough action-man called Mike Gambit (Gareth Hunt) and an ex-ballerina called Purdey (Joanna Lumley). Having three protagonists rather than two altered the central dynamic of The New Avengers, with Steed playing more of a mentor’s role while leaving much of the action to his two younger colleagues. Clemens claimed that the main difference between the original and the revived series was that ‘[t]he old Avengers were brilliant cardboard characters. In The New Avengers I used thicker cardboard. I tried to involve our viewers a little more in the personal side of our leads.’58 The New Avengers was different from the original series in other respects too. For one thing, it was grittier and more realistic in style, perhaps anticipating The Professionals, a late 1970s action series also created by Clemens.59 The ‘look’ of the series was more naturalistic, lacking the Pop Art style of the colour Avengers episodes with their bold visuals and primary colours. The clothes and fashions of the series remained highly contemporary – Lumley’s haircut briefly popularised the ‘Purdey bob’ – and even Steed was given modern cars (a Range Rover and a Jaguar coupé). Yet in a strange sort of way, The New Avengers now seems more dated than The Avengers – due, perhaps, to the sense that whereas the 1960s still exert a strong hold on the popular imagination, with many of the styles of the period still voguish, the 1970s in contrast are widely regarded as ‘the decade that taste forgot’. In terms of its content, The New Avengers seems to be caught in an uneasy limbo between the sensational and realistic lineages of the thriller, never quite able to make up its mind where it properly belongs. Some episodes are very much in the tradition of the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers with their far-fetched and sensational plots. In ‘Eagle’s Nest’ (1976), for example, a monastery on a remote Scottish island turns out to be the refuge of a group of Nazis who escaped from Berlin with ‘Germany’s greatest treasure’ and crashlanded in the Western Isles. The ‘treasure’ is not looted art works, as assumed, but Adolf Hitler, whose body has been kept in a state of suspended animation since 1945. The episode is in the tradition of Diana Rigg stories such as ‘The Town of No Return’ and ‘The Living Dead’, except that the identity of the enemy hiding out in a remote corner of the British Isles is now revealed.

Is There Honey Still for Tea? ‘The Last of the Cybernauts . . .??’ (1976) cleverly refers to The Avengers’ own mythology by reviving the robotic killing machines which had featured in two Rigg episodes. Felix Kane, a double agent thought killed in an explosion, has survived, though crippled and disfigured. He enlists the help of Dr Armstrong’s former assistant to revive the cybernauts, which he uses to kidnap a scientist whom he then forces to provide him with cybernetic limbs. As well as drawing on earlier Avengers episodes, the story also reworks motifs from the horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) with its disfigured, vengeance-seeking villain hiding his scarred face behind a mask, while the half-man, half-machine that Kane becomes is a figure familiar from innumerable science-fiction stories. In other episodes, however, The New Avengers ventures into John le Carré territory with stories of defectors, double agents and moles. This was a new direction for the series, towards more downbeat stories which questioned the moral certainties of the spying game. In ‘House of Cards’ (1976) Perov, a disgraced Russian agent out of favour with his superiors, fakes his own death and activates ‘sleeper’ agents who have been living under deep cover, leading normal lives for years, waiting for the moment when they would be ordered to kill a particular target. The sleepers include a lady friend of Steed’s, who attempts to poison him. Her pleas to Steed to let her go prompt an assertion of his code of duty and loyalty that is far more introspective than anything heard in the original series: ‘I never did tell you about my marriage, my one and only marriage. I married a job, I married a profession. I’ve been very faithful.’ In ‘To Trap A Rat’ (1976) a former British agent, suffering from amnesia for seventeen years, recovers his memory and sets out to expose the double agent who had escaped from his clutches in Berlin in the early 1960s. The episode is essentially a mole-hunt narrative in the le Carré mould: a man known as the ‘white rat’ (‘the bogeyman of the sixties . . . a suspected double agent working here in Whitehall’) turns out to have risen to a position of high authority within the British security services. With its story of internal treachery and deceit, and its harking back to the Cold War, the episode treads similar ground to le Carré’s novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It has an added resonance within an Avengers context, moreover, in that Irwin Gunner, the agent who exposes the mole, is played by Ian Hendry, and there is an irresistible symbolism in the motif of a man who has lost his memory returning to the series in which he was once the star. Whereas the original series had downplayed politics and had made only oblique references to the Cold War, The New Avengers positions itself firmly within a Cold War context and frequently identifies the Soviet Union or East

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Saints and Avengers Germany as the enemy power. In the two-part episode ‘K is For Kill’ (1977) units of the Red Army suddenly appear in France and begin attacking sites of no military importance. The attacks remind Steed of an incident in England in 1965 when a Russian soldier had run amok in a small village and had machinegunned a Salvation Army meeting. It turns out that the soldiers are commando units hidden in the western countries by the Soviet Union after the Second World War and kept in suspended animation until activated by radio signals from a satellite. They have now been activated by accident due to a malfunctioning satellite, and proceed to attack the targets they had been assigned – targets which, in the thirty years the units have been sleeping, have ceased to be military bases (a former Allied headquarters is now a museum, for example). The Russian authorities are anxious to avoid a diplomatic incident and are happy to let their men be hunted down (‘Détente – it is important that we do not upset the balance’). But Colonel Stanislav, who is sent to France to smooth things over, has a special interest in that his own father is one of the ‘K’ agents, charged with a special assignment of assassinating the French president. Stanislav is a military hard-liner opposed to détente who plans to start World War Three. For all the nods towards détente, the story is rooted in Cold War oppositions both past and present; the familiar Avengers motif of a secret army in waiting now has grafted onto it a definite political dimension in that the enemy is identified unambiguously as the Soviet Union. Another difference between The New Avengers and its predecessor is that some of the episodes provide their villains with realistic psychological motivations – something that had been absent from the original series. This is most apparent in ‘Dead Men Are Dangerous’ (1977), in which Mark Crayford, a double agent shot by Steed while defecting, returns from behind the Iron Curtain to exact his revenge. Crayford, who was a childhood friend and schoolboy companion of Steed’s, suffers from an acute inferiority complex having always been runner-up to Steed, the school’s top sportsman who was Victor Ludorum and won every honour and trophy going. Crayford, who has Steed’s bullet in his heart and knows that he has only a short time to live, is obsessed with the idea of beating and humiliating Steed. He wages a campaign of psychological warfare, first by vandalising Steed’s schoolboy trophies and then by kidnapping Purdey to lure Steed into a trap and kill him: ‘Second best, Steed? No, I was always the better man. Always . . . History will look back at the two of us, and they’ll know who was the better man.’ While other Avengers episodes had featured revenge plots, in Crayford’s case the hatred is more intensely felt and stems back to childhood; his desire to kill Steed is entirely personal, rather than professional or ideological.

Is There Honey Still for Tea? Although The New Avengers was sold internationally, it was only partially networked in Britain and did not gain a foothold in the all-important American market. The production was plagued by shortage of finance, and when IDTV pulled out Clemens and Fennell were forced to move the production base to Canada where they had secured backing from a syndicate of television producers and financiers. After four episodes of ‘The New Avengers in Canada’, which showed definite signs of a decline in both quality and imagination, the series was cancelled. Thereafter there were numerous attempts and rumoured attempts to revive the show, though none came to fruition. In 1998, however, a film of The Avengers was released by one of the major Hollywood movie studios Warner Bros. The film of The Avengers was an example of a trend in the US film industry during the 1990s to remake television series of the 1960s, a trend that had already seen The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, The Saint and Lost in Space, amongst others, brought to the screen and given the full big-budget Hollywood treatment. While remaking former television hits is hardly an imaginative production strategy, the process is not as straightforward as it might seem. In order to be successful at the box-office, a remake needs to appeal to a wider general audience than just the fans of the original series, which often results in the film’s fidelity to the original concept being compromised by the need to provide the star names, pyrotechnics and special effects that are deemed essential for the Hollywood blockbuster. The Avengers is a case in point. To be fair to producer Jerry Weintraub, writer Don MacPherson and director Jeremiah Chechik, they did at least attempt to retain the spirit of the television series. Unlike the previous year’s film of The Saint, The Avengers was saved the indignity of being ‘Americanised’: it is set in England, with an English Steed (Ralph Fiennes) and a predominantly British supporting cast. The necessity of a star name for the US box-office, however, resulted in the disastrous casting of Uma Thurman as Emma Peel, her performance handicapped by her complete inability to project the very English sense of humour and witty sophistication the part requires. The film was also marred by a plot that simply did not make sense. Even fantasy should make sense in its own terms: the inexplicable must be explained, the loose ends should be resolved. Whereas the television series had generally accomplished this, the film of The Avengers has several glaring plot loopholes – the result, it seems, of last-minute cuts by the studio following adverse reaction from test screenings. Although set in the present, the film’s narrative belongs in spirit to the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers: megalomaniac Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery) plans to take over the world by controlling the weather. Steed teams

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Saints and Avengers up with Dr Emma Peel, a scientist involved in developing a weather-control system known as the Prospero Shield and who is initially suspected of being a saboteur. If the television series itself was a pastiche, then the film of The Avengers is a pastiche of a pastiche in that it stitches together themes and motifs from episodes of the original. The central idea of the film is derived from the Rigg episode ‘A Surfeit of H2O’ (1966), in which a wine-making factory concealed experiments in weather-control. Among the motifs borrowed directly from television episodes are a conference of villains dressed as teddy bears (‘Mr Teddy Bear’), a sequence where Emma is trapped inside a labyrinthine, disorienting house (‘The House That Jack Built’) and Mother’s mobile headquarters on top of a double-decker bus (‘False Witness’). Although based on the Steed-Peel partnership, the presence of ‘Mother’ (played by comedian Jim Broadbent) links the film to the Tara King period. A further link to the original is provided in a cameo role for Patrick Macnee as the invisible archivist of the secret service. As amusing as these references are for Avengers fans, however, they would have been lost on the general audience for whom the film was intended. They also unbalance the narrative structure of the film, which seems like a series of discrete episodes rather than an integrated whole. The film is also unbalanced by a subplot concerning an evil double of Emma Peel, apparently the result of a cloning experiment conducted by De Wynter. Doppelgängers had been a recurring motif throughout the series, but the presence of the double of Emma Peel is never adequately explained. While mostly modelled on elements from the television series, there are, however, some significant additions for the film. It is difficult to explain why Hollywood studios, having decided to remake a property, should then tamper with the formula of the original to the extent of actually subverting it. This had happened in the film of Mission: Impossible (1996), in which the main protagonist of the television series, Jim Phelps, was revealed as the villain. The most subversive aspect of The Avengers, however, is not that ‘Father’ (here played by Fiona Shaw), a one-off character from the Thorson series (‘Stay Tuned’), turns out to be in league with De Wynter, but rather the explicit (rather than implicit) suggestion of intimacy between Steed and Mrs Peel. Kim Newman explains how the film breaks one of the taboos of the television series: The kiss between the leads drew a deserved boo at the screening I saw, because it breaks the titillating tension carefully established throughout the series (a lesson learned by The X Files) – the only way the old heroes

Is There Honey Still for Tea? could ever kiss was if they had been possessed by villains (‘Who’s Who?’). The business with the clone is so bungled (a major Uma-on-Uma fight has been cut) that we never get the obligatory moment where Steed is fooled by the doppelgänger (her, he could kiss).60

Newman suggests, moreover, that one of the reasons the film did not work was ‘because The Avengers series is so ineffably itself [that] it doesn’t offer the cracks for a revisionary re-reading along the lines of The Brady Bunch Movie or Mission: Impossible’. This seems an accurate assessment. The Avengers was so unique in its blend of wry sophistication and genre parody that it is almost impossible to remake – even its own makers had not been able to recapture the magic in its entirety with The New Avengers – and thus it remains a cultural artefact that is very much of and for its times.

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3 The English Knight Errant

The Saint

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he Saint rivalled The Avengers as the most popular and internationally successful of the British adventure series of the 1960s. Produced, like Danger Man, by ITC, The Saint ran on British television from 1962 until 1969, totalling 118 episodes (71 in black and white, 47 in colour) in four production seasons. It was sold to over 80 countries, was Lew Grade’s most profitable export and made Roger Moore into probably the biggest television star of the sixties. Furthermore, it scored a notable victory in Grade’s campaign to sell British television series to the American market, for, after initially being rejected by US networks, The Saint proved such a success in syndication that in 1965 it was bought by NBC and became a regular evening schedule filler.1 With its fast-paced narratives, glossy production values and globetrotting adventures, The Saint was the model for most of the other adventure series that followed in its wake. Unlike The Avengers, which remained so quintessentially, if absurdly, English in its content and locations, The Saint was a straight thriller that exhibited a cosmopolitan atmosphere as its hero embarked on adventures around the world – even though production rarely extended beyond Elstree Studios and locations in Britain. Where The Saint differed from most other sixties adventure series, however, was that it was not a television original but was based on an existing literary character already over 30 years old whose adventures had previously been adapted for both film and radio.

The English Knight Errant The character of Simon Templar, alias the Saint, ‘the Robin Hood of Modern Crime’, was the creation of Leslie Charteris, born Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore in 1907 of Anglo-Chinese parentage. Charteris enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, travelling the world with his parents, before coming to England to be educated through the public school system. He dropped out of university after one year in order to pursue his ambition of becoming a thriller writer and by the late 1920s was publishing stories in magazines such as Empire News and the Thriller. His first novel, X Esquire, was published in 1927, followed by four more over the next two years (Daredevil, White Rider, The Bandit, Meet the Tiger), all of which featured similar handsome, debonair, swashbuckling crime-fighters. Charteris soon realised the creative and financial advantages to be gained from chronicling the adventures of one hero, rather than inventing new names and slightly different characteristics in each story, and settled on the character of Simon Templar, introduced in Meet the Tiger (1929). His output during the 1930s was prolific: three Saint titles were published in 1930, four in 1931, two in 1932, two in 1933, three in 1934, one each in 1935 and 1936, two in 1937, two in 1938 and one in 1939. These comprised both full-length novels and volumes of two or three shorter novelettes, originally published in the Thriller magazine. Charteris first visited the United States in 1932, lured by the greater sums paid by American magazines, and later settled there, becoming an American citizen in 1946. Although less prolific than in the 1930s, he continued producing new Saint books – seven during the 1940s, six during the 1950s, four during the 1960s – as well as editing the Saint Magazine (1953–67) and writing various film and radio scripts. He moved back to Europe, dividing his time between Britain and France, enjoying the financial rewards of his creation, dying in 1993 at the age of 86. The Saint occupies an important place in the lineages of English crime fiction, and not only for the longevity of his literary career – continuation stories by other writers, supervised and edited by Charteris, were still being published in the 1970s and 1980s. The Saint belongs to the tradition of ‘gentleman outlaws’ who enjoyed their heyday during the interwar period and whose ranks also included the likes of Bruce Graeme’s Richard Verrell (alias Blackshirt), Berkeley Grey’s Norman Conquest (alias 1066), John Creasey’s Richard Rollinson (alias the Toff) and Anthony Morton’s John Mannering (alias the Baron).2 The archetype was also incarnated in the cinema by matinée idol Ivor Novello who starred in The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1927). While the Saint was far from being the first of the gentleman outlaws, he was the one who most caught the imagination of the reading public.

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Saints and Avengers Charteris conceived him as ‘a rambunctious adventurer . . . who really believed in the old-fashioned romantic ideals and was prepared to lay everything on the line to bring them to life’.3 The Saint is a self-appointed crusader who metes out his own brand of justice to those whom he calls ‘the ungodly’, criminals the law cannot touch. He enjoys an uneasy relationship with official representatives of the law, though winning the grudging respect of policemen such as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard and Inspector Fernack of the New York Police Department. Like all the great popular fiction writers, Charteris absorbed the influences of others whilst forging his own distinctive style. The Saint combines elements of E.W. Hornung’s gentleman thief Raffles, Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men and Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond. Like Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, the Saint moves in both high society and the criminal underworld, crossing class and social boundaries though always maintaining the dignity and values of the gentleman hero. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he disguises his fearless courage and steely determination beneath the languid exterior of an easy-going, slightly foppish man-abouttown. Like the Four Just Men, the Saint (who in the early Thriller stories was leader of a gang known as ‘the Five Kings’) takes it upon himself to administer rough justice to those criminals who have escaped the reaches of the law. In the later Wallace stories the Just Men themselves became more legitimised, even to the extent of receiving official sanction, but while the Saint received a royal pardon for past crimes when he foiled a plot by anarchists to blow up the royal train (this occurs at the end of Knight Templar, published in 1930), he continued to operate outside the law and was still regarded as a criminal by the police. Finally, like Bulldog Drummond, the Saint is physically strong and takes pleasure in roughing up and even in killing the most despicable of his enemies, though he is a more attractive and humorous character than Drummond and Charteris’s stories do not exhibit the somewhat fascistic overtones that critics have detected in Sapper. Just as Drummond was married to Phyllis, a chaste relationship that effectively blocked the possibility of any other romantic involvement and thus allowed Sapper to focus on action, the Saint has a permanent girlfriend in the form of Patricia Holm. Jerry Palmer points out how the relationship between the Saint and Patricia works at the level of narrative: ‘Clearly their relationship is sexual – that they live together without the benefit of wedlock is heavily stressed; and at the same time she is a companion in the fullest sense of the word, a trusted accomplice who suffers only from that relative incompetence that is the permanent affliction of the back-up team.’4

The English Knight Errant While bearing similarities to other characters, however, the Saint stands out as not only the most popular of the gentleman outlaws but also as a highly potent mythical and ideological figure. His name is obviously significant: the Christian name of Simon is perhaps an ironic reference to ‘Simple Simon’ (the Saint of course being anything but simple), while the surname of Templar is immediately suggestive of the Knights Templar (the Saint being a crusader against modern-day infidels). Furthermore, like other thriller heroes such as Bulldog Drummond and James Bond, the Saint’s adventures are tracts for their times. The Saint’s era of greatest popularity was during the 1930s, a decade marked by an increasing instability in international politics and by the effects of the Great Depression. The Saint’s enemies represented both threats from abroad, in the form of foreign anarchists and spies who sought to undermine and destabilise British society, and threats at home, including not only the usual gangsters and racketeers but also corrupt City financiers and greedy business tycoons who exploit their workers and represent the worst excesses of capitalism. Like Robin Hood, of whom he was a modern equivalent, the Saint is remarkably flexible in an ideological sense in that he can appeal simultaneously to both the political right and the political left. On the one hand he is a super-patriot and a defender of empire and monarchy, while on the other he is also a champion of the oppressed and dispossessed who takes on a corrupt establishment and in the process becomes an outlaw. In his book The Durable Desperadoes, William Vivian Butler has shown how the character of the Saint evolved over the years. The first, or Mark I Saint, was the character of the first Simon Templar novel Meet the Tiger, whom Butler describes as ‘piratical, romantic, energetic, prone to healthy skipping on beaches, but not considered a major hero, even by his creator’.5 This character was superseded in the early 1930s by the Mark II Saint: ‘the Very English Saint . . . rakehell, impudent, eccentric, outrageously versatile, eternally versifying, prone to telling long stories about such characters as Aristophanes the bow-legged bedbug, and the most dazzling stroller along pavements in fiction history’.6 This is the Saint who appears in early stories for the Thriller, where the persona of a modern-day Robin Hood takes shape. The Saint is nonchalant and witty, regarding crime-fighting as a form of sport and effortlessly running rings around criminals and policemen alike. It is during this period that central elements of the Saint myth emerge, including the gang of helpers (Patricia Holm, faithful valet ’Orace and Monty Hayward – named after Percy Montague Haydon, Charteris’s editor at the Thriller) and the character of Chief Inspector Teal (or ‘Claud Eustace’ as the Saint

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Saints and Avengers affectionately calls him), the mournful, disapproving, gum-chewing detective who is continually frustrated in his efforts to arrest the Saint. The development of the Saint after the early 1930s reflects Charteris’s own career trajectory. The Mark III ‘Anglo-American Saint’ first appeared in The Saint in New York (1935), a novel that had previously appeared in the American Magazine, a more up-market popular weekly than the ‘pulps’. During the late 1930s, as Charteris increasingly made his home in the United States, the Saint gravitated there too, acquiring a new sidekick in the person of a dim-witted American gangster called Hoppy Uniatz. ‘The new Saint is older in the sense that he is smoother, less flamboyant and (to my personal regret) a lot less outlandish than the old one,’ Butler observes.7 In the late 1930s, as the likelihood of war in Europe increased, Charteris found himself having to balance his hatred of dictatorships on the one hand (at the beginning of Prelude for War [1938] Templar listens to a ranting speech on his car radio and has a grim vision of a future of uniformed militia, secret police and concentration camps) with the isolationist sentiments of mainstream America, now his main market, on the other (in The Saint in Miami [1941] the Saint uncovers a Nazi spy ring in still-neutral America). This tension between anti-fascism and American neutrality ended with Pearl Harbour. During the years of American involvement in the Second World War, a Mark IV Saint went to work for the Allies as a secret agent, though significantly, given Charteris’s own trajectory, taking his orders from Washington rather than London. Butler refers to this version as the OSS/CIA ‘or next-best-thing-to-a-G-man Saint’.8 In going to war in this way the Saint was following the trend set by other fictional heroes of the time: the years 1942–43, in particular, saw characters as diverse as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan being pressed into war service by Hollywood. But while the Saint obviously had to perform his patriotic duty, the war years were something of an aberration for the character in that first he lost his familiar companions, operating mostly on his own, and that second he acquired the sort of official legitimacy that was entirely at odds with the character of the gentleman outlaw. Charteris found it difficult after the war to rediscover the carefree pre-war Saint – the ‘Day of the Desperado’, as Butler describes it, was over. From Saint Errant, published in 1949, there emerged the Mark V ‘Cosmopolitan Saint’: ‘a smooth, relaxed, essentially solitary figure, always on the move around the world, rarely seeming to live anywhere but in hotel rooms, and only once appearing in anything longer than a short story’.9 This character, slightly world-weary and lacking the gay insouciance of his earlier

The English Knight Errant incarnations, inhabits the later Charteris stories and was to be the basis of the television series of The Saint in the 1960s. Before making his television debut, however, the Saint had already featured in a successful cycle of feature films and in numerous radio series. RKO Radio Pictures, the smallest of the ‘Big Five’ Hollywood studios, produced a series of eight Saint films between 1938 and 1941. They were essentially supporting features made to be shown as the lower half of a double bill, cheaply produced on the studio lot and with a minimum of location shooting, but they were successful enough to turn the Saint into RKO’s most consistent box-office attraction since the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s.10 The first film was The Saint in New York (1938), directed by Ben Sistrom and written by Charles Kaufman and Mortimer Offner. It was closely based on Charteris’s novel, in which Templar decimates New York gangland and unmasks the machiavellian ‘Big Fellow’ who is the brains behind organised crime in the city, the one significant change being that the film reveals at the end that the Saint’s campaign against the metropolitan underworld was sanctioned by the Commissioner of Police. Thus the film is a more sanitised version of the Saint, downplaying the vigilante aspects by providing him with official legitimacy. This subtle but important modification was necessary to appease the censors, though even so the Saint is very far from being emasculated: The Saint in New York is the most violent of the Saint films in tone. The Saint himself was played by Louis Hayward, a South African-born actor raised in London, appearing on the British stage and screen before decamping for Broadway and Hollywood. Critics are divided over Hayward’s suitability for the role. W.O.G. Lofts and Derek Adley consider that he was ‘completely miscast’, pointing out that he was too short (Hayward was 5’ 9”, whereas Templar is supposed to be 6’ 2”) and suggesting that his acting style was ‘far too excitable and neurotic’.11 For Burl Barer, however, ‘the actor would seem a more than reasonable choice for the lead . . . Simon Templar is a swashbuckling hero, and Hayward is a certified Hollywood swashbuckler’.12 It seems to me that Hayward is the closest of the screen Saints to the Charteris character: he has the jaunty manner and insouciance that Charteris describes, he disguises his ruthlessness by engaging in lighthearted badinage with the villains, and even adopts the habit of wearing his hat at the ‘rakish angle’ that was a characteristic of the literary Saint. Hayward’s Saint is a version of the ‘Anglo-American’ Saint of the later 1930s, complete with ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent and the slightly wistful air with which Charteris had imbued the character by this time.

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Saints and Avengers The series continued without Hayward, who was replaced by George Sanders, an English actor who specialised in playing suave cads and who starred in five Saint films. It was Sanders who came to be regarded as the definitive screen Saint – Tony Mechele and Dick Fiddy, for example, write that ‘Sanders seemed perfectly suited to the role and effortlessly suggested the authority, confidence and suaveness that the Templar character commanded’ – though Charteris himself was rather less impressed, once remarking that ‘I can’t imagine anyone who less fitted the description of the Saint’.13 Sanders’ screen persona always contained a hint of nastiness beneath the suave exterior – among his other roles at this time were Nazi villains in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Man Hunt (1941) and a conniving blackmailer in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) – and his Saint is more surly and snarling than Charteris’s character. Although Sanders himself regarded making them as a chore, all five of his Saint films were well crafted mystery thrillers which contained their full share of violence and mayhem. The Saint Strikes Back (1939), directed by John Farrow, was based on Charteris’s novel Angels of Doom (originally published as She Was A Lady) though with the action relocated to San Francisco and with the character of Inspector Fernack (played by Jonathan Hale) maintained from The Saint in New York. The Saint in London (1939), directed by John Paddy Carstairs and generally thought to be the best of the series, was made in Britain as part of RKO’s British ‘quota’ production. Although it was the third Saint film, internal evidence suggests that it may have been intended as the second sequentially, for it refers to the events of The Saint in New York but not The Saint Strikes Back. Based on Charteris’s story ‘The Million Pound Day’, it again makes a subtle but ideologically significant change in that it provides the Saint with official legitimacy: Templar is revealed to have been working for the British Secret Service, much to the dismay of Inspector Teal (Gordon McLeod). The next three films returned the action to America, and were all directed by Jack Hively. The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940) was an original screen story by Ben Holmes (the credits state it is ‘from the story by Leslie Charteris’, but it bears no relation to any known Charteris story), in which Sanders played both the Saint and his doppelgänger, a jewel thief known as the Boss. The flimsy story revolved around the theme of mistaken identity – in one bizarre scene the Saint, while impersonating the Boss, comes face-to-face with the Boss, who is impersonating the Saint – and the most notable thing about the film is the appearance of horror star Bela Lugosi as a minor villain. The Saint Takes Over (1940) was an original screenplay by Lynn Root and Frank Fenton in which the Saint sets out to clear the name of

The English Knight Errant Inspector Fernack, who has been framed by gangsters. The Saint in Palm Springs (1941), which revolved around murder and the theft of three valuable stamps, was based on a story idea by Charteris which he later wrote up as one of two novelettes in The Saint Goes West. Sanders then left the series, only to play another suave crime-fighter for RKO in their ‘Falcon’ series, a sort of American equivalent of the Saint based on a character created by Michael Arlen. The last two films in RKO’s Saint series were made in Britain with ‘frozen’ funds (in order to redress its shortage of dollar reserves during the Second World War, the British Treasury had limited the amounts that American film companies could withdraw from the monies earned by their films in the British market; those monies could, however, be used to produce films in Britain). Hugh Sinclair, one of the stars of the British film of The Four Just Men (1939), assumed the halo for The Saint’s Vacation (1941) and The Saint Meets the Tiger (1943). Sinclair played an English Saint rather than the Anglo-American Saint incarnated by his predecessors. He lacked the polish of Hayward and Sanders, and his performance had too much of the arid stiff-upper-lip about it to go down well with American audiences. That said, The Saint’s Vacation, directed by Leslie Fenton and with a screenplay by Jeffrey Dell and Charteris himself, based on the novel Getaway, was an entertaining thriller set in a quaint studio-bound version of an unnamed ‘Middle European’ country before the outbreak of war, featuring a suavely duplicitous performance from Cecil Parker as the villain who, for once, is left at large at the end of the film. The Saint Meets the Tiger, directed by Paul L. Stein, was made in 1941 but was considered so poor by RKO that its release was held up for two years, eventually being turned over to Republic Pictures for distribution. Unlike the international intrigue of The Saint’s Vacation, the subject matter of gold bullion smuggling centred around a small Cornish port makes The Saint Meets the Tiger seem rather parochial. Indeed, the absence of a topical wartime background is unusual for a British-made thriller of the time, though perhaps this was due to the film being based on Charteris’s first Saint novel. The Saint then took a sabbatical from the screen, though he enjoyed a prolific career on American radio in the post-war period. The Saint had in fact made his radio debut in 1939 on Radio Eireann, a short-lived commercial radio station which broadcast on a limited basis prior to the war. Terrence de Marney, who had played the Saint, repeated the role in six adventures for the BBC Forces Band in 1940. (These obscure broadcasts, which do not survive in radio archives, were to be the only Saint adventures on British radio until some of Charteris’s original stories were remade by the BBC in the mid-

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Saints and Avengers 1990s). It was in America that the Saint’s radio career took off, with the character played by a succession of British and American actors between 1945 and 1951: Edgar Barrier (American), Brian Aherne (British), Vincent Price (American), Tom Conway (British) and Barry Sullivan (American). The Saint alternated between three networks, NBC, CBS and Mutual. Charteris wrote some of the scripts, which were a mixture of adaptations of old stories and new stories written especially for radio. In hindsight, he believed that the essence of the character had been lost in the radio adaptation, declaring that ‘I knew from my excursion into radio that the Saint as a person was fundamentally and categorically impossible to transport into any such medium’.14 One further Saint film appeared in the 1950s. The Saint’s Return (1954) was one of a number of low-budget crime thrillers produced by Britain’s Hammer Films and distributed in the United States by RKO, where it was retitled The Saint’s Girl Friday. Before the studio found commercial success with its series of Gothic horror films from the late 1950s, Hammer had specialised in second-feature crime films, usually starring second-string American actors with British supporting casts. Richard Carlson, for example, had starred in Whispering Smith Hits London (1952), derived from the detective stories by Frank H. Spearman. The Saint’s Return, directed in workmanlike fashion by Seymour Friedman, was a pleasing if undistinguished film in which Templar returns to London to investigate the murder of an old girlfriend. It was notable chiefly for two reasons: Louis Hayward reprising the role he had first played 16 years earlier (though now aged 44 he looked rather too haggard for the part) and a brief appearance by British starlet Diana Dors as a gangster’s moll. By the 1950s the B-film was on its last legs, its role increasingly taken over by the television series which provided the same sort of entertainment at lower cost. In hindsight it seems inevitable that the Saint should have made the transition to the small screen. Charteris himself, however, mindful of his personal disappointment with the radio Saint, was reluctant to sell the television rights. Among those who, at one time or another, approached Charteris with a view to buying the television rights to the Saint were US advertising firm Stockton, West, Burkhart (who wanted to include the Saint in an anthology series called Mystery Writers’ Playhouse, which seems never to have reached the screen), the peripatetic British producer Harry Alan Towers, and even, according to some accounts, Roger Moore himself.15 In 1961, however, Charteris finally relented and sold the rights to British producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman.

The English Knight Errant Baker and Berman had met while in the Army Film and Photographic Unit during the Second World War. In 1948 they set up a production company, Tempean Films, and for the next decade or so made a number of routine though effective genre films, the most successful of which were thrillers with horrific elements based loosely on actual historical events, such as Jack the Ripper (1958), The Flesh and the Fiends (1959) and The Hellfire Club (1960).16 In 1961 Baker acquired an option from Charteris to make a Saint television series, which Lew Grade agreed to finance. The series went into production at Elstree Studios in June 1962 and the first episode, ‘The Talented Husband’, was broadcast on 30 September. Twenty-six one-hour episodes were commissioned initially, which was extended to 39 when the series proved successful, and were broadcast in two batches in 1962–63 and 1963–64. A second series, eventually comprising 32 episodes, began transmission in September 1964. The first two series, in which all the episodes were adapted from Charteris stories, were made in black-and-white. Baker and Berman, who also jointly produced Gideon’s Way (1964–65) with John Gregson starring as John Creasey’s Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard, went their separate ways in 1965 when Berman left to produce another Creasey adaptation, The Baron, starring American actor Steve Forrest and touted as a possible Saint replacement. Baker, now in partnership with star Roger Moore, continued as producer of The Saint, which went into colour for its third series, broadcast in 1966–67, and its fourth and final series, broadcast in 1968–69. The colour episodes included further adaptations of Charteris stories and some new stories written especially for television. Charteris’s contract with the producers gave him approval of storylines but not of final scripts, and Baker recalled there was ‘a minor vendetta’ between the author and the series’ script supervisor, Canadian-born Harry Junkin.17 Among the scriptwriters involved with the series were Julian Bond, Gerald Kelsey, Donald James, John Kruse (whom Charteris regarded as the best of the television writers), Terry Nation, Michael Pertwee and John Stanton, while the team of directors included John Ainsworth, Roy Ward Baker, Gordon Fleming, Freddie Francis, John Gilling, Pat Jackson, Leslie Norman, Jeremy Summers, Robert Tronson and Peter Yates. John Paddy Carstairs, who had directed The Saint in London, helmed two episodes of the series, and Roger Moore himself directed eight. Lew Grade had originally wanted Patrick McGoohan to play the Saint (Danger Man was in hiatus in 1962). But McGoohan was deemed unsuitable because, as Baker put it, ‘we thought he didn’t have the right sort of panache for the Saint. He didn’t have the humour. We wanted to do the show slightly tongue in cheek’.18 McGoohan’s known aversion to kissing his leading ladies

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15. ‘So you’re the famous Simon Templar!’ Roger Moore in his best eyebrowraising form as The Saint. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

on screen, which had also put him out of the running for the Bond films, would obviously have made him an inappropriate choice to play the romantic gentleman outlaw Simon Templar. The part went instead to Roger Moore, who had established himself as a romantic action hero in the television series Ivanhoe, The Alaskans and Maverick in the late 1950s. In the latter two series Moore had played an English cowboy in the American West, and it was to avoid being typecast in such roles that he returned from Hollywood to Britain in 1960 and signed up with Lew and Leslie Grade’s agency London Management. Why did The Saint prove to be such a successful series? On one level, the production values of the series were on a par with the best of American

The English Knight Errant television at the time, thus making it attractive to overseas buyers. In hindsight The Saint has been derided because it ‘invariably involved stock footage of some exotic location, car chases against wobbly back projection, and much to-ing and fro-ing around a handful of anonymous streets on the back lot of Elstree’.19 But this sort of criticism is unfair in that it judges the series by later standards of television production rather than by those of the 1960s. Indeed, critics at the time praised its production values and technical polish. ‘Production values are a potent plus, with a wide variety of sets and a glossy atmosphere,’ Variety remarked when the second series began in 1964.20 Like the Saint films, the television series has a certain studio-bound charm, with the same exterior set at Elstree doubling, as appropriate, for London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Athens, Geneva, New York, or wherever the story happened to be set that week, though genuine local atmosphere was created through the use of location footage that was expertly matched to the studio shots. When the colour episodes were shown in America, Variety remarked that ‘if Associated Television doesn’t take The Saint on location, it sure seems that way’.21 If the quality of back projection was, admittedly, decidedly ropey, then it was no more so than in many cinema films of the time, including the early Bond films and Moore’s own Crossplot (1969). The ‘glossy atmosphere’ of The Saint, however, was more than just a matter of production values. Like the Bond films, The Saint provided a fantasy of high living and expensive consumption at a time when a majority of people in the West were enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before. Like The Avengers, The Saint can be seen to exhibit an aesthetic of consumerism in which clothes, cars and other consumer goods are more than mere props. As Colin Watson observes: Over the years, one began to feel that the smooth, dependable, inoffensive, sometimes silly but never soporific, Saint series was a projection into drama of all the advertising rituals and assumptions. Most television wears an air of salesmanship somehow; it is, after all, a shop window for talent and ideas as well as things to eat, smoke and wash with, and in the end the patina of commercialism spreads over all. The more expert the programme, the stronger the impression it conveys of trying to sell something. As Simon Templar developed in self-assurance, dress sense, wit and resourcefulness, he became less a representation of good battling against evil than of the victory of the discriminating and deodorized possessor of indispensables.22

Templar represents the ultimate consumer who maintains his extravagant lifestyle and expensive tastes without ever appearing to earn any money. In

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Saints and Avengers the series Templar has a Mews house in London and a modern apartment in New York; when he travels abroad he stays in the most exclusive hotels; he dresses in expensive clothes and drives a sleek sports car (a white Volvo P1800 with the personalised number plate ‘ST 1’). To this extent, the series might be seen as an advertisement selling western-style consumerism to the rest of the world. Another likely reason for the international success of the series was its use of familiar conventions and archetypes. ‘His adventures provide excitement in primary colours in a manner intelligible from here to Hongkong,’ remarked critic Sylvia Clayton in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Villains are clubfooted, swarthy, unshaven. Last night’s arch-plotter conveniently wore a patch over one sinister eye.’23 The Saint is nothing if not stereotyped in its characterisations: Americans are loud and rich, Frenchmen eat garlic and gesticulate, Italians are excitable, Russians are humourless, Balkan types are swarthy and untrustworthy, Latin types are treacherous and corrupt, and the Chinese (invariably represented by actor Burt Kwouk) are utterly inscrutable. In this respect, The Saint represents the continued prevalence in British popular culture of the national and racial stereotypes identified by George Orwell in his famous essay on boys’ adventure stories.24 Its gender politics are equally conventional, with women represented either as helpless damsels in distress or as scheming femme fatales. In opting for the latter-day Saint, the television series did away with Templar’s girlfriend Patricia Holm and instead allowed its hero to become romantically involved with other women. Indeed, The Saint was notable for the number of glamorous female guest stars who featured in the series, usually up-and-coming starlets, including Annette André, Francesca Annis, Alexandra Bastedo, Isla Blair, Julie Christie, Angela Douglas, Shirley Eaton, Samantha Eggar, Suzan Farmer, Penelope Horner, Suzanne Lloyd, Nanette Newman, Kate O’Mara and Nyree Dawn Porter. Their role is essentially decorative: unlike The Avengers, which had constructed positive images of modern, liberated femininity, The Saint adheres to a more reactionary discourse in its representation of women which is typical of much genre fiction. Young women in The Saint are Bond girls by any other name: pretty, characterless, disposable, hanging around until the final clinch but making no demands on the hero and invariably disappearing before the next episode for another model to take their place. Probably the main reason for the success of The Saint, however, was Roger Moore’s performance in the starring role. It is a truism that any long-running detective or adventure series depends in large measure upon the charisma and personality of its star(s). Moore’s performance set the tone of the series.

The English Knight Errant

16. The Saint was notable for its glamorous female guest stars, including Shirley Eaton in ‘The Talented Husband’ … BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

He certainly fitted the part physically, being tall, broad-shouldered, squarejawed and, even in his mid-thirties, possessing the boyish good looks of Charteris’s character. It is fashionable to make fun of Moore’s acting technique as comprising nothing more than a raised eyebrow (or two), and his performance in The Saint was no exception. One critic, for example, remarked that ‘Roger Moore has long realised that raising his right eyebrow and turning his left profile to the camera is all that is required of him’.25 But Virginia Ironside, while also indulging in the critic’s favourite sport, believed that Moore was perfectly suited to the part: Roger Moore makes a particularly good Saint. He has excellent eyebrows that operate independently and gives him a range of expression from

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17. … and Alexandra Bastedo and Kate O’Mara (on bed at right) in ‘The Counterfeit Countess’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

quizzical to puzzled to amused to mildly surprised . . . He also has astonishing hair, so much of it that you can count each individual strand, and that never gets out of place even after the most strenuous fight. He never goes to bed with girls (or, at least, we never see it), and he is so gentlemanly about money you wonder he can afford to run his smart sports car. Of his kind of hero, he is one of the smoothest and the best.26

Moore’s performance style, which he honed to perfection in The Saint and later put to good use as James Bond, is suavity personified. His Simon Templar is patriotic, chivalrous, clever, charming, impeccable in manners and appearance, a protector of women and a champion of the underdog. In certain respects the character seems rather square even for the early 1960s, a time when the new icons of British popular culture were young, irreverent and predominantly working class, exemplified by actors such as Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay and by the new pop groups, pre-eminently The Beatles. Although The Saint was set in the present, the character belonged to an archetype that had enjoyed its heyday in the 1930s and was already beginning

The English Knight Errant to seem rather dated. It is instructive, in this respect, to compare Moore’s characterisation of the Saint with Sean Connery’s characterisation of James Bond (both of whom made their debut within a week of each other in the autumn of 1962). Connery/Bond is cool, classless, ironic, sexually predatory and ruthless in dealing with his enemies, whereas Moore/Templar is square, bourgeois, unironic, chastely romantic and rarely kills anyone. The characteristics that Connery/Bond and Moore/Templar do share, however, are their snobbery – an essential prerequisite for a British action adventure hero – and their fondness for throwaway one-liners after disposing of assailants. The chivalric code of the Saint is established in the first episode of the series. In certain respects ‘The Talented Husband’ seems an unusual choice as the first story. For one thing, its setting in a quaint English village (Cookham in Berkshire) is more reminiscent of Agatha Christie-land than the international jet-set lifestyle of the post-war Saint. And, furthermore, Templar himself is off-screen for much of the story, which focuses on a theatrical producer whose two previous wives have died in mysterious circumstances and who is now married to Madge (Patricia Roc), sister of one of Templar’s old girlfriends. It turns out that Clarron (Derek Farr) is a serial wife-murderer who is plotting to kill Madge in order to claim on her life insurance. Templar works with insurance investigator Adrienne Halberd (Shirley Eaton) to foil Clarron’s scheme, but has little to do in the story until the dénouement. However, writer Jack Sanders contrived to include an early scene in order to explain certain aspects of the Saint’s personality. Templar is visiting his friend Mario, the unlikely Italian landlord of a country pub: Mario: Sometimes I feel I do not know you at all. Templar: I’m not very complicated, Mario. Like all men I’m searching for personal fulfilment. I won’t accept mine by proxy, that’s all. Mario: I do not understand. Templar: It’s very simple. I don’t like being a cog in the machine. Being one of the millions of ants that devours the dragon is all very noble, but it’s not half as much fun as being St George. Mario: With a sword in the hand and a foot on the neck of the dragon. Templar: And an arm around the fair maiden.

Thus the chivalric myth is invoked through reference to St George, and Templar’s self-image as a lone crusader and saintly protector of damsels in distress is established.27

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Saints and Avengers Critics were on the whole favourably disposed towards the new series. Variety described it as ‘a highly entertaining opener, with an ingenious plot and a flow of speedy incident’. ‘Maybe Roger Moore is miles wide of the original “Saint” conception’, it said, ‘but this would only worry the accuracysticklers: in all other respects, he conveyed the reckless charm proficiently. In this segment he had little to do, but this will be remedied later.’28 ‘No criticism on production: it was all presented in the slick and easily digestible way we have come to expect from television,’ remarked the critic of the Daily Telegraph, who was also in no doubt about the audience it was intended for: ‘Everyone, with possible minor exceptions, had that semi-American accent often denigrated as mid-Atlantic which is known to help sell TV series in America.’29 Like all long-running, successful television series, The Saint has its own specific set of narrative codes and conventions that are rarely, if at all, varied. Thus, each episode would begin with a ‘teaser’ sequence in which Templar becomes involved, usually by accident, in this week’s adventure. The sequence begins with an anecdote or wry observation by Templar which establishes the location and his reason for being there; in the black-andwhite episodes these are delivered straight to camera by Moore, whereas in the colour episodes voice-over narration is used. The location thus having been established, some incident would occur (such as an attempted robbery, kidnapping or murder) which Templar would foil. The teaser ends either with the Saint introducing himself (‘The name’s Templar. Simon Templar’) or, more usually, with another character recognising him (with a variation on the line ‘So you’re the famous Simon Templar!’). At the mention of the name, a white halo would appear above Moore’s head, while the Saint’s distinctive ten-note signature tune (composed by Charteris himself) rises on the soundtrack. The main title sequence then follows, based around the famous stick-man logo (again designed by Charteris) and a kaleidoscope of figures fighting in silhouette, guns and target motifs, accompanied by Edwin Astley’s television theme tune. The Saint is best classified as an adventure series in that it draws on storylines from across the range of narratives that are broadly grouped together as thrillers (including murder mysteries, cops-and-robbers, espionage stories, even the occasional horror/science-fiction scenario). Unlike John Drake or John Steed, the Saint is a private investigator who does not work for a government agency. He is, rather, like Richard Hannay, a talented amateur who is occasionally co-opted into the secret service for a job requiring his special talents. It is more usual, however, for the Saint to be suspected of a

The English Knight Errant crime himself so that he has to investigate in order to uncover the real culprits and clear his name. The series maintains from Charteris’s stories the Saint’s ambiguous relationship with the official representatives of law and order. The character of Chief Inspector Teal, the Saint’s regular foil, features in 24 episodes, played on one occasion each by Campbell Singer and Wensley Pither before finding his definitive interpreter in Ivor Dean. Like the literary Saint, the television Saint is involved in both international intrigue and home-grown crime. He combats gangsters, racketeers, spies and saboteurs. He uncovers corruption at all levels of society, from the crooked attorney who ‘knows every trick in the book to get a criminal off’ (‘The Element of Doubt’, 1962) to the deposed tyrant who cheats at the gambling tables to raise money for a counter-revolution (‘The Ex-King of Diamonds’, 1969). He is, above all, a champion of the oppressed and dispossessed, regardless of their nationality or race. He becomes involved in revolutions against corrupt governments in the Middle East (‘The Wonderful War’, 1964) and Latin America (‘The Reluctant Revolution’, 1966). He exposes a gang who are exploiting illegal immigrants smuggled into Britain from the Indian subcontinent (‘The People Importers’, 1969). One plot device which recurs frequently, especially in the first two series, is that of confidence tricksters who steal money from the poor and needy (‘The Charitable Countess’, 1962; ‘King of the Beggars’, 1963; ‘The Bunco Artists’, 1963; ‘The Unkind Philanthropists’, 1964). In some of the later episodes, not based on Charteris stories, the writers would appear to have turned to the headlines for topical plot material. In ‘Locate and Destroy’ (1966), for example, Templar is in Lima, Peru, where he foils an attempt to kidnap a wealthy mine owner. It turns out, however, that the mine owner is really ‘the notorious Hans Kroleg’, an official who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1945 after murdering 5000 Polish Jews by trapping them in a mine and blowing it up, while the would-be kidnappers are Israeli agents. There are obvious parallels with the case of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who had supervised the deportation of Hungarian Jews and had been responsible for organising slave labour. Eichmann escaped to South America after the war, but in 1960 was tracked down to Argentina by Mossad agents who kidnapped him and took him to Jerusalem for trial. ‘The Persistent Patriots’ (1967) similarly borrows from topical current affairs in that it is set against the background of decolonisation. It is difficult not to see the character of Jack Lisgard (played by Edward Woodward), the blunt, abrasive, white prime minister of an African colony coming to London to negotiate independence from Britain, as a thinly-veiled

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Saints and Avengers characterisation of Ian Smith, the Southern Rhodesian prime minister who had made his Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. For all that these episodes are informed by current affairs, however, their narrative strategies serve ultimately to displace political tensions with resolutions that locate conflict within the personal arena. Thus the Nazi war criminal is killed by his own wife, not by Templar or the Israelis, while the conspiracy against Lisgard turns out to have been instigated by a jealous junior official. The Saint is on the whole closer to Danger Man than The Avengers in that for the most part it is informed by the conventions of psychological realism. In the early episodes, especially, villains are provided with credible motivations. Some of the stories, indeed, are more concerned with observing human behaviour than with conventional action and adventure. ‘The Arrow of God’ (1962), for example, is a whodunit murder mystery which explores issues of personal secrets and moral propriety. At a high society house party in the Bahamas an obnoxious, muckraking newspaper gossip columnist called Floyd Vosper is murdered. It turns out that Vosper had compiled dossiers on everyone present, all of whom have a skeleton in the closet they would rather conceal, including a bigamist, an embezzler, a drug addict, a fake spiritualist deported from the USA and a Wimbledon hopeful who is ineligible having played professional tennis. Templar uncovers the culprit and draws a moral from the affair: ‘I suppose the lesson to be learned from all this is simply that nobody who isn’t absolutely clean can fight a man like Vosper and win.’ It is clear that from the beginning the television series was concerned to distance itself from the more extreme vigilante aspects of the literary Saint and to render its protagonist ideologically ‘safe’ for a general audience which included a large percentage of children. Various narrative strategies are adopted to legitimise the Saint in his personal war against ‘the ungodly’. Thus the Saint is shown to be morally righteous, even if his methods are not strictly legal, while the police are shown to be decent but handicapped by the due process of law. In ‘The Careful Terrorist’ (1962), for example, Templar pursues Nat Grendel, a corrupt union boss who has already killed an investigative reporter about to expose his criminal activities. Inspector Fernack (Allan Gifford) warns Templar not to take the law into his own hands: ‘If anyone’s gonna get Grendel, it’ll be me, us – the police. And we will get him in time, Templar, but we’ll do it legally. Now I’m warning you. I know that you like to fight fire with fire, but if you step one inch out of line on this I’ll nail you right into the ground.’ When someone attempts to shoot Grendel, Fernack naturally suspects Templar, who denies it: ‘I don’t shoot people down in the street, not even creeps like Grendel.’ The television Saint thus distances

The English Knight Errant himself from the vigilante actions of the literary Saint (in The Saint in New York, for example, he had announced his arrival by shooting gangster Jack Irboll in the street). The would-be assassin turns out to be the dead reporter’s fiancée. When Templar confronts Grendel, the exchange between them contrasts Templar’s sense of justice and moral righteousness with Grendel’s greed, arrogance and contempt for the people he is supposed to represent: Grendel: What’s behind this crusade of yours? What’s your angle? Templar: I’ve no angle, Nat. I just happen to hate phoneys and frauds. Union bosses who exploit their members . . . You are a parasite and an extortionist. You’ve had dozens of men beaten up by your hired thugs, just because they tried to vote you out and get a decent, honest union boss in your place. Grendel: I’ve had to fight dirty before, Templar, and I will again. A man has to, to get from where I started to where I am now. If you want power you’ve got to take it, you’ve got to control it until it does what you want it to do. You know what this union of mine is? A bunch of thick-headed cretins who aren’t worth sixty cents a week. But I’ve gotten them two dollars and 85 cents an hour and they should lick my boots for it.

Grendel is a typical Saint villain: he is corrupt and ruthless, but also a coward who hires men to do his dirty work for him. Templar takes delight in taunting him by breaking one of Grendel’s objets d’art and anticipating his downfall: ‘I don’t want to put you out of your misery too quickly, Nat, I want you to sweat.’ Ultimately Templar engineers Grendel’s death by contriving for him to blow himself up with a radio-controlled bomb meant for the Saint. There is evidence from the early episodes, moreover, that the strategies of legitimation for the Saint were tied to political and economic considerations. The most important overseas market for the series was the United States. ‘The Careful Terrorist’ ends with a contrived sequence which can only be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to avoid upsetting a particular constituency within the audience. Thus, in a television broadcast which Templar fronts in place of the murdered journalist, he says to viewers: ‘I sincerely hope that what I have told you about the late Nat Grendel will not be taken in any way as an attack upon those honest union leaders whose heroic efforts have done so much to eliminate unfair employment practices’. The danger of upsetting local sensibilities is a not insignificant point. In ‘The Latin Touch’ (1962) an Italian-American mobster kidnaps the daughter of an American state governor on holiday in Rome in order to blackmail him into granting a pardon for the mobster’s brother, who is facing execution for murder. The police are unable

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Saints and Avengers to find the daughter, which Templar attributes to the influence of the Mafia: ‘Tony Unciello is one of the top men in the Mafia. That means three-quarters of the population are scared stiff of him, there are thousands who would help him and literally millions who would never tell the police even if they did know where he was.’ The inference that the Mafia was so pervasive in Italian society – it even transpires that the Chief of Police himself is a member of the Mafia – resulted in Italian television initially refusing to buy the series.30 In later episodes, the Saint’s activities are legitimised through the narrative device of having him working undercover for the police or the secret service. This strategy had been used in some of the Saint films, as well as in Charteris’s wartime stories, and presumably appealed to the producers as a means of providing official sanction for the Saint’s activities. In ‘Escape Route’ (1966), for example, Templar is caught stealing jewellery by Teal and is sent down for ten years. His incarceration, however, is part of a plan to discover the brains behind a gang who arrange prison escapes. Templar unravels the identity of the ‘Mr Big’ who arranges the escape of criminals known to have loot hidden away, for a fee of £50,000, and then kills the escapees once they have led him to it. ‘The Organisation Man’ (1968) begins with Templar apparently killing a civil servant in cold blood in Battersea Park. The assassination is his initiation into a private mercenary army, but of course the killing has been staged and Templar is really infiltrating the army on behalf of British Intelligence. The mercenaries are led by a man called Roper, who believes that the world is divided ‘between those who lead and those who follow . . . Once you’ve grasped that, once you’ve freed yourself from this democratic garbage, then you can act. Democracy is devoted to the protection of the weak.’ Roper’s fascistic attitude towards ‘democratic garbage’ recalls similar villains in episodes of Danger Man and The Avengers. Templar foils Roper’s attempt to rescue an enemy spy captured by the British and, for once, kills the villain. The character of Major Carter, Templar’s secret service contact, appeared in several colour episodes, played first by Jack Gwillim and then (as here) by Mark Dignam. The colour episodes, especially, provide further ideological legitimation for the Saint by locating him within the Cold War, where Templar’s patriotism and anti-communism place him unambiguously on the right side. Unlike The Avengers, which had merely made oblique references to ‘the other side’ and had opted instead to present its villains as megalomaniacs motivated by power rather than by ideology, The Saint is again closer to Danger Man in that East/West tensions inform numerous episodes. Sometimes the Cold War is simply used as topical background in a conventional thriller plot, such as

The English Knight Errant ‘The Russian Prisoner’ (1966) where the villains are standard Soviet/Russian bogeymen trying to prevent the defection of a leading scientist to the West. The Soviets are characterised throughout as humourless, ideological automatons, represented foremost by Colonel Milanov (Yootha Joyce), a redhaired Russian security officer whose manner and appearance bear comparison with Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb in the Bond film From Russia With Love. In other episodes, however, the Cold War assumes a greater prominence which is more than just a matter of topical background. ‘When Spring is Sprung’ (1967), for example, gives every impression of being a deliberate and heavily programmed attempt to reassert British prestige in the Cold War following the Philby and Blake scandals. Templar is picked up by a girl at Nice airport and taken to see a man who introduces himself as Colonel Hannerly of British Intelligence (played in his best military manner by Allan Cuthbertson). Hannerly explains that the British have arrested Spring, a Russian agent, and believes that the Russians will approach Templar to arrange Spring’s escape. Hannerly wants Templar to accept their approach and ‘spring’ Spring, who has agreed to become a double agent for the British, so that his escape will seem genuine to the Russians. So shortly after the escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison of George Blake, which was widely supposed to have been arranged by the KGB, this plot was surely not coincidental. The episode is a story of cross and double-cross in the best John le Carré mould and in which the motifs of patriotism and duty are prominent. Chief Inspector Teal is incredulous at the suggestion that the Saint would help the other side (‘I know Templar, he’d never work for the Russians!’) and is completely perplexed when he does just that. Templar does indeed engineer Spring’s escape, handing him over to Hannerly at a safe house. However, it is revealed that ‘Hannerly’ is an impostor: he is really a Russian agent and has apparently duped Templar into rescuing Spring, who is not a double agent after all. But Templar, of course, has realised this all along and has gone along with the scheme in order to round up the spy ring and hand them over to Teal. The Russians fail because they make elementary mistakes: Templar knew Hannerly was an impostor because he wore the wrong regimental tie (Royal Artillery instead of Royal Horse Artillery – ‘a snobbish but very subtle difference’). Templar’s parting shot to the Russians is an unequivocal response to the perception that Britain has become weak and impotent: ‘You see, for some years now the rest of the world has been systematically underestimating the British. To them – you – we are a second-rate power. Which means that everything about us is second rate.

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Saints and Avengers You’re doing it now – underestimating.’ Templar is therefore not only legitimated ideologically through his role as a cold warrior, but also asserts Britain’s continued world power status at a time when, in reality, its security services were widely perceived to have been compromised. The Saint is interesting, moreover, in that the Russians/Soviets are by no means the only Cold War enemy. ‘Paper Chase’ (1966), for example, identifies the threat to British security as emanating from another Eastern bloc power. Redman, an English civil servant of German parentage, is being blackmailed into providing intelligence secrets to East Germany on the promise that his sister will be allowed to leave for the West. Templar is approached by Major Carter to follow Redman to East Germany and bring back the secret documents he has stolen. Arriving in East Germany, Templar discovers that Redman is being blackmailed by a minor criminal called Metz whose motive is pecuniary rather than ideological. However, Colonel Probst of the People’s Police learns of the existence of the documents and sets out to capture them, so that while the conspiracy may not originally have been state-sanctioned it soon assumes a political dimension. The idea that East Germany was a major enemy – the old wartime enemy Germany combined with the new enemy of Communism – is a prominent theme in British Cold War spy fiction, including John le Carré’s novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (filmed in 1965). The episode is replete with references to Eastern bloc oppression (‘There are more People’s Police in this country than there are people’, Templar observes) and concludes with the familiar Cold War narrative of flight and escape as Templar and Redman’s sister Hanya cross the border into West Germany, though Redman himself is killed. In some later episodes, there is a trend away from the purely European dimension of the Cold War. In ‘The Gadget Lovers’ (1967) Templar foils an assassination attempt on a British agent in West Berlin. The attempted assassination was the work of the Russians, in retaliation for the killing of several of their own agents which the Russians believe to have been the work of the British. The Russians are planning a revenge campaign, but Templar suspects that a third party is responsible for the escalation of violence in an attempt to set the British and Russians against each other. The identity of the mysterious third party is apparent to Templar. ‘You know what I smell? Chop-suey,’ he remarks. ‘What would suit them [he makes a slit-eyed gesture] better than to have us and the Russians slitting each other’s throats?’ In a plot device that anticipates the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, Templar enters into an uneasy alliance with female KGB agent Colonel Smolenko to investigate the conspiracy. The trail leads them first to Paris – where there

The English Knight Errant are echoes of Ninotchka as the Russian ice-maiden melts under Templar’s charm, discovering her femininity by wearing ‘decadent’ frocks – and then to Switzerland, where they discover a monastery is really the front for a secret factory making high-tech assassination equipment and where the ‘monks’ are Chinese soldiers. Colonel Wing (Burt Kwouk) acknowledges the rift that had developed between the Soviet Union and Communist China during the 1960s (‘Colonel, we conduct our campaign against you from many places’) and sees a new world order in the making (‘Let mad dogs eat each other. Ultimately we shall build the future’). The suggestion that Red China presented an even greater threat to western civilisation than the Soviet Union is also made in ‘The Master Plan’ (1969). Templar uncovers a plot to distribute Chinese heroin in Britain through nightclubs in London, Liverpool and Manchester. Mr Ching (Burt Kwouk again) explains how flooding the West with narcotics is part of a plan to take over the world by stealth: Ching: The People’s Republic of China intends to dominate the world. Templar: So did Hitler. Ching: It will not be a rapid process. It may take many years. Nevertheless, we can claim a modest success. Have you any idea how many drug addicts there were in London in 1961? Templar: Three, five hundred? Ching: Today Mr Templar, there are over seven thousand. Sadly we are not as successful here as in America. In New York alone addicts number over a hundred thousand. I tell you this so you will fully understand that we shall allow nothing and no-one to stand in our way.

The representation of the Chinese as conspirators on a grand scale may be attributed to two influences. On one level, it reworks the old idea of the ‘yellow peril’ that has pervaded western popular culture, in which the oriental races are depicted as a villainous, inscrutable ‘other’ which intends to subjugate white, European, Christian civilisation. This narrative tradition reached its apogee in the character of Dr Fu Manchu, the ‘devil doctor’ created by Sax Rohmer in a long-running series of novels (the first was published in 1913) which concerned his many diabolical schemes to conquer the world. It was no coincidence that a series of Fu Manchu films, produced by Harry Alan Towers and starring Christopher Lee, was produced between 1965 and 1970. On another level, however, the ‘yellow peril’ has grafted onto it at this

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Saints and Avengers time an explicitly political dimension due to the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1965– 68) in China, a set of policies imposed by Mao Tse-tung which amounted to nothing less than a wholesale attempt to impose revolutionary Marxist ideology on all levels of society. Moreover, the ‘Cultural Revolution’ coincided with a period in which China gained its first nuclear weapons (it exploded its first atom bomb in 1964, and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967) and began to intervene in African politics, challenging the Soviet Union as the main international supporter of the newly emergent Marxist states. Thus China was seen as both an ideological and a geopolitical threat to the West. ‘The Master Plan’ reflects these fears when Ching makes reference to domestic events in China (‘You realise that in China we are pursuing a revolution with dedicated ferocity’) and asserts the extent of Chinese ambitions (‘Ultimately we will subjugate the West, and whether it takes us fifty years or two hundred is of no importance’). In this respect, The Saint might be compared to other narratives of the late 1960s which presented Red China as trying to conquer the world, most notably the deliriously paranoid science-fiction film Battle Beneath the Earth (1967) in which the Chinese attempt to invade America by burrowing under the ocean. It is not only the Chinese, however, who have totalitarian ambitions. In the colour episodes of The Saint there is a trend away from the low-life mobsters and racketeers who had been the main villains in earlier episodes and towards megalomaniac master criminals in the best Avengers tradition. The most extreme example of this trend is ‘The Man Who Liked Lions’ (1966) in which Templar investigates the death of a reporter friend in Rome which leads to a mysterious criminal syndicate known as ‘the Organisation’, a sort of ‘Murder, Inc.’ which specialises in killing politicians, industrialists and other prominent public figures and making their deaths look like accidents. The head of the Organisation is Tiberio, who models himself on Tiberius Caesar (‘Marvellous archetype – the sort of man who raised Rome to the peak of her power’) and who lives in a villa decorated with Roman artefacts. The episode is replete with visual references to sword-and-sandal Roman epics: Tiberio celebrates his birthday by presiding over an orgy in Roman dress and watching a wrestling competition between two heavily muscled, semi-naked men. As is customary with deranged megalomaniacs, Templar is treated to a lecture on the nature of power: Tiberio: I’m a great admirer of the early Roman culture. It had much to recommend it – force, compulsion, discipline and strength. At least it produced men – real men. Not like our sick, decadent society today. What

The English Knight Errant has it produced? Long-haired, self-absorbed effeminates! I’d like to see most of them quietly exterminated.

His obsession with power, discipline and strength, and his contempt for present-day society, clearly identify Tiberio as a fascist. Ultimately Tiberio meets his end when he challenges Templar to a gladiatorial contest (‘As an enemy, Mr Templar, I trust you’ll provide an exciting opponent’), fought with swords and in Roman garb, which results in Tiberio falling to his death in his own lion-pit.31 A perverse form of social Darwinism motivates the conspiracy in ‘The Death Game’ (1967). Templar becomes involved in a ‘game’ of hunters and victims organised by psychology students, which starts off as an apparently harmless university craze but which takes on much more sinister overtones when participants are asked if they would be willing to play it for real. When a university lecturer is killed, Templar takes his place in the ‘death game’ and travels to Switzerland where he discovers the mastermind behind the scheme is Adolf Vogler, an international blackmailer who has designed the game in order to recruit psychopaths to act as enforcers: ‘My organisation is a large one. I need young men at the height of their physical and mental powers. But particularly I need men who have been psychologically tested and proven.’ The episode bears resemblance to the film The Most Dangerous Game (1932), in which the evil Count Zaroff lures shipwreck victims onto his island so that he can hunt them down and kill them like animals. When Templar’s identity is discovered, he and his companion Jenny find themselves being hunted by Vogler’s psychopaths. Occasionally The Saint ventures beyond the generic territory of the straight thriller and finds itself, in one critic’s apt phrase, ‘wandering along the borderline of Telefantasy’.32 A good example of this trend is ‘The House on Dragon’s Rock’ (1966), which could almost have been lifted from Avengersland were it not for the fact that it was based on Charteris’s story ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’. The episode is a horror/science-fiction narrative which breaks the usual rule of the thriller that, no matter how improbable, the story should at least be in the realm of the possible. Visiting a friend in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, Templar discovers a climate of hostility and fear. The local people are suspicious and afraid (‘There have been things happening around here the last couple of months that nobody understands’), and when a shepherd who had gone missing turns up a gibbering wreck with lacerations on his chest it seems that some sort of beast is at loose in the hills. Suspicion falls on an organisation called Western Research Laboratories

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Saints and Avengers which has bought ‘the old house’ and is conducting scientific experiments in conditions of great secrecy. Templar meets Dr Sardon, who ostensibly is researching communication between human beings and insects but who, it transpires, is using radiation to create a breed of giant ants which have been terrorising the countryside. Sardon is that familiar figure of fantasy fiction, the mad scientist and technocrat who holds people in contempt and for whom the quest for knowledge has become an obsession. He kills his own assistant when the other man tries to destroy the results of the experiments (‘To enlarge the boundaries of science it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice a few lives!’) and plans to unleash the ants on the world in the knowledge that they will destroy the human race. Sardon’s distorted idea of science is apparent as he explains to Templar why he believes ants are superior to human beings: Sardon: Magnificent, isn’t she? She and her kind are the future rulers of the world. We can control her with electronic impulses . . . The human race is doomed, anyway. It’s only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves, and everything else, by nuclear energy. That’s why I plan for the ants to take over. Templar: If ants are so clever, why haven’t they conquered the earth long before this? Sardon: Because nature cheated them. Giving them so much, she made them wait for the last essential – sheer physical size. I have provided that, Mr Templar. Now the ants have strength equal to their intelligence, and they will rule wisely. The inevitable order of perfect organisation!

Like the technocrats of The Avengers who had dreamed of ‘perfect organisation’, Sardon is killed by his own creation, while Templar destroys the ants’ nest with kerosene. The episode owes more to the themes of Frankenstein (a misguided scientist who tampers with nature) and The Island of Dr Moreau (a parable of the bestial forces underlying civilisation) than it does to the thriller or detective story. Indeed, the horrific elements of ‘The House on Dragon’s Rock’ (an episode which, incidentally, was one of those directed by Roger Moore himself) were regarded as problematic and the episode was broadcast in a later time slot than usual with a warning that it was deemed unsuitable for younger audiences.33 Towards the end of the series there are signs that the writers were exploring other avenues for the Saint. ‘The Ex-King of Diamonds’ (1969) anticipates The Persuaders!, the next series Moore and Baker were to make for Grade, through its narrative which teams Templar with an American partner in a

The English Knight Errant light-hearted adventure on the Côte d’Azur. The character of Rod Huston is a brash Texan oil millionaire (‘I’ve got so much bread I’m drowning in it. I got to keep spending it just to be able to breathe’) cast in a similar mould to Danny Wilde, the character played by Tony Curtis in The Persuaders!. Templar and Huston engage in a friendly rivalry both at the gaming tables and in romantic affairs, having a comic brawl before teaming up to frustrate a crooked baccarat game. Huston was played by Stuart Damon, one of the stars of the ITC series The Champions which had been filmed in 1967 but was not broadcast on British television for another two years. ‘Portrait of Brenda’ (1969), a story of racketeering and murder set against the background of ‘Swinging London’, is a misguided attempt to position the Saint in relation to the social and cultural changes taking place during the 1960s, especially the emergence of counter-cultural movements in the latter half of the decade. Rather than aligning the Saint with the counter-cultures, however, the episode merely highlights what an old-fashioned character he is. Templar himself is a wry observer of the counter-culture rather than a participant in it (‘In swinging London, whether you want to buy mauve hipsters or rent a man’s chest wig for the weekend, the King’s Road, Chelsea, is the place to look,’ he muses. ‘They come in all shapes, sizes and sexes’) and, three years after the ‘Swinging London’ label had been coined by Time magazine, the world of pop radio stations, recording groups and fashion boutiques presented in the episode already seems somewhat dated. The story mocks the fad for oriental mysticism that had become popular in the West – in 1967, for instance, the Beatles had adopted the Maharajah Mahesh Yogi as their ‘spiritual adviser’ – through a character known as ‘the Guru’ whose gullible followers have been conned out of their money (though it turns out to be the guru’s secretary who has been cooking the books rather than the holy man himself). At the very end of the series there was an indication that the production team of The Saint was ready to branch out in other ways. Two double episodes shown in two parts on British television – ‘Vendetta for the Saint’ (1969) and ‘The Fiction Makers’ (1968) – were joined together and released to cinemas in other countries. There are several possible reasons for this strategy. The producers cannot have failed to notice the success which a series of films based on the American secret agent series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had enjoyed when released theatrically in Britain and Europe. These films (To Trap a Spy, The Spy With My Face, One Spy Too Many, The Spy in the Green Hat, One of Our Spies is Missing, The Helicopter Spies, The Karate Killers, How to Save the World) had comprised nothing more than double episodes of

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Saints and Avengers the television series, but were successful at the box-office between 1965 and 1968 due to the craze for spy films following the success of the Bond movies. A theatrical release for television episodes was attractive in that any revenues accruing after distribution and marketing costs would be straight profit, the episodes already having been costed from the television budget. It may also have been a way of offsetting increased production costs – ‘Vendetta for the Saint’, for example, featured location shooting in Malta – in addition to providing a dry run at feature film production for Baker and Moore, who would soon afterwards produce and star in the spy caper Crossplot. The fact that both the Saint ‘films’ are sufficiently different from the television episodes, for instance in their longer and more elaborate title sequences and different music, suggests that they were intended for theatrical release from the beginning rather than this being an afterthought.34 The two Saint ‘films’ are quite different from each other, revealing the different directions in which the series was being pulled at the end between the straight thriller format on the one hand and a more tongue-in-cheek treatment on the other. ‘Vendetta for the Saint’, the only Charteris story adapted for the last batch of episodes, anticipates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) in that it explores the internal workings of the Mafia and its code of honour. In Naples, Templar comes across Alexandro Destamio (Ian Hendry), a tough and ruthless Mafia don who dominates his girlfriend through fear and physical intimidation. Don Pasquale (Finlay Currie), ‘the supreme head of the Mafia’, is dying and Destamio is the favourite to succeed him. However, Templar discovers that Destamio is really an impostor, being a bank robber called Dino Cantelli who disappeared twenty years ago and assumed the identity of Destamio. Templar is captured by the Mafia and taken to see Don Pasquale, who tries to persuade him of the social and economic importance of the Mafia: Don Pasquale: Simon Templar, you have given us trouble before. Templar: I’m flattered you remembered. Don Pasquale: Oh, not that it matters, but you have the wrong idea of us. Templar: I doubt it. Don Pasquale: The Mafia has an iron morality, Mr Templar. Did you know that at the end of the second war no less than thirty gangs terrorised Sicily? Templar: And now there’s only one. Don Pasquale: One organisation only, but there is order now. Trade is flourishing. We are harsh, that is true, but we are also just.

The English Knight Errant ‘Vendetta for the Saint’ is realistic in the sense that psychologically determined motives lay behind the conspiracy (greed, power) and that it exposes the organisation of the Mafia (which before The Godfather was rarely mentioned by name in films). It is also a more violent adventure than usual, with Templar engaging in a tough street fight with a knife-wielding assailant and blasting one heavy at close range with a shotgun – another sign, perhaps, that it was intended for cinema release at a time when the level of film violence was increasing in films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). ‘The Fiction Makers’, in contrast, is closer in spirit to the fantasy scenarios of The Avengers and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. than to the tradition of psychological realism. Written by John Kruse, ‘The Fiction Makers’ ingeniously explores the fictionality of its own format whilst also being a witty and exciting adventure in its own right. The tone is set at the beginning when Templar, accompanying an actress to a film premiere, offers a wry commentary on the on-screen fisticuffs: ‘Screen fights are all the same and not difficult to outguess. Now let’s see – a couple of haymakers, followed by a flying hip throw, now a karate chop to the neck, to the midriff, another to the neck, and into the bath . . . A mechanical horse – that must be there for some reason. Which leaves us with the mirror. Plus the groping hand bit.’ The irony here, of course, is that the sequence is spoofing the sort of staged fights that were themselves a hallmark of The Saint – one commentator, indeed, has described Roger Moore as ‘one of the most devastating balsasmashers in the business’.35 The story explores the idea of a fictional creation growing beyond the control of the writer, a notion which seems to have appealed to Charteris who thought it was ‘a splendid job’. ‘“The Fiction Makers” fulfils all the promise of the synopsis, and the dialogue has a crisp sparkle which has all too often been lacking in other scripts,’ he told the producers.36 Templar meets ‘Amos Klein’, reclusive author of the popular ‘Charles Lake’ adventure stories, and discovers that ‘he’ is actually a ‘she’ (Sylvia Sims). The story is based on the ludicrous premise that a master criminal known as Warlock (Kenneth J. Warren) has set up a criminal organisation called SWORD (Secret World Organisation for Retribution and Destruction) based on the Charles Lake books. Warlock kidnaps Amos Klein in order to put the author’s ingenuity and imagination to work in devising a plan to rob Hermetico, a super high-technology underground bank vault where the world’s leading powers deposit their national treasures and valuables. However, Warlock has mistaken Templar for Klein and believes that the girl is really Klein’s secretary (referred to as ‘Miss Darling’). The episode borrows

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Saints and Avengers ideas and plot devices from a range of sources. Warlock’s country house base, with its electrified fences, closed-circuit television and a laboratory in the basement complete with disintegrating ray, would not seem out of place in an Edgar Wallace story. There are certain similarities to both the novel and film of Goldfinger, with its improbable plot to break into a heavily guarded bank, its board meeting of gangsters and the Flemingesque names of female characters such as Galaxy Rose (Justine Lord). The hammy performances and abundance of in-jokes (‘If by so much as a raised eyebrow, Mr Klein, you attempt to betray me to Hermetico, Miss Darling will be placed in the tender care of this exquisite machine’) testify that the story is not meant to be taken seriously, unlike other Saint adventures which had a moral of sorts. In certain respects, indeed, ‘The Fiction Makers’ anticipates Moore’s turn as James Bond, when he played the role in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek style which suggested that he did not take the bizarre predicaments in which he found himself at all seriously. The Saint remained hugely popular and successful to the end, its international sales being such that when the cessation of the series was announced one journalist remarked that it ‘should send a spate of coronaries around the Treasury’.37 Significantly, the series had gained a strong foothold in the American market. Initially rejected by the US networks for being ‘too English’, The Saint had been broadcast in syndication by local television stations for two years. One of the stations which broadcast it was WNBC-TV in New York, where the series drew a large following at 11pm on Sunday nights. Taking note of this, the NBC network aired several episodes in different regions in 1965 and was sufficiently impressed with the response to buy the colour series for coast-to-coast broadcast. In total NBC fully networked 32 colour episodes between 1967 and 1969, usually showing them on Saturday or Sunday evenings as a mid-season replacement for one of the network’s own shows that had been cancelled following a lukewarm reception. In this way The Saint became a reliable (and inexpensive) ‘filler’ for the network, a point which was not lost on the trade press. ‘Television is loaded with paradoxes. In what other game is the bench stronger than the first team?’ Variety asked in 1968. ‘Yet here comes good old Roger Moore again out of the NBC bullpen to relieve a bonus rookie (Maya) who couldn’t make it through the first inning [sic]. And the ITC reliever costs a little more than half as much as the starter.’38 Later attempts to bring the Saint to both the small and the large screen have been rather less successful than the 1960s Saint series. Baker was executive producer of Return of the Saint, which ran for 24 episodes in 1978–

The English Knight Errant 79. It had originally been intended to make Son of the Saint, with an older Templar handing over the halo to his offspring, but this idea was abandoned and Return of the Saint maintained an ageless Templar whose adventures continued to be set in the present day. Ian Ogilvy, who at 35 was the same age as Moore when he began in 1962, was cast largely due to his physical resemblance to his predecessor: although slightly built, Ogilvy bore a noticeable facial similarity to the younger Moore. Like The New Avengers, Return of the Saint now seems a rather pale imitation of the original. The stories are unmemorable, involving standard tropes such as stolen gold (‘Collision Course’), drugs (‘The Poppy Chain’), spying (‘The Debt Collectors’), kidnapping (‘Signal Stop’) and organised killing (‘The Murder Cartel’). In a paradoxical sort of way, the use of authentic European locations works against the series, which lacks the quaint studio-bound charm of the original. The styles and fashions are very much of their time – Ogilvy wears flared trousers and open-necked, wide-collared shirts – but have the effect of making Templar appear more ridiculous than trendy. Moreover, coming as it did in the wake of so many other adventure series, there was no longer anything especially distinctive about Return of the Saint. Templar was now merely another crimefighter who was hardly any different from countless others on television: the character of the swashbuckling gentleman outlaw had become an anachronism by the 1970s. The problem of transplanting Charteris’s character into the modern world was also apparent when London Weekend Television tried to resurrect The Saint as a series of two-hour television movies in 1989. One critic observed: ‘Only nostalgia for the whimsical Sixties series can serve to explain a possibly unprecedented second revival of the formula, as the world of Leslie Charteris, with its clean-cut hero and clear-cut villains, has no obvious relevance to Thatcher’s Britain – despite an extensive re-modelling job by LWT, involving topical storylines, a supposedly “grittier” quality, and locations and characters designed to secure the support of a variety of foreign bankers.’39 Templar was played by Simon Dutton, a conventionally handsome leading man with male model looks, but whose acting gave the impression of having undergone a charisma bypass. The indifferent reception of the first two episodes brought about the swift cancellation of the series, with the remainder being postponed and broadcast later as a schedule fillers. Yet even worse was to come. In 1997 Paramount Pictures released a bigbudget feature film of The Saint starring the American Val Kilmer. It was directed by Phillip Noyce, an Australian who had come to prominence with the taut thriller Dead Calm (1989) before moving to Hollywood where he

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Saints and Avengers helmed two big-budget adaptations of Tom Clancy thrillers, Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). These films, both starring Harrison Ford as CIA agent Jack Ryan, can be seen as an attempt by Paramount to establish an action-adventure franchise to rival the James Bond films, and the same intention lay behind the studio’s decision to make The Saint. However, the fact that The Saint was a critical and commercial failure put paid to any ambitions the studio had for a series. Its failure can be attributed to any number of factors, though foremost among them are the disastrous miscasting of the hero and the film’s complete lack of fidelity to the history and mythology of the Saint character. Indeed, the whole sorry affair is so far removed from any resemblance to Charteris that one wonders why the studio bothered to buy the rights. The Saint is so bad that it makes the film of The Avengers look good. In the first place, a wholly inappropriate backstory was invented in an attempt to provide psychological motivation for the Saint. A young boy is traumatised by his experiences in a Roman Catholic orphanage, where the children are victimised by the priests. The boy rejects the name of ‘John Rossi’ given to him (all the children are named after saints) and, inspired by stories of the crusades, adopts the name of ‘Simon Templar’. The children are all punished for his misdeeds by being deprived of food. Simon sets them free, but he sees his sweetheart Agnes fall to her death from a balcony when a guard dog attacks her. The introduction of a backstory involving childhood psychological trauma borrows directly from the mythology of Batman. Indeed, Kilmer had already played Batman and his alter ego Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever (1995), replacing Michael Keaton who had appeared in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), before surrendering the role of the Caped Crusader to George Clooney for Batman and Robin (1997) in order to make The Saint instead. ‘Even without the rubber suit, Kilmer seems more Batman than Templar,’ one critic complained.40 In adulthood, Simon Templar has become an international thief whose intention is to retire when he has earned $50 million. This represents a complete travesty of Charteris’s character whose motivation was never so selfish, who stole only from criminals and then only to finance his crusade against ‘the ungodly’. Templar is contracted to steal the formula for a new energy process known as ‘cold fusion’ from brilliant nuclear physicist Dr Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue) by Russian Mafia leader Ivan Tretiak (Rade Serbedzija). The Russian villains and locations (though Moscow’s Red Square was actually a massive set at Pinewood Studios) suggest parallels with the Bond film GoldenEye (1995), and the prominence afforded to high-tech trappings and fancy gadgets is further evidence that the producers

The English Knight Errant were trying to imitate the Bond series. The film restores one idea of the early Charteris stories by making the Saint a master of disguise (he appears variously as a Russian army officer, a toothy scientist, a camp German homosexual and a bohemian South African poet called ‘Thomas More’ – all his aliases use the names of saints), but the effect was merely to provide critics of Kilmer’s acting with the sort of opportunities they could not miss: ‘With his array of comic voices and false moustaches, Kilmer would be more suited to a summer season at the Southend Cliffs Pavilion than a Hollywood movie,’ said the Independent.41 Is there an overarching reason for the failure of these attempts to resurrect the Saint since the heyday of the 1960s series? That the 1997 film had to reinvent the character so fundamentally (and, as it turned out, disastrously) suggests that the producers believed Charteris’s original gentleman outlaw would no longer work as a popular hero at the end of the century. This may well be true. As an ideological construct, the Saint is rooted in the 1930s. This was the time when the fundamentals of the Saint myth took shape and when the figure of the swashbuckling freelance crime-fighter was a common one in popular fiction. In the latter twentieth century, however, the gentleman outlaw has been displaced by other archetypes. The uncouth, shabbily dressed, essentially blue-collar action heroes portrayed by Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis in the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard films are far removed from the gentlemanly good manners of the Saint. Unlike James Bond, who has been successfully modernised in the films since Ian Fleming created him in the 1950s, the Saint does not lend himself to the same process of constant renewal. When the television series was made in the 1960s, it was still just feasible to update stories written two or three decades earlier. This is no longer the case. When the BBC adapted three of the early Charteris stories for radio in 1995, it wisely opted to recreate the Saint in period, setting the adventures in the 1930s and using contemporary dance band music for period atmosphere. The adaptations, starring Paul Reece as the Saint, were well received by critics and fans. The same strategy has worked for other fictional detectives of the interwar period. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, for example, following her incarnation as Margaret Rutherford in four films during the 1960s which transplanted the character to the present day, was returned to period for the BBC’s dramatisations with Joan Hickson in the 1980s. The Hercule Poirot stories have also been lovingly recreated in authentic period settings for the ITV series starring David Suchet. If the Saint has a future either in the cinema or on television, it lies in the 1930s rather than in the present.

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4 Swinging Britain

Adam Adamant Lives!

A

dam Adamant Lives! is the odd-one-out among the series included in this study in that it was the only major entry in the detective/adventure genre produced by the BBC. Conceived as the corporation’s summer replacement for the popular American import The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Adam Adamant Lives! ran for a total of 29 episodes in two series: a first series of 16 episodes was broadcast during the summer of 1966 and was successful enough in terms of ratings that a second series of 13 episodes followed early in 1967. Adam Adamant Lives! followed the adventures of a gentleman crime-fighter who, after being frozen alive in 1902, is resurrected in the Britain of the mid-1960s and from there resumes his crusade against the forces of chaos and villainy. Its device of placing a protagonist imbued with the values of late Victorian and early Edwardian England into the midst of the ‘swinging sixties’ meant that Adam Adamant Lives! responded more directly to social trends and attitudes than most examples of the genre. Its reception was mixed, both with critics and within the BBC. Indeed, of all the series discussed in this book, Adam Adamant Lives! is the one which seems to divide opinion most. One commentator feels that it ‘came very close to toppling the crown of The Avengers’.1 The series evidently had its admirers at the time: ‘I hope this series is the first of many,’ one correspondent declared. ‘It is a shining breeze in a cloggy schmaltzy atmosphere, and it is BRITISH!’2 Opinion within the BBC was less enthusiastic, however. As the Head of Series,

Swinging Britain Andrew Osborn, remarked upon its cancellation: ‘I think we all realised for a large variety of reasons its full potential was never fully achieved.’3 For all its deserved reputation for quality drama and realist plays, the BBC is no stranger to fantasy. In one sense Adam Adamant Lives! belongs to a lineage of BBC telefantasy that also includes the three Quatermass serials (The Quatermass Experiment, 1953; Quatermass II, 1955; Quatermass and the Pit, 1957), A for Andromeda (1961), Doctor Who (1963–89), Counterstrike (1969), Doomwatch (1970–72), The Survivors (1975–77), Blake’s 7 (1978– 81) and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (appearing first on radio in 1978 and then on television in 1981). There have also been adaptations of works by science-fiction authors such as H.G. Wells and John Wyndham and single plays with a science-fiction theme, notably The Flipside of Dominick Hyde (1981). Adam Adamant Lives! is slightly different, however, in that it is less a pure science-fiction series than an adventure series with certain science-fiction elements. Comparisons with The Avengers are inevitable, though this would not have been a yardstick of which the BBC’s senior hierarchy approved. The fact that ITV enjoyed greater ratings success in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a thorn in the side of the BBC’s Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, who complained publicly in 1963: ‘So long as a young cock can crow from the malodorous farmyard of a series known as The Avengers, so long will civilised relations be difficult.’4 It is ironic, therefore, that one of the BBC’s responses to ITV’s lead in the battle for ratings was to recruit the man who had initiated The Avengers, Sydney Newman. The main reason for Newman’s appointment as Head of the Drama Group (Television) in 1962 was his success as producer of ABC’s Armchair Theatre; during his time at the corporation, Newman was to be principally responsible for The Wednesday Play (1964–70) which quickly acquired an almost mythical reputation for its socially-relevant, realist dramas. But Newman also had that degree of ‘undoubted dynamism and talent for showmanship’ which the corporation hoped would also bring popular success.5 It was under Newman that the BBC commissioned some of its most popular entertainment series of the 1960s such as Doctor Finlay’s Casebook and Sherlock Holmes. It was Newman, too, who initiated what was to become the corporation’s longest-running popular serial, Doctor Who, in 1963. It was predicted, accurately, that with Doctor Who ‘the BBC Drama Group should be making its first major ratings breakthrough against ITV’. Doctor Who was described as being ‘a somewhat mysterious type of programme consisting in part of fantasy and realism’ in so far as ‘while the premise . . . is fantastic, the treatment of various places and periods will be treated realistically’.6

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Saints and Avengers The idea of ‘realistic fantasy’ is not so absurd as it may seem: one of the hallmarks of British science-fiction, especially that produced by the BBC, is that it tends to use a realistic, at times almost documentary-like style to present unlikely events. This was exemplified by the Quatermass serials and by the BBC’s adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). The combination of fantasy and realism that characterised Doctor Who and other science-fiction programmes was to be prominent in the production discourse of Adam Adamant Lives!, another series initiated by Newman. While, in the event, Adam Adamant Lives! was a television original, documentation in the BBC Written Archives reveals that it was not originally intended as such. Newman had in fact wanted to make a television series based on the character of Sexton Blake. Sexton Blake – ‘the other Baker Street detective’ – had been created by the Harmsworth Press in the 1890s and had since enjoyed a prolific career in print, film and radio.7 Originally the brainchild of Hal Meredith (pseudonym of Harry Blyth), but since chronicled by others, Sexton Blake was a sort of poor man’s Sherlock Holmes, even down to his Baker Street address and habit of playing the violin. He combined the intellectual brilliance of Holmes with the physical attributes of the Richard Hannay-Bulldog Drummond type of hero and his adventures were a mixture of cerebral detection and fast-paced sensational thriller action. George Curzon had played Sexton Blake in three cheaply-made British films of the 1930s (Sexton Blake and the Bearded Doctor, Sexton Blake and the Mademoiselle, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror), succeeded by David Farrar in the 1940s (Meet Sexton Blake, The Echo Murders), while the BBC had broadcast a radio series in 1940. The Sexton Blake Library had run until 1963 when the rights for the character passed to Fleetway Publications. Newman became interested in the character in 1965 and for several months actively explored the possibility of making a Sexton Blake television series. His intention, it seems, was to update Sexton Blake from the Victorian period to the present day. Negotiations were opened with Fleetway: ‘[W]hat we seek from you is the right to use the basic Sexton Blake character, on the basis that he has the spiritual attitude of 1895 set in a 1965 context,’ R.G. Walford, the BBC’s Head of Copyright, explained to the sceptical publishers.8 Newman proposed the title Sexton Blake Lives and the premise that Blake would be resurrected in the present after having been preserved in ice since the 1890s. The idea of a protagonist taken out of his own time and relocated in the future is a familiar one: its various manifestations include Rip Van Winkle, Buck Rogers and Austin Powers. Newman’s specific idea of Blake being frozen alive was influenced, apparently, by press reports that American

Swinging Britain scientists were developing ‘ice tombs’ and ‘freezer cemeteries’ to preserve human bodies in cold storage until a time when cures had been found for presently incurable diseases. But Newman clearly had in mind more than just another ‘out-of-his-own-time’ adventure hero. He proposed to use the series to examine present-day social mores and attitudes through the eyes of its Victorian protagonist. Preparation for the series extended as far as the drafting of a writers’ ‘bible’, which declared: The series, Sexton Blake Lives, though primarily thorough-going hokum, sets out to project a virtuous Victorian into the incubus of the mid twentieth century, and thus throw an oblique satirical look at 1965 from the point of view of 1895 and vice versa. Because our series is one concerned with adventure and crime it is, ipso facto, concerned with the triumph of good over evil, and will, therefore, reaffirm the lasting values epitomised by our Victorian hero. By the same token he will, by dint of his shocked awareness, be able to recognise that which is positive and good in the institutions and attitudes of the world as it is today.9

Thus the element of social realism that characterised quality drama was also to be present in the adventure series. ‘It is mandatory that the drama series not so much reflects social mores for what they are, but suggests what they might be,’ the preamble to the writer’s guide declared. ‘There is nothing wrong with this provided it is recognised that in an enlightened Christian society charity is the greatest virtue and bigotry the greatest vice.’ The document reveals an equivocal attitude towards the demise of Victorian values and the emergence of the ‘permissive society’: Because Victorian and Edwardian morality was rooted in respectability and outward appearances and material expansion and very little else, it was inevitable that it be blown to disreputable tatters by two world wars and a bloodless social revolution. This is not to say that its philosophy of ‘God’s in His heaven’ is inapplicable today since the expansion of the Victorian myth has left a void that is rapidly being filled by the stagnant waters of amorality upon which western industrial civilisation is largely rudderless.10

The document thus expresses the view, held by many social commentators and historians, that the 1960s was the time when British society finally broke free from the prurient Victorian morality which, depending upon one’s point of view, had acted either as a restraint or as a safety-valve for the best part of a century. The writers’ bible provides further details of the proposed format of Sexton Blake Lives. Blake, after being resurrected in modern-day London, was to

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Saints and Avengers resume his crime-fighting career. Blake was characterised as a highly moral character – ‘the best possible example of mens sana in corpore sano’. He was to have an assistant in the form of Tina, granddaughter of the faithful Tinker (Tinker had been created as a point of narrative identification for young readers, starting out as a ten-year-old boy, later becoming a young man in his early twenties). Tina was to be ‘acutely aware of her time and place’ and ‘should identify completely with today’s teenager’. ‘The real core of the relationship between Blake and Tina is that they are rocks of personal morality in terms of their own time,’ the document declared, also revealing that Tina ‘has always hero-worshipped Blake the legend’ and that ‘[s]he is in love with Blake but will never confess it by word or deed to him’. It is clear in hindsight that Adam Adamant Lives! was present in embryonic form in the proposed Sexton Blake Lives, and that the characters of Adam Adamant and Georgina Jones were simply Sexton Blake and Tina Carter by different names. As far as the style of the series was concerned, the main influence is not difficult to identify: ‘Wayout stories and characterisation demand supplementary presentation. Design, lighting, sound and camera-work must have panache; must be continually inventive to supply the eye-jerking, the ear-fixing, the unexpected. The mid-shot is outlawed even as a transition.’11 It was, in other words, to be a clone of The Avengers. Why did Sexton Blake Lives never make it into production? There are several reasons. For one thing, despite Newman’s personal enthusiasm for the project, there were reservations within the BBC. Kenneth Adam, whose distaste for The Avengers was already a matter of public record, expressed his misgivings to Newman: This could be a winner, but the way you suggest doing it seems to me to involve very great risks. I am not at all sure you will achieve credibility with such a ‘science fiction’ start, and I am more and more doubtful about Tinker as a girl. I incline to the view that you must play it much straighter if it is to come off.12

Adam, clearly, did not approve of fantasy in any form, disliking the premise of the series and urging Newman to take a more conventional approach. While there was opposition within the BBC hierarchy, however, the abandonment of Sexton Blake Lives was due largely to the attitude of the Sexton Blake copyright holders. Although Fleetway did not object to a modern-day Sexton Blake, they objected to the idea of the Victorian Blake being frozen and resuscitated in the present. Ultimately Fleetway demanded too high a fee and too much control over the series. By the summer of 1965, enthusiasm for

Swinging Britain the series was waning. Andrew Osborn, Newman’s subordinate as Head of Series, reported that ‘we cannot summon up very much enthusiasm for the project. However this is dressed up it still remains another “private eye” series and not a terribly original one at that.’13 Although a Sexton Blake television series did materialise in 1969, it was a half-hour programme made for ITV and aimed principally at children. Frustrated in his efforts to bring Sexton Blake to television, Newman decided instead to proceed with a series based on an original character, though maintaining the idea of a hero dislocated from his own time and placed in the present day. Various names were mooted for the protagonist, including Magnus Hawke, Dick Dexter, John Dextrous, James Strongheart and Sir Cosmo Dashwood. The protagonist’s name, which would also be used in the title, was an important consideration as it would do much to set the tone of the series. As writer Philip Chambers observed: ‘[W]e have to reject the Amos Burke type of name (Harris Tweed, Basildon Bond, etc) as being too facetious – though this kind of name (i.e. having its own impact as opposed to a merely generic one of the Dick Barton, John Drake, Mark Sabre, connotation) would, I think, be preferable if we could only arrive at it without seeming to be bent on doing a send-up’.14 ‘I finally picked Adam Adamant, although other ideas to other people seemed equally appropriate,’ Newman told a journalist. ‘Incidentally, I think if you look “adamant” up in the dictionary, you will discover it is the name of one of the hardest stones in existence.’15 Thus Adam Adamant Lives! became the BBC’s first attempt at producing the sort of fantasy adventure series that was so much in vogue during the 1960s. Newman appointed former Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert as producer of Adam Adamant Lives!; Lambert in turn appointed Tony Williamson as script editor, after another writer, Ken Levison, had been involved in developing the format. Williamson had previously contributed to Danger Man, The Avengers, The Planemakers, The Spies and Mask of Janus and so was well versed in writing episodic thrillers. Williamson was in no doubt about the sort of writers he wanted to employ: ‘[A]s script consultant I was responsible for commissioning writers and used people such as Brian Clemens and Richard Harris because they understood the kind of series we were producing.’16 No less than five of the 15 writers commissioned to write scripts for Adam Adamant Lives! (Brian Clemens, Terence Feely, Richard Harris, Robert Banks Stewart and Williamson himself) either had already or would later also write for The Avengers. The most frequently used writers over the two series, after Williamson himself, were the team of Vince Powell and Harry Driver, who contributed five episodes. There was evidently much

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Saints and Avengers interest in writing for the series: amongst others Williamson turned down stories by Terrance Dicks (later a prolific contributor to Doctor Who) and American crime novelist Patricia Highsmith.17 ‘Writers must not only have inventive plots but be able to get outside 1966 and look at it objectively, then show it through a Victorian’s eyes, which calls for a good deal of knowledge,’ Lambert told the Radio Times, adding that ‘I recommend them to read The Victorians, a book compiled by Joan Evans from letters dealing with life in those days.’18 There was a subtle difference of emphasis between Williamson and Lambert – the former opting for writers who specialised in extraordinary adventure stories, the latter emphasising authenticity in characterisation – that was also evident in the style of the series. Adam Adamant Lives! was shot on videotape, with film inserts, by BBC house directors such as Moira Armstrong, Anthea Brown-Wilkinson, Paul Chiappessoni, Philip Dudley and Roger Jenkins. Ridley Scott, who had joined the BBC as a designer, directed three episodes. The visual style of the series, evident from the surviving episodes, displays a tension between realism (the preponderance of close shots recalls early television ‘intimate drama’) and fantasy (the unusual camera angles and occasional blurring of focus – not always necessarily intentional – having a disorienting effect that creates a slightly unworldly feel). The filmed extracts are used to provide authentic local colour – exemplified in the extensive use of Blackpool locations in the second episode (‘Death Has A Thousand Faces’) – and for exteriors where open spaces are required, such as the opening of ‘The League of Uncharitable Ladies’ (one of the episodes directed by Ridley Scott) in an eerily deserted early morning St James’s Park. The programme was budgeted at £5,650 for the first episode and £4,900 per episode thereafter, though it frequently overspent, much to the dismay of Andrew Osborn who was ‘alarmed at the increasing debt into which you seem to be running. It is understandable that the first few episodes of a new series should overspend, this being absorbed as the series proceeds. The reverse seems to be happening with Adamant.’19 The overspend was due, in large measure, to the number of sets required per episode and the amount of exterior filming. While the cost of the series was low in comparison to the filmed series made by ITC, by BBC standards it was relatively expensive. The central protagonist of Adam Adamant Lives! was played by Gerald Harper, a tall, lean, sharp-featured actor hitherto appearing in small roles in British film and television as well as on the stage and who won the part due to his performance in an ITV adaptation of The Corsican Brothers where he had demonstrated his proficiency with a sword (Adamant was to be an expert

Swinging Britain

18. Gentleman adventurer Adam Llewelyn de Vere Adamant (Gerald Harper) is resurrected in ‘Swinging London’ with dolly-bird sidekick Georgina Jones (Juliet Harmer). BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © BBC Worldwide Enterprises.

swordsman and boxer). Newman always believed that Harper was a little too ‘theatrical’ in his mannerisms, a style of performance that Newman felt ‘should be ruled out . . . Adam should be treated naturally’.20 Critics were generally favourable – James Thomas remarked that ‘Gerald Harper plays Adamant with a splendid tongue-in-cheek bravado’, while Maurice Wiggin thought his performance was ‘a delight’ – though a note of dissent was sounded by Virginia Ironside who complained that Harper and co-star Juliet Harmer ‘ham their way through the programme with such difficulty and forced acting it is a pain to watch’.21 Newman, for his part, was disparaging of Juliet Harmer. ‘She must learn to articulate her lines better,’ he told Lambert. ‘Tell her to take lessons in speech and voice projection at her own cost.’ He also disliked her appearance: ‘Georgina looks like something the cat dragged in. Her hair is still a mess. Surely she can look relaxed and informal and yet have panache and style.’22 Critics dismissed her as ‘a breathless blonde dolly’, ‘a slightly

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Saints and Avengers off-beat deb’ and ‘a chick in a mini-skirt who represents London as imagined by Time magazine’.23 The regular cast was completed by Jack May as Adamant’s valet William E. Simms, a former music hall artiste who has a habit of speaking in doggerel verse. The criticisms made of the performances of the leading players seem more than a little unfair, however, because as so often critics insist on judging the actors by the standards of conventional drama rather than realising they are playing generic archetypes. Maurice Richardson, at least, recognised this in respect of Harper’s performance, finding Adamant ‘an unattractive character’ but considering that it was the role rather than the actor that was at fault: ‘Gerald Harper plays him very nicely, but his creators have given him a fusty ideology to go with his Victorian gear.’24 Adamant belongs to a lineage of swashbuckling gentleman adventurers that includes Anthony Hope’s Rudolf Rassendyll and Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. He is a man of the highest moral principles, a sportsman who fights fairly (‘Defend yourself or die!’) and, above all, a true-blue patriot (‘There can be no excuses for a man who betrays his country’). His dialogue remains quaintly dated (‘Blaggards! Does their villainy know no bounds?’) and the nearest he ever comes to an expletive is to hiss at a villain ‘You fiend!’ Although such dialogue and moral virtue could have been played for laughs – a strategy adopted by the contemporaneous American series Batman, to which Adam Adamant Lives! was often compared – Harper plays the role straight rather than sending it up. Criticism of Juliet Harmer’s ‘breathless blonde dolly’ is equally unfair in that her role in the series – like that of Doctor Who’s assistants – is to ask questions so that Adamant can explain the plot and to get captured by the villains so that Adamant can rescue her. Her casual dress and slang speech (her favourite exclamation is ‘Zoink!’) are a deliberate point of contrast with the resolutely formal Adamant which highlight the cultural differences between them. Adam Adamant Lives! got off to a less than auspicious start in so far as its first pilot episode, like that of Doctor Who, was not deemed suitable for broadcast and had to be taped again. Although the original pilot no longer survives, the following synopsis exists in the BBC Archives: 1902. (Betrayed by the beautiful Louise), Adam Adamant, gentleman adventurer, falls into the hands of his arch-enemy, the Face, who condemns him to a living death. 1966. A demolition squad find him, still alive in a block of ice, and he is taken to hospital. Terrified, he escapes. Just as two villains are about to run him down, he is rescued by Georgina Jones, a

Swinging Britain teenage girl, and taken unconscious to her flat. Thus foiled, the Face abducts the Home Secretary and offers to exchange him against Adam Adamant. Adamant contacts the authorities and agrees to go to the rendezvous, and foil the plot. He sets out for a regional seat of government where he is to meet a government agent, Mr Smith, who is to give him the final details about the handover. Suspecting villainy, Georgina has hidden in his car. After vanquishing the false chauffeur, Adamant meets Mr Smith as planned. (Mr Smith is a woman and a double agent and Adamant is caught off guard and trapped. Overhearing villainy, Georgina tries to help by warning the authorities that Mr Smith is not to be trusted, but she only succeeds in getting herself into trouble. Adamant has been left to his fate on a conveyor belt moving towards the door of an incinerator. Using a fire extinguisher to protect himself, he hides inside the furnace and when the villains bring in Georgina, he manages to defeat them after a fight. When he confronts Mr Smith, she commits suicide, knowing the game is up.) Having proved his identity by his brilliant feats of daring and intelligence, Adamant, like the Face, declares that the fight will go on.25

The pilot would therefore have set up an on-going duel between Adamant and the Face, a masked villain reminiscent of the movie serials who was described in promotional material as ‘the undiluted essence of evil, motivated by an implacable hatred of mankind’. The arch villain at the head of his own criminal organisation is a necessary antagonist for any hero worth his salt: the Face was to be to Adam Adamant what Professor Moriarty was to Sherlock Holmes, Carl Peterson to Bulldog Drummond and Ernst Stavro Blofeld to James Bond. Yet, having been recorded, the pilot was scrapped. ‘We all knew it wasn’t right,’ Newman said. ‘About two-thirds of the script had to be rewritten.’26 The first episode of Adam Adamant Lives! proper, ‘A Vintage Year for Scoundrels’, maintains the prologue of 1902. Adamant foils an attempt to assassinate the King at Windsor Castle and reveals his suspicions that one mastermind is behind all ‘the events of the last few years’, including the Indian Mutiny, the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War. Adamant is lured to a house in Stepney by a note from his fiancée Louise, whom he believes to be in danger. Inside the house he is captured in a trap set by the Face, assisted by the duplicitous Louise. The dialogue between Adamant and the Face recalls Holmes and Moriarty’s famous meeting in Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Final Problem’: Adamant: I always suspected there was one man behind everything. At last I’ve come face to face with you.

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Saints and Avengers The Face: A privilege granted to no other man, and granted to you too late. Now I have you and I intend to keep you . . . During the last few years you have caused embarrassment, Mr Adamant, considerable pain. You will not do so again. Now I am free to continue with my plans to weaken the world little by little until it is in a state of utter chaos. Adamant: You fiend!

The Face explains that he has discovered the secret of suspended animation and injects Adamant with a serum that condemns him to a ‘living death’. Once Adamant is revived in the present, however, the episode differs significantly from the original pilot. The idea of bringing the Face into the 1960s to continue his duel with Adamant was dropped (for the time being) and instead of a sensational thriller narrative involving the kidnapping of the Home Secretary, Adamant becomes involved with low-life villains running a protection racket. The conspiracy plot is of relatively little substance in the first episode, however, which focuses more on Adamant’s reactions to his new surroundings. He does not realise immediately that he has been in suspended animation for 64 years and is now 99 years old. He wanders around Piccadilly Circus where he is confronted by the sights and sounds of modern London: neon lights, strip clubs, transistor radios, mini-skirts. He is unable to comprehend the Underground (‘What infernal place is this?’) and initially mistakes Georgina, who is wearing trousers and a cap, for a boy (‘Miss Jones, this masculine attire – is it part of the madness outside?’). Georgina takes Adamant to her flat and reveals that her grandfather had once met Adamant (‘You’ve been my hero ever since I was a kid’); Adamant believes he has ‘compromised’ her by sleeping on her sofa and, when she remarks casually that other men have slept there before him, assumes that she is a prostitute. The episode takes every opportunity to exploit the clash of cultures between Adamant’s Victorian world-view and the new social norms of the 1960s. The conspiracy plot develops only in the last third of the episode, when the manager of the discotheque where Georgina works is murdered by gangsters when he refuses to pay protection money and she in turn is threatened when she makes a statement to the police. Adamant immediately comes to her assistance (‘It appears that 1966 has a great deal of capacity for a man of my talents’) and, after disposing of the gangsters, vows to continue the fight against crime in his new time (‘There is much for me to do in this world, Miss Jones’). Critical and popular reaction to the first episode was muted. The Times compared it unfavourably to the American import it had replaced on Thursday evenings: ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had the merit of mocking its own

Swinging Britain conventions, but Adam Adamant Lives, which last night replaced it, seems not yet to have decided what its character is and, in this first instalment, spent a long time between its processed thrills.’27 Pauline Peters, standing in for Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times, felt that ‘the first few minutes were lovely nonsense’ but that ‘[w]hen he [Adamant] woke up in 1966 it all fell as flat as a pancake’.28 The BBC’s own Survey of Viewing and Listening, which compiled regular reports based on the opinions of a panel of sample viewers, concluded that ‘a good many viewers in the sample . . . found this first episode of Adam Adamant Lives! far-fetched and ridiculous in the extreme’. There were criticisms of the ‘quite ridiculous adventure with what was surely the most unconvincing protection racket gang in the business’. Some two-fifths of the sample ‘did not care for it at all’, although ‘a substantial minority expressed themselves well pleased with the opening episode’ and found Adamant ‘a refreshing change of hero’. ‘Taken as a whole, nevertheless,’ the report concluded, ‘viewers in the sample responded with a marked lack of enthusiasm to the story itself and also to the way it was presented.’29 The Times critic’s comment that the series ‘seems not yet to have decided its own character’ indicates a tension within the format of Adam Adamant Lives! between a straight thriller and a parody. This tension reflects different shades of opinion within the production team as to how seriously it was meant to be taken. Newman, for one, was keen to emphasise its realist pretensions. ‘Remember that the series is essentially realistic, or better still heightened realism,’ he asserted in a production directive. ‘In short, each episode should be entirely believable and plausible. After all, we are revealing the sins and foibles of today using an adventure thriller approach.’ Newman felt that ‘[t]he more real the story and its parts, the more easily the audience will accept it’ and to this end he believed that ‘characters should be realer than real’.30 This may help to explain why the original pilot, which had a sensational storyline, was deemed unsuitable and remade with more down-to-earth villains. Ken Levison, however, saw it in a slightly different light, arguing that ‘the series is in a fantasy realm and has its own convention’. He distanced himself from Newman, observing that ‘we have consciously deserted documentary realism, and are free to use other conventions and stylisation’. Once the series had established its own conventions and style, however, Levison believed they should be strictly adhered to, pointing out that ‘the further we go, the greater our responsibility to play fairly with the audience’.31 The necessity of ‘playing fair’ with the audience was a view shared by critics. As Maurice Wiggin remarked, apropos of The Avengers: ‘I guess the key or governing law of escapist fantasy is simply this, that having tacitly

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Saints and Avengers agreed to connive at the preposterous basic improbability of the whole thing, thereafter we expect a fairly rigid scrupulousness in the little things. We accept unblinkingly that the incredible hero and his occupation exist; but the six-shooter must never fire seven.’32 This principle was maintained in the writers’ bible for Adam Adamant Lives!, which insisted upon maintaining the internal logic of even the most fantastic storylines: Since we start with a fantastic premise, we are free to take off into the clouds. We can be outrageous – but not wanton or arbitrary. Each story must contain plenty of unpredictable incident but it must be believable. It must possess its own inner logic and develop organically from one initial outrageous idea, taken seriously . . . The nearest to what we are after is to be found in Hitchcock at his best – the suspense, outrage and comedy in equal proportions, as in North by Northwest.33

Like The Avengers, therefore, Adam Adamant Lives! took the films of Alfred Hitchcock as one of its yardsticks. Hitchcock’s films have been seen as maintaining a veneer of realism on the surface (for example using recognisably ordinary locations) which helps audiences accept their unlikely plots. The shadow of The Avengers inevitably loomed large over Adam Adamant Lives!. One critic complained that it ‘sounded like a rejected Avengers script, with none of the imagination or slickness of that programme’; another described it as ‘a poor relation of The Avengers’.34 And The Avengers continues to be the yardstick against which Adam Adamant Lives! is judged: in one source it is described as ‘the BBC’s Avengers variant’.35 There are good reasons for the comparison, as the two series inhabit much the same generic terrain. Individual episodes of Adam Adamant Lives! feature the sort of parodic conspiracy plots that characterised The Avengers from 1965. The ambitions of fiendish criminal masterminds in British television series during the sixties seemingly knew no bounds: villains plot to blow up Blackpool’s Golden Mile in order to increase the value of their own real estate holdings (‘Death Has A Thousand Faces’), the fanatical Dr Mort panics London into believing that World War Three has broken out in order that he may rob city banks in the confusion (‘The Doomsday Plan’), a charitable organisation dedicated to world peace is used as cover by a villain acting for foreign powers (‘The League of Uncharitable Ladies’) and a soap powder manufacturer plots to turn Britain into a nation of drug addicts as a prelude to taking over the country (‘The Sweet Smell of Disaster’). Like The Avengers, the villains of Adam Adamant Lives! are completely detached from any suggestion of psychological realism; their motives stem from either greed or megalomania. Newman’s preference

Swinging Britain for ‘believable and plausible’ stories and his desire that ‘characters should be realer than real’ seem to have been forgotten as the writers followed the Avengers path of diabolical madmen and their fiendish designs. Comparisons between Adam Adamant Lives! and The Avengers, furthermore, extend to specific plot similarities between episodes. This is perhaps only to be expected. Given the crossover in writers between the two series, some crossover of ideas was inevitable. A case in point is the Brian Clemensscripted episode ‘The Terribly Happy Embalmers’. The opening is pure Avengers: a man wishes goodbye to his family before climbing into a coffin while a doctor declares ‘I pronounce Sir George Marston dead’; the coffin is taken away, Sir George gets out (‘It’s good to be alive again!’) and is promptly shot dead. Adamant, called in to investigate, discovers that Marston had owed a fortune in back taxes and finds a pattern of prominent financiers and businessmen who have conveniently died while under investigation by the Inland Revenue. It transpires that a gang of villains, based at a phoney health clinic, are certifying the men dead so they are not liable for tax and are offering to preserve their bodies in suspended animation until the fuss has died down. Instead of being preserved, however, the men are killed, after having signed over their estates to the gang through power of attorney. Clemens later reworked the story as the final Avengers episode ‘Bizarre’, in which businessmen seeking to escape their tax liabilities are declared dead and found living in a colony beneath a funeral parlour. While this is an example of an Adam Adamant script being rewritten as an Avengers script, there was traffic the other way too. Julian Wintle, producer of The Avengers, even went so far to complain to the BBC that the Adam Adamant episode ‘Death By Appointment Only’, in which an upmarket escort agency is the front for a murder organisation who kill wealthy businessmen in order to benefit from fluctuations on the Stock Exchange, was derived from the earlier Avengers episode ‘The Murder Market’. Wintle had a point, especially as both episodes were scripted by Tony Williamson, though the BBC’s Head of Copyright argued otherwise: ‘There is a general similarity of theme and possibly of what one might call inspiration, but it seems to me that there is no more than this.’36 Yet accusations that Adam Adamant Lives! is simply an Avengers clone are unfair. While both series exhibit a tendency towards bizarre and quirky conspiracy plots, and while there is undoubtedly some cross-fertilisation of ideas, there are also some very significant differences. The most obvious of these is in the very different images of Britain and England they present. Adam Adamant Lives! is set against a trendy background of discotheques, pop music studios, fashion boutiques and hairstyling salons that is completely

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Saints and Avengers absent from The Avengers. Steve Chibnall observes that ‘swinging’ Britain is nowhere to be found in The Avengers: ‘The mod imagery of beat clubs and boutiques is curiously absent and teenagers are as rare as crinolines in Carnaby Street.’37 Adam Adamant Lives!, however, is replete with that sort of imagery. As a character remarks in one episode: ‘This is London, 1966, the swinging city’ (‘Beauty Is An Ugly Word’). It was in April 1966, while Adam Adamant Lives! was in production, that Time magazine had devoted an issue to ‘Swinging London’, though, as Arthur Marwick has shown, similar articles were also appearing in French and Italian magazines at the same time.38 It is against this background that Adam Adamant Lives! needs to be seen. The ‘Swinging London’ scene is highly prominent, especially during the first series in 1966: Adam Adamant Lives! came along at precisely the right moment to exploit the current fads and fashions. The morality and permissiveness of the ‘swinging sixties’ were explored – and laid bare – in British films such as Darling (1965) and Alfie (1966), but Adam Adamant Lives! opts for satire in its treatment of social mores and cultural trends. The satirical import of the series arises from Adamant’s reactions to modern life. Adamant himself maintains the clothes, mannerisms and outlook of the Victorian/Edwardian gentleman, his one concession to modernity being that he drives a Mini Cooper – very much a symbol of ‘Swinging Britain’. One of the recurring narrative strategies of Adam Adamant Lives! is to confront the hero with an aspect of modern life and then to reveal a sinister conspiracy behind it. In some instances these conspiracies can be seen as responding, albeit in a much exaggerated way, to real social concerns. In ‘Sing A Song of Murder’, for example, a pop music recording engineer has developed something called ‘hyper-sound’ which affects the brain and can be used to brainwash and even to kill. After listening to a single by a group known as The Hypersonics, Georgina and her friends go out and rob a bank, later having no recollection of their actions. Adamant, whose preference for Mozart renders him immune, soon realises what is afoot: ‘Somehow he has managed to corrupt innocent people with music.’ The notion of popular music as a corrupting influence has been a recurring theme in popular culture: jazz was attacked in such terms in the 1920s, rock’n’roll in the 1950s, pop in the 1960s, punk in the 1970s and rap in the 1980s. The Adam Adamant episode represents an extreme, paranoid realisation of the fears expressed by some contemporaries about sixties rock groups such as the Rolling Stones who were attacked from some quarters for corrupting the nation’s youth through the suggestive, sexually permissive lyrics of their songs.

Swinging Britain The contrast between Adamant’s Victorian sense of propriety and the changing values of the present is frequently highlighted. In ‘To Set A Deadly Fashion’ he witnesses a ‘ghastly’ fashion show of girls in bathing costumes: ‘This incredible exhibition shows an alarming change in morality and attitude!’ He is investigating the suspicious deaths of several ambassador’s wives who all died suddenly of heart attacks, the only connection between them being that they were all wearing dresses bought from a boutique run by designer Roger Clair. The episode parodies the world of high fashion, a prominent feature of sixties culture in Britain represented by the emergence of designers like Mary Quant, Jean Muir and John Bates. Adamant’s distinctive sartorial style, complete with cloak and stick, meets with the approval of the rather effete Clair: Clair: May I complement you on your exquisite ensemble . . . I always said the Victorian look would be back. Adamant: It was always my hope, sir.

Adamant learns that Clair is involved in espionage: his dresses contain tiny microphones that record chit-chat at ambassadorial receptions and an electrical gadget that induces a heart attack when the unwitting ladies have served their purpose. Once again, therefore, an aspect of the ‘Swinging London’ scene is a façade for treachery and murder. ‘Beauty Is An Ugly Word’ offers a distinctly jaundiced view of the sixties obsession with physical appearance. Marwick argues that ‘becoming apparent in the late fifties and accelerating from around 1964 onwards was the triumph of the “modern” view of beauty, of physical beauty, detached altogether from moral judgements, wealth and class’. The notion of purely physical beauty (or, put crudely, sex-appeal), rather than moral beauty (or inner beauty) ‘dominated society at large, in its public mores, its newspapers, its advertisements, its television programmes, its social, cultural and political behaviour’.39 The differences between the ‘old’ and ‘modern’ notions of beauty are rehearsed when Adamant meets Sinoda, owner of a nightclub that hosts monthly beauty contests. The display of feminine pulchritude is an affront to Adamant’s sense of propriety, whereas Sinoda clearly revels in the spectacle: Adamant: The phenomena I find a little distasteful. Sinoda: You disapprove of beauty? Adamant: Shall we say that I don’t make it a fetish? Sinoda: Beauty is not a fetish, it is a sublime truth.

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Saints and Avengers Adamant: It is also only in the eye of the beholder. Sinoda: That is just a feeble excuse to justify ugliness. Adamant: Ugliness and beauty need no justification. Without one how would we recognise the other?

Events take a sinister turn when Georgina wins a contest to become ‘Miss September’ and finds herself ‘invited’ (in fact coerced) to Sinoda’s country house. Adamant follows and discovers the full extent of Sinoda’s diabolical plan. Sinoda has stolen a virus, discovered accidentally by a scientist in a government research establishment, that ‘is capable of destroying human tissue . . . this could make the H-bomb as obsolete as bows and arrows’. Sinoda plans to use the virus to wipe out the human race, leaving just his own colony of physically perfect specimens to breed a new race of beautiful people: Sinoda: I plan to save the world! Adamant: By destroying it? Sinoda: How else? Ugliness must be replaced by beauty.

At this moment, however, an interesting reversal of ideologies takes place, as Sinoda, the one with the ‘modern’ view of beauty, appeals to Adamant’s nostalgic affection for the past, whereas Adamant defends modern society for what it is: Sinoda: Think back to the England you knew as a boy. Where is it now? It has vanished. Adamant: So have slavery and injustice. Sinoda: Our once green countryside is slowly being engulfed by the rising tide of suburbia! Adamant: But suburbia, sir, means homes to many people instead of hovels. Sinoda: But surely, Mr Adamant, you must agree? Yours was a gracious age. Adamant: But it was also an age of oppression and injustice. I saw it.

Thus Adamant accepts that modern society is not all bad. For all his sentimental attachment to the past he recognises its injustices, and for all his distaste at some aspects of modern life he recognises that social conditions

Swinging Britain have improved for many people. Sinoda, in contrast, is committed to destroying society and remaking it according to his own vision. He represents, in extreme form, the unspeakable forces of chaos that threaten to engulf the world. The conspiracy anticipates the James Bond film Moonraker (1979) in which the villain Drax plans to wipe out the human race with nerve gas and breed his own race of genetically pure superhumans selected from the fittest, strongest and most beautiful people. While Adamant welcomes the improved social conditions of the present, however, he maintains an essentially Victorian world-view in his values and behaviour. He believes in emotional restraint rather than hedonistic gratification and lives by the gentleman’s code of chivalry, honour, patriotism and duty. One of Newman’s intentions for the series had always been to show that certain old-fashioned values were still important in the modern world. He believed that modern youth had become disillusioned: Today, in particular, the ‘adolescent in protest’ (a phenomenon that has always been with us and, one hopes, always will) feels betrayed by the hypocrisy and ineffectuality of the authoritarian generations. He scoffs at the words loyalty, honesty, thrift, industry, fidelity and duty for the reason that, for him, they have been devalued.40

This theme is explored in ‘The Last Sacrifice’. The conspiracy involves what appears to be a satanic cult presided over by a young aristocrat, Lord Rufus Pearmain. The cult is dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure (‘When convention is rejected, all is pleasure!’) and carries out ritual murders. In fact Pearmain and his wife lure prominent men into compromising positions and then blackmail them into betraying official secrets that they sell to foreign powers. Adamant, called in to investigate by ‘D.I.6’, is shocked by the goings-on at Pearmain Manor but even more shocked by the attitude of Pearmain himself, who is motivated by a combination of greed and disillusion with his country: Pearmain: You know, you almost upset the balance of a very fine and lucrative operation. Adamant: Blackmailing hedonistic swine into betraying their country! Pearmain: There’s no secret so small that it won’t fetch a few shillings, given the right buyer of course. Frankly, I think my country owes it to me. I’ve been shackled to this mouldering heap of British heritage for far too long! One has one’s standards, don’t you agree? And let’s face it, this green and pleasant land isn’t really up to it anymore.

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Saints and Avengers Adamant: Your country owes you nothing, sir! You are the servant of your country. God save the Queen. Pearmain: Point taken. How very appropriate that you should die for your Queen and country.

Pearmain is a traitor to both his class and his country. He differs from the villains of Danger Man and The Avengers who sought to restore Britain to its position of greatness by imposing authoritarian rule; instead he hastens Britain’s decline by undermining its security and selling its secrets for pecuniary gain. For Adamant, however, patriotism and duty come first. These sentiments, while rooted in his Victorian upbringing, still possess a contemporary resonance in so far as they echo the words of President Kennedy (‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’).41 The storylines of Adam Adamant Lives!, however, do not seem to have found much favour with either audiences or critics who complained of their over-familiarity. ‘Certainly the basic idea was novel and attractive, a good many viewers agreed,’ the Survey of Viewing and Listening reported after the sixth episode, ‘but unfortunately the same could not be said of the stories so far which had been too reminiscent of situations used in countless other programmes of the mystery thriller type’.42 Milton Shulman made a similar assessment: ‘The strain of trying to fit an Edwardian Dr Who into the with-it world of Soho and Piccadilly has rapidly exhausted the imagination of its scriptwriters.’ ‘Adam Adamant will no doubt be returning to the block of ice from which he came,’ Shulman concluded. ‘And the BBC series department ought to have been taught a sharp lesson about the futility of leaping onto band wagons after the parade has passed.’43 Shulman’s prediction was wrong, however, as a second series of Adam Adamant Lives! was commissioned, beginning on New Year’s Eve 1966. With the ‘Swinging London’ theme all but exhausted, the writers’ strategy was to reintroduce Adamant’s nemesis the Face (Peter Ducrow), who has preserved himself in a state of suspended animation and is revived to renew battle with Adamant in the present. The Face appears in six of the 13 episodes, a sinister and shadowy presence who, like Professor Moriarty, becomes the mastermind responsible for organised crime in the metropolis and beyond. The Face represents the forces of chaos and anarchy that the thriller unleashes upon an unsuspecting society. He has no plausible motive; his intention is simply to wreak havoc and destruction. His nefarious designs, all thwarted by Adamant, include the assassination of an African leader (‘A Slight Case of

Swinging Britain Reincarnation’), brainwashing prominent women to do his bidding through a device hidden in hairdryers (‘Tunnel of Death’) and experimenting with an aggression-enhancing drug (‘The Resurrectionists’). In ‘Black Echo’ Adamant comes face-to-face with his former love Louise, now an old woman (played by guest star Gladys Cooper) impersonating a Russian grand duchess in an attempt to acquire the Vorokhov inheritance for the Face. The last episode, ‘A Sinister Sort of Service’, suggests some interesting narrative possibilities that might have been developed had another series of Adam Adamant Lives! been commissioned. Adamant investigates a crime wave in London that leads him to a private security organisation called Surveillance Services. The political associations are blatant: members of the firm wear black uniforms with ‘SS’ insignia and give raised-arm salutes; to emphasise the association the German-accented leader Lang even says ‘This is SS Control’ over a radio link to his men. Thus the episode equates organised crime with Nazism in a quite explicit way. Lang explains how Surveillance Services uses its central computer to plan and execute robberies: Lang: Every crime planned to the last detail, every step analysed by computer, its probabilities of success projected to impossible odds . . . The police [are] undermanned, under equipped, trying to cover an entire city. All we have to do is compute their weaknesses – and they are many.

Behind Lang, however, is the Face, who appears to Adamant on a television monitor, from, it is implied, a time in the future: The Face: Adam Adamant – next time there will be no quarter. Adamant: Where are you? The Face: Where you can never reach me. Adamant: You never have the courage to meet me face to face. The Face: When next we meet, it will be on my terms, in my time and on my ground. And then there will be no escape.

The episode seems to suggest, therefore, the possibility of a time-travel device being introduced to allow Adamant to battle against the Face in another time. This direction was never to be explored, however, for the series was cancelled. How can the demise of Adam Adamant Lives! be explained? The first series had been successful in the ratings, topping the viewing figures for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The evidence of the Survey of Viewing and Listening, moreover, suggests that audiences were warming to the second series. ‘I have

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Saints and Avengers quite enjoyed the series,’ one viewer commented. ‘Even when it is ludicrous and laughable it’s still enjoyable. I like “Adam” enormously, so much nicer than American type heroes.’ ‘Comment on the series as a whole was, in the main, favourable, though quite a number felt that it could be improved in various ways,’ the survey reported after the transmission of the last episode.44 The fact that the series was cancelled when ratings were good and audience approval showed some evidence of an upward trend is curious. The most likely explanation seems to be internal hostility towards the series within the BBC. Tony Williamson later remarked: ‘It was looked down upon by many people at the BBC at that time almost as an embarrassment.’45 Some evidence of this can be gleaned from the BBC Written Archives. Verity Lambert, for instance, was unhappy about the lack of publicity that attended the launch of the second series: ‘I feel that its return had very little promotion from either the Radio Times or the Publicity Department’.46 Derek Hoddinott of the Publicity Department replied that ‘the “non-publicity” regarding Adam Adamant Lives! has not been due to a lack of interest on my part, but that the return of the series came rather at an awkward time; we had the launching of The Forsyte Saga and were still dealing with the back wash of Cathy Come Home, both of which were taking up considerable newspaper space’.47 Lambert had further reason to believe the corporation was not entirely behind Adam Adamant Lives! when the second series (broadcast on Saturday evenings) was not allocated a regular transmission time. ‘I am not terribly happy about changing the time of transmission every two weeks or, in three cases, every week,’ she complained. ‘I do not see how we can build up any kind of audience with this kind of transmission pattern.’48 There was one repeat of Adam Adamant Lives!, but the series has not been seen on British television since the 1960s and only the first two episodes have been released on home video.49 Approximately half the 29 episodes were wiped and no longer exist in the BBC Archives. Its disappearance from view means that Adam Adamant Lives! has not gained the same cult following as series such as The Avengers and The Saint which continue to be repeated on television and are repackaged for video as ‘cult classics’. This is a shame, for the surviving episodes indicate that Adam Adamant Lives! had a distinctive style and quirky charm of its own. However, it is very much tied to a specific historical moment: the ‘Swinging London’ environment, topical in 1966, would have seemed extremely dated within only a few years. In contrast, the timelessness and enduring appeal of The Avengers may be due in some measure to the absence of the ‘Swinging London’ scene, as nothing dates faster than fashions and pop music. It is unlikely, moreover, that Adam

Swinging Britain Adamant Lives! would work very well if revived. The format has been spoofed by the films Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery (1997) and its sequel Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), in which a secret agent from the ‘Swinging Britain’ of the 1960s is revived from suspended animation in the 1990s to continue the struggle against his arch enemy Dr Evil. Film critics discussed the Austin Powers films as spoofs of James Bond and, to a lesser extent, The Avengers, though it seems to me that a much more appropriate comparison would be to Adam Adamant Lives! The Austin Powers character reverses the moral sensibilities of the pious Adam Adamant in that, as played by comedian Mike Myers, Powers represents the permissive values of the sixties (‘Shall we shag now or shall we shag later?’ he asks women upon first meeting them) which are contrasted with the political correctness of the 1990s. With the format having been so successfully spoofed, a straight version of the ‘out-of-his-time’ crime-fighter narrative would be unlikely to succeed any more. Thus Adam Adamant Lives! seems likely to remain, if not quite forgotten, a curio item that for some reason did not quite work out as its creators had hoped. Its fate was best summed up by Sydney Newman: ‘This series, from where I sat, was a near miss – we were so close to really having something great, but somehow or other it just eluded us.’50

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5 Have Gun, Will Travel

Man in a Suitcase

M

an in a Suitcase, which ran for 30 episodes in 1967–68, was an altogether different type of series to Adam Adamant Lives! It followed the adventures of a down-at-heel American ex-CIA agent based in London and making a living as a private investigator and bounty hunter. In contrast to the glossy sophistication of most other crime-fighters from the ITC stable, Man in a Suitcase was set in a decidedly seedy environment which owed more to the hard-boiled tradition of American detective fiction. The presence of an American tough-guy hero in a British adventure series makes for something of a cultural and generic hybrid, and while on the one hand this hybridity might have been a production strategy designed to make the series appeal to a wide audience, on the other hand it meant that Man in a Suitcase lacked the distinctive sense of Britishness or Englishness that had made Danger Man, The Avengers and The Saint so successful. Man in a Suitcase was certainly not a failure – it was sold to territories as diverse as Scandinavia, South America and Australasia and was broadcast by ABC in the United States – but it never achieved the same popularity and cult status as some other sixties adventure series. The hybridity of Man in a Suitcase extended to its production team, which comprised an eclectic mix of experienced old hands from the British film industry and young turks who were making their way in television. It was produced by Sidney Cole, a film industry veteran who had started out as an editor at Ealing Studios in the 1930s, becoming an associate producer during

Have Gun, Will Travel the 1940s before moving to television in the 1950s. Cole was no stranger to television adventure series, having been producer of The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Four Just Men. Other former Ealing personnel involved with the series included the directors Pat Jackson, Charles Crichton and Charles Frend. The format of the series was devised by Richard Harris and Dennis Spooner. Harris (not to be confused with his actor namesake), a playwright now best known for the musical Stepping Out, had written for the drama series Knock On Any Door and had contributed scripts to The Avengers and Adam Adamant Lives!, while Spooner, a former gag-writer, had written early episodes of Coronation Street before finding his niche in telefantasy with scripts for Gerry Anderson’s ‘Supermarionation’ puppet series Stingray and Thunderbirds and a stint as story editor for Doctor Who. Unusually, for creators of a series format, Harris and Spooner relinquished the role of ‘executive story consultant’ to American screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg. The series was filmed at Pinewood Studios, with other regular directors including Peter Duffell, Freddie Francis and Robert Tronson. Future Bond film director John Glen worked on the series as an editor and made his directorial debut with one episode. As with any series centred around one protagonist – the original title for Man in a Suitcase was McGill, the name of the central character1 – much of its success depended upon the casting. Richard Bradford, a 30-year-old, prematurely grey-haired Texan who had studied at the Actors’ Studio in New York, brought a moody Method intensity to the role of McGill, a cynical and disillusioned character who has lost his job in American Intelligence in shady circumstances. Bradford’s performance style is self-centred and intense: his movement on screen is often edgy, his mannerisms abrupt and his exchanges with other actors curt and abrasive. His technique is effective at creating the impression of a character struggling to hold his anger in check and capable of exploding unpredictably. Critics were divided over his performance. Variety felt that he gave McGill ‘a certain punch and virility’ and admired his ‘laconic throwaway technique with his dialog and a hint of hidden depths’, though regretted that the character ‘has no background, depths, or human connections to give him a dimension’.2 Philip Purser, however, disliked him on the grounds of both his nationality and his technique: ‘He looks to me like any other of the American actors, apparently made of concrete, whom ATV have hired during the long and shameful history of pandering to supposed American tastes which recently won them a Queen’s Award for Industry.’3 The Method acting technique embraced by American actors of Bradford’s generation clearly did not find favour with British critics.

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Saints and Avengers The character of McGill belongs to a very different lineage from the gentleman heroes of other adventure series such as John Steed, Simon Templar and Adam Adamant. McGill has none of the refined manners or charm of the British heroes; he is brusque, ill-mannered and short-tempered. Whereas his British counterparts are impeccable in appearance with cultured (for which read expensive) tastes in clothes, wine and cars, McGill drinks beer and bourbon from the bottle and drives a battered Hillman Imp. He lives in cheap hotels and a succession of different apartments depending upon his current financial status; he is a loner who has few friends and no lasting relationships with women; he remarks that his only possessions are his suitcase and his car. Unlike Steed or Templar, physical force is usually McGill’s first rather than last resort when he finds himself in a tight spot. Yet for all his surliness and cynicism, McGill is an honest and honourable character who all too frequently becomes personally involved with his clients’ problems and who instinctively takes the side of the weak and the victimised. He has his own code of honour – in several episodes he refuses to betray the intelligence service that has betrayed him – and is often shown to possess more integrity than those who hire him. In this sense McGill belongs to the same tradition of hard-boiled private eyes as Dashiell Hammett’s unnamed ‘Continental Op’, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. The format of Man in a Suitcase bears comparison to several other adventure series of the 1960s from both sides of the Atlantic. Its similarities to three series in particular highlight the generic hybridity of Man in a Suitcase. Variety observed that it was about ‘another of those freebooting adventure-seekers looking for trouble worldwide, with a family resemblance to that Man of the World who came from the same stable a few seasons back’.4 ATV’s Man of the World (1962–63), which had run for 20 one-hour episodes, had starred American actor Craig Stevens as a troubleshooter who travelled to exotic foreign locations in the guise of a photo-journalist. The American hero based in London and undertaking all manner of dangerous jobs made Man of the World a virtual prototype of Man in a Suitcase, even down to the similarity of the title with its connotations of travel and adventure. Man of the World, which began at the same time as The Saint, was successful enough to produce its own spin-off series, The Sentimental Agent (1963), which followed the adventures of a supporting character from one of the early Man of the World episodes. As well as its resemblance to Man in a Suitcase, Man of the World might also be compared to the short-lived American series Cover Up (1985) in which two government agents travelled the world in the guises of a female fashion photographer and a male model. Where Man in a Suitcase

Have Gun, Will Travel is different, however, is that McGill’s lifestyle is much less glamorous and that his assignments usually bring him into contact with the seedier side of the underworld. The second series to which Man in a Suitcase can usefully be compared is The Baron, which had similarly followed the adventures of an American protagonist based in Britain. The Baron was produced by Monty Berman for ITC and had run for 30 episodes in 1966–67. It was ostensibly based on a character created in the 1930s by John Creasey (writing under the pseudonym of Anthony Morton), though the television character bore little relation to the literary original. Creasey’s John Mannering, alias ‘the Baron’, belonged to the same tradition of gentleman thieves as A.J. Raffles: a debonair manabout-town who took to crime for a living after being jilted by a girl he loved. In the television series, Mannering, as played by the likeable American actor Steve Forrest (younger brother of Dana Andrews), became a millionaire antiques dealer with shops in London, Paris and Washington; the title was explained insofar as he had made his millions as a cattle baron in America. Mannering was also a part-time undercover agent, using his knowledge of antiques and his jet-setting lifestyle as a cover. The Americanisation of Creasey’s hero, in stark contrast to the treatment of The Saint, indicates that The Baron was designed from the outset with US sales in mind: indeed, it was bought by the ABC network before it had been shown on British television.5 The character of the self-made millionaire who takes up crimefighting has been a recurrent motif in American television, including Burke’s Law (1962–63), Hart to Hart (1979–84) and Matt Houston (1982–85), and The Baron fits more easily into this lineage than it does in the British adventure series. Man in a Suitcase, which followed one year after The Baron, must have been seen as something of a follow-up to the earlier series in that its protagonist would be another American, again based in London but occasionally undertaking assignments abroad. The key difference, of course, is that McGill is essentially a blue-collar hero, unlike the cultured and sophisticated John Mannering. A third series to which Man in a Suitcase invites comparison is The Fugitive (1963– 67), a Quinn Martin production for the American ABC network. The Fugitive, which ran for 120 episodes, followed the adventures of Dr Richard Kimble (David Janssen), a surgeon wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, who escapes from custody due a train crash and goes on the run. The Fugitive uses a double-hunt narrative structure: as Kimble searches for the mysterious one-armed man who is the real killer of his wife, he in turn is hunted across America by the dogged Lieutenant Gerrard

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Saints and Avengers (Barry Morse). The ‘running man’ formula of The Fugitive recurred in the television series of The Incredible Hulk (1977–82), while The Fugitive itself was successfully turned into a Hollywood film starring Harrison Ford as Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Gerrard in 1993. Man in a Suitcase is comparable to The Fugitive through its wronged protagonist, seeking to clear himself of a crime he did not commit and continually on the move. The Fugitive is an example of David Buxton’s ‘human nature’ series in that ‘the good and wise Dr Kimble . . . finds the time to solve the problems of numerous small town residents on the way’.6 Man in a Suitcase would also fit into the category of the ‘human nature’ series in that it uses the thriller narrative to explore existential anxieties and moral dilemmas. One episode of Man in a Suitcase, especially, resembles The Fugitive. In ‘Why They Killed Nolan’ a private investigator and acquaintance of McGill’s is in fear for his life after uncovering a secret about one of his clients. Nolan is desperate to leave the country and seeks shelter in McGill’s apartment. McGill agrees to cash a cheque for Nolan at his bank, but on returning to his apartment he is knocked unconscious and awakes to find Nolan dead, shot with McGill’s gun. McGill is therefore placed in the same position as The Fugitive’s Kimble in that he is wanted for murder and must track down the real murderer in order to prove his own innocence. McGill learns that Nolan had been hired by the wealthy Mrs Arnoldson to follow her husband, who was having an affair. Nolan, however, had accidentally discovered that the Arnoldsons were wanted criminals who had pulled off a major airport robbery. Mr Arnoldson has had plastic surgery to alter his appearance, but his wife has not, and when Nolan recognised her he was hunted and killed by the desperate Arnoldson. McGill tracks down Arnoldson, who strangles his wife so that he can leave the country with his mistress, and kills him in a gunfight. A significant difference between Man in a Suitcase and other sixties adventure series is its sense of moral ambiguity. Man in a Suitcase belongs squarely in the lineage of what Michael Denning calls ‘existential thrillers which play on a dialectic of good and evil overdetermined by moral dilemmas, by moves from innocence to experience, and by identity crises’.7 This is evident from the beginning of the series with ‘Man From the Dead’, the sixth episode to be shown on British television but, from internal evidence, probably intended to have been the first in that it explains the reason for McGill’s dismissal from American Intelligence. There are echoes of the classic postwar British thriller The Third Man (1949) in the story of Harry Thyssen, a man presumed dead but who is glimpsed by his daughter Rachel walking past in the street.8 When the story is reported in the press McGill takes a

Have Gun, Will Travel close interest because Thyssen is the one man who could clear his name. Thyssen, McGill’s superior officer in American Intelligence, had ordered him to let Lefevre, ‘one of the world’s outstanding scientists’, defect to the Russians. When Thyssen subsequently disappeared, faking his death in a plane crash, McGill was blamed for the defection and dismissed. McGill is bitter because both he and his former boss Coughlin (Lionel Murton, who had played a similar role in early episodes of Danger Man) know that he is innocent of the charges brought against him. Despite being warned off by Coughlin, McGill traces Thyssen and learns the truth: that Lefevre is really a double agent working in Moscow and that Thyssen is his courier. Thyssen has returned to London to see his daughter because he is now dying. McGill realises that to establish his own innocence over Lefevre’s ‘defection’ would compromise the agent’s safety and thus has to accept being the fall-guy. McGill, who has unwittingly led Russian agents to Thyssen, covers Thyssen’s escape by letting himself be cornered and beaten up by the Russians. Like the hard-boiled private eyes of American detective fiction, Man in a Suitcase would frequently feature its hero stoically taking a beating from his enemies. There is no conventional happy ending to the episode and no narrative resolution: Thyssen’s reunion with his daughter is short-lived and McGill’s name and reputation remain tarnished. Some episodes of Man in a Suitcase are set against a Cold War background, but they are closer to the Cold War as described by John le Carré and Len Deighton than to that of Ian Fleming. McGill becomes involved in the secret war between Eastern and Western intelligence services by chance and frequently finds himself being used as an unwitting pawn by his own side. In ‘The Boston Square’ McGill is hired to trace Dolby, a brilliant oceanographer who has left his job at a marine research institute, taking with him a confidential report on deep sea farming in the Adriatic. McGill follows Dolby to the Greek islands, where he discovers that Dolby is really working undercover with an American agent called Packard to locate a secret Chinese submarine base in Albanian waters. When Dolby and Packard are killed following a skirmish with Albanian agents, McGill returns to London and finds that American Intelligence denies any involvement in the incident and has washed its hands of the two men (‘We never heard of ’em’). In ‘Somebody Loses, Somebody . . . Wins?’ McGill travels to Dresden in East Germany, having been hired to trace Johann Liebkind, the brother of an émigré living in London. In Dresden McGill meets Ruth Klinger, an old girlfriend and a former agent of British Intelligence, who has apparently defected and is now working for the East Germans. When Ruth reveals that Liebkind is a

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Saints and Avengers prominent figure in a Nazi revival movement, McGill realises that he is an unwitting player in a ploy designed to make the East Germans think there is a link between Liebkind and American Intelligence. Ruth is a double agent and her safety depends upon McGill going through with the deception. Although McGill makes his getaway to West Germany, Ruth finds that the deception has not convinced the East German authorities of her true loyalties and is faced with an uncertain and dangerous future behind the Iron Curtain. While the narrative resembles le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with its protagonist used as a pawn in an elaborate deception to safeguard a double agent in the East German security service, the visual style of the episode, set against the backdrop of a bomb-damaged city with piles of rubble and shabby apartment blocks, recalls The Third Man, a film on which the episode’s director John Glen had worked as an assistant editor. The moral uncertainties of Man in a Suitcase sometimes mean there is little difference between good and bad characters. In ‘Essay in Evil’ McGill uncovers a plot by three blackmail victims to murder blackmailer George Masters. Masters is a thoroughly unpleasant character who makes his living by exploiting the weaknesses of others (‘Knowledge is an asset. And assets are what a businessman exploits to make his little profit’), but his victims are little better, and one of them, De Burgh, wants to kill Masters so that he can have Masters’s wife, who schemes with De Burgh against her husband. In other episodes, even characters possessing a sense of moral integrity do not always win. In ‘Burden of Proof’ Henry Faversham, the improbably English Minister of Works in a Latin American banana republic, flees back to London and admits to having embezzled money from official coffers. He hires McGill as a bodyguard to protect him from Colonel Garcia who has followed Faversham to London. It turns out that Faversham is involved in a scheme to expose Garcia, who is plotting a coup against the democratically-elected president. Garcia is contemptuous of Faversham’s English sense of duty and loyalty to the president which he describes as ‘cultural nonsense’. Faversham is captured and tortured by Garcia’s men and, although Garcia is exposed, Faversham dies. It is typical of Man in a Suitcase that episodes would often end on a downbeat note, a reminder of the human cost of the cloak-and-dagger world that is only rarely alluded to in other adventure series. In most episodes of Man in a Suitcase McGill is a loner who works outside of any official capacity. There are a few episodes which, in the manner of The Saint, provide McGill with a degree of official legitimation by having him employed by the police or secret service. ‘The Sitting Pigeon’ has McGill

Have Gun, Will Travel picked up by Chief Inspector Franklin of Special Branch and persuaded – by threatening to ‘make life uncomfortable’ – to act as a bodyguard to Rufus Blake, the brother of two gangsters who has agreed to give evidence against them. The episode bears an uncanny resemblance to the real case of the notorious Kray twins who were convicted in 1968 of murdering Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie: Lenny and Frank Blake have killed Joe Kilburn, a rival gangster who tried to muscle in on their ‘patch’. In ‘Night Flight to Andorra’ McGill is ostensibly planning to rob a villa in the Pyranees with a gang of desperadoes, but turns out to be working for British Intelligence to obtain and destroy a microfilm containing specifications of a missile guidance system that has been obtained by an international criminal. Even in these episodes, however, McGill’s relationship with his employers is uneasy as he is distrustful of officialdom and prefers to work on his own. Like the private detectives of American fiction, McGill becomes an observer and critic of the society in which he works. A recurring theme of the series is the difference between McGill and the wealthy clients who need his services but treat him with contempt. There is an element of social criticism in certain episodes which offer distinctly unfavourable characterisations of the wealthy and privileged classes. ‘Sweet Sue’, for example, exposes the vacuousness and downright unpleasantness of both the nouveaux riche and the English upper class. Sue Mandel is a spoiled rich girl who is running around the French Riviera with two effete English con artists who rob her father’s villa. McGill is hired by her father to recover the money and to show Sue the error of her ways. When Sue learns what McGill’s job is, she expresses her contempt: Sue: You’re a detective – a cheap, prying, flat-footed, peep-hole specialist. McGill: I’m not cheap.

The antagonism between rich society playgirl and the downtrodden private investigator (which, as convention has it, inevitably turns into sexual attraction) is a common theme in detective fiction, perhaps most famously played out in the relationship between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’s 1946 film of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Sue’s attraction to McGill arouses the jealousy of her boyfriend Charles, a snobbish and supercilious English ex-public schoolboy who is calculatedly rude to McGill and who tries (unsuccessfully) to cheat him at poker. Sue at first refuses to accept that her boyfriends are criminals, and only when they try to kill her and McGill does she accept the truth. McGill finally returns Sue to

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Saints and Avengers her father, who regards her as a wastrel, and who inadvertently reveals his distaste both for his daughter and for McGill: Mandel: She’s worth nothing, nothing at all. In her time she’s not done a thing that’s worthwhile. McGill: She saved my life. Mandel: How much is that worth? McGill: Three hundred dollars a week plus expenses.

While Charles had been antagonistic towards McGill on the grounds of class, Mandel feels superior because he is worth more money. In the midst of this snobbery and disdain, McGill emerges as the only character with any moral integrity. Man in a Suitcase is also sceptical of the motives of those in public service, often revealing prominent public figures to be morally bankrupt or having embarrassing secrets to hide. In ‘Web With Four Spiders’ McGill is hired by Dr James Norbert, an American ‘big-time lawyer’ who is chairman of an international committee set up to establish the legal principles of space exploration. Norbert is being blackmailed, however, by a consortium who do not want international law extended to space and who have a series of compromising photographs of Norbert with a prostitute and falling down drunk in an alley. Norbert, an egotistical but fragile man, is contemptuous of McGill (‘How can you presume to judge? A hired man sweeping up the dirt in other people’s lives’) and is pathetically concerned with his own reputation (‘What do you know about ideals? I have a lifetime of work and achievement and truth’). The episode concludes on a note of moral compromise: McGill fails to recover the photographs and Norbert agrees to the blackmailers’ demands by suppressing the conclusions and recommendations of his report. In ‘All That Glitters’ McGill is hired by Michael Hornsby, a prominent and ambitious politician, whose former housekeeper’s grandson has been kidnapped. McGill, however, is suspicious of Hornsby’s motives: McGill: So you just help your housekeeper and her grandson out of kindness? Hornsby: There’s no ulterior motive in helping them, if that’s what you mean. McGill: Well, that’s close enough. But I understand that. Suppose I help people too. Hornsby: Out of kindness?

Have Gun, Will Travel McGill: For money. Hornsby: How much money? McGill: Well, how much help do you need? Hornsby: My friend told me that you were difficult. And rude. McGill: You have a very well informed friend.

Whereas McGill makes no secret of his pecuniary motives – he is, after all, a troubleshooter for hire – Hornsby’s apparent altruism hides a secret: the boy is his illegitimate son and if this were to become public knowledge it would destroy his political career. Hornsby is financially dependent upon his wealthy wife who is unable to have children. On this occasion, however, there is a successful resolution: McGill delivers the ransom money for Hornsby and rescues the boy. Wounded in a shoot-out with the kidnappers, McGill is treated in a private hospital at Mrs Hornsby’s expense. Man in a Suitcase offers a more detached and critical perspective on British society that is closer in spirit to the social realism of Armchair Theatre or The Wednesday Play than to the adventure genre. ‘The Bridge’, which exemplifies the ‘human nature’ content of the series in that it focuses on personal problems, offers a distinctly jaundiced view of ‘Swinging London’. McGill is hired by Lord Gorman, a gruff self-made man who has been elevated to the House of Lords after ‘a lifetime of slog’, to keep an eye on his son Tim, who has repeatedly attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself off the Albert Bridge. Tim is haunted by the death of his friend Danny, who fell to his death from the bridge following a drunken dare. McGill traces the witnesses to Danny’s death, including a couple of shady characters who run a discotheque in Chelsea, and a girl called Annabelle, whose wealthy father Sir Walter Fenchurch has McGill beaten up in an attempt to frighten him off. McGill gradually uncovers the truth of what happened on the bridge: that Danny had humiliated Annabelle, his girlfriend, by publicly dumping her and that Annabelle had accidentally pushed Danny off the bridge. Tim, who suffered concussion in the incident, thinks he was responsible for Danny’s death and the others have let him believe that in order to cover up their own involvement. It is an unusual story in which there is no actual crime as such but which has a haunting power of its own through its use of flashback and its atmospheric photography on the bridge in the early morning mist. The episode exposes the young, swinging party set as morally vacuous: the shy and impressionable

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Saints and Avengers Tim is tolerated by the group only so that they can make fun of him, while his so-called best friend Danny is revealed to have been a heartless cad. McGill himself does not remain untainted by the greed and corruption around him. The two-part story ‘Variation on a Million Bucks’ is a morality tale in which McGill’s own greed nearly gets him killed and loses the woman he loves. The story begins with McGill seeming, for once, reasonably settled, enjoying life with his Japanese girlfriend Taiko, a successful model, and his friend Max, a Russian exile living in London. Max is a former Russian agent who stole his own contingency fund and defected to the West. Then Max is shot, but before dying he reveals to McGill the whereabouts of the money he stole from his paymasters. The temptation is too much for McGill, who decides to go after the money himself despite being warned off by Michaels of American Intelligence: ‘Don’t get yourself killed because of a pot of gold . . . If you go after that illusion of a million bucks you’ll be followed by half the agents and adventurers in Europe – the vultures out there’ll eat you alive.’ He also ignores Taiko’s objections: Taiko: You are going after the million dollars? McGill: I’m going to work. Taiko: I thought you were giving up that kind of work. McGill: I can’t, not yet. Taiko: But the money isn’t even yours. McGill: Honey, the Russians don’t claim it, the Americans don’t claim it, it doesn’t belong to anybody.

McGill has the key to a safety deposit box in a bank in Lisbon where the money is hidden, but finds that various other parties are seeking it. He is beaten up by one gang even before leaving London and then, after arranging passage on a cargo ship he is nearly killed by the treacherous crew. The wounded McGill gets to the bank vault, where he kills a Russian agent lying in wait for him, but before he can post the money to himself in London he is intercepted by American agents who want secret documents that are also believed to be in the deposit box. McGill is therefore prevented from getting the money for himself, and although he is given a reward of $30,000 by Michaels (who earlier had offered him the same amount for the key), he discovers Taiko has left him and returned to Tokyo. Again, the story ends on a downbeat note with McGill worse off than at the beginning: not only has he not got the money, he has lost his girlfriend as well.

Have Gun, Will Travel On occasion the social criticism of Man in a Suitcase assumes a political dimension. ‘Property of a Gentleman’ explores the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, exhibiting a clear hostility towards Franco’s Fascist regime and sympathy for the defeated Republican side. McGill travels to a villa outside Madrid where he meets Santiago Gomez, who offers him six gold bars to undertake an unspecified assignment. McGill refuses and returns to his hotel, where he is confronted by Minister of the Interior Rafael Palma who accuses him of working for political dissidents led by Gomez and who uses a forged letter from the ‘Anarchist Federation of Spain’ to persuade McGill to spy on Gomez. McGill discovers that Gomez had been a political prisoner for thirty years, but that during the civil war he had intercepted a shipment of Franco’s gold bullion reserves which he has hidden away. Gomez and Palma had been on the same side, but Palma betrayed Gomez to the Fascists and had him imprisoned. Gomez wants to know whether Palma is still committed to the cause and is using his political position to undermine the regime. Palma himself is unsure of his loyalties any more: Palma: I’ve stayed so long with Franco, I’ve grown old with him. My memory fades. I can no longer clearly remember being an anarchist [sic]. McGill: You’ve turned completely. Palma: To cease to be one thing is not always to become another. Sometimes it is only to become nothing.

Palma and Gomez finally confront each other, and Palma is prevented from shooting Gomez by McGill. Ultimately political and personal differences are resolved and the two men decide that they might as well share the gold themselves, only to discover that it has been stolen by Gomez’s daughter and son-in-law. ‘They prove what you have always wanted to prove – that we Spanish are all anarchists!’ Palma declares. The slightly comic ending of the episode is somewhat at odds with the story of treachery and betrayal, but even so its treatment of the Fascist regime and the suggestion of continued opposition to Franco both inside and outside Spain clearly indicate on which side of the ideological divide the narrative stands. A similar leaning towards the left can be detected in a number of episodes which revolve around the issue of decolonisation. Like several episodes of Danger Man, Man in a Suitcase employs narratives of white reactionaries unable to come to terms with the withdrawal from empire. But whereas Danger Man had shown the British acting as colonial guardians to protect their former territories from dictatorship and civil war, Man in a Suitcase takes the

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Saints and Avengers unequivocal position that the new states should be allowed to run their own affairs and that the British should keep out. In ‘Brainwash’ McGill is kidnapped and drugged by Colonel Davies, the former white president of the central African state of Iquala who has been deposed following a popular uprising orchestrated by the British and American secret services. Davies wants McGill to admit his role in the uprising as the first step to regaining power, but McGill is unimpressed by Davies’ claims of public service: Davies: A few of us started a nation: communications, industry, education. We tried to lift them from the bronze age to the modern age in one generation. And we were making progress, until radicals and fools illegally took over, with Anglo-American help, of course. They drove us into exile, and what have they achieved? McGill: We call it democracy. Davies: Chaos! The jungle’s moving back in.

Davies is a reactionary who wants to restore white rule and who regards Africans as unfit to govern themselves. The same theme is explored in ‘No Friend of Mine’, which is set against the background of civil unrest in the African state of Kanunga, a British colony on the verge of independence. McGill is working undercover at the Cameron Mining Corporation, whose chairman Garfield Cameron has hired him to investigate a campaign of sabotage which the company blames on the black independence leader Masutu. However, McGill discovers that the acts of sabotage are being carried out by the company’s own police force under the direction of Cameron’s own son-in-law Baldwin in order to discredit Masutu. The episode equates the reactionary forces of imperialism with the interests of big business. Cameron distrusts Masutu (‘Irresponsible sabotage is his cause . . . This is the man that Whitehall in its wisdom wants to hand over to’), while Baldwin is a racist who believes that self-government will lead to anarchy (‘Independence for those savages! . . . The Africans are out of control’). Masutu, on the other hand, is characterised as an intelligent and educated leader, and the episode is clearly sympathetic to his cause (‘I want what Africans want all over this continent. Our freedom – equal opportunities’). Unrest spills over into violence when Baldwin closes the mines, the workers protest at losing their jobs and the company police fire on the protesters. The episode ends with Cameron killed in the fracas and with Baldwin discredited, but the wider issues of British economic interests in Africa following decolonisation are left unresolved.

Have Gun, Will Travel Taken together, the ‘human nature’ content of Man in a Suitcase, its ingredients of social criticism and the political content of some episodes stand it apart from other adventure series. If most thriller and spy narratives are ideologically to the right, then Man in a Suitcase might be placed further towards the left than usual for a series of its type. It does not revolve around the discourses of nationhood, patriotism and modernity that characterise Danger Man, The Avengers, The Saint and Adam Adamant Lives! There is evidence both of a social conscience in the style of the ‘human nature’ series and of a greater commitment to social realism on the part of the production team. The explanation for this is speculative, though it almost certainly has something to do with the involvement of Sidney Cole as producer of the series. Cole was a left-wing activist who throughout his career had shown a close interest in progressive causes. In 1938 he had collaborated with Thorold Dickinson on the production of two newsreel-documentary films sympathetic to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War: Behind Spanish Lines and Spanish ABC. In 1944 he had been associate producer and co-writer (with director Basil Dearden) of Ealing’s film of J.B. Priestley’s play They Came to a City, a discursive film about the building of the welfare state after the Second World War which was described by the National Film Archive as ‘the first attempt to carry out socialist propaganda in the British feature film’.9 Since the 1930s Cole had been an activist in the Association of Cinema Technicians (later the Association of Cinema and Television Technicians), and in the 1950s and 1960s sat on the board of its company, ACT Films, for which he also wrote and produced The Kitchen (1961), based on a play by Arthur Wesker, one of the lesser known of the British ‘New Wave’ films of the early 1960s which brought a greater degree of social realism than before to the treatment of the working-class experience. In Cole’s television work, moreover, there is evidence of an inclination towards characters who, like McGill of Man in a Suitcase, are social outsiders. Cole said that he was attracted to The Adventures of Robin Hood because ‘it has a hero who is outside the law but morally justified’.10 Cole would return to a similar sort of character when he produced the children’s costume adventure series Dick Turpin (1978). Although the case should not be overstated, Cole’s influence on determining the style and content of Man in a Suitcase would seem to have been at least as significant as the input of Greenberg, Harris and Spooner. Contemporary critics do not seem to have appreciated these nuances, however, regarding Man in a Suitcase as a thick-ear thriller of no particular merit. For Maurice Wiggin, it was ‘yet another thuggish variant on the theme of the armed freebooter; it cuts a familiar dusty swathe through the alien

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Saints and Avengers corn’.11 Philip Purser found the content unpleasant and the storylines contrived: ‘The picture of a swinging, crime-consumed London in the episode about the informer was peculiarly offensive as well as ludicrously engineered’.12 The unenthusiastic reception of Man in a Suitcase by British critics suggests that it was considered too ‘American’ for British tastes. At the same time, however, the likely reason for it not catching on in America is that it was not different enough from the usual diet of private eye and detective fare already familiar to American audiences. There was nothing especially distinctive about Man in a Suitcase to find it a niche in the American schedules. Ironically, it lost out to another British series, as the ABC network preferred The Avengers and held Man in a Suitcase back as a schedule filler.13 The conclusion to be drawn from the relative failure of the series, in comparison to others of the same pedigree, would seem to be that those British adventure dramas which succeeded in America did so because they offered something different from their American counterparts. This was not the conclusion drawn by Lew Grade and ITC, however, who in the late 1960s clung to the belief that American-style series were more likely to succeed in the American market.

Return from Shangri-La

6 Return from Shangri-La

The Champions

T

he Champions, another ITC secret agent adventure series aimed at the international market, had an odd production history. The 30 episodes of the series were filmed at Elstree Studios in 1967, but were not broadcast on British television until 1969 by which time the series had already been cancelled. This two-year delay was caused by the complexities of international sales and distribution, which had seen The Champions sold to the United States (where some episodes were networked by NBC in 1968) and to countries as diverse as Japan and Australia before it was aired in its home territory.1 Although it was not as successful as other ITC exports such as Danger Man or The Saint, and despite the ridicule with which it was received by most critics, in hindsight The Champions appears more significant in the development of the telefantasy genre than its lukewarm contemporary reception would allow. For one thing, it marked the first collaboration between Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner, the creative team behind several ITC series in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Department S, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jason King and The Adventurer. For another, it was the first ITC series to use an entirely fantastic premise in that its heroes were endowed with certain super-human and psychic powers. In this respect The Champions anticipated several British and American telefantasy series of the 1970s. The production team of The Champions included enough experienced hands from other sixties adventure series to suggest that it should have been

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Saints and Avengers successful. Berman had co-produced the black-and-white episodes of The Saint and had produced The Baron, while Spooner had been a scriptwriter for The Avengers and The Baron and was co-creator of Man in a Suitcase. They jointly devised The Champions, with Berman acting as producer and Spooner as script supervisor. In addition to Spooner himself the writers for the series included Philip Broadley, Brian Clemens, Donald James, Ralph Smart and Tony Williamson, while Roy Ward Baker, Cyril Frankel, John Gilling, John Llewelyn Moxey and Don Sharp were among the directors. Production values were high, with a budget of £40,000 per episode, and the series had the same slick and glossy style as others from the same stable. The Champions represents the convergence of two different, though related, lineages within genre fiction: the spy thriller and the super-hero adventure. The premise of the series is that three agents, working for an international security organisation called Nemesis, come to possess special powers after their plane crashes in Tibet and they are healed by a mysterious civilisation hidden in the mountains. The title is explained in the voice-over introducing each episode: the three agents are ‘champions of law, order and justice’. The existence of an international security organisation that is not answerable to any particular country (the Geneva headquarters of Nemesis is suggestive of the United Nations) locates The Champions in the same lineage as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. This may have been a strategy to depoliticise the content of the series for international sales, though if so it was not applied consistently. The Champions does still refer to the Cold War as topical background, though China rather than the Soviet Union is represented as the main communist antagonist. One critic, indeed, complained after viewing the first episode of ‘the wholesale slaughter of Chinese in the pursuit of World Peace’.2 The characterisations of The Champions are conventional in the extreme, lacking the quirkiness and eccentricity of, say, The Avengers or Department S, and again suggesting that international sales underlay the entire production strategy. The series followed the ‘two men and a girl’ formula that has remained a standard device in the adventure series (including Department S, The New Avengers and Bugs), while the casting reflected its international ambitions. Stuart Damon, a personable American actor who had appeared on Broadway and the London stage, headed the cast as Craig Stirling. Stirling is very much in the mould of the conventional leading man: a combination of dark, matinée idol good looks, physical prowess, smart dress sense and boyish charm. He is, to all intents and purposes, Napoleon Solo by another name. The feminine interest was provided by Alexandra Bastedo, a 21-year-old English actress of mixed Canadian and Italian background. It would be fair to say that Bastedo,

Return from Shangri-La a cool blonde mannequin, was cast less for her acting ability than for her looks (she bore more than a passing resemblance to Catherine Deneuve), but her expressionless face and unfocused gaze are oddly effective at projecting the aura of a heroine with unworldly powers. She at least brought a degree of European sophistication to the part of Sharron Macready, a young widow and scientist (shades of Emma Peel in The Avengers) who has joined Nemesis following her husband’s death. The trio was completed by a young William Gaunt, hitherto best known to British television audiences as sidekick Bob Marriott in the BBC’s Victorian detective series Sergeant Cork, who played Richard Barrett. If Stirling is another Napoleon Solo, then Barrett is a British Ilya Kuryakin, being rather more serious and intense than his American colleague. The only other regular character in the series is Tremayne (Anthony Nicholls), the head of Nemesis, who performs the same function as Leo G. Carroll’s Mr Waverly in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in providing plot information and narrative legitimation for the agents to embark on their globetrotting assignments. While The Champions bears comparison to other secret agent series, most especially The Man From U.N.C.L.E., however, it also draws upon some themes and motifs from the genre of the super-hero adventure. The superhero is predominantly an American tradition which has its origins in comic books during the late 1930s and early 1940s where characters such as Superman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern and the Flash all first appeared. The super-hero may be defined as one who possesses extraordinary powers or abilities which exceed those of ordinary mortals – Batman, who also made his debut in comic books at this time, is not strictly a super-hero in that he has no super powers. The first super-heroes of the late 1930s can be seen as a response to the Depression in that their enemies (like those of the Saint at the same time) were often corrupt capitalists and industrialists. With the coming of the Second World War, however, the attention of the super-heroes turned outwards to foreign dictators and spies who threatened American security. While the idea of the ‘super man’ might be interpreted as having ideologically questionable Nietzschian overtones, this was mediated by associating the super-heroes closely with the cause of American democracy and freedom. Most of the leading comic book heroes made the transition to the screen during the 1940s in serials and were adapted for radio and later for television. A second generation of super-heroes emerged during the 1960s, such as Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, whose comics were characterised by a greater degree of psychological realism and

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Saints and Avengers which reflected the greater cultural and ethnic diversity of American society. Unlike the square-jawed patriots of the 1940s, the super-heroes of the 1960s and after were more often outsiders whose adventures foregrounded the themes of social dislocation and cultural difference. Like all popular fictional genres, the super-hero adventure has its own set of narrative codes and conventions. Foremost amongst these is the origin myth, which provides a back-story and explains how the super-heroes came into being in the first place. The first generation of super-heroes are usually ordinary people whose powers are endowed by scientists or mystics to enable them to fight against the enemies of democracy and freedom. Thus, Steve Rogers is transformed into Captain America by the injection of a serum, intended to make him the first in a breed of super secret agents, while Billy Batson is given special powers by the wizard Shazam which enable him to transform into Captain Marvel. Later generation super-heroes are more likely to acquire their powers as the result of a freak accident. Thus, Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes Spiderman, while Dr Bruce Banner’s alter ego the Incredible Hulk is the result of exposure to gamma radiation. The Champions combines the different types of origin myth in that their special powers are the result of both an accident and endowment by an ancient civilisation. The other essential ingredient of the super-hero myth is that they conceal their super powers, usually by adopting an unassuming alter ego who becomes their everyday persona when not engaged in fighting crime. Superman, for example, adopts the guise of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, while Wonder Woman disguises herself as bespectacled secretary Diana Prince. Although the protagonists of The Champions do not adopt other personas, they do not flaunt their super powers, which remain a closely guarded secret, even from their chief Tremayne. Roy Ward Baker later suggested that The Champions ‘had been inspired by the sight of some prodigious feats at the Olympic Games, only more so’.3 This explanation, however, is not corroborated by other sources. According to Dennis Spooner, The Champions was simply a logical development of the direction in which adventure series were already going: Action dramas have reached the stage when the principal characters are achieving the impossible in their exploits, fights, cunning and unbelievable physical stamina. They go beyond the realms of probability. One man can defeat a dozen several times in the course of a single story. No one can believe that any mortal could achieve what the present day heroes manage to do and survive. But The Champions makes it all logical because the three characters have these out-of-the-ordinary powers.4

Return from Shangri-La Spooner stressed, however, that their powers remained ‘within the bounds of possibility’. This is one area where The Champions differs from most superhero adventures in that its protagonists ‘can do anything within the limits of human capabilities’. Each episode would put one or more of the protagonists in a situation where they survived an incident that would stretch their physical endurance to the limit, such as holding their breath underwater, being trapped in a refrigerator or stranded in a desert. They have enhanced sight and vision, allowing them to see in the dark and hear sounds outside the normal human range. Furthermore, their powers are mental as well as physical, for they are also endowed with higher IQs and with a degree of extra-sensory perception to the extent that if any one of the trio is in danger the others can detect it. The Champions, then, was an attempt to incorporate elements of the superhero genre into the secret agent series. What is especially interesting about the series is that, for all its fantastic premise, the storylines remained for the most part reasonably down-to-earth. It is as if the writers, having asked the audience to suspend their disbelief over the powers endowed upon the protagonists, were unwilling to test that suspension of disbelief any further. There were to be no death rays, killer robots or diabolical masterminds bent on world domination in The Champions, which dealt instead with more mundane criminals such as kidnappers, saboteurs and assassins. It is this contrast within the series, between the fantastic and the realistic, the supernatural and the rational, that may explain why The Champions is less well regarded, and has not spawned the same cult following, as some other series. Its super-hero elements, certainly, were too low-key to appeal to fans of the genre. ‘The Champions were definitely super-heroes . . . but they didn’t act like super-heroes,’ complains one aficionado. ‘They looked and dressed like ordinary people, and their mostly mental abilities were fairly prosaic.’5 The origin myth of The Champions is explained in the first episode, written by Spooner and appropriately entitled ‘The Beginning’. The idea was originally mooted of making the pilot episode 90 minutes long (now a common practice), though in the event it went ahead at the usual 50-minute length.6 The episode begins with three secret agents (they are obviously secret agents because, this being the 1960s, they are wearing black polo neck sweaters) infiltrating a research laboratory somewhere in China and stealing bacteria samples. The agents make good their escape with the samples, but their plane is damaged by gunfire on take-off and they are forced to crash land in the Himalayas. The trio are knocked unconscious, and when they reawake they realise that two days have passed and that the injuries they sustained in the crash have been healed with surgery. ‘Something’s happened,’ Richard Barrett

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19. ‘We’re different – we’re very different’. Richard Barrett (William Gaunt, left), Craig Stirling (Stuart Damon) and Sharron Macready (Alexandra Bastedo) realise something has happened to them in The Champions. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

observes. ‘We’re different – we’re very different.’ Craig Stirling has vague recollections of seeing a bearded old man in the snow and of being in some kind of operating theatre. When Sharron Macready reveals that she saw lights on the ground just before the plane crashed, Craig surmises that it could have been an unknown city and remarks quite matter-of-factly: ‘The world’s a big place. A lost civilisation in Tibet? Storytellers have been dreaming about it long enough, why shouldn’t it be true?’ There is indeed a long tradition of lost civilisations in popular mythology. The discovery of such civilisations was a recurring theme in the adventure fiction of writers such as Henry Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The idea of a lost civilisation in Tibet received its most enduring expression in Lost Horizon by the English writer James Hilton. Lost Horizon, published in 1933, tells the story of Conway, a British diplomat in the Far East who, with three companions, is kidnapped and taken to the monastery of Shangri-

Return from Shangri-La La in the Valley of the Blue Moon in Tibet, where he is told he has been chosen to succeed the 200-year-old High Lama. It is a romantic, utopian tale in which Shangri-La is presented as an earthly paradise where the lamas pursue their chosen paths of research and meditation uncorrupted by the taint of materialism. The climate of the valley, furthermore, allows the lamas to live to a ripe old age. Shangri-La is a haven of wisdom and learning – ‘a sort of multi-national All Souls College in the Himalayas’.7 Lost Horizon was lavishly filmed by Columbia Pictures in 1937, with Frank Capra directing and Ronald Colman starring as Conway. The film had a different ending from the book: Hilton’s hero had rejected the High Lama’s request to take his place, but in the film he returns to Shangri-La, having initially left with his weakling brother. A misguided musical remake of the film, produced by Ross Hunter and starring Peter Finch, followed in 1973. The Champions is not concerned with picturing a lost civilisation and exploring an alternative lifestyle in the manner of Lost Horizon. For obvious budgetary reasons, there are no glimpses of the lost city in the Himalayas, and even its population is represented only by one old man (Finlay Currie with a long white beard and wearing a yellow dressing gown). Nothing is ever learned of the mysterious people, their lifestyle or their culture, which remains unseen. ‘Our civilisation has run parallel to your own. We have chosen to follow a different path,’ is all that the Old Man says about it. The existence of the lost civilisation is merely a plot device which serves to provide the heroes of The Champions with their special powers. What is apparent, however, is that the Himalayan people possess advanced medical skills which allow them not only to repair the bodies of the three agents but actually to improve both their physical and their mental faculties. As the Old Man explains to Richard: Our treatment did more than mend your bodies. It improved them. It transformed the efficiency of your minds and senses. You have unbelievable strength. You have the power to see and hear far more than you could imagine. There has been a sharpening of your reason and of all your faculties . . . But remember – these currents are not automatic. You must learn to use them just as children learn to use them. Moreover, you are not infallible. You will make mistakes. In fact, you are still human. Super-human, perhaps, but not infallible and not immortal.

One of the themes of The Champions is that its protagonists do not initially know the extent of their own powers, but are constantly learning what their abilities and limitations are. This is different from the typical super-hero adventure, in which there is usually a set of ‘rules’ about the extent of the

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Saints and Avengers hero’s powers: Superman’s X-ray vision could not see through lead, for example. The existence of such rules and conventions provides a ‘realistic’ counterpoint to the fantastic premise of the super-hero adventure – a similar example might be how the myth of the vampire, which is posited on a supernatural premise, is regulated by a set of pseudo-scientific laws which lay down methods of destroying a vampire. In The Champions, these rules are developed as the series progresses and are thus subject to some variation. There are other points of interest in the pilot episode of The Champions, however, which have nothing to do with its super-hero elements. The theme of bacteriological warfare was a topical one at the time, when military scientists in both East and West were known to be developing and stockpiling chemicals and bacteria that might be used in the event of war. The idea of a plague threatening to wipe out the human race informed several late sixties spy thrillers, including Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). What is especially interesting about this episode, however, is that it is the Chinese who are shown to be developing bacteria samples and that the operation to steal them is being carried out by Nemesis at the joint request of the Americans and the Russians. Like certain episodes of The Saint, therefore, The Champions suggests that China might pose a greater threat to the West than the Soviet Union and even posits the notion of a combined Anglo-American-Soviet operation to reduce the threat. This notion was perhaps not so absurd as it might seem: in 1964 the American government had actually considered joining the Soviet Union in some form of ‘preventative military action’ against China following China’s development of nuclear weapons.8 Furthermore, the direction which the episode takes, as Chinese soldiers (led, inevitably, by Burt Kwouk) pursue the Nemesis agents to Tibet, reflects China’s real military excursion into Tibet, which it had occupied since 1951 and incorporated into the People’s Republic in 1965. Like Danger Man, but unlike The Avengers, The Champions draws upon real political anxieties and social problems for topical background to its conspiracy plots. Its politics are different from Danger Man, however, in that The Champions distances itself from the discourses of British imperialism that had characterised the earlier series. Instead, The Champions positions itself in relation to a notion of international security legitimated through the agency of the United Nations. Nemesis exists to maintain the balance of power and to combat threats to international security – which, of course, means threats to the security of the Western bloc powers. While most threats to the status quo emerge from unnamed or fictitious countries, when a particular country is named, or inferred, it is almost invariably a communist

Return from Shangri-La state. Furthermore, The Champions legitimates intervention in the domestic affairs of Third World countries if international security is threatened. In this sense The Champions might be seen as a legitimation of the sort of covert operations pursued by the CIA, which had organised successful coups in Iran and Guatemala during the 1950s before being discredited by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. The anti-communist, pro-interventionist narrative ideologies of The Champions are exemplified by the episode ‘Get Me Out of Here!’, in which the identity of the enemy is not difficult to guess. The Nemesis agents are sent to rescue Professor Anna Martez, a leading figure in medical research who has become a naturalised US citizen but who has been tricked by her ‘ex-country’ into returning with a false story of a patient requiring her attention. The country in question is a Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean called ‘San Dios’ which is ruled by an ideologically committed dictator known as ‘El Jefe’: Richard: With El Jefe, politics come into everything, even medicine. Craig: And this being his ‘Year of Scientific Progress’, if she’s going to get any glory he wants a share of it.

The island is obviously meant to represent Cuba, while El Jefe (who remains unseen) is Fidel Castro. The episode asserts unequivocally that the US citizenship which Professor Martez enjoys is sufficient justification for intervention in San Dios/Cuba and that western democracy is morally superior to political (communist) dictatorship. It also suggests the existence of internal opposition to El Jefe/Castro, as the Nemesis rescue mission is assisted by political dissidents who sacrifice their own lives to ensure the professor’s escape. The Champions takes for granted the bipolar world system of the Cold War, but is opposed to the rise of a third superpower which might disrupt the delicate balance of power. The military and ideological threat of Red China, already seen in the first episode, is a recurring theme in the series. While The Champions does not go so far as to credit the Chinese with plans to take over the world by stealth, as The Saint had done, it does express western anxieties about the growth of Chinese military strength. In ‘The Ghost Plane’ these anxieties are related to the existence of malcontents at home. It seems that the Chinese have developed a super-fast, delta-winged fighter plane which is far superior to any western aircraft (‘China will have complete air superiority for a very long time,’ remarks Tremayne). The US Navy are sceptical about

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Saints and Avengers the report of their pilot who saw the plane, believing that the Chinese are not technologically equipped to produce such a weapon (‘They don’t have that kind of technology. They couldn’t build a plane like the one you describe.’) It turns out that the design expertise and technology involved in the fighter are not Chinese at all but are the work of Dr Newman, a Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University who has become disillusioned after the British government shelved his plans for the experimental aircraft: Newman: Years and years of work wasted by politicians’ stupidity! But now I have my commercial interests to think of. I’m being paid a great deal of money. Sharron: By an enemy? Newman: By a customer. The West could have bought my invention. They turned it down. The East didn’t. It’s as simple as that. The only thing that’s important to me is that my work, my genius, is in use, and not lying gathering dust on a ministry shelf.

There is a two-edged ideological agenda at work here. On the one hand, it reassures that the Chinese are not as technologically advanced as the West and rely on western (indeed British) expertise in constructing their new weapon. On the other hand, it makes an implicit criticism of the British government for not backing its own scientists and suggests that they might be tempted to defect. The ‘brain drain’ among scientists was another recurring theme of sixties spy fiction, represented, for example, by The Ipcress File (1965). Newman plans to escape behind ‘the bamboo curtain’, but his motive would appear to be a mixture of greed and frustration rather than a political commitment to Chinese Communism. In the event, Nemesis prevents the necessary aircraft parts from reaching China by blowing up the freighter on which they are being transported in an Albanian port. Another geopolitical threat to the status quo arises from the Third World. Again, The Champions can be seen as responding to real global anxieties, as one of the consequences of decolonisation in the late 1950s and early 1960s had been the emergence of newly independent states which had political agendas of their own. The expansion of the United Nations gave a voice to those countries, especially in Africa and Asia, which, with much justification, were highly critical of the imbalance of wealth and resources between the First and Third Worlds. If the Suez Crisis had been the first major reaction against western imperialism, later crises and conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America brought home that ‘[t]he agenda of world

Return from Shangri-La politics was no longer exclusively in the hands of those powers possessing the greatest military and economic muscle’.9 Even the anti-nuclear campaigner Eugene Rabinowitch was of the opinion that ‘confrontation between [a] rapidly advancing “developed” world and stagnant “underdeveloped” world . . . is as much a threat for the peaceful future of mankind as is the confrontation of nuclear superpowers’.10 Several episodes of The Champions are posited upon military threats from (unnamed) Third World countries which are motivated by the politics of exclusion and resentment. The solution provided by the series, however, is reactionary in the extreme, for invariably these crises are resolved by the use of force which is considered both politically and morally justifiable. In ‘Operation Deep-Freeze’, for example, a mysterious explosion in the Antarctic, and the subsequent disappearance of a team of scientists sent to investigate, leads to the discovery of a secret underground bunker where a South American military regime is stockpiling tactical atomic weapons. The explosion had been the result of an accident; Craig and Richard discover the team sent to investigate have been shot. General Gomez, in command of the base, is fuelled by resentment and anger towards the larger powers: Gomez: Always we have been exploited, robbed, humiliated by foreigners – foreigners who frown on our ways of government, apply legal pressures to bring it down. Soon that will happen no more. Throughout history large, rich nations have always bullied small, poor ones. Now it changes. Craig: Does it? Gomez: A little man with a gun is as strong as a big man with a gun – it only takes one very small finger to pull the trigger . . . On the completion of our work here we will be a great power. No country will tell us what to do. They can destroy us, yes, but soon we will be in a position to destroy them as well.

The suggestion of political difference suggests that the unnamed country is a thinly disguised communist or socialist regime (Cuba and Chile would be the most likely contenders), but more significant than the actual identity of the enemy is the way in which the episode expresses the resentment which so many ‘have not’ countries felt against their richer and more powerful neighbours. In the event, Gomez’s plans are thwarted when Craig and Richard blow up the base with one of his own atomic shells. The politics of resentment also lay behind the conspiracy in ‘The Silent Enemy’. A missing American submarine surfaces off the Irish coast, its crew all dead from cardiac failure.

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Saints and Avengers Retracing the voyage of the submarine leads to an uncharted island off the West African coast which houses a secret laboratory. ‘The whole object of this project is to give our country a weapon that will enable its voice to be heard,’ a government minister tells sinister scientific chief Minos, who has developed a gas that kills by inducing cardiac failure. Again, the conspiracy is fuelled by a sense of exclusion and resentment: Minos: If it were not for the United Nations, our country would not be isolated in a hostile world, cut off, alone. Minister: If the world doesn’t like our politics, Minos, we have to defend them.

The resolution of the episode leaves no doubt that the western powers are not prepared to tolerate being held to ransom by upstart Third World countries: the island base is destroyed, in the most emphatic way, with a nuclear bomb dropped by an RAF Vulcan bomber. In large measure, therefore, The Champions is concerned with policing threats to the balance of power. Those threats are often associated with a particular country or regime, real or inferred, but sometimes they are the result of individual agency rather than geopolitics. In ‘Project Zero’, Nemesis investigates the disappearance of dozens of top scientists who have left their jobs to work for a secret research project. The episode opens with a sequence reminiscent of The Avengers as a man in a white coat, obviously in fear for his life, runs through an eerily deserted village before seeking refuge in the post office, where he demands to use the telephone and is promptly shot dead by the postmaster. Richard, posing as a computer expert, is recruited by a panel purporting to represent the British government and is taken to a top secret underground laboratory somewhere in Scotland run under the tightest security regime by Dr Voss. When Richard is revealed as an impostor, he is assigned to menial duties and is fitted with an explosive collar that will be detonated if he tries to communicate with the outside world. Craig and Sharron, masquerading as guidance system experts, are also recruited to the project. It turns out that Voss has recruited a team of experts to develop a ‘fission gun’, a weapon that can be used to detonate nuclear warheads by bombarding them with electronic particles. Voss remarks that the fission gun could ‘wipe out the nuclear stockpiles of the major powers – or, more to the point, either one of them’. He is motivated not by politics but by blackmail: his intention is to hold the nuclear powers to ransom. The machinations of an individual madman, therefore, threaten the peaceful co-existence of East

Return from Shangri-La and West. A similar conspiracy featured in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971) in which arch-villain Blofeld uses a laser-equipped satellite to force the major powers to hold ‘an international auction – with nuclear supremacy going to the highest bidder’. In the event, however, Voss’s plans are foiled by Sharron who booby traps the plane in which he mounts the fission gun. The Champions frequently revolves around an opposition between science and the supernatural. Unusually, however, it is the supernatural (as represented by the three protagonists themselves) that is associated with morality and justice, whereas science is shown to be dangerous and corrupt. Unlike the technocrats of The Avengers, the scientists of The Champions are motivated by greed and personal ambition rather than by ideology. ‘The Experiment’, one of the best episodes of the series, is also one of the few to follow the traditional mad scientist formula – and even then the villain’s ambitions are never fully explained. Sharron is persuaded to volunteer for a secret experiment, ostensibly sponsored by the combined western security services (MI6, the CIA and the French Sûreté), but actually a private undertaking by Dr Glind. Glind has used advanced medical science to create a group of super-humans with enhanced speed and strength, but his problem is that using their powers for more than 15 minutes results in their complete mental breakdown. Glind is aware of the powers of the Nemesis trio and tries to force Sharron to reveal their origin, but she answers truthfully that she does not understand them herself. The doctor has monitored Sharron’s reactions in a series of physical tests and feeds the results into a computer in order to devise ‘a perfect way of killing you all’. Glind’s intention, it is revealed, is to kill the Nemesis trio, whom he sees as ‘the only people who could jeopardise what I want to do in the future’. His weakness, however, is that he is over-reliant on computer analysis (‘The computer chose the weapons – and the method. It’s too late to change it now’) and so commits himself to an elaborate and inevitably flawed scheme for killing them. In this respect, the episode provides a ‘rational’ explanation for one of the quaint conventions of the secret agent adventure in which villains must devise unlikely death scenarios for the heroes rather than choosing the obvious method of just shooting them. Craig and Richard therefore have a pitched fight with four knife-wielding super-humans, but the tables are turned when Glind’s creations realise that he considers them expendable and they turn on their creator. The episode is especially significant for two reasons. First, it is the only occasion during the series when the protagonists are pitted against foes with strength and speed similar to their own. One of the dramatic problems of the

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Saints and Avengers super-hero adventure has always been that it often lacks suspense and tension because the heroes can use their powers to escape from whatever predicament they find themselves in. There are two strategies for overcoming this: narratives which pit super-heroes against enemies with equal or similar powers (as here), or narratives which deprive the heroes (albeit temporarily) of their special powers. Second, the episode asserts that the attempt to create artificially enhanced human beings is both scientifically flawed and morally wrong. Although the precise nature of Glind’s experiment is never really explained, there is an implication of some form of genetic engineering, with all its overtones of concentration camps and experimentation on human ‘guinea pigs’, which clearly places it beyond the pale of what is considered morally acceptable. In contrast to its supernatural premise, however, The Champions rejects supernatural explanations for the inexplicable. A good example of this is ‘Shadow of the Panther’ which delves into the world of voodoo mysticism. Nemesis has got wind that ‘something odd’ is going on at a hotel in Haiti, which seems to be home to an unusually large number of top scientists and politicians. Sharron investigates the death of a scientist who appears to have been frightened to death. The local doctor subscribes to a supernatural explanation: ‘The most powerful emotion in man is fear. This man died in a state of terror . . . In this island we believe in superstition, mysticism and voodoo.’ Sharron discovers that the hotel guests have all been turned into zombies by a masked illusionist called Dambala and apparently falls under his spell herself. When the others arrive, they surmise that voodoo is being used by Dambala as a form of social control: ‘With ninety per cent of the population going to bed with chicken bones under their pillows, voodoo’s a good way of keeping them quiet.’ The Nemesis agents remain sceptical about the power of voodoo, even when the zombified guests begin stalking them through the hotel corridors with swords and axes. It turns out that Dambala is really an American called Crayley, who is using advanced brainwashing techniques to turn politicians and scientists into killers. ‘My zombies are the perfect assassins,’ he tells Sharron (who has only pretended to be brainwashed). ‘They hold positions of power, they move freely through the tightest security. And when they leave here they won’t even know that they’ve been programmed to kill!’ Apparently supernatural events have pseudoscientific explanations: the zombies are controlled by ultra-sonics and hypnosis rather than voodoo, while Crayley has developed a nerve gas which induces a feeling of intense fear so that victims are literally frightened to death. It is unclear whether Crayley’s own motivation is political or personal,

Return from Shangri-La but in a sense this does not matter: he is simply another manifestation of the ‘chaos world’ of the thriller which threatens to disrupt the existing social and political order. Brainwashing is a recurring plot device in The Champions, and in this sense the series might be seen as responding to a particular aspect of Cold War paranoia. Incidents such as the trial of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949, and the behaviour of some American prisoners-of-war who returned from captivity in Korea spouting communist propaganda, raised anxieties in the West, most especially in America, that the Soviets and Chinese had developed techniques for controlling the minds of individuals through a combination of drugs and psychological conditioning. The brainwashing phenomenon (the word ‘brainwashing’ itself is generally credited to American journalist Edward Hunter) was the subject of numerous scaremongering books and newspaper articles during the 1950s and received academic legitimacy through the work of psychologists such as William Sargant and Vance Packard. The idea of brainwashing was popularised in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, filmed by John Frankenheimer in 1962, in which an American ‘war hero’ captured in Korea is programmed by the Chinese to return to America and kill a prominent American politician.11 ‘Autokill’, another one of the series’ best episodes, begins with one of Nemesis’s top agents arriving at headquarters after being reported missing and attempting to kill the chief of security. The situation recalls the first chapter of Ian Fleming’s last novel The Man With the Golden Gun (1965), in which James Bond, presumed dead at the end of the previous book, returns to secret service headquarters in London and promptly tries to assassinate M, having been captured and brainwashed by the Soviets. The Champions episode features a plot to destroy Nemesis by conditioning its own agents to kill specific targets within the organisation. The episode suggests that everyone is susceptible to brainwashing and that even the strongest-willed characters are vulnerable. Thus, Tremayne is kidnapped and programmed to kill the Nemesis medical officer, though he is foiled in the attempt. Richard is the next victim and is programmed to kill Craig, being brainwashed into believing that Craig had killed his father and brother and had stolen his girlfriend. A psychological motivation is required, therefore, to make a brainwash victim act against his normal instincts. In the event, however, the episode suggests that brainwashing is a medical rather than a psychological condition and that it can be cured by a medical antidote. The episode climaxes in a furious fight between Craig and the brainwashed Richard (the most violent

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Saints and Avengers fight sequence of the entire series, with both men bruised and bloodied) before Sharron is able to inject Richard with the antidote. The Champions was derided by British critics, who had much fun at its expense, ridiculing everything about the show from its premise and writing to its production values and acting. For Sylvia Clayton, it was ‘a series conceived without wit, fantasy, or even the kind of energy that powered Batman’.12 Philip Purser found it ‘quite unbelievably bad’, and, noting that the script editor’s namesake was the Reverend W.A. Spooner, coined a ‘spoonerism’ of his own in describing the series as ‘cupid strap’ [sic].13 Another joke at the series’ expense was made by the critic of the Daily Sketch: ‘The Champions work for a peacekeeping force known as Nemesis – which my dictionary says means “retribution”. I trust it comes swiftly to the people who devised this super silly show.’14 Nancy Banks-Smith followed the tradition of many critics in discussing fantasy by detecting a perverse kind of pleasure in its absurdity, remarking that ‘The Champions . . . reaches a peak of pure awfulness which is downright enjoyable if you are in the mood for it’. She went on to ridicule the heroes’ super powers as ‘[t]he ability to lift huge papier mâché rocks, [and] to hear ridiculous dialogue from a ridiculous distance. Superhuman reason and reflexes. Unfortunately, one detects no improvement in their acting ability.’15 The overwhelmingly negative verdict of the critics was summed up by Maurice Wiggin: ‘There is a melancholy distinction in being the worst in any category, and I think The Champions achieve it.’16 The derision with which The Champions was received was probably the cumulative result of several factors. Its belated showing on British television, in the wake of so many other sixties telefantasy series from both Britain and America, probably meant that critics experienced a sense of déjà vu with The Champions. Such an attitude might be inferred from Wiggin’s despairing comment about ‘the three agents working their preposterous wonders for the latest global security agency’. Moreover, the fact that The Champions had an avowedly fantastic premise put it in a different category from series such as Danger Man, still the best regarded ITC series, which had maintained a veneer of realism and believability. For some critics, however, their dislike of The Champions went beyond their inability to appreciate fantasy on its own terms. In the Daily Mail Peter Black made a stinging attack on Grade’s entire production strategy which, he averred, was contemptuous of its audience and was interested only in profits: The enormous advantage that Sir Lew Grade has over his rivals among the network is not that he knows better than they do what the public wants. It is

Return from Shangri-La that he doesn’t mind. He goes on commissioning stuff like The Champions with the patriotic zeal of a convoy skipper in wartime bringing precious cargoes through a minefield. After knocking about the regions for some time, The Champions opened in London last night. It is the latest version of the ancient folk myth, modified to meet the demands of colour TV and the international market, about the superhuman heroes, magically endowed to fight the giants. It appears to have been motivated by one simple thought: Why don’t we do Thunderbirds with real people? . . . It is possible to tell this kind of story with something of the charm and inventiveness of the fairy tales which are its true ancestors. The dreary thing about so many of Sir Lew’s dollar-earning fictions is dull lack of the true creative spark, of real human interest, of invention that rises above the obvious. I felt that a dog could have written it if he had wanted dollars more than dog biscuits. There wasn’t a moment to stimulate even the simplest of minds. And this is peak-time television in one of the greatest cities in the world.17

The implication of Black’s article, clearly, was that a series like The Champions could have been made more entertaining and original were it not for the commercial imperative of selling it in the international market. Coming so soon after Grade’s ATV had won the Queen’s Award to Industry for its export achievements, the accusation that his productions had consistently privileged profits over quality was an especially damning verdict, all the more so because Grade prided himself on his combination of showmanship and business sense. A lone voice among the chorus of disapproval, however, was James Thomas of the Daily Express, who felt that the series was a cut above others of its kind. ‘The Champions is understandably popular,’ he wrote, ‘for its writers are more inventive than those on the routine adventure serials, the producers more ready to take a chance with improbable ideas and try, within the framework of the studios, to give them a cinema quality.’ He recognised that it ‘is not intended to be credible’ but, alone among his colleagues, he considered that ‘its casting is excellent and it is produced with care, which takes it outside the realms of the TV comic strip’. He also praised the acting, declaring that the three leads ‘consistently keep the programme a cut above average with performances which one does not feel have been instantly manufactured on a studio floor but at least have been given a little thought’.18 However, the fate of The Champions had already been sealed by its reception in America. Ten episodes were screened by NBC in the summer of 1968, but the response was lukewarm. Variety realised that the series was

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Saints and Avengers obviously produced with American audiences in mind, noting its ‘increased concessions to Yank taste’, but observed that ‘hopes faded that ATV was on to another Saint in style and pulp fiction ingenuity’. The reviewer disliked the supernatural elements of the series, arguing that ‘the persuasion isn’t helped any by rigging the leads with superhuman endowments’.19 Dennis Spooner, while conceding that the series was not as successful as he had hoped, suggested the reason it did not catch on was because it was slightly ahead of its time: If it had got absolutely enormous figures and had been an absolutely outstanding hit, then indeed they [NBC] might have moved it to the winter schedule – and if it had still been an outstanding hit, it would have gone on. But it never got to that situation. But what did happen with shows like The Champions was that it proved there was a market, because The Champions spawned a lot of like-minded shows. It produced the superhero. I’m not saying The Champions thought of that, because The Champions in its turn was the after-runner of things like Superman. But I think, if you like, The Champions smoothed the way for other shows.20

There is probably some truth in this. The evidence can be found in the cycle of super-hero adventure series produced by American television during the 1970s. The first, and most successful, was The Six Million Dollar Man (197378), starring Lee Majors as an American astronaut who is paralysed in a crash and is rebuilt with ‘bionic’ limbs by a secret government organisation. There are obvious parallels with The Champions in Steve Austin’s enhanced strength, speed and vision, though there are differences in that his powers are provided by technology rather than by the supernatural. The Six Million Dollar Man spawned a cycle of what have been termed ‘enhanced secret agent’ dramas, including its own spin-off The Bionic Woman, The Invisible Man, The Gemini Man and The Man From Atlantis.21 These series endowed their protagonists with certain super-human powers and sent them to work for secret organisations fighting against sabotage and subversion. As this was also the premise of The Champions, it may be seen as a generic forerunner of the enhanced secret agent adventures of the 1970s.

The Marie Celeste

7 The Marie Celeste

Department S

D

epartment S, which ran for 28 episodes in 1969–1970, was another product of the fertile collaboration between Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner. To some extent Department S can be seen as a follow-up to The Champions, following as it does the same formula of three secret agents – two men and one woman – working for an international security organisation. In style and content, however, the bizarre conspiracy plots and quirky characterisations of Department S were closer to later episodes of The Avengers than they were to the rather po-faced seriousness of The Champions. Whereas The Champions had a fantastic premise but reasonably plausible storylines, Department S had a plausible premise but fantastic storylines which stretched the boundaries of credulity without resorting to supernatural explanations. It is with Department S that the last vestiges of psychological realism disappear from the ITC adventure series and the format embraces wholeheartedly the elements of ‘pop’ and ‘camp’ that had made The Avengers so distinctive. While it never matched the international success of The Avengers, Department S was successful enough in its own right to warrant a spin-off series, Jason King, which promoted one of the trio of investigators to centre stage.1 Berman and Spooner had set up their own production company, Scoton Productions, to streamline their production of series for ITC. This was to result in them working simultaneously at Elstree on both Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), which followed in production several months

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Saints and Avengers later. Department S employed much of the same production team responsible for The Champions. Berman acted as producer and Spooner as ‘executive story consultant’, while Cyril Frankel, a regular director of The Champions, was additionally credited as ‘creative consultant’. Terry Nation, who had been script editor of The Baron, joined a team of writers that also included Philip Broadley, Donald James, Harry W. Junkin, Gerald Kelsey and Tony Williamson, while the directors included such experienced hands as Ray Austin (a former stunt arranger who had turned to directing with later episodes of The Saint and The Avengers), Roy Ward Baker, Paul Dickson, Cyril Frankel, John Gilling and Leslie Norman. The only newcomers to the team were writer Leslie Darbon and director Gill Taylor, neither of whom had previously worked on the ITC production line. The formula of Department S was explained in the publicity material, which was also at pains to point out how it was different from other secret agent and detective series: Department S is the world’s most unusual police department, an off-shoot of Interpol, stepping into cases which cannot be solved, or handled, by any other authority. They are mysteries which may be caused by a natural occurrence, calamity, disaster or either premeditated or spontaneous crime. A departure from conventional mystery-adventure programmes, Department S has three principal characters . . . whose personalities are as contrasting as their styles as they investigate cases which are apparently inexplicable, baffling everyone with their total lack of logicality, but finding that even the most illogical of situations has a logical explanation.2

While the publicity discourse emphasises difference, however, Department S can be placed squarely within a generic lineage that stretches back to the birth of independent television in Britain. The device of a special investigator who is called in to crack cases that have baffled the police had already seen service in Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1955), based on John Dickson Carr’s collection of stories The Department of Queer Complaints and starring Boris Karloff as an urbane, eye-patched investigator who was to be the first in a long line of quirky and eccentric sleuths to populate British television screens. ATV’s Ghost Squad (1961–63), based on a book by Detective Superintendent John Gosling, was a fictionalised account of the work of a team of undercover Scotland Yard investigators, while Granada’s The Man in Room 17 (1965–66) was a comedy-thriller whose protagonists (played by Richard Vernon and Michael Aldridge) were high-IQ boffins solving unusual cases of espionage. Concurrent to Department S, the BBC produced a science-

The Marie Celeste fiction variation on the formula with Doomwatch (1970–72), which concerned a secret government agency set up to investigate and contain disturbing advances in science and technology. This formula reached its most successful interpretation from American television in the 1990s in the form of Fox’s The X Files, which follows the investigations of two FBI agents into the bureau’s unsolved cases. Leon Hunt describes Department S as ‘a pre-emptive version of The X Files’.3 But whereas The X Files mixes conventionally explicable crimes with stories involving alien abductions and other paranormal phenomena, Department S is insistent upon providing rational (if rather far-fetched) explanations for extraordinary events. The generic hybridity that had characterised both Man in a Suitcase and The Champions – and which was also to be a feature of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – is less apparent in Department S, though the series does draw upon archetypes from two slightly different lineages of thriller fiction. On one level Department S repeats the pattern of The Champions with its central dynamic of two men and one woman, who work both individually and as a team, and who are responsible to an authority figure who provides plot information and narrative legitimation. Two of the three protagonists are conventional secret agents, with the casting and characterisation once again reflecting the international market the producers had in mind. American Joel Fabiani was cast as Stewart Sullivan, a square-jawed action man, while English Rosemary Nicols played computer analyst Annabelle Hurst. Neither role is especially memorable: Sullivan has so little personality that he is indistinguishable from the mill of sixties adventure heroes, while Annabelle is virtually a clone of Linda Thorson’s Tara King in The Avengers, even down to the same hair style and clothes. Although there are attempts to add a little spice to the relationship – one of the recurring situations in the series is Stewart disturbing Annabelle when she is partially undressed – it lacks the frisson between John Steed and his partners. The third member of the team, however, belongs to a slightly different lineage – that of the professional crime writer turned amateur detective. Spooner explained the inspiration for the character of Jason King thus: I knew that during the [Second World] War, Winston Churchill had got hold of Dennis Wheatley and said: ‘OK. You’re clever. Get me six thriller writers and tell me how to win the War’ [sic] . . . With the three heroes in Department S, you got the normal approach and the analytical approach and a hairbrained approach from someone who gave them ridiculous explanations which – every now and then – were right. Jason King tended to turn up for

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Saints and Avengers ten minutes in Department S, behave like a combination of Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, obviously thought he was God and made a lot of money. He worked very well because you saw him in small doses and he never dominated the show.4

Peter Wyngarde, a silky-voiced actor who had brought a distinctive style of outré villainy to episodes of The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron and The Champions, plays Jason King, an eccentric, dandyish, womanising author for whom crime-solving is an amusing diversion between writing his bestselling ‘Mark Caine’ adventures. It is the King/Wyngarde persona that provides a highly distinctive variation for the otherwise conventional characterisations of Department S. The character is another example of the dandified gentleman hero already incarnated by John Steed and Adam Adamant, while Wyngarde’s performance style is the very definition of ‘camp’ in that it takes every opportunity to foreground the excessive and ostentatious characteristics of the role. Jason King is a more insistently trendy character than either Steed or Adamant, a trait that is most explicit in his long hair and outrageous fashion sense (his wardrobe consisting of wide-lapelled suits, absurdly large-knotted ties and pastel shirts with winged cuffs). That the persona was considered somewhat excessive for a television hero, even by the standards of the late 1960s, is apparent in the views of those critics who remarked upon his ‘highly superfluous hair’ and ‘Carnaby Street masculinity’.5 Certainly the character is at some remove from the conventional heroics of his colleague Stewart Sullivan. One of the recurring jokes in Department S, for example, is that Jason usually comes off worst in fights and is knocked out by the villains in almost every episode. Yet it is Jason’s eccentricity that makes him the most interesting character, and Wyngarde’s flamboyant performance style that stands him apart from the wooden stoicism of Fabiani and the bland prettiness of Nicols. Variety made a perceptive, if unwitting, prediction of the character’s future in its observation that ‘Wyngarde seems to have [the] best chance of developing something recognizable out of Jason King, a rakish, playboy author dressed and coiffed a la mod who takes on a bit of detection to pass the time twixt books’.6 Department S therefore represents a point of convergence for the professional and the amateur traditions within thriller fiction. Mysteries are solved through a combination of professional investigation (Stewart), computer analysis (Annabelle) and writerly imagination (Jason). Official legitimation for this unusual trio of investigators is provided by the authority figure of Sir Curtis Seretse (Dennis Alaba Peters). The fact that Sir Curtis is black has

The Marie Celeste been hailed by some commentators as ‘a quietly wonderful gesture to how youthfully liberal the series was trying to be’.7 Yet it would be a mistake to read too much into the casting: Peters’s role in each episode is minimal, and the presence of one black actor playing a secondary character is hardly indicative of the sort of multiculturalist agenda that was a feature of contemporary American police series such as Hawaii Five-O and The Mod Squad. Sir Curtis’s race is entirely incidental, whereas his class background is rather more significant: his high-level government and civil service connections and his impeccable Oxbridge elocution clearly identify him as a member of the establishment. Department S is also characterised by its quirky storylines and unusual plot devices. Spooner suggested that the idea behind the series was the mystery of the Marie Celeste: I thought what we’ve got to do is bring up-to-date the Marie Celeste. If the Marie Celeste were to happen tomorrow, who would investigate it? So the gimmick of Department S was that every ‘hook’ was a Marie Celeste. There was an absolutely inexplicable beginning, which we then spent 50 minutes explaining.8

It is here that the series most closely resembles The Avengers in its juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Department S is similarly posited on the notion of the ‘chaos world’ that lurks beneath everyday normality. Among the more unusual mysteries set up in the ‘teaser’ sequences of episodes are a dead man in a space suit being found in London (‘The Man From X’), the unexplained deaths of all the passengers in a tube train (‘The Last Train to Redbridge’) and the discovery in a disused warehouse of a perfect replica of an expensively furnished room containing a dead woman and a mad young man (‘The Man in the Elegant Room’). There are also some more conventional murder mysteries, such as the gang of robbers machine-gunned while celebrating their latest crime (‘A Cellar Full of Silence’) and the golf professional who turns up dead on a beach (‘Handicap – Dead’). Each episode would begin with a caption identifying the location and date, conventionally a device for imparting a sense of documentary reality, but here serving to highlight the contrast between the mundane and the absurd. One recent commentator suggests that ‘the programme’s anti-realist elements became a defiant celebration of the possibilities of writerly ingenuity, rather than the generic obligations of a simple “mystery” series’.9 Yet there is some evidence of the writers’ imaginations being so stretched that they were soon having to recycle ideas. ‘Six Days’, the first episode of the series,

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Saints and Avengers written by Gerald Kelsey, opens with a passenger airliner, missing for six days, arriving at London airport with its passengers and crew oblivious to the time that has elapsed. It turns out that the airliner had been diverted to Albania where one of its passengers, an important Foreign Office official, was brainwashed so that he would pass on details of a new Anglo-American naval treaty to an unspecified foreign power. The rest of the passengers and crew have been drugged so they have no memory of the missing time. Variety thought the mystery was ‘quite a hooker’, though it also felt that it did not do enough to establish the precise role of the protagonists: ‘It may have been intentional and part of a game to confuse the viewer, but the opener neither specified the duties or affiliation of the department nor adequately established the characterization of the three main roles.’10 Tony Williamson’s ‘One of Our Aircraft is Empty’, the fifth episode to be broadcast, features not only a similar plot but an almost identical teaser sequence. An airliner that lands at London airport turns out to be completely empty (quite literally a modern version of the Marie Celeste), the only signs that anyone has ever been on board being unfinished meals and a tape recording on the flight deck. This time it turns out that one of the passengers, a wealthy industrialist, had died during the flight and other members of the board of wanted to prevent the news of his death affecting share prices days before a major deal was completed. Thus the aircraft was diverted to a private landing strip in Ireland, where the passengers are now ‘guests’ in a private hospital, the plane itself being flown on to London by a pilot who concealed himself on board and was then murdered when he threatened to reveal the deception. ‘They say a drowning man’s past swims before his eyes,’ wrote television critic Mary Malone, ‘but as Department S has been on screen only a few weeks, it’s surprising to find it re-running its triumphs so soon.’11 The very best episodes of Department S, however, reveal a level of imagination and a relish for the bizarre and the absurd that merits favourable comparison with later episodes of The Avengers. Donald James’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hambledown’ is a good example of a mystery that offers some different variations on standard thriller motifs. Like The Avengers, the setting of a small English village identifies the threat to society as emanating from the most quaint and innocuous location imaginable. The publican’s daughter, who has taken a sleeping pill, is woken during the night by bright lights and through her window sees the villagers being loaded into vans. She falls asleep again, but in the morning wakes to find the village completely deserted. The investigators discover that the villagers are being held in a complex beneath the manor house of Colonel Durning who plans to test a new bacteriological

The Marie Celeste warfare agent in the village. Thus far the conspiracy by a leader of the community recalls the deranged aristocrats and ex-military types familiar from The Avengers: Colonel Durning: I have bought a weapon, Sullivan, one that no government can ignore. My objective is control of foreign policy – Britain’s, Russia’s, the United States’, China’s . . . Only foreign policy, you understand. I would scrupulously avoid interference in the internal affairs of any states.

The colonel is motivated, however, not by megalomania but by a misguided sense of altruism in that his aim is to bring about world peace by threatening to unleash a mutant strain of a deadly virus on those countries which do not comply (‘A world without war! I can achieve it with this virus.’) The misguided altruist who believes that the ends justify the means, even if the means involve mass murder, represents a new type of villain in popular fiction that was a response to the acceleration of the nuclear arms race and the prospect of global destruction. It was to be a theme explored in the 1970s in episodes of Doctor Who and The Bionic Woman.12 There is a further twist, however, in that the colonel’s virus turns out to be harmless. He has been the victim of a con trick by scientist Brogan who has been bleeding the wealthy colonel for his own ends (‘You saw a world without war, he saw dollar signs,’ Stewart remarks). The irresistible conclusion to be drawn from the episode is that those who believe in high ideals such as world peace are not only misguided but are also gullible dupes whose foolishness prevents them from posing any real threat to the existing order. Like The Avengers, Department S displaces real political and social anxieties by reducing its conspiracy plots to the abstract level of unnamed foreign powers. Unlike The Avengers, however, the conspiracies are not directed solely against England but are international in scope. In ‘Black Out’, for example, the disappearance of a technical expert leads the team to the Bahamas where they discover a plot to interfere with the launch of space vehicles from Cape Kennedy. The identity of the foreign power behind the conspiracy remains unknown, though audiences may draw their own conclusions: ‘A certain country is prepared to pay vast sums of money to retire the American rocket programme,’ the chief conspirator informs Stewart. The plot recalls the first Bond film, Dr No, in which the titular villain had been involved in the radio-beam ‘toppling’ of American space probes. But perhaps the nature of the conspiracy plots should not be taken too seriously. Like the later Avengers, Department S should be seen as a parody of the generic conventions of the adventure thriller. This becomes apparent

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Saints and Avengers through the frequency with which characters actually comment on the use of particular devices. When a villain tries to make Stewart drunk by forcing him to drink brandy, recalling an attempt to kill Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, his response is: ‘Not the car ride bit? . . . It shows no imagination at all.’ The presence of Jason King, especially, becomes a means through which the series engages in a commentary on its own conventions as he continually draws parallels between his stories and the circumstances in which he finds himself. Thus, for example, when he and Stewart have set a trap for the villains: Stewart: You think they’ll fall for it? Jason: They always do in my novels.

This strategy of drawing attention to its own use of conventions might be seen as the series’ answer to the sort of literal-minded critics who so often criticised genre television for being formulaic and predictable. It is the sort of postmodern strategy that became fashionable in American television two decades later with unconventional detective series such as Moonlighting (1985–88) and Twin Peaks (1990) which were concerned as much with exploring (and transgressing) the conventions of genre as they were with telling conventional mystery stories. While it would be overstating the case to claim Department S as a postmodern text to anything like the same degree, its selfconscious foregrounding of its own generic conventions nevertheless adds a self-reflexive dimension that distinguishes it from other adventure series (such as The Champions) which played the genre game straight. This aspect of the series was to become even more pronounced when it returned two years later in a revised format. But already there are hints of future developments. In ‘The Trojan Tanker’, Jason is so impressed by the villains’ scheme of robbing gold bullion from a transport aircraft by hiding inside a refuelling tanker, that he decides to use it as the basis for his next novel: Annabelle: The only difference is Mark Caine solves the case single handed! Stewart: Annabelle, doesn’t he always?

In hindsight, the fact that in Jason’s version of the story there is no role for his two colleagues might be seen to anticipate the Jason King series, which was to dispense with the characters of Stewart and Annabelle and make the flamboyant crime writer the sole protagonist. Critical reaction to the series was mixed, though this in itself was an improvement on the reception of other ITC adventure series in the late 1960s.

The Marie Celeste Variety observed that it ‘passes muster without difficulty and reflects plenty of gloss and upper-bracket production values’. ‘ATV and ITC have been playing the spy game long enough now to know what ingredients sell programs and cop ratings,’ the reviewer observed. ‘It is inconceivable that Department S will not be in business in both.’13 Mary Malone greeted it as ‘[a] series with style and the hint of pace and class, a touch of the adult and imagination’, while Maurice Wiggin, who had been less than complimentary to both The Avengers and The Champions, thought the new series was ‘sharp and ingenious’ and exhibited ‘a touch of style in the crazy proceedings’.14 Other voices, however, were less enthusiastic. T.C. Worsley felt that it ‘got off to an only moderate start’ and added that ‘I found it rather too full of holes, which I count a vice in a thriller’.15 Sean Day-Lewis complained that it ‘looked like one of those travel commercials which are the present seasonal hazard on this channel’, reflecting on the series’ penchant for exotic locations (as ever represented by the artful use of stock footage) and the foregrounding of conspicuous consumption that had become a hallmark of the glossy adventure series: ‘The chromium-plated living bit has been seen in a dozen series of this kind, but the calculated lack of excitement, with even the fights taken in slow motion, suggests a striving towards some sort of originality.’16 The most unfavourable reaction came from Stewart Lane, critic of the communist Morning Star, who regarded the series as representative of a regrettable (in his view) trend away from the realist style of thriller: Ever since Spy Who Came in from the Cold [sic] days, the accepted routine is that our side is just as cold-blooded as their side, but it is our side after all. The role of the hero is to be suitably full of integrity and be disgusted with the behaviour of both sides, but to carry on doing the job – presumably for the money (there are higher motives after all). But plots become so fantastic as to be quite incredible . . . If this is the level we have reached, then quite obviously Get Smart has the right approach.17

Lane deplored the glamourisation of espionage, but his comments, regardless of the political affiliations of his newspaper, still exemplify the inability of most critics to accept sensational and fantastic narratives on their own terms. Department S was not shown on American television until 1973, and then only in syndication, but its international sales to other territories were sufficient to warrant a second series. However, it was to return in a different format. ‘I had no idea they were going to drop Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols,’ Peter Wyngarde later said, rather defensively. ‘That was a shock and I objected . . . However, it was explained to me that dropping them was a

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Saints and Avengers matter of expense. I could either have better stories and locations on my own, or the other two back and studio-bound stories.’18 This explanation seems rather disingenuous given that Jason King was to be no less studio-bound than its predecessor. It would be 18 months after the end of Department S that its follow-up would reach the screens. In the interim, Berman and Spooner had created yet another series for ITC.

The Ghostly Detectives

8 The Ghostly Detectives

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

R

andall and Hopkirk (Deceased), an unusual variant on the private eye genre, was produced simultaneously with Department S by Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner. In terms of its place within the lineage of ITC telefantasy, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) represents a combination of themes and devices Spooner had already employed in Man in a Suitcase and The Champions. On one level, it bears comparison to Man in a Suitcase in so far as it borrows from the predominantly American tradition of the private eye genre, again relocating it to a British context by focusing on two rather seedy London-based private detectives. But on another level, it develops the supernatural element of The Champions courtesy of its ‘twist’: one of the protagonists is dead and returns from beyond the grave to give his partner a helping hand. Although now fondly remembered by some aficionados, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) met with overwhelmingly negative reviews during its intermittent run on British television in 1969-1970 and duly returned to its grave after 26 episodes. It failed, moreover, to be bought by any of the US networks – it was shown only in syndication in America under the title My Partner the Ghost – prompting one critic to remark that ‘[i]t can hardly be described as one of Sir Lew Grade’s finest achievements’.1 Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was made by much the same production team as Department S. The bulk of the writing chores were divided between Donald James (who wrote eleven episodes) and Tony Williamson (who wrote

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Saints and Avengers nine). The most prolific directors were Ray Austin (with seven episodes), Cyril Frankel and Jeremy Summers (who each directed six), though there were also contributions from Roy Ward Baker, Jeremy Burnham, Leslie Norman and Robert Tronson. Frankel again received a credit as ‘creative consultant’, and Edwin Astley again provided ‘musical direction’. Tony Williamson believed that an experienced production team was the key to a successful television series: As a series it was very satisfying to work on, largely due to Dennis Spooner’s laid back approach and Monty Berman’s experienced control. I think the majority of episodes had the right blend of comedy, which is not as easy as it looks, and there has been nothing quite like it since. But the writers, directors and producers who made these series in the Sixties really understood what they were doing and could work to budgets that were far tighter in relative terms than those enjoyed today.2

Although critics were to be much less complimentary towards the series than Williamson, the one aspect that did attract some favourable comment was the level of production values. ‘Its chief virtue is its extremely attractive colour,’ remarked Richard Last of the Sun, though he opined that the series itself was nothing more than ‘[a] fairly routine piece of hokum’.3 Tise Vahimagi sums up Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) as ‘Thorne Smith Meets Mickey Spillane’.4 It is an appropriate analogy in that those authors are representative of the two genres which the format of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) attempts to combine: the supernatural fantasy and the hard-boiled private eye thriller. Thorne Smith’s novels had been much in vogue in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The first and most influential film of this cycle was Topper (1937), based on Smith’s novel The Jovial Ghosts, and produced by Hal Roach, best known as the producer of the Laurel and Hardy comedies. Topper is a variation on the screwball comedy in which the ghosts of a sophisticated young couple (played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett), killed in a car accident, take a mischievous delight in playing tricks on their friend Cosmo Topper (Roland Young), who is the only person aware of their spectral presence. Much of the comedy in the film arises from creating situations in which the respectable, middle-aged banker Topper is placed in socially embarrassing situations. The film was successful enough to warrant two sequels (again with Young but without Grant and, for the third film, with Joan Blondell replacing Bennett): Topper Takes A Trip (1939) is in the same vein of comedy of social embarrassment as Mrs Topper considers divorcing her husband, while Topper Returns (1941) changes the formula to that of an

The Ghostly Detectives

20. Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased): The ghostly Marty (Kenneth Cope, in white suit) spoils a romantic interlude for Jeff Randall (Mike Pratt) with beauty queen Natasha (Jan Rossini) in ‘Just for the Record’. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

old dark house comedy-thriller in the mould of the popular Bob Hope vehicles The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940). Smith’s stories were also the basis for Turnabout (1940), in which a benevolent genie makes a quarrelsome couple change bodies to see other’s point of view, and for René Clair’s charming fantasy I Married A Witch (1942). These adaptations of Smith’s stories need to be seen within a trend for supernatural fantasies at the time, which also included Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), based on a play by Harry Segall, and The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), from the novel by R.A. Dick. British cinema at the same time contributed Blithe Spirit (1945), David Lean’s film of Noël Coward’s play, a sophisticated supernatural comedy of manners in which a successful novelist conjures up the ghost of his first wife during a seance. Blithe Spirit provides a foremost example of one of the conventions of supernatural fantasy in that only Charles (Rex Harrison) can see and hear the spirit of the deceased Elvira (Kay Hammond), causing all manner of misunderstandings with his second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings). One of the recurring jokes of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased),

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Saints and Avengers though lacking the sparkling wit of Coward’s dialogue, was the three-way conversation scene between the ‘live’ detective Jeff Randall (Mike Pratt), his ghostly white-suited partner Marty Hopkirk (Kenneth Cope) and a third party who can see and hear only Jeff. The supernatural fantasy became voguish again in the 1960s, when the genre was successfully transferred to American television. There had already been a television series of Topper in the 1950s, with Leo G. Carroll, but it was the popularity of Bewitched (1964-72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70) which would seem most likely to have been an influence upon Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Bewitched successfully introduced a supernatural element into the domestic situation comedy in that young housewife Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) is a witch trying to lead a normal life but who constantly finds herself in situations where she has to use her magic powers, much to the consternation of her husband Darren (played first by Dick York and later by Dick Sargent). I Dream of Jeannie starred Larry Hagman as an astronaut who crash lands on a desert island where he discovers a bottle and releases a genie (played by Barbara Eden) who then takes up residence in his house to serve her ‘master’ – a mildly risqué domestic situation given the notoriously conservative nature of the American television networks. Although entirely speculative, it seems possible that the name of Annette André’s character in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was suggested by the latter series: young widow Jean Hopkirk is always referred to as ‘Jeannie’. As well as drawing upon the tradition of supernatural fantasy, however, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) also belongs to the lineage of the private eye/detective series. On one level, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is an extreme example of the various attempts by television producers to wring the changes on a familiar format. In common with their American counterparts, British producers of detective series have striven to make each new character different from others in the genre, usually through the use of a gimmick unique to the series. A dead detective, it might be argued, is simply another gimmick designed to differentiate the series from others of its type. The case for locating Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in the private detective genre is that, its gimmick aside, the series employs a range of familiar devices and archetypes. The character of Jeff Randall belongs to the tradition of hard-boiled, down-at-heel private eyes, working from a shabby office, struggling to make a living and frequently on the receiving end of a beating from the villains. There is some suggestion that the role was intended originally for comedian Dave Allen, but in the event Randall was played by Mike Pratt, a former songwriter whose previous television appearances had

The Ghostly Detectives been as supporting heavies in series including The Baron, The Champions and Man in a Suitcase, and whose casting ensured that Randall would be characterised squarely within the ‘tough guy’ persona.5 This archetype is familiar from American film and television, though attempts to translate it into a British context have been generally less successful. There are further archetypes from the private eye tradition in the series’ format. Jeff’s relationship with Jeannie, who comes to work as his partner (though in practice this amounts to little more than acting as a glorified secretary), recalls that between Sam Spade and his secretary Effie Perine in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. The relationship is a platonic one (despite Marty’s suspicions to the contrary) with Jeff relying on the sensible and practical Jeannie to keep the business running. Like most private detectives, furthermore, Jeff enjoys an uneasy relationship with the police who generally dislike him and often suspect him of committing the crimes he is investigating. Ivor Dean’s characterisation of Inspector Large, who appeared in five episodes, was virtually a reprise of the same actor’s role as Chief Inspector Teal in The Saint, which had ceased production at the time that Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) started. The hybrid form of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is, if nothing else, distinctive. Tise Vahimagi remarks that ‘this series operated in some unique area between Blithe Spirit-type comedy and pulp private-eye violent drama’.6 It is unique in the sense that no other series has ever inhabited the same point of convergence between those two genres. The fact that there has been no other detective series to use this particular hybrid form is suggestive in its own right. Although generic hybridity is a common feature of television production, there are certain hybrids which do not work. The relative failure of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), in comparison to other telefantasy series of the sixties, is surely due in large measure to the incompatibility between the two genres it draws upon. The series is split between two genres and two styles which pull it in different directions with the result that it never seems quite able to decide what it is supposed to be – a fantastic comedy or a private eye drama. The first episode, ‘My Late Lamented Friend and Partner’, illustrates the tensions between the conventions of the hard-boiled detective drama and the elements of supernatural fantasy. The case is a conventional private eye narrative: Jeff and Marty have been hired by a Mrs Sorrensen to investigate her husband whom she suspects of having an affair. Sorrensen employs a gang of contract killers to murder his wife, who is the major shareholder in a business founded by her father. Her death is made to look like heart failure

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Saints and Avengers and a verdict of death by natural causes is returned. However, Marty suspects foul play, and when Sorrensen learns this he arranges to have him killed too. Marty is run down by a car in what is made to look like a hit-and-run accident. Hitherto the episode is following one of the familiar motifs of the private eye genre: the murder of one partner which will be solved by the other (The Maltese Falcon is the classic example of this narrative). After Marty’s funeral, however, Jeff is telephoned by someone claiming to be Marty and pleading to meet him at the graveyard. In the middle of the night, Jeff drives to the graveyard where he meets Marty’s ghost: Jeff: Why don’t you stay dead like anyone else? Marty: Jeff, how can I? How can I lay there quiet in my grave while my murderer goes free?

This is the moment at which the narrative breaks away from the surface realism of the detective story and crosses the boundary into the territory of supernatural fantasy. Having persuaded Jeff that his death was no accident, the spectral Marty helps his partner to bring Sorrensen and the gang to justice. Stephen Neale argues that all genres require ‘different types of source material to legitimise their fiction and anchor their regime of credibility’.7 One of the flaws of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), it might be argued, is that it attempts to combine genres which have different regimes of legitimation. On the one hand, the detective story is concerned with ‘truth’ and ‘facts’: the narrative focuses on the process by which the detective solves the crime, which involves the accumulation of clues and evidence to establish the guilt of the criminal. On the other hand, the supernatural fantasy is concerned with superstition and myth: the genre is posited on the interface between the ‘real’ or ‘known’ world and an ‘unreal’ or ‘unknown’ world that is not subject to the same physical laws. This is not to say there are no laws regulating the supernatural fantasy, but they are of a much different order to those which govern the detective genre. Neale observes that ‘the kinds of legitimating documents and references employed in the predominantly “phantasy” genres will tend to be ancient texts, parapsychological treatises, myths, folklore, religion, etc.’ In Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) this takes the form of an ancient rune which explains why Marty cannot return to the spirit world: Afore the sun shall rise anew Each ghost unto his grave must go Cursèd be the ghost who dares to stay

The Ghostly Detectives And face the awful light of day He shall not to the grave return Until a hundred years begone

Recalling the gypsy folklore of classic horror films like The Wolf Man (1941), this device is the premise upon which the supernatural element of the series is based. And herein lies the main problem of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased): that while ancient runes and folklore are acceptable in a pure fantasy, where they can provide a set of rules that regulate the fantastic premise, they are entirely at odds with the realistic milieu of the hard-boiled detective genre. The result is an incongruity at the heart of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) that the series is never quite able to resolve. The internal contradictions of its format are exposed throughout Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). The better episodes tend to be quirky mystery stories which balance the supernatural and detective elements. In ‘That’s How Murder Snowballs’ Jeff and Marty investigate the death of a stage psychic who is shot during a ‘Russian roulette’ act. Jeff goes undercover at the variety theatre as a mind reader, using Marty to feed him the necessary information. With its theatrical setting and ingenious solution to a baffling problem, the episode anticipates the successful late 1990s series Jonathan Creek about a magician’s assistant who uses his skills to solve perplexing crimes. ‘Just for the Record’, in contrast, exemplifies the generic uncertainty of the series in a tale about an Avengers-type villain who uses a remote-controlled probe to steal medieval documents from the Public Record Office in order to establish his claim to the English throne as ‘King Harold the Fourteenth’. While megalomaniac villains of this type are relatively commonplace in the sensational secret agent adventure, however, they seem somewhat out of place in the private eye drama which tends to focus on more down-to-earth examples of villainy. The limitations of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) are also apparent in the repetition of particular narratives and plot devices. One of the favourites is the haunted house mystery in the tradition of The Cat and the Canary. In ‘The House on Haunted Hill’ – incidentally also the title of a horror film by exploitation filmmaker William Castle – Jeff is hired by an estate agent who is having trouble selling Merston Manor due to rumours that it is haunted. In ‘For the Girl Who Has Everything’ he is called in to investigate mysterious goings-on in a castle said to be haunted by the ghost of a medieval knight. In both episodes the ghostly apparitions are caused by human rather than supernatural agency: thieves using the manor as a hideout in the former, and

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Saints and Avengers a much-married woman who plots to murder her seventh husband and take up with her young lover in the latter. Another plot device milked for all it is worth is that of villains who masquerade as spiritualists and mediums. In ‘All Work and No Pay’ a gang of con artists set out to make Jeannie think Marty is trying to make contact, using radio control to make objects fly around her apartment. Virtually the same plot reoccurs in ‘The Man From Nowhere’ in which a man appears in Jeannie’s apartment claiming to be the reincarnation of Marty. But the dramatic irony within these episodes – that it takes the intervention of a ‘real’ ghost to expose the fakes – is never properly developed, illustrating again the uncertainty at the heart of the series as to whether it was intended primarily as a comedy or whether it was simply another detective series with an unusual twist. Individual episodes of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) vary between those which foreground the supernatural and comedy elements of the series and others which revert to familiar thriller territory set against a vaguely ‘Swinging London’ background. George Melly, for one, noted a change of style in mid-series: The interesting thing about this series is that it has changed gear. It began as pure whimsy with other ghosts and haunted houses, but it’s moved towards a rather flimsy near-realism with protection gangs and rather too much violence. I can only suppose it’s aiming at the American market and, having failed to make it with the first formula, is trying another.8

A more likely explanation for the change of direction – given that episodes would have been made so far in advance of broadcast there would have been little opportunity to respond to reaction from either critics or television networks mid-series – is to be found in the differences between the two main contributing scriptwriters. Although these differences should not be exaggerated, as all writers worked within the guidelines laid down by Spooner, it is apparent that Tony Williamson’s scripts exhibited a greater tendency towards the fantastic elements whereas Donald James’s were more inclined towards realism. Williamson’s scripts, most of which happened to fall earlier in the series, are characterised by their unusual storylines and bizarre plot devices: they include ‘Never Trust A Ghost’ (Marty observes a murder while wandering the streets at night, but the body has disappeared when Jeff calls in the police), ‘Whoever Heard of a Ghost Dying?’ (a clairvoyant aware of Marty’s presence attempts to exorcise him), ‘When Did You Start To Stop Seeing Things?’ (an impostor wearing a latex face mask impersonates Jeff and kills his clients) and ‘The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo’ (a comedy in which Jeff is hired as a bodyguard by Marty’s eccentric aunt who

The Ghostly Detectives has devised a foolproof mathematical system for winning at roulette). In contrast, James’s scripts tend towards more conventional thick-ear private eye fare: they include ‘Could You Recognise That Man Again?’ (Jeff and Marty becoming involved with gangsters and protection rackets), ‘A Sentimental Journey’ (Jeff hired to bodyguard a beautiful woman), ‘Money To Burn’ (a case of currency fraud) and ‘It’s Supposed To Be Thicker Than Water’ (Jeff set up for the killing of an escaped convict). The differences between the Williamson and James episodes are exemplified by their different interpretations of the standard revenge plot. In the Williamson-scripted ‘Murder Ain’t What It Used To Be’ the threat originates in the spirit world and thus the episode draws more upon the conventions of supernatural fantasy than it does upon the private eye genre. Marty meets another ghost, an American gangster called Bugsy Spanio, who has a score to settle with a fellow racketeer who killed Bugsy when they ran liquor during Prohibition (‘I swore I’d never rest till I’d put him where he put me’). The comedic aspects of the story are emphasised by spoofing the style of Hollywood gangster movies with black-and-white flashbacks to the Chicago of the 1920s where smartly-attired gangsters spray tommy-guns at one another, and through the characterisation of Bugsy (David Healy) who appears in white suit and fedora, chomping a fat cigar and carrying a violin case. A similar plot occurs in the James-scripted ‘Vendetta for a Dead Man’, the difference being, however, that this time the threat originates in the real world. A vengeful gangster (played by veteran heavy George Sewell), imprisoned on Marty’s evidence, is released from jail and, upon discovering that Marty is dead, goes after Jeannie instead. The episode is a straight revenge narrative in which the very real physical threat to Jeannie militates against there being much comedy and which instead displays the ‘flimsy near-realism’ and violence identified by George Melly. Critical opinion of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was unanimous: it received bad reviews from all quarters. ‘I can’t really recommend anyone with something better to do to watch the new ITV Sunday series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased),’ said Richard Last, summing up its qualities thus: ‘Corny situations, acting only so-so, script sadly undistinguished.’9 The Daily Telegraph described it as ‘a farrago of childish rot’, while the Daily Mirror found it merely ‘tedious’.10 Virginia Ironside in the Daily Mail echoed the criticisms made of other ITC adventure series of pandering to the American market: It’s bad enough watching American series bought up for English television (bar a tiny percentage the series we get are just so much pap) but when we

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Saints and Avengers get English series produced American-style to appeal to the American market, it’s going too far. Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) just shouts American from the musical sound-track down to the obvious breaks in the action for commercials. As a money-spinner it may do well; as watchable English entertainment it can go jump in a lake.11

The most negative reaction came from Milton Shulman, who held the series up to ridicule as an exemplar of all that was bad in popular television. ‘Having watched about a half-dozen episodes of this series, I can think of nothing kindly to say about it except the fact that it is soon to come off,’ he declared by way of an opening, proceeding, however, to find plenty of unkindly things to say, singling out for special mention ‘dialogue . . . of that wooden kind chiefly useful for acting as crutches to help the lame action from one improbable moment to the next’, ‘an acting style which might be described as relaxed sleep-walking’, and ‘the maladroitness and sheer sloppiness of the story-telling and the plot-making’. This latter point was a particular bone of contention for Shulman, who went on to list numerous examples of plot loopholes and contrived situations: Coincidences abound; improbabilities proliferate; loose ends are left lying all over the screen. My seven-year-old son, a devoted fan, is sometimes insulted by the unexplained links in the plots. Thus the woman pilot of a plane, destined for France, lands conveniently in England at a tiny airport where the police just happen to be waiting for her. Characters who are safely bound hand and foot merely slip off their ties whenever it is convenient. A plot to substitute paper for old notes to be burnt by the Mint just happens without the slightest indication of how such a complicated feat was managed. In a series like The Avengers that depends upon a flip, cynical, almost surreal style, such grotesque plotting can be acceptable. In this series, it merely suggests unimaginative, careless writers, a contempt for the public and a sad deterioration of standards.12

On one level Shulman’s stinging attack on the series, like similar reviews of The Champions, exemplifies the inability of British television critics to accept fantasy on its own terms and to insist upon judging it by the criteria of conventional drama. On another level, however, it demonstrates the differences that so often exist between critics and audiences. The ridiculous situations and slackness in plotting made Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) an easy target for the critics, but what Shulman could not understand was why audiences accepted those defects: ‘The fact that there has been no

The Ghostly Detectives massive public protest against the sheer silliness of this series indicates to what depressing depths the tolerance level of the TV public has now been pushed.’ Thirty years later, however, and the reputation of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) came in for some degree of rehabilitation when it was remade by Working Title Productions, a subsidiary of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, one of the most successful independent production companies of the 1990s responsible for hit British films such as Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). The decision to remake what was now described as ‘the cult Sixties private detective series’ was prompted by the vogue for so-called ‘nostalgia TV’ in the late 1990s. According to one media journalist: The boom in nostalgia TV reflects a feeling among television executives that many of the best popular television ideas came from a creatively fertile period in the Sixties and Seventies. The more cynical believe that, rather than take risks, producers are turning to old formats.13

A point missed by all commentators, however, was that Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) had actually been one of the less successful formats and had been universally derided by critics at the time. Moreover, the failure of the film versions of The Saint and The Avengers provides ample evidence that remaking 1960s television series is no guarantee of success. The new Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), however, provides a rare instance of a remake that is a considerable improvement upon the original. There are a number of reasons why this is so. The main one is that the remake has a much surer sense of what it sets out to be, resolving the tension between the comedic and thick-ear elements in the original series by inclining emphatically towards comedy. This was perhaps only to be expected given the personnel involved in its production: producer-writer Charlie Higson had enjoyed cult success with the comedy sketch series The Fast Show in the late 1990s, and his Fast Show collaborator Paul Whitehouse was also involved with the Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) remake. The emphasis on comedy is also reflected in the casting, with comedians Vic Reeves (as Marty) and Bob Mortimer (as Jeff) starring in their first dramatic series. Reeves and Mortimer’s style of comedy, exemplified in the stand-up format of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and the anarchic quiz show Shooting Stars, may not be to everyone’s taste, but the fact that they had a well established partnership before Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) gives them a rapport that had been lacking between non-comedians Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope.

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Saints and Avengers The remake also benefits immeasurably from advances in the field of special effects since the 1960s. While visual effects alone are no substitute for good writing and acting, of course, they are a necessary component of the supernatural fantasy – as the Topper films and Blithe Spirit had demonstrated. In the original series Marty’s appearances and disappearances had been accomplished by a simple jump cut (not always a very smooth one), but in the remake he fades in and out, changes shape and can even inhabit other people’s bodies. The enhanced level of visual imagination also allows the series to include scenes in the spirit world inhabited by Marty that had been entirely absent from the original. The sepia-tinted title montage of the original series is replaced by a James Bond-style title sequence of effects-generated colours and shapes, complemented by a moody, supernatural theme tune from Bond composer David Arnold. The visual style, moreover, is characterised by bright colours and high definition photography rather than the slightly sordid realism of the original. The remake follows the basic format of the original series, though with one or two modifications that actually work in its favour. Marty acquires a mentor and guide to the spirit world in the form of Wyvern (played by ex-Doctor Who Tom Baker) who teaches him various tricks which he can then play on the hapless Jeff. Jeannie (Emilia Fox), who is now Marty’s fiancée rather than his wife, is given a more prominent role in the series, being characterised as a modern, independent young woman rather than the bland dolly bird of the original. There is an element of The Avengers in her character: before the main title sequence of the first episode she lays out a villain, who is beating up Marty, with a well-aimed karate kick. And more is made of the relationship between Jeff and Jeannie, with Jeff secretly in love with Jeannie. Marty’s jealousy when he realises this, and the petty tricks he plays on Jeff as a consequence, is the source of much of the humour. Individual episodes are inclined towards parody rather than realism. The first episode (‘Drop Dead’) ends with a scenario reminiscent of the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s as the villain threatens to lower Jeff into a fiery inferno. The ‘twist’ here is that it is Jeannie who comes to the rescue – thus the convention of ‘gentlemen to the rescue’ that characterised the serials is parodied. The series posits the existence of the ‘chaos world’ lurking behind the façade of everyday normality, locating many of its conspiracies within institutions such as a mental hospital where the director is more insane than his patients (‘Mental Apparition Disorder’) or a public school where black magic is practised by satanists (‘The Best Years of Your Death’). There is a

The Ghostly Detectives relish for the bizarre and the absurd and a gleeful disregard of any notions of psychological realism. Six episodes of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) were broadcast (by the BBC) in the spring of 2000 and at the time of writing a second series is in production. The healthy viewing figures of the first series (an audience of over 10 million in the competitive Saturday evening slot) suggests that it appealed to a wider constituency than just the fans of Reeves and Mortimer. Its success was due, probably, less to the fact that it was a remake of ‘the cult Sixties private eye series’ than to its appearance at a time when fantasy was back in vogue in popular television. The new Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) can be seen as a timely British entry in a cycle of supernatural crime-fighter series that have been forthcoming from American television in the late 1990s spawned by the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cycle that also includes Charmed, Dark Angel, Roswell and the Buffy spin-off Angel. The special effects and bright visual style of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), especially, have more in common with Buffy-style fantasy than with the rather seedy original.

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Saints and Avengers

9 The Bohemian Touch

Jason King

J

ason King, which ran for 26 episodes in 1971–72, was the successor series to Department S, made by substantially the same production team and chronicling the further adventures of the character portrayed by Peter Wyngarde. In generic terms it represented a shift away from the secret agent format of Department S and relocated its protagonist within the tradition of the talented amateur for whom crime-fighting is a hobby rather than a profession. The character of the crime novelist who becomes involved in detection is a staple one in genre fiction – the archetypal British example is Paul Temple, created by Francis Durbridge, who had enjoyed a prolific career on BBC radio since the 1930s and made the transition to television in the late 1960s – but it is with Jason King that the archetype finds its most colourful and flamboyant expression. Jason King is very much a product of its time, an example par excellence of the fashions and styles of the early 1970s and featuring surely the most absurdly camp hero in the history of television detectives. Its format is the most parodic of all the British adventure series, surpassing even The Avengers, but while it is now claimed as a classic of kitsch the initial reaction to the series was less than favourable. Sir Lew Grade actively disliked it, and there was no interest forthcoming from the American networks. Jason King was again produced at Elstree Studios with Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner in their familiar roles, respectively, of producer and

The Bohemian Touch ‘executive story consultant’ and employing essentially the same team of writers and directors as Department S, though with music provided by Laurie Johnson rather than Edwin Astley. According to Tony Williamson, who wrote six episodes of the new series: ‘Jason King was a natural follow-up to Department S and as I recall it was planned by Dennis Spooner fairly early on in the Department S screenings when it became apparent that the character was so popular.’1 Spooner himself was not entirely happy with the change of format: ‘I’m not saying I didn’t want to do the Jason King series, but I thought the failing of Jason King would be just what it turned out to be – that, in big doses, he would be too flamboyant.’2 These sentiments were shared by Peter Wyngarde: ‘I don’t think the 26 Jason King episodes were as good as the Department S ones – they had a better type of story.’3 Moreover, Jason King was made on 16-millimetre film, a production economy measure that militated against it being bought by American television. Although speculative, it may be that Grade had only commissioned the series in response to favourable foreign reaction to Department S but did not have much faith in it himself. At this time he was making what was to be his last major bid to conquer the American market with The Persuaders!, a glossy action adventure series that had much higher production values than Jason King and was packaged more obviously to suit American tastes. Anecdotal evidence that Grade was no fan of Jason King is forthcoming from Wyngarde: Lew Grade phoned me up . . . I thought he was going to tell me they were not repeating Department S. When I went to see him he said to me: ‘I don’t like you. My idea of a hero is somebody blond [sic] with blue eyes, like Roger Moore. You, with your funny dark hair, moustache, and terrible clothes are not my idea of a hero at all, but my wife loves you, so you have to do another series.’4

There is reason to believe, therefore, that neither its financial backer nor its production team were entirely happy with the format of Jason King, an unusual situation to say the least, and one which almost certainly helped to determine its fate. And yet, despite the reservations of its own producers, Jason King is a fascinating cultural artefact in its own right. Whatever its qualities as entertainment, Jason King is interesting for its use of camp, parody and pastiche, both in terms of its representation of sexuality and gender, and in its visual and narrative excess. Jason King is even more absurd in content and style than Department S or The Avengers: it makes no pretence at being a straight crime series and delights in spoofing the conventions of the genre.

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Saints and Avengers ‘What other series could you have with a hero who hardly ever won a fight?’, Spooner asked rhetorically, citing an incident from the episode ‘A Thin Band of Air’ in which Jason gains entry to the villains’ warehouse hideout by concealing himself inside a packing case, complete with pillows and champagne, only for the case to be delivered upside down trapping Jason inside.5 Jason King is so infused with a sense of the ridiculous that it should more appropriately be regarded as a comedy rather than as a detective series. Andy Medhurst, for example, writes: The whole project is one of ineffably English piss-elegance [sic]. Its preposterous stories were a kind of running joke about taking anything in this genre even remotely seriously, and its sexual outlook would seem laughably misogynistic were the whole thing not so patently a huge sendup of heterosexuality’s ridiculous conventions. This is such a ripe, prime slab of camp that you wonder how it was ever screened without a health warning.6

Jason King is so absurd in its situations and characterisation, indeed, that it would not be out of place if located in the lineage of genre spoofs that includes, in a British context, the mid-period Carry On films (it could almost have been called ‘Carry On Sleuthing’) and, from America, the short-lived television series Police Squad (1982) and its rather more successful big-screen spinoffs, the Naked Gun films. Whereas the thriller generally revolves around the juxtaposition of the normal and the abnormal, with ordinary protagonists finding themselves in unfamiliar situations (even The Avengers began in this vein), Jason King is closer in spirit to the tradition of ‘Looney Tunes’ cartoon comedy in which a patently ridiculous protagonist finds himself in equally ridiculous situations. In promoting its titular protagonist from co-star to centre stage, Jason King took the character to even greater extremes than in Department S. The series’ publicity material described its hero as ‘flamboyant, extrovert, a lover of the good things in life . . . He’s a trend-setter, wit and athlete. His successful novels have made him wealthy enough to do anything and go anywhere’.7 His hair is even longer – ‘a spectacular grey-highlighted bouffant’8 – while his wardrobe, in addition to the wing collars and colourful cravats, also includes suede jackets, snakeskin shoes, silk lavender dressing gowns, kaftans and kimonos, and, when he is called upon to act the action-man, skin-tight black leather trousers with matching jacket (worn unzipped and without a shirt). The fashions and character traits ascribed to the character relate to different, and contradictory, social and cultural trends. On the one hand his

The Bohemian Touch

21. A bad hair day for Peter Wyngarde as Jason King. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs © Carlton International Media Ltd.

preference for oriental clothes and leather apparel suggest the character shares some affinity with the hippy sub-cultures that had emerged in Britain and North America in the late 1960s, for whom different styles of (non-western) clothing were a means of expressing a sense of self-identity. On the other hand, however, his self-designed clothes are from exclusive tailors rather than ‘head shops’, and his taste for expensive food and champagne distances him from those sub-cultural groups who rejected materialism and ostentatious displays of wealth. Instead, he embraces wholeheartedly the high-living and conspicuous consumption that was the preserve of the wealthy gentleman of leisure. It is almost impossible to differentiate character from performance in Jason King, which depends entirely upon the King/Wyngarde persona to sustain its narrative interest. The series represents a perfect combination of actor and performance: only Wyngarde could deliver lines like ‘I’ve discovered a

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Saints and Avengers new paté’ with such audible relish. Wyngarde likes to suggest that he invested the character with his own personality: ‘I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me . . . I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy.’9 This merging of character and performer was encouraged by the series’ own publicity: ‘Jason is undoubtedly a combination of fiction and fact. Wyngarde has imbued him with a personality of his own but also a tremendous amount of his own personality. It is difficult to know where one begins and the other leaves off.’ The same publicity document goes on to compare the biographies of Wyngarde and Jason, and is worth quoting at length for its elaborate attempts to suggest parallels between actor and character even where they are not immediately apparent: Just how much of Peter Wyngarde goes into Jason King can be judged by the Jason King ‘biography’ prepared for the series . . . The biography states: Jason King was born in Dangeeking, India. Illegitimate son of a Glasgow engineer and a little-known French countess. That’s fiction. Peter Wyngarde was born in Marseilles, though he is of Anglo-French parentage. He is the perfectly legitimate son of a British diplomat and a French mother. The biography continues: Educated privately in Switzerland (expelled from his English public school after six months). After embarking on the Mark Caine books, which he started writing whilst interned in a Japanese camp at the age of twelve, he joined the Hong Kong Police Force as a Forensic Adviser. The Peter Wyngarde facts: Because of his father’s profession he was always on the move. But he was educated in Switzerland and in England – without being expelled! – and he was interned in a camp as a youngster. It was here that he found a form of escapism in writing and acting in camp plays. Leaving school, he went into an advertising agency and studied law before becoming an actor . . . ‘Jason King’ is therefore a fascinating combination of fact and fantasy. Wyngarde himself developed the character considerably from the original outline. He suggested the name. He also suggested the name of Mark Caine.10

In the terms of the publicity discourse, therefore, Jason King becomes as much Wyngarde’s creation as Spooner’s. Like all publicity material, it can be seen as an attempt to determine how the series should be read, to position the critic and the viewer into believing that character and actor are to all intents and purposes the same. This attempted positioning, however, has significant implications for understanding the protagonist’s masculinity.

The Bohemian Touch That the King/Wyngarde persona represents a complex and even contradictory type of masculinity is evident from the very different responses he has provoked. On the one hand, there is evidence to suggest that the King/Wyngarde persona was an object of great sexual fascination for women. In Australia, where both Department S and Jason King had a large fan following, the character topped a poll as the man most Australian women would prefer to lose their virginity to, while Wyngarde recalls being mobbed by a crowd of women when he arrived there to launch a television channel.11 Such sexual attraction, however, did not necessarily survive the revelation of Wyngarde’s own homosexuality following a much-publicised scandal that damaged his career in the mid-1970s. One female journalist who admitted having a childhood crush on the actor, for example, later came to regard it as ‘an aberration that keeps me awake at night’.12 On the other hand, it would seem that the King/Wyngarde persona prompts a very different reaction in men. As Bill Bryson recalled in his book Notes from a Small Island: If you’re of a certain age and lacked a social life on Friday evenings in the early Seventies, you may recall that it [Jason King] involved a ridiculous rake in a poofy kaftan whom women unaccountably appeared to find alluring. I couldn’t decide whether to take hope from this or be depressed by it. The most remarkable thing about the programme was that, though I saw it only once more than twenty years ago, I have never lost the desire to work the fellow over with a baseball bat studded with nails.13

Bryson’s desire to inflict physical violence upon Jason is shared by characters in the series: ‘I’m gonna show this pretty boy just what I think of him . . . I know all about his reputation. Don Juan had nothing on Jason King,’ declares one jealous boyfriend before punching him on the nose (in the episode ‘Nadine’). The male reaction to the character would therefore seem to be a contradictory mixture of distaste for his effeminacy and jealousy over the sexual attraction he held for women. The fact that Jason dressed and acted in such a seemingly effeminate manner (exemplified by his long hair and ‘poofy kaftan’) gave rise to the obvious joke that he should have been called ‘Jason Queen’. It is the contradictory nature of his sexuality – that he is both a rake and a ‘poof’ – that in large measure accounts for the fascination of the King/ Wyngarde persona. Leon Hunt explains this contradiction by comparing the character to real historical examples, pointing out that conservatives have always reacted to fops and dandies with the suggestion that they must really be homosexuals. He cites Puritan opinions of ‘the Enlightenment gallant’

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Saints and Avengers and a nineteenth-century essayist who asked why ‘the young fops don’t just put on petticoats and have done with it’.14 Hunt’s reading of the character is informed by Paul Hoch’s work on race, sex and masculinity, which argues that the history of masculine identities has revolved around two opposite and competing types. On the one hand there is the puritan, who is ‘hard-working [and] hard-fighting’ and who lives by the principle of ‘duty before pleasure’. On the other hand there is the playboy, ‘who lives according to an ethic of leisure and sensual indulgence’ which often finds expression in extrovert clothes ‘with bright colours characteristic of the leading class in playboy periods’.15 In the British adventure series, John Drake of Danger Man represents the extreme example of the puritan (serious, moral, dutiful) while Jason King is the extreme example of the playboy (carefree, self-indulgent, libertine). The fact that the character of the hero had changed so much in the space of a decade should be seen as a response to social change which in turn had brought about one of the occasional realignments between the two types of masculinity. Whereas Drake had been influenced by the solid, patriotic, upstanding heroes of 1950s popular culture (one thinks especially of the likes of Richard Todd and John Mills in British war movies of the decade), Jason King is influenced by the flamboyant, long-haired, libidinous cultural icons of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as the footballer George Best and pop stars like Mick Jagger and the bizarrely-costumed, sexually ambiguous David Bowie. The playboy persona comes to the fore at times of economic and financial surplus. In Britain, as in America, standards of living had improved markedly during the 1960s: average weekly earnings increased 130 per cent between 1955 and 1969, against an increase in retail prices of 63 per cent over the same period, meaning that in real terms most people were better off than ever before, with more disposable income for spending on leisure and consumer goods.16 The playboy type represented by Jason King – and by the millionaire protagonists of The Persuaders!, broadcast at the same time as Jason King – is an extreme manifestation of the affluent leisured hero ‘emphasising upper class etiquette and elaborate playboy rituals of extramarital dalliance’.17 That Jason is wealthy is stressed throughout the series. He now lives as a tax exile in Paris (‘I’m only allowed in England for thirtysix hours’) and travels around Europe staying in expensive hotels while working on his latest novel. His playboy lifestyle is also evident in his attitude towards work: he is often to be found hungover and surrounded by empty champagne bottles. He disavows any sense of responsibility, spending much time trying to avoid both his publisher Nicola Harvester (Ann Sharp) – who

The Bohemian Touch is constantly haranguing him for an overdue manuscript – and British Intelligence chief Sir Brian (Dennis Price), who occasionally tries to get him to undertake a secret assignment either by playing on his vanity or by blackmailing him over his unpaid income tax. Jason King is the first adventure series to embrace wholeheartedly the ‘permissive society’ that had emerged over the previous decade. One of the irreversible legacies of the 1960s, as Arthur Marwick would have it, was ‘a general sexual liberation, entailing striking changes in public and private morals and . . . a new frankness, openness, and indeed honesty in personal relations and modes of expression’. 18 Previous ITC adventure heroes negotiated their way uneasily around the fringes of the permissive society – Simon Templar (The Saint) and McGill (Man in a Suitcase) had been observers rather than participants in the ‘Swinging London’ scene – but Jason King’s lifestyle exemplifies the sexual liberation enjoyed by men (if not necessarily by women) during and after the sixties. The series does not condemn him for his many affairs and dalliances, though it does sometimes affront his dignity: in ‘That Isn’t Me, It’s Somebody Else’, for example, Jason’s secret liaison with a married lady is rudely interrupted by three fans (female, of course) seeking his autograph and resulting in his undignified exit through the window and straight into a dustbin. Jason does not seem to be bothered by sexual jealousy – he barely turns a hair when an old acquaintance takes up with his present girlfriend Jonquil (a heavily pouting Madeline Smith) in ‘All That Glisters . . .’ – and his attitude towards relationships is indicative of the frankness, openness and honesty identified by Marwick: Jason: I was paying you a compliment. It’s a gift given to a few. Jonquil: To grasp pleasure? Jason: Instantly. Jonquil: Without question? Jason: Yes, if you ease into it, coolly. Which is exactly what you do. Jonquil: I still think it’s terrible the way I can’t stop myself. Jason: Nothing succeeds like excess.

Such sentiments exemplify perfectly the playboy ethos of self-indulgence, sexual pleasure and personal gratification. They are also the very qualities that critics of the sixties dislike for their disavowal of any notions of duty and responsibility.

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Saints and Avengers Jason King is also interesting for its formal strategies and narrative devices. It develops the parodic element of Department S to an even greater degree, taking every opportunity to foreground its own status as fiction and to flaunt its generic self-awareness. This is most apparent in the episode ‘Wanna Buy A Television Series?’, written by Dennis Spooner, which gives every impression of having been conceived as a satirical commentary on the production of episodic television detective fiction. The episode’s ‘teaser’ – in which a lag is released from prison and travels to Geneva where he pays a girl to undergo plastic surgery as part of a deception plan – turns out to be a ‘pitch’ for a Mark Caine television series that Jason is narrating to a television executive called Harry Carmel (David Bauer). As Jason describes the plot, the episode switches between discussion scenes in Carmel’s office and action scenes that are part of the fiction-within-a-fiction in which Jason himself takes the part of Mark Caine. In formal terms, the episode collapses the distinction between ‘reality’ (the diegetic world inhabited by Jason and Carmel) and ‘fiction’ (the non-diegetic world of Mark Caine and other protagonists in the story-within-a-story): at one point Mark Caine stops in the middle of a scene and demands that Carmel should answer his ringing telephone. The dialogue provides a commentary on the construction of television fiction (‘I thought this was a good point to bring in the commercials’), while also juxtaposing the creative instincts of the writer with the commercial interests of the philistine producer, obsessed with ratings and foreign sales. Jason takes umbrage at Carmel’s interventions, which include the necessity for regular action sequences (‘I know what’s bothering me. We haven’t had a fight yet!’) and such suggestions as a black or Chinese sidekick for Mark Caine to keep ‘right with the current trend’. The tendency to represent women as mere sex objects is acknowledged: Carmel: Who’s the girl? Jason: She’s just there for the dressing – sex appeal. Carmel: Then get her clothes off!

There is an irresistible temptation to read the episode as an allegory of the relationship between the series’ own creator (Jason as Dennis Spooner) and ITC (Carmel representing Lew Grade). This temptation is reinforced by Carmel’s attitude towards the flamboyant Mark Caine (‘In television we like our heroes to be more like heroes, not so off-beat’) which recalls Grade’s own opinion of the King/Wyngarde persona. Jason’s remark that ‘I’m not quite sure if your channel is ready for Mark Caine’ might be read as Spooner’s

The Bohemian Touch assertion that Grade was not ready for Jason King. In this instance, however, the writer has the last laugh when Jason receives a better offer from another network. While the devices used in the episode may now seem rather clichéd, especially in the wake of Moonlighting which constantly broke down the barrier between the diegetic and non-diegetic worlds (actors speak to the camera, a fight scene stops when the director calls ‘cut’, characters discuss what they did in the break between seasons and even, in the last episode, try to prevent the cancellation of the series), at the time of Jason King they would have been much less familiar. A recurring theme of Jason King is the fluidity between fiction and diegetic reality. The series employs several strategies to this end. One of these is the Department S-type story in which Jason is called in by the authorities to investigate a particularly perplexing mystery. In ‘A Deadly Line in Digits’ Jason is asked by Sir Basil to investigate a series of unsolved robberies in London. Jason is now a reluctant employee of British Intelligence: Jason: I am no longer with Department P, Q, R or S. Sir Basil: We’re not interested in your private life, just your fertile mind.

Threatened with the Inland Revenue, Jason investigates and discovers that an organisation known as Crime Control is using Scotland Yard’s crime computer to plan and execute the robberies; the head of Crime Control turns out to be a police superintendent.19 Jason is recruited once again in ‘A Page Before Dying’, this time to devise a means for a British agent to be smuggled across the Berlin Wall. British Intelligence promises to buy the film rights to one of Jason’s books because ‘it describes a perfect method of bringing a man from East Berlin into West Berlin’ – concealed inside a safe – and Jason is on record as having said ‘I never put anything down on paper that I haven’t tried out myself’. A convoluted plot ends up with Jason himself smuggled into East Berlin inside a safe and having to devise his own route back to the West (disguised as an East German police officer complete with monocle). To add insult to indignity, it turns out that Sir Basil wanted Jason’s idea only as a decoy, and that the agent is in fact concealed inside a coffin – a device borrowed from Len Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin. Jason is indignant: ‘How dare you use his novel instead of mine!?’ Despite the notional Cold War background, Jason King is not invested with any sense of Cold War ideology. Jason’s services, indeed, are in demand by the East as well as by the West. In ‘From Russia . . . With Panache’ Jason is delivered in a crate to Moscow (‘Oh no! Not another package tour!’) where

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Saints and Avengers he is needed to investigate ‘three impossible murders’ in the Kremlin. It is another Department S-type mystery: three men have apparently been vapourised in a lift, but Jason discovers they have concealed themselves inside the Kremlin where they plan to steal czarist treasures from the vaults. The idea of a British hero assisting the Russians at their request would have been completely unthinkable in Danger Man or The Saint, but Jason King illustrates how far the adventure series genre had now distanced itself from ideological commitments. In any event, politics are mediated through an insistence upon comedy. The episode is especially reminiscent of Ninotchka, not only through the character of a Russian female interpreter whose cold exterior melts under Jason’s charm, but also through the comic antics of three incompetent detectives assigned to assist Jason who recall the three Soviet functionaries of Ernst Lubitsch’s film.20 Another plot device that occurs frequently throughout the series is that of villains who use Jason’s stories as cover for their own activities. In ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ Jason discovers that a Mark Caine comic strip in a Hong Kong newspaper is being used to pass on coded messages to an elite corps of ‘Red’ assassins (the chief assassin is played, of course, by Burt Kwouk). In ‘The Stones of Venice’ he discovers that a prize has been awarded to a Mark Caine novel he did not write, but which describes a real case of kidnapping and murder. It turns out that the novel has been written by a computer programmed by a young woman in order to lure Jason to Venice to investigate the disappearance of her sister. And in ‘That Isn’t Me, It’s Somebody Else’ a gang uses the Mark Caine adventures as a blueprint, while using a lookalike to frame Jason for the crime. Yet another device is to have Jason discover uncanny resemblances between real incidents and imaginary plots. In ‘Chapter One: The Company I Keep’ he begins a novel concerning murder and political intrigue in a Rome bordello, then discovers the events he has described and the names he has used are coming true – it transpires the ideas have been subliminally implanted by a time-operated tape recording playing in his hotel room while he sleeps. In ‘An Author in Search of Two Characters’ Jason witnesses a murder committed by a man in a spacesuit and is then knocked out by another man in a bear costume; later he finds that a typescript describing the event has been inserted into the film script he is writing. It turns out to be part of a plot to drive Jason insane as a prelude to robbing his Swiss bank deposit box. While these stories provide an explanation for the parallels between fiction and reality (however unlikely that explanation may be), in other instances the parallels are simply coincidental. In ‘A Kiss for a Beautiful

The Bohemian Touch Killer’ Jason is lured to a South American military dictatorship to collect an award, only to find himself suspected of collaborating with revolutionaries: ‘It is obvious that the corrupt totalitarian government investigated by Mark Caine in your book Power With No Glory is intended to be this government and the Minister of Justice embezzling American aid is a thinly veiled exposé of Colonel Cordova . . . The details in your book are so exact that everyone knows you must have had inside information.’ Jason protests his innocence (‘The art of a novelist is to make fiction appear authentic’) but is still tortured by the authorities before being rescued by the rebels. The collapsing of the distinction between reality and fiction is also apparent in the ease with which Jason assumes the mantle of Mark Caine when called upon to investigate the latest mystery. There is a sense in which Jason feels he has to live up to the heroic image of his own creation. In ‘Nadine’, for example, Jason is targeted by a gang who use well-known celebrities to smuggle drugs across national borders on the assumption that they are less likely to be searched by customs officials. Jason has worked out the scheme in advance, but goes along with it because he is attracted to the beautiful Nadine (Ingrid Pitt): Nadine: You’ve changed. Mark Caine has taken over. Jason: Yes, he’s inclined to do that. Nadine: The fantasy world has become more real than the real one. I envy you that. Jason: It’s only because the real world is much more improbable, much more like fiction.

The frequency with which fiction mirrors reality and reality mirrors fiction in Jason King might be seen as the logical outcome of the crime writer-turneddetective sub-genre. Jason uses the diegetic mysteries he investigates as inspiration for his novels, the success of which, in turn, allow him to adopt the playboy lifestyle he has invented for his protagonist. Although all popular culture is a product of and for its times, this truism is especially so in the case of Jason King. The excessively dandyish playboy hero belongs to that moment in the early 1970s when the cultural changes of the previous decade had reached their fullest expression, especially in respect of fashion and permissive sexuality, and when most sections of British society enjoyed a level of consumer affluence they had never experienced before. The mid and late 1970s were to see a decisive shift away from the dandy

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Saints and Avengers playboy, however, in favour of the tough, no-nonsense, working-class protagonists of series like The Sweeney and Shoestring. To some extent, at least, this shift was a reaction to the economic downturn that occurred in the middle of the decade: rising unemployment, the three-day week, and galloping inflation in the wake of the international oil crisis. The ostentatious wealth and playboy lifestyle of Jason King would quickly become out of date as the 1970s progressed. So, too, would the parodic and comedic style of detection, which was soon displaced by the sordid realism and violence of The Sweeney and The Professionals.

The Special Relationship

10 The Special Relationship

The Persuaders!

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he Persuaders! (the screen title always included the exclamation mark) was the most ambitious and most expensive of Sir Lew Grade’s international action adventure series. The extent of its ambition was apparent in its casting, which for the first time tempted a major Hollywood movie star (Tony Curtis) into a television series and teamed him with the biggest British television star of the sixties (Roger Moore). The combination of American and British leading men, both afforded the accolade of being billed by surname alone (the opening titles read ‘CURTIS + MOORE: THE PERSUADERS!’), was Grade’s answer to the American networks which had been lukewarm to his most recent offerings. At a cost of £2.5 million, moreover, The Persuaders! was the most expensive television series ever to have been made in Britain until that time.1 Its expense was due largely to the increased production costs incurred through location shooting in Europe as for the first time an ITC series ventured beyond the studio backlot (each episode cost in the region of £80,000), though it was also due in no small measure to the generous salaries which Grade had paid his two reluctant stars to ‘persuade’ them into the series. Twenty-four episodes of The Persuaders! were made, being broadcast simultaneously on British and American television in 1971–72. The series was pre-sold to 50 countries and commentators predicted that Grade ‘has once again hit a TV export bonanza for Britain’.2 But while The Persuaders! was hugely successful in Europe, it failed to make much of an impression in America, where it was taken off air after only 20 episodes had been broadcast.

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Saints and Avengers The Persuaders! is unique in several respects. For one thing, its combination of two leading American and British stars was unprecedented in television history. The Persuaders! marks a pivotal moment in the careers of both Curtis and Moore. While the two men were of a similar age – Curtis, born in 1925, was just two years older than Moore – the former was nearing the end of his period of top-rank stardom whereas the latter was in the ascendancy and would soon land the most important role of his career. Curtis had come to prominence in the early 1950s in costume swashbucklers such as The Prince Who Was A Thief (1951), Son of Ali Baba (1952) and The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), where his natural athleticism and gymnastic ability made up for his tendency to speak all his lines with a Bronx accent. Later in the decade, however, Curtis sought to widen his dramatic range, receiving good notices for serious roles in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958), before his successful teaming with Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) demonstrated his flair for comedy. Curtis’s self-parodic performances in sixties comedies such as The Great Race (1965) and Monte Carlo or Bust (1968) anticipated his role in The Persuaders!. Following The Persuaders!, however, Curtis’s career took a downward turn as he made a string of forgettable films and became more famous for being the father of actress Jamie Lee Curtis, his daughter by first wife Janet Leigh. By contrast, Moore had struggled to launch his film career when working in Hollywood during the 1950s and had become a star through television rather than cinema. His film career was in hiatus for most of the 1960s, and neither of the two films he had made between completing The Saint and beginning The Persuaders! – the sub-Hitchcockian thriller Crossplot (1969) and the psychological horror film The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) – had set the box-office alight. Shortly after completing The Persuaders!, however, Moore was offered the role of James Bond and made the first of his seven appearances in the Bond series with Live and Let Die (1973). Moore’s success in the Bond films propelled him, in middle age, to a career as a highly-paid, bankable adventure hero in films such as Gold (1974), Shout at the Devil (1976) and The Wild Geese (1978). There are differing accounts of the origins of The Persuaders!, though all sources agree that Grade’s personal involvement was instrumental in making the necessary deals. The account given by Grade himself in his autobiography gives the impression that he suggested the series in a moment of inspiration when he paid a visit to ABC in New York and heard the network’s executives discussing the following year’s schedules:

The Special Relationship I said to them, ‘What about a series starring Roger Moore about a couple of troubleshooters called “The Persuaders”?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘Roger Moore’s been around much too long in “The Saint”. He’s been overexposed.’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What would you say if I could get Tony Curtis for the other role?’ ‘You’ll have a firm order for 24 episodes,’ they replied.3

According to this version of events, Grade flew immediately to California where he met Curtis, who hitherto had turned down all offers of television work: ‘After about one and a half hours of discussion, during which I once again proved my powers as a salesman, he agreed to do the series.’ Grade then returned to London, where he met Moore, who insisted that he did not want to commit himself to another television series, and won him over by offering him a cheque for an undisclosed amount: ‘“Roger, old boy,” I said, “this is to be getting on with . . .” Roger looked at the cheque. “When do we start?” he said.’ According to a slightly different version of the story told by Moore, Grade had appealed to his sense of patriotism: ‘The country needs the money. Think of the Queen, Roger!’4 While Grade’s account makes for a good story, however, there are reasons to believe that it contains a number of embellishments which may distort the true facts. Whereas Grade recalled that he negotiated with Curtis before Moore, evidence from the contemporary trade press indicates that Moore was in the frame for the series some months before Curtis. In July 1969 (over two years before the first episode of The Persuaders! was broadcast) it had been reported that ‘the new Roger Moore series’ had been pre-sold to ABC in a contract worth $4 million ‘with options for a further series’. The report added that ‘Sir Lew Grade said he had given the initially unenthusiastic Roger Moore three reasons for doing another series . . . “I told him the country needed the money, ATV needed the money, and ATV needed a new series”.’5 At this point there was no mention of an American co-star. Curtis’s involvement was confirmed early in 1970 when further details of the new series were revealed: The series is entitled The Friendly Persuaders [sic] and will star both Tony Curtis and Roger Moore. It will be produced by Bob Baker with Terry Nation as script editor. A surprising fact about the deal was Sir Lew’s ability to bring two major stars into one television package and still work out an agreement that was highly profitable to his film production/distribution company – Independent Television Corporation. The Friendly Persuaders will deal with the adventures of two crime-busting types who travel the world solving various crimes and other major social problems.6

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Saints and Avengers The report added that Grade ‘could not have mounted the series without it first being backed by one of the major US networks’. The necessity of preselling the series to America indicates how far the economic imperatives of television production had changed since the production of Danger Man a decade earlier. The Persuaders! – the adjective was soon dropped, perhaps to avoid confusion with the film Friendly Persuasion (1956) – began production at Pinewood Studios in May 1970.7 It was produced for ITC by Tribune Productions: the three directors of the production company were Robert S. Baker (whose screen credit is that he ‘devised and produced’ the series), Johnny Goodman (credited as associate producer) and Roger Moore himself. The fact that Baker and Moore were involved in the production side of the series (which Grade’s account ignores) is significant. There are other versions of the genesis of The Persuaders! in which it was Baker who suggested the series to Grade.8 Indeed, the origins of the series might be seen in the Saint episode ‘The Ex-King of Diamonds’ which had teamed Moore’s So-VeryEnglish Simon Templar with a brash but likeable American oil millionaire Rod Huston, played by Stuart Damon. The storyline, a light-hearted crime caper set on the Côte d’Azur, was secondary to the playful rivalry between Templar and Huston which saw them racing their cars along the French Riviera (actually a country lane near Elstree Studios) and engaging in a comic brawl – incidents that would be re-enacted in the first episode of The Persuaders! The Persuaders! brought together a creative team that had vast experience in the production of action adventure series. As well as Terry Nation (credited as ‘story consultant and associate producer’) the writers included Brian Clemens, Donald James, John Kruse and Tony Williamson, while the directors numbered experienced hands such as Roy Ward Baker, Sidney Hayers, James Hill and Leslie Norman (all of whom had directed episodes of either or both The Saint and The Avengers). Moore himself directed three episodes, while Bond director Peter Hunt (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), who would direct Moore in Gold and Shout at the Devil, directed one. Two veterans of the British film industry were involved, furthermore, in Val Guest (who directed two episodes and wrote a third) and Basil Dearden (who directed three). Dearden had been one of the first established film directors to work in television during the 1950s when he directed episodes of The Four Just Men. His return to television with The Persuaders!, shortly before his death in a car accident in March 1971, in all likelihood came about from having directed Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself.9

The Special Relationship There are many points of interest in The Persuaders!, the least of which concern the actual storylines. The first episode, ‘Overture’, written by Clemens and directed by Dearden, establishes the agency through which the two protagonists are brought together. Lord Brett Sinclair, an English playboy aristocrat, and Danny Wilde, a self-made American millionaire, are invited by the retired Judge Fulton (Laurence Naismith) to his chateau on the Côte d’Azur. Fulton believes the two men will make an explosive combination in his personal crusade against crime (‘Take two relatively harmless compounds, say nitro and glycerine, mix them both together and you have a very potent combination’). He regards them both as wastrels but recognises that they are tough and competitive (‘You’re both facile and foolish, and a useless waste of humanity, but you like to fight’). Indeed, Brett and Danny have already fought – with each other – and it is on this basis that the Judge blackmails them into working for him, or else face 90 days in jail for a hotel brawl which started from an argument over whether a ‘Creole Scream’ cocktail should contain one olive or two. Fulton, who has unofficial contacts with the police, functions as the authority figure who provides ideological legitimacy for the two protagonists: Fulton: I sat as a judge for 15 years and during that time I did my best to protect the innocent and punish the guilty – the guilty that came to court, that is. One of the anomalies of the law is that it protects the innocent – Brett: But the guilty often go free too. Fulton: Since my retirement I’ve done my best to redress that in my small, private way . . . You think I’m a crazy old man. Brett: No, I think you’re one of the sanest men I ever met.

Their first assignment is to investigate a racketeer, now believed dead but who once ‘ran the whole Mediterranean crime syndicate’, and whom Fulton suspects is still alive. The racketeer Dupont knows that Fulton is on his trail and kidnaps him so that Brett and Danny have to come to his rescue. In this way the episode establishes a bond between the protagonists: Brett and Danny, who initially dislike each other, find that they work well together as a team in rescuing the Judge. The case successfully wrapped up, the episode ends with Brett and Danny being approached by a pretty girl who begs them for help (‘Judge Fulton sent me. You must help me – I’m in serious trouble!’) This situation, which was used in the ‘Falcon’ films of the 1940s (early films in the series would end with a young woman appealing to the debonair sleuth

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Saints and Avengers Gay Lawrence for his help), is yet another example of the intertextuality that characterises Brian Clemens’s work in popular genre television, though the device was dropped after the first episode. The Persuaders! falls somewhere between the secret agent narrative in which the protagonist is employed by an official government or international agency (Danger Man, The Avengers, The Champions, Department S) and the private detective narrative in which the protagonist works outside the law (The Saint, Man in a Suitcase). The semi-official crusade against criminals who have escaped the law has been a recurring narrative device in both British and American television fictions from The Four Just Men to Knight Rider (1982–84). Thus the protagonists have an underlying moral and social objective (maintaining law and order) which legitimates their sometimes illegal actions. The fact that they cannot go to the police for help, however, provides a plausible narrative explanation for the improbable number of scrapes and adventures in which they find themselves embroiled. Most episodes of The Persuaders! are crime capers which rely upon familiar plots. Thus, Danny and Brett investigate a bullion smuggling operation (‘The Gold Napoleon’), run foul of the Mafia (‘Five Miles to Midnight’), uncover a Russian spy ring (‘The Man in the Middle’), foil a gang of confidence tricksters (‘To the Death, Baby’), solve the murder of a girl whose body they discover whilst water-skiing (‘Powerswitch’), come to the aid of a Russian aristocrat seeking to reclaim her family jewels (‘The Ozerov Inheritance’), investigate attempts on the life of an heiress (‘Take Seven’) and expose a traitor in British Intelligence (‘Read and Destroy’). While, in some episodes, they are assigned to a case by Judge Fulton, in others they become involved entirely by chance. Indeed, many episodes depend so entirely upon contrivance that a parodic intent on the part of the scriptwriters might reasonably be assumed. One recurring plot device, for example, is to have Danny mistaken for someone else by the villains. In ‘Element of Risk’ he is picked up at Heathrow by members of a gang who mistake him for the American criminal mastermind they have employed to plan a bullion robbery – the real criminal has placed his attaché case on Danny’s luggage trolley. This convention is taken to the extreme in ‘Anyone Can Play’ when Danny and Brett visit a casino in Brighton and Danny is mistaken for the paymaster of a spy ring when he unwittingly uses phrases that are part of a secret recognition code. The formulaic plots of The Persuaders! drew the usual brickbats from critics. Stanley Reynolds felt that it was ‘a mixture of every other television series you have ever seen with only the stars’ hair styles and the latest model cars and the latest model models to let you know it is happening this season’.10

The Special Relationship

22. Danny Wilde (Tony Curtis) and Lord Brett Sinclair (Roger Moore) eye up their targets in The Persuaders!. Flashbacks © Carlton International Media Ltd.

‘The new version of The Saint, with Tony Curtis joining Roger Moore, is disguised under the title of The Persuaders!,’ wrote T.C. Worsley. ‘£80,000 I have seen stated as the sum each single episode of this series is costing and if I had paid that sum and my writers came up with anything so childishly unconvincing as these stories I should want to know why.’11 The cultural and ideological currency of The Persuaders!, however, arises from other factors than its plots. The series has recently attracted attention from academicians who have analysed it in terms of its representation of masculinity and its foregrounding of discourses of leisure and consumerism. John Cook, for example, considers The Persuaders! ‘a highly interesting example of the intersection of the values of the “permissive society” of the 1960s and early 1970s with an ultimately conservative and conformist vision of a masculine fantasy ideal’.12 For Leon Hunt, The Persuaders! exemplifies a peculiarly seventies cultural construct that he terms ‘Safari Suit Man’ – an archetype that combines macho masculinity with a leisured lifestyle through

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Saints and Avengers ‘his fictional incarnation [as] a kind of vigilante tourist’.13 The themes of male power and male sexuality, indeed, are central to the narrative ideology of The Persuaders!, which provides a rich site for the exploration of masculine identities. The Persuaders! is posited upon a different dynamic than most other adventure series in that the central relationship is that between two men. This stands it apart from other series in which there had typically been one of three dynamics: a lone, solitary protagonist (Danger Man, The Saint, Man in a Suitcase), a platonic male-female partnership (The Avengers), or a team comprising two men and one woman (Adam Adamant Lives!, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S).14 The Persuaders!, however, is an example of what is often described as the ‘buddy’ formula: a malecentred narrative which focuses on relationships between men whose professional and personal lives intersect with each other to such a degree that they become, to all intents and purposes, a ‘couple’. The buddy narrative was in vogue in the early 1970s following the box-office success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) which dramatised the relationship between the two western outlaws, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a pair of loveable rogues. The buddy formula later became a staple of American television, especially in cop series such as Starsky and Hutch (1975–79) and Miami Vice (1984–88). On British television it has more often found expression in the form of situation comedies, such as The Likely Lads (1964–66) and Men Behaving Badly (1992–98). The buddy narrative works best when there exist class and/or cultural differences between the protagonists. These differences are usually posited on one or more sets of binary oppositions: working class/middle class (The Likely Lads), white/black (Miami Vice), Jewish/WASP (Starsky and Hutch). David Buxton’s description of Starsky and Hutch sums up the nature of the buddy dynamic: ‘Although they are often at odds, theirs is a strong friendship based on mutual respect for the other’s way of being.’15 In The Persuaders! the oppositions are those of America/Britain, rough/respectable and working class/aristocracy. The cultural backgrounds and personal histories of the two protagonists are established by the ingenious title sequence in which two dossiers appear on the screen – one red (marked ‘Danny Wilde’), the other blue (‘Brett Sinclair’) – followed by a split-screen montage of photographs, film clips and newspaper headlines which contrast their early lives. Visual signifiers of New York (the Statue of Liberty) and London (the Houses of Parliament) indicate their nationalities and establish the Anglo-American theme of the series. The parallel lives then unfold: Danny grew up in a

The Special Relationship tenement district of the Bronx, served as a rating in the US Navy (reflecting Curtis’s own early life) and then made his fortune in the oil business, whereas Brett was born into a life of aristocratic privilege, attended Harrow and Oxford, was commissioned in the Guards, then enjoyed the lifestyle of an international playboy, owning racehorses and driving racing cars. These personal histories then converge into split-screen colour shots of sports cars, champagne, a roulette wheel, wads of money and a woman wearing a diamond necklace and fur coat – signifiers of financial and sexual capital – followed by shots of Danny and Brett together in sunny climes, ogling a girl in a bikini, standing in a casino and waving to one another whilst water-skiing. As Leon Hunt observes: ‘The elaborate title sequence of The Persuaders! encapsulates its “real” story – the story of how Britain and America, respectively, produce the Playboy type through the English class system and the “American Dream”.’16 The title sequence is accompanied John Barry’s memorable theme tune, a moody bass guitar melody which suggests an entirely different tone from the light-hearted style of the series. The ideological role of the buddy narrative is to present an ideal of male friendship based on mutual respect and camaraderie. In The Persuaders! this takes the form of friendly rivalry, light-hearted banter and constant oneupmanship. Much of this arises from the class and cultural differences between the two protagonists: Brett: If you had any class you’d charter a flight. Danny: The French knew how to handle you aristocrats.

The performance styles of the two stars, both of whom excelled at light comedy, did much to set the tone for The Persuaders!. Indeed, it was the comedic aspects of the series that won most plaudits from critics. ‘Most impressive is the emergence of Moore and Curtis as a pair of very funny knockabout comedians,’ remarked Martin Jackson in the Daily Express, while Variety considered that the two stars ‘play off each other here and against the absurdity of their roles with a finesse that could make this a hit’.17 One of the conventions of the buddy narrative is that the central dynamic of the male ‘couple’ militates against either of them developing emotional attachments elsewhere. It is not impossible for one partner of a buddy team to have a permanent relationship – a good example is the Lethal Weapon film series in which Murtagh (Danny Glover) has a wife and family whereas his partner Riggs (Mel Gibson) is a widower – but in such cases the relationship has been established before the two buddies have met. Brett and Danny are

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Saints and Avengers both bachelors who enjoy their hedonistic lifestyle. On the two occasions in the series when a third party comes between them, narrative agency requires that the third party must be dispensable (in other words a villain). In ‘The Morning After’, for example, Brett wakes up in Stockholm with a hangover to discover that he has a wife, and Danny arrives after receiving a telegram that Brett was about to marry ‘the most beautiful girl in Sweden’. Brett, who has no memory of the wedding, assumes that the girl, Kristin, intends to blackmail him and offers her ‘a couple of thousand in cash’ to get rid of her – the wealthy bachelor’s immediate response being that she must be a gold-digger. But it transpires that Kristin is playing for higher stakes and that the marriage (which turns out to be fake) has been arranged so that she can gain access to Brett’s country house where a senior United Nations official (the only man who ‘could find a solution to the situation in the East’) is staying prior to meeting the prime minister at Chequers. When Kristin’s ‘brother’ turns up, he is a hit-man hired to assassinate the diplomat. What is most interesting about the episode, however, is that it is not Brett (who finds himself falling in love with his ‘wife’) but Danny who seeks most vigorously to discover the truth and expose the conspiracy – as if he fears losing his best friend to a woman. The situation is reversed in ‘Angie . . . Angie’ in which it is Brett who is suspicious (and, to a degree, jealous) when an old friend of Danny’s threatens to come between them. The twist on this occasion, however, is that ‘Angie’ is a man. Brett’s suspicions are confirmed when ‘Angie’ turns out to have gone bad and is now a professional assassin hired by gangsters to kill a union boss. ‘Angie’ is killed at the episode’s climax, after which Danny and Brett are reunited and grudgingly express their feelings for each other: Danny: I’ll tell you something, Your Lordship, you’ve got style. Brett: You’re not so bad yourself, but let’s not get maudlin.

Thus the buddy dynamic is re-established and Danny and Brett can settle back into the mode of banter and mockery through which they express their friendship for one another. The homosocial nature of the buddy narrative is such that it has often been mistaken for homosexuality. The Persuaders!, while not in the same camp as Jason King, has been interpreted by some commentators in this way. Laura Lee Davies, after viewing a repeat of the pilot episode in the 1990s, commented upon its ‘camp charm’ and said that ‘someone walked into my lounge and accused me of watching an ancient gay-porn film, such was the puffed-up body language and dramatic glances they sparred with’.18

The Special Relationship There is a sequence in ‘Overture’, furthermore, which might on the face of it lend credence to those who insist on interpreting the relationship between Danny and Brett as something more than a heterosexual friendship. Early in the episode Danny and Brett race along the Côte d’Azur in their sports cars, courtesy of a split-screen sequence resembling The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) which is replete with exchanges of meaningful looks and is accompanied by a banal pop song written by Tony Hatch and performed by Jackie Trent (‘Now the birds will soon be flying, way up in the sky/And for a while, forget your worries, say goodbye/Gotta get away’). Yet to insist upon a homoerotic reading of this sequence would be to misunderstand the nature of male bonding (the admiring looks are more likely to be directed at the other man’s car), just as it would be mistaken to interpret Danny and Brett’s habit of walking arm-in-arm as anything other than the perfectly innocent, old-fashioned expression of friendship that it is. Some insight into the nature of the relationship between Danny and Brett is provided by Curtis’s own account of how he and Moore reacted to each other when they first met in Hollywood in the 1950s: Both being handsome men we were immediately attracted to each other because we saw in looking at each other that there was no possible way that we would ever be in conflict with each other. We were equal on that level and that pleased me and I think it pleased Roger.19

While the Danny/Brett relationship should not be interpreted as a reflection of the real-life relationship between Curtis and Moore (there are differing accounts as to how the two stars got on off-camera), there is no reason to believe that the two characters share anything other than a healthy male friendship in which each recognises the other as a kindred spirit.20 The most decisive argument against a gay reading of The Persuaders!, however, is the overt heterosexuality of its protagonists. This is inscribed in the title sequence in a shot where Danny and Brett both turn to admire the derrière of a passing bikini-clad girl: the men desire, the woman is the object of desire. The ‘puffed-up body language’ identified by Laura Lee Davies’ visitor is itself typical of the macho posturing of males seeking to impress the opposite sex. Indeed, there are times in The Persuaders! when this is taken to the extreme and Danny and Brett seem more like a pair of middleaged, medallion-wearing sex tourists than the debonair playboy crime-fighters they are supposed to be. The gender politics of The Persuaders! are so reactionary, indeed, that the series might almost be seen as a backlash against the ‘second wave’ of feminism that gained momentum in the late 1960s and

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Saints and Avengers early 1970s. At a time when writers like Germaine Greer and Juliet Mitchell were revising many commonly-held assumptions about women’s expectations and behaviour, and when radical feminists were making their voices heard by sabotaging beauty contests (the Miss World pageant at the Albert Hall in November 1970 was ‘invaded’ by demonstrators), The Persuaders! seems quite deliberately provocative in its representation of women as brainless sex objects. Variety noticed this in the first episode, remarking upon ‘the gimmick girls the series will no doubt exploit (women’s libbers please dummy up)’.21 Both Danny and Brett are introduced surrounded by young women – Danny with the stewardesses on a private jet, Brett with a sports car full of willing female hitch-hikers – and other episodes of the series would take every opportunity for the sort of gratuitous swimming pool shots that were also a feature of the Bond films during the 1970s and 1980s. The Persuaders! followed The Saint in its array of pulchritudinous starlets in both guest star and walk-on parts: Annette André, Diane Cilento, Joan Collins, Susan George, Jenny Hanley, Imogen Hassall, Anouska Hempel, Penelope Horner, Suzy Kendall, Valerie Leon, Jennie Linden, Kate O’Mara, Nicola Pagett, Catherine Schell, Madeline Smith, Melissa Stribling and Yutte Stensgaard were amongst those who provided, in Davies’ words, ‘the constant totty patrol throughout every episode’.22 Yet perhaps the overt sexism of its protagonists should not be taken too seriously. The Persuaders! is, as John Cook points out, ‘a male fantasy of material success’.23 Danny and Brett’s success with women is simply one aspect of their international playboy lifestyle which also includes expensive food, clothes and cars. The Persuaders! takes to an even more extreme level the aesthetic of consumerism that had characterised both The Saint and later episodes of The Avengers. There are times, indeed, when the series resembles nothing more than an extended lifestyle commercial for the wealthy and leisured classes. The signifiers of wealth and status are everywhere: Brett, for example, drives an Aston Martin (like the cinema’s James Bond), while Danny drives a Ferrari. The foregrounding of material possessions is so gratuitous, however, that it militates against individual episodes being very exciting or suspenseful. Sylvia Clayton complained that the heroes ‘spent so much time last night zooming around Monte Carlo in their brightly coloured sports cars that the play seemed like a prolonged commercial for highperformance petrol’.24 The themes of leisure and travel are central to the narrative ideology of The Persuaders!. The use of genuine European locations – primarily the South of France and Italy – gives the series the look of a glossy tourist brochure. In

The Special Relationship this respect The Persuaders! stands apart from other ITC adventure series which had represented foreign locations through an artful mixture of studio backlots and stock footage. Nick Freeman makes the point that the glossy materialism of the series depended on the use of real locations: It is perhaps telling that The Persuaders! could not employ stock footage, as its playboy heroes were on permanent Mediterranean holiday. As rich, independent men-of-the-world they could be witnessed sunning themselves in the casino culture of Monte Carlo rather than having that world evoked through televisual sleight-of-hand. The Persuaders!’ financial backing meant that it did not need to resort to stock shots, but more importantly, it could not afford to do so, so important was the setting to its mise en scène. Danny Wilde and Lord Brett Sinclair were tax exiles, revelling in conspicuous consumption. To cut corners in production would have cheapened the entire ethos of the show, one reason why it was the most expensive British television series of its period.25

This point is only half correct, however. Like other commentators – Hunt also refers to Brett and Danny being ‘on a permanent Mediterranean holiday’ – Freeman overlooks the fact that half the episodes of The Persuaders! are set in Britain. The protagonists are not tax exiles: Brett has a country estate and a London apartment, and in ‘A Home of One’s Own’ Danny even buys a dilapidated cottage that he intends to renovate (calling it ‘my little piece of England’). There is a pronounced difference in visual style, moreover, between episodes set on the Continent (bright colours, the sun always shining, girls sunning themselves in bikinis) and those which are set in Britain (drab colours, grey skies, characters wrapped up against the weather). It is significant, therefore, that Danny and Brett take every opportunity to leave behind the gloomy surroundings of Britain for the sunny climes of southern Europe, the playground of the European jet-set where they can enjoy their life of leisure and irresponsibility free from the social constraints that exist at home. The fact that its protagonists are gentlemen of leisure who are virtually press-ganged into becoming crime-fighters by the authority figure of the Judge means that The Persuaders! shares some links with an older lineage of British thriller fiction. Danny and Brett have less in common with professional secret agents like John Drake or James Bond (despite Moore’s effortless transition from The Persuaders! to assume the mantle of 007) than they do with the earlier generation of heroes represented by Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay. Bennett and Woollacott point out how the professional Bond differed from ‘the heroes of Buchan and McNeile [who] are gentleman amateurs,

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Saints and Avengers reluctantly pressed into the service of their country when the need is great’.26 Just as, for Hannay and Drummond, fighting treacherous conspiracies was a diversion between rubbers of bridge or hearty games of rugger, so for Danny and Brett crime-fighting is an amusing diversion that comes between the serious business of gambling, partying and womanising. The reason they take to their ‘work’ so well is that crime-fighting is fun – both men enjoy a good fight. In ‘Five Miles to Midnight’ Brett tries to explain to Sidonie (Joan Collins) what it is that makes him tick: Sidonie: What are you shopping for? Brett: Funnily enough, neither of us knew until we met Judge Fulton. Sidonie: Oh, don’t give me that poor little rich boy stuff again. Brett: No, I’m serious. A year ago I was racing at Monza – came off the track at a hundred and thirty miles an hour . . . The funny thing is I didn’t feel anything. No excitement, no fear – nothing. But during the jobs I’ve done for Judge Fulton I’ve come alive again. Sidonie: And I thought you did things for strong, noble reasons like justice and integrity and all that sort of thing. Brett: That is what the Judge likes to think. But I’ll let you into a little secret. Quite frankly I’m having the time of my life.

Brett therefore disavows any sense of a moral responsibility in what he does and instead insists that he does it for fun (‘I’m having the time of my life’). His attitude in this respect invites comparison with Bulldog Drummond, who similarly suffered from a sense of ennui and became a crime-fighter to relieve the tedium of his daily life after the First World War. Like Brett, Drummond belongs to the leisured ruling classes, has links with politicians and moves in the Mayfair cocktail set. And, also like Brett, his main reason for taking on villains is less for any moral purpose than for the ‘sport’ it provides.27 This is not to say, however, that The Persuaders! belongs entirely to the Drummond-Hannay tradition. The series is concerned to ensure that its men of the world are emphatically men of the modern world. Indeed, The Persuaders! sometimes goes to quite absurd lengths in its attempts to make its protagonists trendy by positioning them in relation to the youth culture of the time. Brett and Danny are often to be found at discotheques (the sight of Moore and Curtis disco dancing defies description) and participating in the ‘swinging’ culture which had emerged during the later 1960s. Their

The Special Relationship womanising, certainly, represents a significant departure from the cold showers of the old school hero and identifies Brett and Danny as participants in the ‘permissive society’. The fashions and dress sense are very much of their time. Their interest in clothes and accessories is supposed to place them at the cutting edge of fashion, at least according to the series’ publicity: ‘Danny Wilde and Brett Sinclair have the money to buy only the most expensive clothes. Ultra-modern but not Carnaby Street. Modes for the modern man.’28 Curtis, with his leather jackets and casuals, emerges as less of a fashion victim than Moore, who has longer hair than in his incarnation as Simon Templar and a wardrobe of safari suits, ruffled shirts and silk cravats. In line with its generic predecessors, The Persuaders! gives a prominent screen credit to its fashion consultants who, however, are not quite in the same league as the London Fashion House (Danger Man) or Pierre Cardin (The Avengers): ‘Lord Sinclair’s clothes designed by Roger Moore. Gowns courtesy of Total Look of Debenhams’. Danny and Brett are stereotypes of, respectively, the brash American selfmade millionaire and the effete English aristocrat, but The Persuaders! has much fun in recognising them as such and in sending them up. A good example of the deliberate excess of the characterisations (and the performances) occurs at the beginning of ‘Chain of Events’ where Danny and Brett have gone on a camping holiday together ‘somewhere in England’. Danny is camping cowboy-style (in the cold English dew) with nothing more than groundsheet, blanket and coffee-pot; he is shown rubbing sticks together to start a fire and leaving for a stream to catch some fish. Then, as an alarm clock rings, the camera pans left to reveal a huge tent complete with all mod cons including cooker, freezer, television, drinks decanters and, most absurdly, a chandelier hanging from the awning. Brett emerges from under his electric blanket and, making tea in his silver teapot, remarks that ‘I rather like roughing it, but one does miss the morning papers’. The juxtaposition of discomfort and luxury represents in extreme measure their vastly different lifestyles – Danny is self-sufficient and capable of ‘roughing it’, whereas Brett is a pampered aristocrat born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. The class politics of The Persuaders! are intriguing. If Danny and Brett are supposed to represent the possibility of friendships across the class divide – and, in Danny’s case, the possibility of social mobility – there are other representatives of their respective social groups who are not presented in such a favourable manner. Quite often the villains in The Persuaders! are either a particularly nasty type of rich businessman or (shades of The Avengers)

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Saints and Avengers reactionary aristocrats who cannot come to terms with a changing society. For a series which features a wheeler-dealer millionaire as one its heroes, it is perhaps surprising how often the world of big business and high finance is associated with villainy. In ‘The Long Goodbye’ Danny and Brett stumble across a formula for synthetic fuel invented by a brilliant scientist who died in a plane crash. Various parties are interested in the formula and are prepared to resort to any means to get it, including the Russians (who believe the dead scientist had been ready to defect) and a consortium led by the dead man’s former partner. However, the real villain of the piece turns out to be Sir Hugo Chalmers, chairman of the British and Arabian Oil Corporation, who fears that the formula will put his company out of business and wants to suppress it – at any price. In ‘That’s Me Over There’ Brett sets out to expose Thaddeus Krane, whose business empire is a front for every kind of illegal activity including arms dealing, drug smuggling, property swindles, share rigging and organised prostitution. Brett is being fed inside information by one of Krane’s employees, who is murdered when Krane finds out. Krane is a particularly reprehensible example of a stock character in the thriller – the villain who has built a legitimate business empire on the back of his illegal activities and who has acquired outward respectability. The Persuaders! also calls upon those ever-present stand-by villains of the adventure series, disaffected aristocrats with totalitarian ambitions. In ‘The Time and the Place’ Brett and Danny stumble on a plot by members of the exclusive Coalition Club (peers, generals, press barons and civil servants) to engineer a coup d’etat. The conspiracy is led by Lord Croxley (played by Ian Hendry) who believes that the government has lost control in the face of a wave of ‘anarchy, strikes, demonstrations, civil disorders . . . We must once again establish the rule of law’. Croxley plans to assassinate the prime minister during a televised debate on a new Law and Order Bill and to institute martial law in order to restore social order. On one level this narrative is simply replaying the sort of reactionary conspiracy familiar from so many episodes of The Avengers, but on another level the storyline now gains a degree of contemporary relevance in the aftermath of scenes of civil disorder witnessed in Britain in the late 1960s, the foremost example being the ‘Battle of Grosvenor Square’ in March 1968 which saw violent clashes between the Metropolitan Police and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators outside the American Embassy. Nor is it only the English aristocracy who have fascist tendencies. ‘The Old, the New and the Deadly’ explores the legacy of the German occupation of France and wartime collaboration. The Comte de Marceau has successfully concealed his wartime treachery, which is laid at

The Special Relationship the door of the disgraced Marquis de Villaire (‘The great traitor – the man that sold France to the Germans’) who committed suicide due to the scandal. The truth is revealed when a bronze eagle, presented to Marceau with an inscription from Hitler, is discovered. Marceau is characterised as a reactionary longing for the past who listens obsessively to records of Hitler’s speeches (‘Inspiration! We must never forget!’). Yet as well as being a source of conspiracy, the aristocracy themselves are also under threat. ‘A Death in the Family’ is a black comedy which takes as its main point of reference the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) in which the disavowed relation of an aristocratic family had murdered his way to the dukedom by killing off all the relatives who stood in his way. The Persuaders! episode has members of the Sinclair family being killed off by an unknown assassin. The complex social satire of Kind Hearts and Coronets, however, is here displaced by an emphasis on broad comedy verging on slapstick. Thus the various members of the Sinclair family are caricatures who meet their deaths in bizarre and improbable ways: General Sir Randolph Sinclair is blown up by a model of a Tiger tank; cousin Onslow Sinclair, a budding pop musician, meets his death by electric guitar; Brett’s Uncle Lance, an alcoholic drinking away the profits of a distillery, is drowned in a vat of wine; and Sir Angus Sinclair is crushed by the drawbridge of his castle. Brett himself has a narrow escape when a dog delivers an exploding parcel to him. The culprit turns out to be cousin Roland whose motivation is simply that he coveted the family’s title and estates. The episode is replete with injokes which reinforce its comedic intent. Roger Moore plays three members of the Sinclair clan (a general, an admiral and a spinster aunt), recalling how Alec Guinness had played eight separate parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets – whether this casting was intended to be making some point about inbreeding within the aristocracy can only be a matter for speculation – while the ending of the episode refers back to Curtis’s famous performance in female drag in Some Like It Hot when he turns up as Danny’s Aunt Sophia. Yet for all the jokey inter-textual references, the episode is something more than mere pastiche in that it deliberately and quite schematically reinterprets the source material. Whereas Kind Hearts and Coronets had invited sympathy with its protagonist Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), ‘A Death in the Family’ reworks the story from the perspective of the family who come under threat so that what was originally a subversive narrative about usurping the existing social structure becomes a conservative narrative about preserving that social structure. The resolution would thus seemingly reinforce John Cook’s argument that, for all its flirting with the values of the ‘permissive society’,

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Saints and Avengers The Persuaders! ‘is constantly interlaced with an underlying ideological conservatism – a depiction, ultimately, of the “rightness” of hierarchies of wealth and social status and, above all, the moral rationalism of the dominant order’.29 This underlying conservatism is perhaps only to be expected given the commercial imperative of a series like The Persuaders! The ‘American Dream’ of material success and personal fulfilment which pervades the series is an economic as well as an ideological strategy. To an even greater extent than any other ITC adventure series, The Persuaders! was packaged and pre-sold with the American market in mind. Initial indicators were promising. Variety considered the series ‘a highly entertaining mix of action and comedy’ and predicted that it ‘may well emerge the winner’ in the ratings battle against home-grown series like Mannix and Mission: Impossible.30 For once, however, the trade bible’s instincts were to be proved wrong. It is interesting to conjecture why the series, which seemed to have all the ingredients for success, did not make much of an impact on American viewers. A simple explanation might be that its broadcast time (Saturdays at 10 pm) put it in direct competition with the ever-popular Mission: Impossible, which consistently beat The Persuaders! in the ratings. A rather more culturally complex reason might be that the style of the series was too ‘European’ for American tastes. It is instructive to note, in this regard, that the rival Mission: Impossible, which originally had featured American agents toppling dictators in Third World and East European countries, had refocused its narrative interest in the early 1970s onto domestic crime in the United States. Or it might simply be, as the British critics had observed, that the plots were not distinctive or exciting enough in their own right. Whatever the reasons, however, it was the lukewarm American reaction to the series which signalled the end of the line not only for The Persuaders! but also for the ITC international action adventure series as a whole. Grade had seen The Persuaders! as a test of his ‘special relationship’ with the American television networks, but not for the first time it transpired that the special relationship was ultimately rather one-sided.

Conclusion

Conclusion

T

he Persuaders! was the last major entry in the cycle of action adventure series that had begun eleven years earlier with Danger Man in 1960. Its failure to make an impression in the all-important American market was to bring about a change of production strategy on the part of Sir Lew Grade and ITC. While several more adventure series were made before British producers called time on the genre, later entries were handicapped by production economies and fiscal retrenchment. This is apparent in the return to the half-hour format by series such as The Adventurer and The Protectors. The Adventurer was the last series from Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner’s Scoton Productions and ran for 26 episodes in 1972–73. It was essentially a rehash of The Baron with two American stars, Gene Barry (the erstwhile Amos Burke of Burke’s Law) and Barry Morse (the dogged Lieutenant Gerrard of The Fugitive). It does not stand up well: Michael Richardson suggests that ‘quite a number of production personnel including Dennis Spooner and Cyril Frankel were very unhappy working on it’ and observes that ‘episodes were apparently completed as fast as possible just to get them out of the way’.1 The Protectors was produced for ITC by Gerry Anderson and ran for 52 episodes between 1972 and 1974. It starred former Man From U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter (one of the actresses considered for the role of Emma Peel in The Avengers) as two international crime-fighters. The Protectors is more memorable than The Adventurer, but is still a pale imitation of series that had gone before: the use of stock footage from feature films in the title montage, including the helicopter sequence from the Bond

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Saints and Avengers film From Russia With Love, emphasises the second-hand feel of the whole enterprise. What accounts for the decline of the British adventure series during the 1970s? There are a number of reasons, both economic and cultural. In economic terms, the rising costs of television film production made the genre a less profitable undertaking. When The Saint began production in 1962 individual episodes were budgeted at £25,000; eight years later in 1970 individual episodes of The Persuaders! cost £80,000. Dennis Spooner explained the economic considerations involved in television production: I suppose ITC stopped making those type of adventure series after The Protectors because, I think, inflation had caught up with the cost of production and the revenue that comes back from television is limited. The return from a television show is governed by what the various countries are prepared to pay. You can say you’ll get back £6 million from a television series and that’s fine if it costs you £3 million. But, if it costs you £4 million and then £5 million and you’re still only getting £6 million back, then you start dropping shows and suddenly you’re investing but you haven’t got the bonanza.2

Grade, for his part, became more interested in feature films than television, entering the film industry in the later 1970s with varied productions such as The Cassandra Crossing (1976), The Boys from Brazil (1978) and The Muppet Movie (1979). Grade enjoyed critical and commercial success producing the acclaimed mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and then invested $32 million in the disastrous Raise the Titanic! (1980). In cultural terms, moreover, the adventure series had had its day. The trend in popular television during the 1970s was away from the sort of gentleman adventurers who had been so prominent over the previous decade and towards a more realistic, hard-edged style of television thriller. This change in style was partly a response to the economic downturn of the later 1970s. The glossy, sophisticated, consumerist lifestyle portrayed in The Avengers, The Saint, Jason King and The Persuaders! was no longer appropriate in the context of galloping inflation and the three-day week. The shift from fantasy to realism in television thrillers was signalled by the success of The Sweeney (1975–78), which starred John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as two hard-fighting, hard-talking, hard-drinking Flying Squad detectives. It was followed by a number of similarly violent police and detective series in the late 1970s, including Target and Hazel, characterised by their sordid realism and unglamorous settings. Whereas in the 1960s the adventure series

Conclusion had represented a trendy, glamorous and modern style of popular television, by the 1970s it seemed jaded, nostalgic and backward-looking. This is apparent from the failure of the attempts to revive the two most successful adventure series of the 1960s in new formats: neither The New Avengers nor Return of the Saint were able to repeat the success of the originals and met with a lukewarm reception from audiences and critics alike. It is significant that when Brian Clemens returned to the secret agent action series with The Professionals (1978–82) it was done in the violent and realist style of The Sweeney rather than in the fantasy style of The Avengers. Dennis Spooner was script editor of the first series of The Professionals but did not enjoy working on the series. ‘I story-edited the first series of The Professionals and that was an unhappy experience insofar as they’re all serious and straight stories,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s my view of the world that a lot of these things shouldn’t be taken seriously.’3 The heyday of the adventure series, undoubtedly, was in the 1960s. While there have been attempts to revive the genre (C.A.T.S. Eyes in the 1980s, Bugs and CI5: The New Professionals in the 1990s) it has never again reached the same prominence it enjoyed during the 1960s. Moreover, there is little that is distinctively British about these series. C.A.T.S. Eyes, with its trio of glamorous female special investigators, was clearly modelled on the American series Charlie’s Angels (adding the figure of the black authority figure from Department S), while both Bugs and CI5: The New Professionals follow the strategy of international casting. British action series of the 1990s, moreover (The Knock, Thief Takers, Bodyguards), are strongly influenced by the shoot’em-up style of American television and, for all their slickness and production gloss, lack the quirky charm of their 1960s equivalents. The tradition of the eccentric individual investigator still survives with the BBC’s Jonathan Creek (produced by Adam Adamant’s Verity Lambert), but this is a different lineage from the adventure series which has many antecedents in popular fiction. While the adventure series is no longer a major aspect of British television culture, however, it retains a prominent place in British television’s heritage. The repackaging of The Avengers, The Saint, The Champions, Department S, Jason King and The Persuaders! as ‘cult classics’ for video release, and their seemingly ubiquitous presence on cable television, proves that an audience still exists for these programmes which are now some 30 to 40 years old.4 The fact that one of the least successful examples of the genre at the time, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), could be reclaimed as ‘the cult Sixties private detective series’ and successfully remade 30 years later is eloquent testimony to the genre’s hold on the popular imagination. This may be due

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Saints and Avengers largely to the vogue for ‘nostalgia TV’, but, as with the continued popularity of Dad’s Army, it has deeper cultural implications. The enduring appeal of the adventure series, I would suggest, represents a wish to reclaim a distinctively British contribution to popular television. The adventure series is very much part of a British generic tradition. It is distinct from American television genres such as the western and the private eye series. Although American television has produced its own adventure series, the genre has been much less prominent there than it has in Britain. Television, even more than the cinema, has become the foremost vehicle for the Americanisation of global culture. Consider how many of the popular cultural icons of recent decades have been products of American television: Captain Kirk (Star Trek), J.R. Ewing (Dallas), Alexis Carrington (Dynasty), B.A. Barracus (The A Team), Bart Simpson (The Simpsons), Mulder and Scully (The X Files), Dr Doug Ross (ER), Ross and Rachel (Friends), Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess), Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) – the list could be extended almost indefinitely. While British television still maintains an international profile, it is significant that its most exportable commodities for the last two decades have been heritage dramas (The Jewel in the Crown, Pride and Prejudice; even Inspector Morse could be so described) rather than contemporary adventure series. And, for all the critical and popular success of British heritage drama, it is quantitatively overshadowed by American television genres such as the cop and private eye series and, in recent years especially, the science-fiction and fantasy series. The advent of satellite, cable and more recently digital broadcasting, moreover, creates a huge demand for ‘product’ with the result that American series dominate our television screens more than ever before. The sixties generation of Saints and Avengers, however, reminds us of a time when it was not always so.

Notes

Notes

Books are cited by the place of publication and the date of the edition used. Full publication details of all books referred to are provided in the Bibliography. Where television reviews or newspaper articles are cited without page references, the source is the British Film Institute’s microfiche collection, which does not usually include page numbers. Quotations from Variety are extracted from the relevant volumes of Variety’s Television Reviews, listed in the Bibliography.

Introduction 1. Peter Black, ‘Undercover and out of mind, except for that Mrs Gale’, Daily Mail, 13 October 1962. 2. The now orthodox history is represented by Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume V: Competition 1955–1974 (Oxford, 1995), and in the essays collected together in Edward Buscombe (ed.), British Television: A Reader (Oxford, 2000). Hitherto the study of British popular television genres has been limited, in the main, to John Corner (ed.), Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (London, 1991), and to cultural studies monographs on individual series, such as Chris Gregory, Be Seeing You . . . Decoding the Prisoner (Luton, 1997) and Toby Miller, The Avengers (London, 1997). There are, of course, many ‘fan’ histories of cult television series: the most useful of these are listed in the Bibliography. Much academic work on popular television has been inclined either towards a cultural studies approach concerned with how concepts have evolved and been appropriated outside their original contexts, such as John Tulloch and Manuel Alvorado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (London, 1983), or towards audience and reception studies, such as John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek (London, 1995). 3. Hitherto there has been little investigation of critical discourse in television studies, though at the time of writing volumes on Feminist Television Criticism and Critical

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4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Ideas in British Television are promised in the ‘Oxford Television Studies’ series. John Caughie points out that ‘ “serious drama” . . . replete with scare quotes, designates in shorthand the tradition in British television drama which stretches from the single play to the television-commissioned art film, including on the way certain “authored” series and serials and “quality” and “classic” adaptations’. Caughie argues, rather defensively, that this tradition does not include genres such as ‘soap operas, crime series and hospital melodrama’. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford, 2000), p.3. The academic interest in Potter, especially, is reflected in the recent plethora of books: Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: The Authorised Biography (London, 1998), John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester, 1995) and Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds – a critical reassessment (Basingstoke, 1998). Critical appreciation of genre writers is limited, in the main, to articles in journals and fan magazines: these are listed in the Bibliography. Milton Shulman, ‘Not so blithe Spirit’, Evening Standard, 18 February 1970. The Frankfurt School was so called because its leading proponents had been at Frankfurt’s Institute of Social Research before leaving for Columbia University, New York, when the Nazis came to power in Germany. During their exile in the United States these Marxist intellectuals were highly critical of ‘mass culture’ (films, radio, magazines, popular music, television) which they saw as uniform, standardised and predictable. It was produced by the ‘culture industries’ for the masses, who consumed it uncritically. These views reached their fullest expression in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1973 edn). Sample opinions: ‘Movies and radio no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce’ (p.121) and ‘The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves’ (p.126). Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, 1990), p.86. Gregory, Be Seeing You, p.24. Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford, 2000), p.77. Quoted in Caughie, Television Drama, p.55. Kinematograph Weekly, 29 December 1960, p.18. ‘If you want to get ahead get a series’, Kinematograph Weekly, 11 December 1965, p.23. Quoted in Charles Barr, ‘“They Think It’s All Over”: The Dramatic Legacy of Live Television’, in John Hill and Martin Muloone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton, 1997), p.65. Dave Rogers, The Ultimate Avengers (London, 1995), p.20 & p.78. Milton Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’, Evening Standard, 1 December 1965. Ibid. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), p.455. Kinematograph Weekly, 14 July 1960, p.26. ‘Lew Grade: “The most significant breakthrough”’, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 October 1965, p.14. Lew Grade, Still Dancing: My Story (London, 1987), pp.217–8. ‘Week’s work that could open a new era’, Kinematograph Weekly, 2 December 1965, p.18.

Notes 22. ‘No worries ahead for Grade’s ITC’, Kinematograph Weekly, 4 February 1967, p.14. 23. Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’, Evening Standard, 1 December 1965. 24. Martin Jackson, ‘How to send chills down the Treasury’, Daily Express, 19 November 1968. 25. Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’. 26. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, 1997), p.353. 27. ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interviewed by John Fleming], StarBurst, 4:9 (May 1982), p.47. 28. The narrative ideologies of the Bond films are explored in my book Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London, 1999). 29. Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’. 30. L. Marsland Spender, ‘Mrs Gale will claim the Throne’, Daily Telegraph, 9 March 1964. Josh Billings described Dr No as ‘a bizarre comedy melodrama’ in Kinematograph Weekly, 13 December 1962. 31. See, for example, Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (Enfield, 1996 edn), an impressionistic (and opinionated) survey of the authors’ favourite television series which includes sections on ‘BBC Telefantasy’ (the Quatermass serials, Doctor Who, Doomwatch, The Survivors, Blake’s 7) and ‘ITV Telefantasy’ (The Avengers, The Prisoner, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Tomorrow People, Sapphire & Steel, Robin of Sherwood). The authors also include The Saint, Department S and Jason King in the category of ‘Crime Drama’. 32. I have discussed the British film thrillers of the 1930s in my chapter ‘Celluloid Shockers’, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 (London, 1998), pp.75–97, while for an overview of the action aventure film in British cinema generally see my forthcoming chapter ‘Action, spectacle and the Boy’s Own tradition in British cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London, second edn 2001), pp.227–35. 33. David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), p.77 34. Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 1969; Peter Black, ‘Sir Lew champions the fairies against the Reds’, Daily Mail, 27 November 1969. 35. Quoted in Buxton, p.98. 36. My approach to Bond was absurdly attacked by one critic for not engaging with once fashionable trends in cultural theory: ‘I’d rather have seen Chapman deconstruct the myth. The classic post-structuralist approach would have read the cinematic logic of each film against its political logic, and thrown up a few “aporia” – for example, the cinematic need for crisis versus the irenic tendency of the oeuvre’s conservative ideology. Nobody would have had a clue what he was talking about, but it would have sounded great’ [sic]. Amusingly, if somewhat contradictorily, the same critic would also seem to prefer that I had written a fan book, advising the publishers ‘to repackage the book as a large format hardback with colour pictures, and cut out words like “narrative ideology” and “foregrounded”’. Giles Coren, ‘Could Bond tackle Barthes?’, The Times, 18 November 1999, p.46.

1. Dirty Work: Danger Man 1. Stanley Reynolds, Guardian, 14 September 1967.

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Saints and Avengers 2. David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), p.78. The series was still being shown in syndication on American television in the late 1980s. ‘Now more than 20 years old, the capers still play remarkably well, their short scenes tumbling along and keeping the pace moving at a clip that doesn’t leave much time for thought,’ wrote John C. Connor in the New York Times, 4 June 1987, p.C–26. 3. Buxton, p.78 4. Kinematograph Weekly, 15 September 1960, p.16. 5. Variety, 21 September 1960 (‘Otta’). 6. Peter Graham Scott, British Television: An Insider’s History (London, 2000), pp.146–7. 7. The character of Harry Lime, memorably played by Orson Welles, was the villain of the classic 1949 film and had been killed at its climax. The BBC had a habit of resurrecting dead film characters. Dixon of Dock Green, the long-running police series that started in 1955, revived the character of PC George Dixon, shot dead in the 1950 Ealing crime drama The Blue Lamp. Jack Warner played Dixon on both film and television. 8. Kine Weekly reported: ‘In spite of what is claimed to be a financial success with its first filmed series made here, The Third Man, there are no immediate plans for any tv film projects . . . Among the US companies over here National Telefilm Associates is also silent about future tv film programmes. It is quite clear by the sale of The Third Man that, while the company did not exactly make much of a profit, they did not lose much over the entire series. The industrial troubles during production and the high budget of that series has apparently had a depressing effect on the NTA leadership in the States . . .’ Kinematograph Weekly, 27 October 1960, p.20. 9. ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), p.265. 10. Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London, 1987), p.34. 11. Buxton, pp.92–3. 12. The voice-over differs slightly in some episodes. The first episode ‘View from the Villa’ does not include the sentence ‘NATO also has its own’. 13. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London, 1987), p.24 14. Ibid, p.99. 15. Quoted in Buxton, p.78. 16. Albert R. Broccoli, with Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London, 1998), p.64. 17. Buxton, p.166 (note 17). 18. ‘Danger Man’, TV Times, 11 September 1960, p.8. 19. ‘It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it.’ Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (London, 1989 edn), p.7. 20. Variety, 21 October 1964 (‘Otta’). 21. Ibid. 22. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 3 October 1965. 23. Variety, 7 April 1965 (‘Pit’) 24. Variety, 19 May 1965 (‘Abel’).

Notes 25. For a discussion of the spread of ‘Bondmania’, see James Chapman, Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London, 1999), pp.111–19. 26. Variety, 19 May 1965. 27. ATV press release entitled ‘Dangerman’ [sic], dated October 1964, on BFI microfiche for Danger Man. 28. ‘McGoohan Magic in and out of Danger Man’, TV Times, 25 September 1965, p.38. 29. Stanley Reynolds, Guardian, 14 September 1967. 30. Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice, p.92. 31. Wiggin, Sunday Times, 3 October 1965. 32. Buxton, p.92 33. Denning, Cover Stories, p.2. 34. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford, 1990), p.163. 35. Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (London, 1997), pp.504–5. 36. Buxton, p.83. 37. Ibid, p.90. 38. Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1996 edn), p.194. 39. ‘Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England.’ Ian Fleming, Moonraker (London, 1989 edn), p.28. 40. Variety, 1 March 1967 (‘Otta’). 41. Reynolds, Guardian, 14 September 1967. 42. Quoted in Buxton, p.78. 43. Reynolds, Guardian, 14 September 1967. 44. ‘Is McGoohan making a modern morality play?’, Kinematograph Weekly, 15 September 1966, p.21. 45. The best academic study of the series, from a cultural studies perspective, is Chris Gregory, Be Seeing You . . . Decoding The Prisoner (Luton, 1997). More anecdotal and fan-oriented accounts are Ian Rakoff, Inside The Prisoner: Radical television and film in the 1960s (London, 1998) and Matthew White and Jaffer Ali, The Official Prisoner Companion (New York, 1988). 46. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 8 October 1967; Peter Knight, ‘Surrealistic element in new thriller’, Daily Telegraph, 2 October 1967. 47. Richard Last, ‘Farewell To The Prisoner – And No Regrets’, Sun, 5 February 1968; Peter Knight, ‘Angry viewers left in dark on “Prisoner”’, Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1968.

2. Is There Honey Still for Tea? The Avengers 1. Anne Francis, Julian Wintle: A Memoir (London, n.d.), p.86. British trade sources reported that the sale of the series to the American ABC network was expected to bring $7,500,000 from North America alone, making it ‘the most successful British film series to play the USA since Robin Hood’. ‘“Avengers” will bring in $7,500,000’, Kinematograph Weekly, 15 April 1967, p.24. 2. ‘“Avengers” smash into US market’, Kinematograph Weekly, 19 November 1966, p.16. 3. Speaking on the television documentary Avenging the Avengers (Screen First Productions, 1992). This programme was originally shown as part of Channel 4’s

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

cultural documentary series Without Walls. It was repeated to accompany a rerun of the fourth series of The Avengers on Channel 4 in October 1995, while an expanded version including material not used in the original broadcast was released on video by Kult TV in 1999 (KLT20030). Hereafter, all unattributed quotations in this chapter are from interviewees in this programme. Steve Chibnall, ‘Avenging the Past’, New Society, 28 March 1985, p.476. David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), p.96. Hitherto the only monograph devoted entirely to the series is by a US academic: Toby Miller, The Avengers (London, 1997). While it has some interesting points to make, the work as a whole is intellectually shallow and is flawed by an over-reliance on the opinions of his ‘informants’, most of whom seem to be uncritical fans of the series. There are, of course, numerous ‘fan’ histories of The Avengers: some are detailed in the Bibliography. Though neither the only nor the first to argue in this vein, I have discussed the postmodern characteristics of the series in my chapter ‘The Avengers: Television and popular culture during the “High Sixties”’ in Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick (eds), Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London, 2000), pp.37–69, and in ‘“Excellent stupidity, silly excellence”: Visual Style in The Avengers’, Visual Culture in Britain, 1/1 (2000), pp.89– 108. ‘A History of The Avengers. With a Guide to the Characters of John Steed and Emma Peel’, publicity notes by press officer Marie Donaldson on the BFI microfiche for The Avengers, undated but prepared for the fourth season in the autumn of 1965. Peter Wollen, ‘Hitchcock’s Vision’, Cinema (GB), 3, 1969, p.4. Wollen uses the phrase ‘the thin protection of civilisation’, which he derives from John Buchan. In Buchan’s novel The Power House (London, 1916) the villain Andrew Lumley asks the protagonist, Sir Edward Leithen: ‘Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?’ Hitchcock was a great admirer of Buchan, and acknowledged the influence Buchan had on his films to François Truffaut: ‘What I find appealing in Buchan’s work is his understatement of highly dramatic ideas’. See François Truffaut, with Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock, rev. edn (London: Paladin, 1986), p.122. Peter Wollen (writing as Lee Russell), ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, New Left Review, 35, January– February 1966, pp.89–90. Quoted in Dave Rogers, The Ultimate Avengers (London, 1995), p.52. Ibid, p.18. Umberto Eco, ‘The Narrative Structure in Fleming’, in Oreste Del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), The Bond Affair, trans R.A. Downie (London, 1966), p.58. The book which differs most from the usual narrative pattern of the Bond novels is The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Fleming experimented with the form, albeit with uneven results. The story is written as a first-person narrative as if from the perspective of a woman, Vivienne Michel, who leaves England after two unsatisfactory love affairs and lands herself a job as manager of a motel in northern New York State. Vivienne is threatened by two gangsters who have been hired to burn down the hotel as part of an insurance fraud. James Bond appears belatedly in the story, stopping at the motel by chance when he gets a flat tyre. He kills the two gangsters, sleeps with Vivienne and leaves in the morning. Eco omits the book from his analysis because it ‘seems quite untypical’.

Notes 15. Wheeler Winston Dixon, ‘The Man Who Created The Avengers: An Interview with Brian Clemens’, Classic Images, 287, May 1999, p.C–20. In this interview Clemens claims to have written the first episode, ‘Hot Snow’, though other sources credit that episode to Ray Rigby, based on a story by Patrick Brown. Clemens wrote the second episode, ‘Brought to Book’, which concluded the story begun in the first. 16. Quoted in Patrick Macnee, with Dave Rogers, The Avengers and Me (London, 1997), p.15. 17. Quoted in Rogers, The Ultimate Avengers, p.16. 18. ‘Crime M.D.’, TV Times, 10 March 1961, p.11. 19. Variety, 1 February 1961 (‘Erni’); Variety, 29 March 1961 (‘Otta’). The different dates of the reviews were due to the different transmission dates in ITV regions. 20. Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (London, 1966 edn), p.13. 21. Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London, 1969), pp.204–5. 22. ‘Kinky Boots’ was written by Herb Kretzmer and Benny Lee, who had also penned the Peter Sellers/Sophia Loren hit ‘Goodness Gracious Me’. It was released by Decca in February 1964 and promptly sank without trace, though it was successfully resurrected in December 1990 when it reached number four in the British charts – an example of the retrospective ‘cult’ appeal of The Avengers. 23. Thomas Andrae, ‘Television’s First Feminist: The Avengers and Female Spectatorship’, Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 18/3 (Spring 1996), p.115. 24. ‘A History of The Avengers’, BFI microfiche. The Gale/Blackman persona was the subject of serious analysis by a social psychologist who claimed her as an example of ‘masculine protest’ by a woman unwilling to accept conventional gender stereotyping: ‘The appeal of The Avengers . . . consists in the fact that it reflects the masculine protest. In Cathy Gale we see the female masculine protestor par excellence. She is the idol of thousands of women because through her they are assured that their femininity is not a sign of inferiority . . . The Avengers is made possible by the fact that today men and women are confused about their sex roles. The series attempts to sort out the confusion by imposing upon it a style of life which is, however, actually contrary to the natural order.’ ‘The Avengers Psycho-Analysed’, Psychology, April 1964, pp.20–23. The article is attributed to an anonymous ‘Consultant’. 25. Stanley Reynolds, Guardian, 16 January 1967. 26. Maurice Richardson, Observer, 3 October 1965; Francis Hope, ‘Thriller Plus’, New Statesman, 31 January 1964. 27. Quoted in Rogers, The Ultimate Avengers, p.52. 28. Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice, p.101. 29. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), p.248. 30. The basic premise of this episode recurred in the big screen version of Mission: Impossible (1996), directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Cruise. In order to clear himself from suspicion as a ‘mole’ and smoke out the real traitor, new generation IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) breaks into the high-tech, top-security CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, to copy a disc of a ‘Noc’ (non-official cover) list. Whether Mission: Impossible was directly inspired by the Avengers episode is impossible to say, though as the break-in sequence also borrows directly from the heist movie Topkapi (1964) some degree of pastiche on the part of the writers might reasonably be assumed.

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Saints and Avengers 31. Jack Edmund Nolan, ‘Films on TV’, Films in Review, 25/8 (October 1974), pp.489– 93. 32. Several Honor Blackman stories were later remade with Diana Rigg, as the videotaped episodes had not been broadcast in America. ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ was remade as ‘The Joker’ (1967), and ‘The Charmers’, also scripted by Clemens, as ‘The Correct Way to Kill’ (1967). Clemens returned to the lady-in-jeopardy theme in ‘The House That Jack Built’ (1965), ‘Epic’ (1967) and ‘Pandora’ (1969). 33. Francis Hope, ‘Thriller Plus’, New Statesman, 31 January 1964. 34. Variety, 16 October 1963 (‘Otta’). 35. Michael Gower, ‘Exit Cathy’, Daily Mail, 23 March 1964. 36. Francis, Julian Wintle, p.84. 37. Variety, 6 October 1965 (‘Otta’). 38. At the end of ‘Lobster Quadrille’, Blackman’s last episode, Cathy announces that she is going on holiday to the Bahamas. When Steed remarks upon her ‘pussy-footing along those sun-soaked shores’, Cathy replies that ‘I shan’t be pussy-footing along those sun-soaked beaches, I’ll be lying on them’. ‘Not pussy-footing?’ Steed muses. ‘I must have been misinformed.’ 39. ‘The Avengers: A Summary of Facts about the Programme and its Stars’, publicity notes by Marie Donaldson, autumn 1965, on the BFI microfiche for The Avengers. 40. ‘New-style “Avengers” can’t miss’, Kinematograph Weekly, 30 September 1965, p.14. 41. Milton Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’, Evening Standard, 1 December 1965. 42. ‘A History of The Avengers’, BFI microfiche. 43. ‘The Avengers: Facts about the Programme and its Stars’, publicity notes on BFI microfiche. 44. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 3 October 1965. 45. Chibnall, ‘Avenging the Past’, p.477. 46. It was the scene where Cartney whips Emma that caused problems with the ITV network. Clemens said that ‘I think he whipped her four or five times, and we had to cut it down to just one whipping – just one lash of the whip’. The 1993 video release of the episode by Lumiere Pictures (LUM 2024) contains the full whipping scene: it is actually quite difficult to work out how many times Cartney lashes out with the whip, though up to twelve cracks can be counted. However, Emma successfully avoids the lashes so that not once is she actually touched by the whip. Although ‘A Touch of Brimstone’ was not screened in the United States, it has become part of Avengers folklore that it was viewed by US television executives at private parties and conventions. 47. Theodore Roszak was a young American academic who was Chair of the History of Western Culture Program at California State University. In his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY, 1969), Roszak asserted that technocracy was ‘the mature product of technological progress and scientific ethos’ which ‘eludes all traditional political categories’ and argued that it resulted in a form of totalitarianism because it grew unopposed and supposedly in the name of progress. ‘When any system of politics devours the surrounding culture, we have totalitarianism, the attempt to bring the whole of life under authoritarian control . . . But in the case of technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while

Notes 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us by exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific world-view . . .’ (pp.5–13). Henry Raynor, ‘No offence in the world’, The Times, 28 September 1968. Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 15 January 1967. I am indebted to Susan Burnett for this phrase, which seems so aptly to sum up The Avengers. Virginia Ironside, Daily Mail, 5 December 1968. The episode is a spoof of John Huston’s 1941 film of the Dashiell Hammett novel rather than of the novel itself. The performances of Stratford Johns and Ronald Lacey are comic impersonations of, respectively, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in the Huston film. Their characters’ names (Sidney Street and Humbert Green) reinforce the link to the ‘fat man’ of the film, while the name of a secondary villain, Baron Von Orlac (Ferdy Mayne), recalls Lorre’s character in Karl Freund’s Grand Guignol horror film Mad Love (1935). Virginia Ironside, Daily Mail, 5 December 1968. Daily Express, 14 May 1968. Variety, 25 January 1967 (‘Mor’). ‘“Avengers” faces tough competition’, Kinematograph Weekly, 18 November 1967, p.16. Variety, 27 March 1968 (‘Mor’). Quoted in Rogers, The Ultimate Avengers, p.256. The Professionals was a tough, action-based adventure series made by London Weekend Television, running for 57 episodes between 1978 and 1981. The key members of its production team had all worked on The Avengers: producer Sidney Hayers, executive producers Clemens and Fennell, and composer Laurie Johnson. The Professionals starred Gordon Jackson as Cowley, head of special security department ‘CI5’, with Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins as agents Doyle and Bodie. Coincidentally, Shaw and Collins had appeared together in the New Avengers episode ‘Obsession’ in which they had played mercenaries (‘Maybe we should work together again, we’re a good team,’ Collins’s character says to Shaw’s). Sight and Sound, New Series, 8/10 (October 1998), p.39.

3. The English Knight Errant: The Saint 1. ‘Lew Grade: “The most significant breakthrough”’, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 October 1965, p.14; Paul Kerr, ‘Making the Saint’, Primetime, 12 (Spring/Summer 1987), p.3. 2. ‘Anthony Morton’ was a pseudonym of the prolific John Creasey. 3. Quoted in the entry on Charteris by Joan Del Fattore, in Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 77: British Mystery Writers, 1920–1939 (Detroit, 1989), p.67. 4. Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London, 1978), p.34. 5. William Vivian Butler, The Durable Desperadoes (London, 1973), p.177. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid, pp.177–8. 8. Ibid, p.211. 9. Ibid, p.234.

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Saints and Avengers 10. Richard B. Jewell, with Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (London, 1982), p.119. 11. W.O.G. Lofts and Derek Adley, The Saint and Leslie Charteris (London, 1971 edn), p.39. 12. Burl Barer, The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television of Leslie Charteris’ Robin Hood of Modern Crime, Simon Templar, 1928–1992 (Jefferson, NC, 1993), p.42. Barer’s book is invaluable, as the author had access to Charteris’s own papers, including contracts and correspondence with film and television companies. 13. Tony Mechele and Dick Fiddy, The Saint (London, 1989), pp.19–20; Bower, p.48. 14. Quoted in Barer, The Saint: A Complete History, p.68. 15. Ibid, p.121. According to Roy Moseley’s biography of Moore, the actor had approached Charteris during the late 1950s when he was starring in the television series Ivanhoe, though Charteris denied this. Roger Moore: A Biography (London, 1986 edn), p.89. 16. The Flesh and the Fiends was based on the story of Dr Robert Knox (played by Peter Cushing) and the graverobbers Burke and Hare. 17. Barer, p.123. ‘On one occasion in commenting on a script by Harry Junkin, Leslie’s reply was a terse comment, “This script is fit for Junkin(g)”,’ Baker recalled. ‘Harry was vastly amused.’ One part of Junkin’s role as script supervisor was to ensure that no words or phrases were used that would confuse American viewers. Unlike The Avengers, American English was used in The Saint: ‘elevator’ instead of ‘lift’, ‘gas’ instead of ‘petrol’, ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’, etc. 18. Ibid, p.122. 19. ‘Enter the Saint’, episode 3 of The Radio Detectives (BBC Radio 4, 1998), written and presented by Jeffrey Richards. 20. Variety, 14 October 1964 (‘Otta’). 21. Variety, 24 May 1967 (‘Bill’) 22. Colin Watson, Snobbery With Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience (London, 1987 edn), p.228. 23. Sylvia Clayton, ‘Suave Saint Embarks on New Series’, Daily Telegraph, 26 September 1966. 24. George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920– 1940 (London, 1968), pp.460–84. 25. Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘A Wet and Weighty Night of Crime’, Sun, 11 September 1969. 26. Virginia Ironside, Daily Mail, 15 October 1970. 27. The line about ‘ants devouring the dragon’ is adapted from Charteris’s introduction to The Second Saint Omnibus (1940). Barer, p.123. 28. Variety, 17 October 1962 (‘Otta’). 29. J.F.W., ‘ “The Saint” Begins: A queer accent at Cookham’, Daily Telegraph, 1 October 1962. 30. Michael Richardson, ‘The Stick Man’, Primetime 12 (Spring/Summer 1987), p.6. 31. Tiberio is played by Peter Wyngarde, who made something of a speciality of gloriously camp and excessive villains in sixties adventure series, having already played a similar role in the Avengers episode ‘A Touch of Brimstone’. The Roman trappings of the episode and fascist tendency of the conspiracy are similar to the Avengers episode ‘The Grandeur That Was Rome’. There is a certain irony in Tiberio’s denunciation of ‘long-haired, self-absorbed effeminates’ given Wyngarde’s later television role as Jason King. 32. Richardson, p.6.

Notes 33. Ibid. 34. There is evidence that the feature-length episodes were planned as ‘television specials’. In 1967 Kine Weekly announced ‘a number of two-hour television specials made by Roger Moore in his Saint role’. ‘ATV to spend £8m in next two years’, Kinematograph Weekly, 4 November 1967, p.15. 35. Watson, Snobbery With Violence, p.227. 36. Quoted in Barer, The Saint: A Complete History, p.136. 37. Martin Jackson, ‘How to send chills down the Treasury’, Daily Express, 19 November 1968. 38. Variety, 28 February 1968 (‘Bill’). 39. John Dugdale, ‘Watching Week’, Listener, 31 August 1989, p.24. 40. Tim Cooper, ‘Kilmer makes a devil of The Saint’, Evening Standard, 15 April 1997. 41. Quoted in John Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide, 13th edn (London, 1998), p.667.

4. Swinging Britain: Adam Adamant Lives! 1. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Adam Adamant lives again!’, StarBurst 7: 7 (March 1985), p.30. 2. BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter BBC WAC) T5/783/1: Letter from a B.D. Hobson to Tony Williamson, 6 September 1966. 3. BBC WAC T5/783/2: Andrew Osborn to Gerald Harper, 13 March 1967. 4. Quoted in Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume V: Competition 1955–1974 (Oxford, 1995), p.374. 5. M.K. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play, 1962– 66: institutional containment versus “agitational contemporaneity”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17: 3 (August 1997), p.374. 6. ‘ITV can expect a jolt when the BBC launches its “Dr Who”’, Kinematograph Weekly, 24 October 1963, p.22. 7. The following details are from ‘Sexton Blake – the other Baker Street detective’, episode 4 of The Radio Detectives (BBC Radio 4, 1998), written and presented by Jeffrey Richards. 8. BBC WAC T5/783/1: R.G. Walford to P.G. Mason, 28 March 1965. 9. BBC WAC T5/783/3: 12-page typescript entitled ‘Sexton Blake Lives’, p.4. 10. Ibid, p.2. 11. Ibid, pp.6–12. 12. BBC WAC T5/783/1: Kenneth Adam to Sydney Newman, 18 February 1965. 13. Ibid: Andrew Osborn to Philip Ridgeway, 10 August 1965. 14. Ibid: Philip Chambers to Sydney Newman, 9 June 1965. 15. BBC WAC T5/802/1: Sydney Newman to Jack Bell, 9 June 1966. 16. Michael Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, Time Screen 20 (Spring 1994), p.5. 17. Williamson told Terrance Dicks: ‘The general development of this story is not as believable as we wish for this series. For although our characters may be off-beat, the situations themselves must be logical and totally convincing’ (BBC WAC T5/791/1: 12 October 1966). To Patricia Highsmith he wrote: ‘Thank you again for your story idea which I am returning now. I am afraid that it is not suitable for the series, not because it is bad but because the flavour and atmosphere are not modern enough’ (BBC WAC T5/803/1: 11 March 1966).

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

‘Adam Adamant’, Radio Times, 29 December 1966, p.3 BBC WAC T5/783/1: Andrew Osborn to Verity Lambert, 13 July 1966. Ibid: Sydney Newman to Verity Lambert, 1 July 1966. James Thomas, Daily Express, 24 June 1966; Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 3 July 1966; Virginia Ironside, Daily Mail, 5 August 1966. BBC WAC T5/783/1: Sydney Newman to Verity Lambert, 1 July 1966. Ironside, Daily Mail, 5 August 1966; Stewart Lane, Morning Star, 25 June 1966; Peter Black, Daily Mail, 24 June 1966 Maurice Richardson, Observer, 9 October 1966. BBC WAC T5/781/1: Drama Early Warning Synopsis, 10 March 1966. The parentheses in the text were used to indicate plot information that was not to be mentioned in publicity. Quoted in Jack Bell, ‘How A Victorian James Bond Gets To Be Inside A Block Of Ice’, Daily Mirror, 18 June 1966, p.13. A different actress, Ann Holloway, had played Georgina in the pilot. Newman felt that ‘She was adorable, but she just didn’t have the qualities we were looking for’. The Times, 24 June 1966. Pauline Peters, Sunday Times, 26 June 1966. BBC WAC T5/784/1: Audience Research Report ‘A Vintage Year for Scoundrels’, 11 July 1966. BBC WAC T5/783/1: Sydney Newman to Verity Lambert, 1 July 1966. BBC WAC T5/783/3: Production development notes by Ken Levison, undated. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 3 October 1965. BBC WAC T5/783/3: 19-page typescript entitled ‘Adam Adamant: A New BBC Television Series’, p.10. Ironside, Daily Mail, 5 August 1966; Mary Crozier, Guardian, 1 July 1966. Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Avengers Dossier (London, 1998), p.142. BBC WAC T5/791/1: R.G. Walford to Julian Wintle, 30 December 1966. Steve Chibnall, ‘Avenging the past’, New Society, 28 March 1985, p.477. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), p.456. Ibid, p.406. BBC WAC T5/783/3: ‘Sexton Blake Lives’, p.2. The association of the aristocracy with transgressive and excessive behaviour is a recurring theme in popular fiction, also exemplified in the Avengers episode ‘A Touch of Brimstone’. BBC WAC T5/789/1: Audience Research Report ‘The Terribly Happy Embalmers’, 4 October 1966. Milton Shulman, ‘I’ll settle for Batman against frozen Adam any time . . .’, Evening Standard, 27 July 1966. BBC WAC T5/801/1: Audience Research Report ‘A Sinister Sort of Service’, 18 April 1967. Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, p.5 BBC WAC T5/783/1: Verity Lambert to Derek Hoddinott, 13 January 1967. Ibid: Derek Hoddinott to Verity Lambert, 19 January 1967. Ibid: Verity Lambert to Sydney Newman, 9 January 1967. ‘A Vintage Year for Scoundrels’ and ‘Death Has A Thousand Faces’ were released on one cassette by Paradox Films (THE 20035).

Notes 50. BBC WAC T5/783/2: Sydney Newman to Gerald Harper, 10 April 1967.

5. Have Gun, Will Travel: Man in a Suitcase 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

‘Man in a Suitcase’, Kinematograph Weekly, 26 November 1966, p.18. Variety, 18 October 1967 (‘Otta’). Philip Purser, ‘Low Grade Nonsense’, Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 1967. Variety, 18 October 1967. Milton Shulman, ‘Sold abroad: the celluloid hero’, Evening Standard, 1 December 1965. David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), p.56. Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London, 1987), p.34. Graham Greene, who wrote the original screenplay of The Third Man, began from a sentence he had written on the back of a (possibly apocryphal) envelope: ‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’ Quoted in Jeffrey Richards, ‘The Third Man’, in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Good Guys and Bad Guys (London, 1982), p.20. Quoted in Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London, 1993 edn), p.195. ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), p.265. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 8 October 1967. Purser, ‘Low Grade Nonsense’, Sunday Telegraph, 15 October 1967. The British trade press reported that The Avengers ‘was chosen for its [ABC’s] Januaryto-summer run in preference to the network’s own-financed British series, “Suitcase”, made for them at Pinewood Studios by ITC. This show, while remaining an ABC commitment, will be available to replace some of the network’s anticipated casualties next autumn.’ ‘“Avengers” smash into US market’, Kinematograph Weekly, 19 November 1966, p.16. The incorrect suggestion that the series was financed by the US network prompted a stern reply from Grade: ‘More in anger than in sorrow Lew Grade, managing director of ITC, has asked me to point out that Man in a Suitcase, first entitled McGill in this country, which he is making for the American Broadcasting Corporation [sic], is being financed 100 per cent by ITC and not by the US network.’ Kinematograph Weekly, 26 November 1966, p.18.

6. Return from Shangri-La: The Champions 1. Grey Franklin, ‘The Champions’, Primetime 11 (Summer 1986), pp.22–24. 2. Nancy Banks-Smith, Guardian, 27 November 1969. 3. Roy Ward Baker, The Director’s Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Film and Television (London, 2000), p.123. 4. Quoted in Franklin, p.22. 5. William Schoell, Comic Book Heroes of the Screen (New York, 1991), p.172.

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Saints and Avengers 6. Franklin, p.24. 7. Jeffrey Richards, ‘Things to Come and science fiction in the 1930s’, in I.Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London, 1999), p.31. 8. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London, 1989), p.514. 9. Ibid, p.507. 10. Quoted in Lawrence S. Wittner, ‘The Nuclear Threat Ignored: How and Why the Campaign Against the Bomb Disintegrated in the Late 1960s’, in Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker (eds), 1969: The World Transformed (Cambridge, 1998), p.448. 11. For an account of the brainwashing fears following the Korean War, see Susan L. Carruthers, ‘“Not Just Washed but Dry-Cleaned”: Korea and the “Brainwashing Scare” of the 1950s’, in Gary D. Rawnsley (ed.), Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s (London, 1999), pp.47–66. 12. Sylvia Clayton, ‘Rubbishy Plot With People As Puppets’, Daily Telegraph, 27 November 1969. 13. Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 14 December 1969. A ‘spoonerism’ is the accidental (or in this case deliberate) transposition of the initial sounds of two words. 14. Gerard Garrett, ‘Nemesis – what a super idea!’, Daily Sketch, 27 November 1969. 15. Nancy Banks-Smith, Guardian, 27 November 1969. 16. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 30 November 1969. 17. Peter Black, ‘Sir Lew champions the fairies against the Reds’, Daily Mail, 27 November 1969. 18. James Thomas, ‘Above the rut of telly-corn’, Daily Express, 15 October 1970. 19. Variety, 12 June 1968. 20. Quoted in Franklin, ‘The Champions’, p.24. 21. David Pringle (ed.), The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: The Definitive Illustrated Guide (London, 1996), p.144.

7. The Marie Celeste: Department S 1. If Jason King is regarded as a continuation of Department S, as it is by Cornell, Day and Topping in The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (Enfield, 1996 edn), rather than as a separate series in its own right, then the total of 54 episodes makes the combined series the fourth-longest-running adventure series after The Avengers, The Saint and Danger Man. 2. Press release on BFI microfiche for Department S. 3. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London, 1998), p.71. 4. ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interviewed by John Fleming], StarBurst, 4: 9 (May 1982), p.57. 5. Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 12 January 1969; Sean Day-Lewis, ‘Holiday First for Sleuths’, Daily Telegraph, 18 January 1969. 6. Variety, 22 January 1969. 7. Cornell, Day and Topping, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, p.234. 8. ‘Dennis Spooner’, p.57. 9. Nick Freeman, ‘See Europe with ITC: Stock Footage and the Construction of Geographical Identity’, in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (London, 1999), p.59.

Notes 10. Variety, 22 January 1969. 11. Mary Malone, Daily Mirror, 19 February 1969. 12. In the Doctor Who serial ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974) a scientist attempts to turn back time to a lost ‘golden age’ before pollution and over-population had spoiled the planet, and in ‘Robot’ (1975) another scientist creates a powerful robot which he thinks is being used to further the cause of world peace – a device itself borrowed from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). In the two-part Bionic Woman episode ‘Doomsday is Tomorrow’ (1977) a scientist tries to enforce nuclear disarmament by creating a doomsday machine that will destroy the world the next time a nuclear warhead is detonated by any nation. 13. Variety, 22 January 1969. 14. Mary Malone, Daily Mirror, 14 April 1969; Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times, 12 January 1969. 15. T.C. Worsley, Financial Times, 15 January 1969. 16. Sean Day-Lewis, ‘Holiday First for Sleuths’, Daily Telegraph, 18 January 1969. 17. Stewart Lane, ‘So tired’, Morning Star, 19 February 1969. 18. ‘To Play the King’ [interview by Liam Michael Rudden], Cult TV, 2: 2 (January 1998), p.35.

8. The Ghostly Detectives: Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) 1. Milton Shulman, ‘Not so blithe Spirit’, Evening Standard, 18 February 1970. In contrast, aficionados of the series include Tise Vahimagi, for whom it is ‘[o]ne of my favourite Spooner shows’, and Cornell, Day and Topping who describe it as Spooner and Berman’s ‘masterpiece’. See Vahimagi, ‘TV Zone’, StarBurst, 9: 9 (1987), p.54, and Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (Enfield, 1996), p.344. 2. Michael Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, Time Screen 20 (Spring 1994), p.5. 3. Richard Last, Sun, 22 September 1969. 4. Tise Vahimagi, ‘Randall & Hopkirk face the awful light of day!’, Primetime, 10 (Summer 1985), p.10. 5. ‘When I was writing these early scripts I understood that the part of Jeff Randall was to be played by comedian Dave Allen,’ revealed Tony Williamson. ‘However ATV decided to put him into a different kind of show, and although Mike Pratt gave an excellent performance, it would have been interesting to have seen what Dave Allen would have done with the character.’ Quoted in Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, p.5. 6. Vahimagi, ‘TV Zone’, p.54. 7. Stephen Neale, Genre (London, 1980), p.37. 8. George Melly, Observer, 1 March 1970. 9. Last, Sun, 22 September 1969. 10. L. Marsland Spender, ‘Disappointing start to crime series’, Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1969; Matthew Coady, Daily Mirror, 21 February 1970. 11. Virginia Ironside, Daily Mail, 22 September 1969. 12. Shulman, ‘Not so blithe Spirit’, Evening Standard, 18 February 1970. 13. Paul McCann, ‘Sixties hit set to rise from TV graveyard’, Independent, 22 November 1997, p.11.

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Saints and Avengers 9. The Bohemian Touch: Jason King 1. Michael Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, Time Screen 20 (Spring 1994), p.6. 2. ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interviewed by John Fleming] StarBurst, 4: 9 (May 1982), p.58. 3. ‘To Play the King’ [interview by Liam Michael Rudden], Cult TV, 2: 2 (January 1998), p.35. 4. Ibid. 5. ‘Dennis Spooner’, p.58. 6. Andy Medhurst, ‘Home amusement’, Are we having fun yet? The Sight and Sound Comedy Supplement, New Series 4: 3 (March 1994), p.3. 7. ‘Who is Jason King?’, typed publicity notes on BFI microfiche for Jason King, undated, p.3 8. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London, 1998), p.67. 9. Observer Magazine, 19 December 1993, p.8. 10. ‘Who is Jason King?’, p.4. 11. ‘To Play the King’, p.35. 12. Jacki Stephens, ‘Lovely kaftans, Jason – shame about ze accent’, Today, 3 September 1994, p.9. 13. Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London, 1996), p.22. 14. Quoted in Hunt, pp.67–8. 15. Ibid, p.67. 16. Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1996 edn), p.114. 17. Hunt, p.67. 18. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), p.18. 19. ‘A Deadly Line in Digits’ reworks the plot of the last episode of Adam Adamant Lives!, ‘A Sinister Sort of Service’: both were written by Tony Williamson. 20. The three comic detectives are called Porokov, Kivich and Krosnic; the three functionaries in Ninotchka had been Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski.

10. The Special Relationship: The Persuaders! 1. John Cook, ‘“Men behaving badly?”: Basil Dearden and The Persuaders!’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), p.233. 2. Martin Jackson, ‘Jackie set for some persuasion’, Daily Express, 21 April 1971. 3. Lew Grade, Still Dancing: My Story (London, 1987), p.218. 4. Speaking on the television programme The Persuader: The TV Times of Lord Lew Grade, BBC2, 27 August 1994. 5. ‘ATV sales to US touch the $9 million mark’, Kinematograph Weekly, 12 July 1969, p.5. 6. ‘Major US series to be made here’, Kinematograph Weekly, 26 February 1970, p.19. 7. ‘Pinewood series’, Kinematograph Weekly, 11 April 1970, p.14. Roy Moseley’s biography of Roger Moore mistakenly states that Curtis arrived in London to begin work on the series at the end of April 1969 – a whole year before production commenced. Roger Moore: A Biography (London, 1986 edn), p.170. 8. Moseley, p.164.

Notes 9. See Cook, ‘Men behaving badly’, pp.231–40, for an attempt to read The Persuaders! in general and ‘Overture’ within auteurist terms: ‘Basil Dearden was ideally suited to introduce the audience to such male bonding in the first episode. In earlier films such as The Blue Lamp (1950), The Gentle Gunman (1952) and particularly The League of Gentlemen (1960), Dearden frequently emphasised the satisfactions of male group relationships over marital domesticity.’ The attempt to overlay an auteurist perspective onto the episode is unconvincing in the extreme. 10. Stanley Reynolds, The Times, 29 September 1971. 11. T.C. Worsley, ‘Familiar faces’, Financial Times, 29 September 1971. 12. Cook, p.238. 13. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London, 1998), p.66. 14. The first series of The Avengers had, of course, featured two male protagonists, but the relationship between John Steed and Dr Keel was not really that of ‘buddies’ in that it was posited on an entirely professional basis and did not spill over into their personal lives. In buddy narratives where the protagonists work together they are invariably also each other’s best friend in private life. 15. David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), p.129. 16. Hunt, p.69. 17. Jackson, ‘Jackie set for some persuasion’, Daily Express, 21 April 1971; Variety, 22 September 1971 (‘Bill’). 18. Laura Lee Davies, ‘The going gets toff’, Time Out, 31 August–7 September 1994, p.145. 19. Quoted in Moseley, Roger Moore: A Biography, p.167. 20. One can only imagine what analysts would now make of The Persuaders! had the American role been played, as once mooted, by Rock Hudson, whose homosexuality was later revealed. 21. Variety, 22 September 1971 (‘Bill’). 22. Davies, ‘The going gets toff’, p.145. 23. Cook, ‘Men behaving badly’, p.235. 24. Sylvia Clayton, Daily Telegraph, 18 September 1971. 25. Nick Freeman, ‘See Europe with ITC: Stock Footage and the Construction of Geographical Identity’, in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (London, 1999), p.61. 26. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London, 1987), p.111. 27. Drummond regards crime-fighting as ‘sport in a land overflowing with strikes and profiteers; sport such as his soul loved’. Sapper, Bulldog Drummond (London, 1983 edn), p.122. 28. Quoted in Hunt, British Low Culture, p.66. 29. Cook, p.237. 30. Variety, 22 September 1971 (‘Bill’).

Conclusion 1. Michael Richardson, ‘Tony Williamson’, Time Screen 20 (Spring 1994), p.6.

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Saints and Avengers 2. ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interviewed by John Fleming], StarBurst 4: 9 (May 1982), p.48. 3. Ibid, p.49. 4. While I have been engaged in research for this book, the cable channel Granada Plus has screened colour episodes of The Avengers, The Saint, Man in a Suitcase, Jason King and The Persuaders! At the time of writing The Prisoner is showing on the SciFi Channel. In 2000, Carlton Home Video launched its ‘Cool Spies and Private Eyes’ series which includes Danger Man, The Saint, Man in a Suitcase, Department S, Jason King, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Persuaders! Episodes of The Avengers continue to be released by Canal + in themed ‘collections’: ‘the Avengers Evolution Collection’, ‘the Monochrome Collection’, ‘the Kinky Boots Collection’, ‘the M-Appeal Collection’, ‘the Sci-Fi Collection’, ‘the Parallel Lines Collection’, ‘the Celebrity Guest Collection’, etc.

Bibliography

Bibliography

BBC Written Archives The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham Park, Reading, holds 21 production files for Adam Adamant Lives! containing letters, memoranda, synopses, cast lists, budgets and technical data. These comprise three general files (T5/783/1–3), three files of correspondence with writers (T5/791/1, T5/792/1, T5/803/1) and 15 files relating to individual episodes including the untransmitted pilot (T5/781/1) along with ‘Allah Is Not Always With You’ (T5/788/1), ‘Beauty Is An Ugly Word’ (T5/797/1), ‘Death By Appointment Only’ (T5/796/1), ‘Death Has A Thousand Faces’ (T5/785/1), ‘The Doomsday Plan’ (T5/ 795/1), ‘The Last Sacrifice’ (T5/793/1), ‘The League of Uncharitable Ladies’ (T5/798/1), ‘More Deadly Than the Sword’ (T5/786/1), ‘Sing A Song of Murder’ (T5/794/1), ‘A Sinister Sort of Service’ (T5/801/1), ‘To Set A Deadly Fashion’ (T5/790/1), ‘The Terribly Happy Embalmers’ (T5/789/1), ‘Village of Evil’ (T5/799/1) and ‘A Vintage Year for Scoundrels’ (T5/784/1). There is also one file of press cuttings (T5/802/1).

British Film Institute unpublished scripts The BFI Library holds a range of unpublished scripts for Danger Man, The Avengers and The Saint, though it does not hold an entire run for any of the series. There is also a copy of the rehearsal script for ‘Overture’, the first episode of The Persuaders! (S17509). There are two main types of script: pre-production screenplays (which describe story events and include draft dialogue) and dialogue continuity scripts (which reproduce the actual dialogue of episodes for dubbing purposes). Most of the pre-production screenplays I have consulted differ only in minor detail and dialogue from the finished episodes. An interesting example of the sort of changes sometimes made occurs in the Danger Man episode ‘Colony Three’. In the screenplay for this episode (S12709) the character of Randall, the English communist, says: ‘I was a communist before you were born or thought of. I learned a long time ago that the Party is not afraid to lie when it needs to.’ Perhaps

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Saints and Avengers this was deemed too political, as the line is absent from the dialogue continuity script (S12708) and thus from the final episode.

Newspapers and periodicals The chapter notes indicate which newspapers and periodicals I have used for television reviews. The majority of these are taken from the press clippings on the British Film Institute’s microfiche collection and include the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Guardian, Independent, Morning Star, New Statesman, Observer, Sun, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, Time Out and The Times.

Trade press and television magazines Sources can again be traced through the chapter notes. Broadcast details of the television series discussed in the book are derived from the listings in the Radio Times and TV Times. I have drawn upon the television pages of Kinematograph Weekly for production information and on the Listener for selected reviews. Reviews from the US trade paper Variety are taken from the collected volumes of Variety’s Television Reviews, edited by Harry H. Prouty: Volume 7: 1960–1962, Volume 8: 1963–1965 and Volume 9: 1966–1969 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989). Individual articles on television series and personnel are listed separately.

Selected fiction Buchan, John, The Power House (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984; first published by William Blackwood & Sons, 1916). Charteris, Leslie, Enter the Saint (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1983; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1930). Charteris, Leslie, The First Saint Omnibus (New York: Doubleday, 1932). Charteris, Leslie, The Saint’s Getaway (London: Coronet, 1989; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1932). Charteris, Leslie, The Saint and Mr Teal (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933; 1963 edn). Charteris, Leslie, The Saint in London (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934; 1960 edn). Charteris, Leslie, The Saint in New York (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1935). Charteris, Leslie, The Second Saint Omnibus (New York: Doubleday, 1940). Charteris, Leslie, The Saint Goes West (London: Coronet, 1989; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1942). Fleming, Ian, Moonraker (London: Coronet, 1989; first published by Jonathan Cape, 1955). Fleming, Ian, Goldfinger (London: Coronet, 1989; first published by Jonathan Cape, 1959). Haining, Peter (ed.), The Television Crimebusters Omnibus (London: Orion Books, 1994). Heald, Tim, John Steed – An Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). Macnee, Patrick, and Peter Leslie, Dead Duck (London: Titan Books, 1994; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1965).

Bibliography Macnee, Patrick, and Peter Leslie, Deadline (London: Titan Books, 1994; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1965). Peel, John, and Dave Rogers, Too Many Targets (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993). Sapper [Herman Cyril McNeile], Bulldog Drummond (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1983; first published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1920). Smith, Frederick E., The Persuaders! Book One (London: Pan, 1971). Smith, Frederick E., The Persuaders! Book Two (London: Pan, 1972).

Biographies and autobiographies Baker, Roy Ward, The Director’s Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Film and Television (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2000). Broccoli, Albert R., with Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London: Boxtree, 1998). Bryson, Bill, Notes from a Small Island (London: Black Swan, 1996). Francis, Anne, Julian Wintle: A Memoir (London: Dukeswood, n.d.). Grade, Lew, Still Dancing: My Story (London: Collins, 1987). Macnee, Patrick, with Dave Rogers, The Avengers and Me (London: Titan Books, 1997). Moseley, Roy, with Philip and Martin Masheter, Roger Moore: A Biography (London: New English Library, 1985). Scott, Peter Graham, British Television: An Insider’s History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000).

Books and monographs Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973). Barer, Burl, The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television of Leslie Charteris’ Robin Hood of Modern Crime, Simon Templar, 1928–1992 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993). Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, second edn (London: Studio Vista, 1993; first published 1977). Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987). Booker, Christopher, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Collins, 1969). Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume V: Competition 1955–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Buscombe, Edward (ed.), British Television: A Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Butler, William Vivian, The Durable Desperadoes (London: Macmillan, 1973). Buxton, David, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Caughie, John, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Carrazé, Alain, and Jean-Luc Putheaud, The Avengers Companion (London: Titan Books, 1997). Chapman, James, Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B.Tauris, 1999).

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Saints and Avengers Cornell, Paul, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, second edn (Enfield: Guinness Publishing, 1996). Cornell, Paul, Martin Day and Keith Topping, The Avengers Dossier (London: Virgin, 1998). Corner, John (ed.), Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (London: British Film Institute, 1991). Denning, Michael, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Eco, Umberto, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Falk, Quentin, and Dominic Prince, Last of a Kind: The Sinking of Lew Grade (London: Quartet, 1987). Fink, Carole, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker (eds), 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the German Historical Institute, 1998). Fiske, John, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987). Gregory, Chris, Be Seeing You . . . Decoding the Prisoner (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1997). Hunt, Leon, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London: Routledge, 1998). Jacobs, Jason, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Jewell, Richard B., with Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (London: Octopus Books, 1982). Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana Press, 1989). Lofts, W.O.G., and Derek Adley, The Saint and Leslie Charteris (London: Hutchinson Library Services, 1971). Marwick, Arthur, British Society Since 1945, third edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996; first published 1982). Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c.1959–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Mechele, Tony, and Dick Fiddy, The Saint (London: Boxtree, 1989). Miller, Toby, The Avengers (London: British Film Institute, 1997). Morgan, Kenneth O., The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Neale, Stephen, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980). Ousby, Ian, The Crime and Mystery Book: A Reader’s Companion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997). Palmer, Jerry, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (London: Greenhill, 1997). Pringle, David (ed.), The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: The Definitive Illustrated Guide (London: Carlton, 1996). Rakoff, Ian, Inside the Prisoner: Radical Television and Film in the 1960s (London: B.T. Batsford, 1998). Richards, Jeffrey, Films and British national identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Rogers, Dave, The Complete Avengers: Everything you ever wanted to know about The Avengers and The New Avengers (London: Boxtree, 1989). Rogers, Dave, The Ultimate Avengers (London: Boxtree, 1995). Rose, Brian G. (ed.), TV Genres: A Handbook and Reference Guide (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985).

Bibliography Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). Schoell, William, Comic Book Heroes of the Screen (New York: Citadel Press, 1991). Shaw, Tony, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001). Simpler, Paul, The Saint: From Big Screen to Small Screen and Back Again (London: Chameleon Books, 1997). Terrace, Vincent, Television Character and Story Facts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993). Tibballs, Geoff, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (London: Boxtree, 1994). Truffaut, François, with Helen G. Scott, Truffaut, rev. edn (London: Paladin, 1986). Vahimagi, Tise (ed.), British Television: An Illustrated Guide, second edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Walker, John (ed.), Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide, thirteenth edn (London: HarperCollins, 1998). Watson, Colin, Snobbery With Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience, rev. edn (London: Methuen, 1987). Wheen, Francis, Television (London: Guild Publishing, 1985). White, Matthew, and Jaffer Ali, The Official Prisoner Companion (New York: Warner Books, 1988). Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, rev. edn (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992 ).

Articles and chapters Abbott, Jon, ‘Danger Man’, StarBurst 7: 10 (June 1985), pp.28–31. Andrae, Thomas, ‘Television’s First Feminist: The Avengers and Female Spectatorship’, Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 18: 3 (Spring 1996), pp.112–36. Barr, Charles, ‘“They Think It’s All Over”: The Dramatic Legacy of Live Television’, in John Hill and Martin Muloone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1997), pp.47–75. Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Adam Adamant lives again!’, StarBurst 7: 7 (March 1985), pp.30–33. Carruthers, Susan L., ‘“Not Just Washed but Dry-Cleaned”: Korea and the “Brainwashing” Scare of the 1950s’, in Gary D. Rawnsley (ed.), Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp.47–66. Chapman, James, ‘Celluloid Shockers’, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998), pp.75–97. Chapman, James, ‘The Avengers: Television and Popular Culture During the “High Sixties”’, in Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick (eds), Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000), pp.37–69. Chapman, James, ‘“Excellent stupidity, silly excellence”: Visual style in The Avengers’, Visual Culture in Britain 1: 1 (2000), pp.89–108. Chapman, James, ‘Action, spectacle and the Boy’s Own tradition in British cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, second edn (London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp.227–35. Chibnall, Steve, ‘Avenging the past’, New Society, 28 March 1985, pp.476–7. Cook, John, ‘“Men behaving badly!”: Basil Dearden and The Persuaders!’, in Alan Burton,

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Saints and Avengers Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 1997), pp.231–40. Del Fattore, Joan, ‘Leslie Charteris’, Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 77: British Mystery Writers, 1920–1939 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1989), pp.58–57. ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interview by John Fleming], StarBurst 4: 9 (May 1982), pp.47–50. Dixon, Winston Wheeler, ‘The Man Who Created The Avengers: An Interview with Brian Clemens’, Classic Images 287 (May 1999), pp.C18–22. Eco, Umberto, ‘The Narrative Structure in Fleming’, in Oreste Del Buono and Umberto Eco (eds), The Bond Affair, trans. R.A. Downie (London: Macdonald, 1966), pp.35–75. Fiddy, Dick, ‘In Surrey Green a Plant is Eating People . . .!?’, Primetime 1 (July 1981), p.13. Fleming, John, ‘Dennis Spooner’ [interview], StarBurst 4: 9 (May 1982), pp.47–50. Franklin, Grey, ‘The Champions’, Primetime 11 (Summer 1986), pp.22–24. Freeman, Nick, ‘See Europe with ITC: Stock Footage and the Construction of Geographical Identity’, in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Television (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp.49–65. ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’ [by the editors] in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture, pp.260–66. Kerr, Paul, ‘Making The Saint’, Primetime 12 (Spring/Summer 1987), pp.2–3. Killick, Jane, ‘Still Avenging’, StarBurst Special 40 (Summer 1999), pp.71–75. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, M.K., ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play, 1962– 66: institutional containment versus “agitational contemporaneity”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17: 3 (August 1997), pp.367–81. Nolan, Jack Edmund, ‘Films on TV’ [article on Brian Clemens], Films In Review, 25: 8 (October 1974), pp.489–93. Orwell, George, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920–1940 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp.460–84 [the article originally appeared in Horizon in 1939]. Richards, Jeffrey, ‘The Third Man’, in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Good Guys & Bad Guys (London: Orbis/Susan Reynolds Books, 1982), pp.20–1. Richards, Jeffrey, ‘Things to Come and science fiction in the 1930s’, in I.Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.16–32. Richardson, Michael, ‘The Stick Man’, Primetime 12 (1987), pp.4–7. Richardson, Michael, ‘Tony Williamson’, Time Screen 20 (Spring 1994), pp.4–8. Russell, Lee [Peter Wollen], ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, New Left Review 35 (January–February 1966), pp.89–92. Sawyer, Helen, ‘The Prisoner’, StarBurst 9: 10 (April 1987), pp.43–45. Stern, Matthew Morgen, ‘The Marshall Chronicles’, Primetime 13 (Winter 1987/88), pp.2–7. ‘To Play the King’ [interview with Peter Wyngarde], Cult TV 2: 2 (January 1998), pp.32–5. Vahimagi, Tise, ‘TV Zone’ [on Danger Man], StarBurst 4: 3 (1981), p.55. Vahimagi, Tise, ‘Randall and Hopkirk face the awful light of day!’, Primetime 10 (Summer 1985), pp.10–11. Vahimagi, Tise, ‘TV Zone’ [on Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)], StarBurst 9: 9 (May 1987), pp.54–5. Wollen, Peter, ‘Hitchcock’s Vision’, Cinema (UK) 3 (June 1969), pp.2–4. Wyver, John, ‘Danger Man: Thirty Minute Hero’, Primetime 9 (Winter 1984/85), pp.2–5.

Bibliography

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold type denote an illustration. A for Andromeda (tv series), 135 A Team, The (tv series), 246 Adam Adamant Lives! (tv series), 1, 2, 13, 15, 134–55, 141, 156, 157, 232, 245; production of, 139–40, 145, 153–4; reception of, 141–2, 145–6, 152, 153–4; visual style of, 140; [Episodes]: ‘Beauty Is An Ugly Word’, 148, 149–51; ‘Black Echo’, 153; ‘Death By Appointment Only’, 147; ‘Death Has A Thousand Faces’, 140, 146; ‘The Doomsday Plan’, 146; ‘The Last Sacrifice’, 151–2; ‘The League of Uncharitable Ladies’, 140, 146; ‘The Resurrectionists’, 153; ‘Sing A Song of Murder’, 148; ‘A Sinister Sort of Service’, 153; ‘A Slight Case of Reincarnation’, 152–3; ‘The Sweet Smell of Disaster’, 146; ‘The Terribly Happy Embalmers’, 147; ‘To Set A Deadly Fashion’, 149; ‘Tunnel of Death’, 153 Adam, Kenneth, 135, 138 Adley, Derek, 105 adventure series, 13, 19–20, 26, 51, 242, 244, 245, 246 Adventurer, The (tv series), 2, 171, 243 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (tv series), 7, 20, 157, 169 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (tv series), 3 Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The (tv series), 7 Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The (tv series), 7 Aherne, Brian, 108

Ainsworth, John, 109 Alaskans, The (tv series), 110 Aldridge, Michael, 190 Alfie (film), 148 Alien films, 63 Allen, Dave, 202–3 Allingham, Margery, 62 Alwyn, Jonathan, 66 Ambler, Eric, 21, 22, 23 American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 10, 52, 75, 156, 159, 170, 226–7 American Magazine, 104 Amis, Kingsley, 62 Ampex (video recording machine), 6, 8 Amyes, Julian, 18 And Soon the Darkness (film), 79 Anderson, Gerry, 157, 243 André, Annette, 112, 202, 236 Andrews, Dana, 159 Angel (tv series), 211 Angels of Doom (novel; aka She Was A Lady), 106 Annis, Francesca, 33, 112 Arlen, Michael, 107 Armchair Theatre, 2, 57, 58, 135, 165 Armstrong, Moira, 140 Arnold, David, 210 Associated British Corporation (ABC), 10, 52, 57, 74, 88, 93 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), 18 Associated-Rediffusion, 7–8 Associated Television (ATV), 7, 20, 111, 157, 158, 190, 227 Association of Cinema and Television Technicians, 169

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Saints and Avengers Astley, Edwin, 116, 200, 213 Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery (film), 155 Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me (film), 155 Austin, Ray, 190, 200 Avengers, The (tv series), 1, 2, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 22, 34, 42, 46, 51, 52–99, 60, 64, 65, 69, 76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 88, 91, 100, 111, 112, 118, 120, 124, 125, 129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 145–6, 147, 152, 154, 156, 157, 172, 173, 178, 182, 183, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 208, 210, 212, 214, 228, 230, 232, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243; Englishness of, 52, 77; and fashion, 63, 65, 75–6, 86–7; and genre, 53–7, 59, 62, 67, 73–4, 84–6, 92; ‘kinkiness’ of, 63; production of, 57–8, 74–5, 87–8; reception of, 58–9, 74, 86, 93; representation of class, 62, 87; representation of femininity, 63–6, 75– 7, 87; representation of maculinity, 62, 77; visual style of, 66–7, 75, 86–7; [Episodes]: ‘The Big Thinker’, 67; ‘Brief for Murder’, 70; ‘Bizarre’, 89, 147; ‘Bullseye’, 67; ‘Castle De’ath’, 79; ‘The Charmers’, 67–8, 69, 254; ‘The Correct Way To Kill’, 254; ‘The Cybernauts’, 83, 84; ‘Death at Bargain Prices’, 81–3; ‘Death Dispatch’, 67; ‘Death of a Batman’, 71; ‘Don’t Look Behind You’, 73–4, 254; ‘Epic’, 254; ‘False Witness’, 98; ‘Fog’, 91, 91–2; ‘The Frighteners’, 59–61; ‘Game’, 92; ‘The Grandeur That Was Rome’, 70, 256; ‘The Gravediggers’, 81; ‘The Hidden Tiger’, 85; ‘The House That Jack Built’, 83–4, 98, 254; ‘Intercrime’, 67; ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, 89; ‘The Joker’, 254; ‘Legacy of Death’, 90; ‘The Living Dead’, 79, 94; ‘Lobster Quadrille’, 254; ‘Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers . . .’, 89–90; ‘Love All’, 89; ‘Man-Eater of Surrey Green’, 85; ‘Mandrake’, 68–70; ‘The Mauritius Penny’, 70; ‘Mr Teddy Bear’, 67, 98; ‘Mission . . . Highly Improbable’, 85; ‘The Murder Market’, 79, 147; ‘Murdersville’, 79, 80; ‘My Wildest Dream’, 89; ‘Never, Never Say Die’, 85; ‘November Five’, 67; ‘The Nutshell’, 72–3; ‘Pandora’, 254; ‘Propellant 23’, 67; ‘Quick-Quick Slow Death’, 79; ‘Return of the Cybernauts’, 85, 85–6; ‘Room Without A View’, 79; ‘A Sense of History’, 80– 81; ‘Split!’, 90; ‘Stay Tuned’, 98; ‘A Surfeit of H2O’, 98; ‘The Thirteenth Hole’, 79; ‘A Touch of Brimstone’, 80–

81, 82, 254, 256; ‘The Town of No Return’, 78, 79, 94; ‘Traitor in Zebra’, 67; ‘Who’s Who?’, 87, 99; ‘Wish You Were Here’, 90; ‘You’ll Catch Your Death’, 89 see also: The New Avengers Avengers, The (film), 97–9, 132, 209 Bacall, Lauren, 163 Bain, Bill, 66 Baker, Robert S., 108, 109, 126, 128, 130, 228 Baker, Roy Ward, 75, 109, 172, 174, 190, 200, 228 Baker, Tom, 210 Bandit, The (novel), 101 Banks-Smith, Nancy, 186 Barer, Burl, 105 Baron, The (tv series), 2, 7, 10, 11, 109, 159, 172, 190, 192, 203 Barrier, Edgar, 108 Barry, Gene, 243 Barry, John, 233 Bastedo, Alexandra, 112, 114, 172–3, 176 Bates, John, 75, 149 Batistá, (General) Fulgencio, 28 Batman (tv series), 142, 186 Batman (film), 132 Batman and Robin (film), 132 Batman Forever (film), 132 Batman Returns (film), 132 Battle Beneath the Earth (film), 124 Bauer, David, 220 Bay of Pigs invasion, 28 Beatles, The, 9, 32, 127 Beeching Report, 81 Behind Spanish Lines (documentary film), 169 Bennett, Alan, 4 Bennett, Constance, 200 Bennett, Tony, 24, 237–8 Berman, Monty, 108, 109, 171, 172, 189– 90, 198, 199, 212–3, 243 Bernard, Peter, 66 Best, George, 218 Bewitched (tv series), 202 Big Sleep, The (film), 59, 163 Billion Dollar Brain (novel), 22 Billion Dollar Brain (film), 22, 178 Billy Liar (film), 18 Bionic Woman, The (tv series), 188, 195, 261 Birds, The (film), 85 Bishop, Terry, 18 Black Shield of Falworth, The (film), 226 Black, Ian Stuart, 18 Black, Peter, 1, 14, 186–7 Blackman, Honor, 62–6, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 87 Blair, Isla, 112 Blake’s 7 (tv series), 135 Blake, George, 12, 22, 121

Bibliography Index Bleasedale, Alan, 4 Blithe Spirit (film), 201 Blondell, Joan, 200 Blue Lamp, The (film), 250 Blyth, Harry, 136 Bodyguards (tv series), 245 Bogart, Humphrey, 59, 163 Bonanza (tv series), 6, 14 ‘Bond’ films, 1, 9, 12, 15, 21, 31, 33–4, 46, 70, 111, 128, 132, 133, 226 ‘Bond’ novels, 23–4, 29, 54–6 Bond, Julian, 109 ‘bondage art’, 81 Bonnie and Clyde (film), 129 Booker, Christopher, 62–3 Borehamwood Studios, 18, 49 Bourke-White, Margaret, 65 Bowie, David, 218 Boys from Brazil, The (film), 244 Boys from the Blackstuff (tv series), 4 Bradford, Richard, 157 Brady Bunch Movie, The (film), 99 brainwashing, 185–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 6, 8, 15, 19, 62, 85, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 154, 173, 190, 211 Broadbent, Jim, 98 Broadley, Philip, 31, 172, 190 Broccoli, Albert R. (‘Cubby’), 24 Brown-Wilkinson, Angela, 140 Brummel, Beau, 61 Bryson, Bill, 217 Buccaneers, The (tv series), 7 Buchan, John, 21, 23, 237 ‘buddy’ narrative, 232—5 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (tv series), 211, 246 Bugs (tv series), 172, 245 Burgess, Guy, 12, 22 Burke’s Law (tv series), 159 Burnham, Jeremy, 200 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 176 Bushell, Anthony, 18, 20 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (film), 232 Butler, William Vivian, 103–4 Buxton, David, 13–14, 16, 17, 22, 34, 35, 53, 160, 232 C.A.T.S Eyes (tv series), 245 CI5: The New Professionals (tv series), 245 Callan (tv series) 22 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 10, 57 Cambridge spy ring, 68 ‘camp’, 212, 213–14, 234–5 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 72 Capra, Frank, 177 Cardin, Pierre, 86–7, 239 Carlson, Richard, 108 Carr, John Dickson, 190

Carroll, Leo G., 173, 202 Carroll, Madeleine, 76 Carry On Spying (film), 72–3 Carstairs, John Paddy, 106, 109 Casino Royale (novel), 23 Cassandra Crossing, The (film), 244 Castle, William, 205 Castro, Fidel, 28, 179 Cat and the Canary, The (film), 201, 205 Cathy Come Home (tv play), 3, 154 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 28, 179 Chaffey, Don, 31, 49, 75 Champions, The, 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 26, 39, 127, 171–88, 176, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199, 203, 208, 230, 232, 245; and genre, 172–5; production of, 171–2; reception of, 171, 186–8; [Episodes]: ‘Autokill’, 185–6; ‘The Beginning’, 175–8, 176; ‘The Experiment’, 183–4; ‘Get Me Out of Here’, 179; ‘The Ghost Plane’, 179–80; ‘Operation Deep-Freeze’, 181; ‘Project Zero’, 182–3; ‘Shadow of the Panther’, 184–5; ‘The Silent Enemy’, 181–2 Chandler, Raymond, 158, 163 Charlie’s Angels (tv series), 245 Charlie’s Angels (film), 63 Charmed (tv series), 211 Charteris, Leslie, 101–8, 109, 129, 131, 132 Chayevsky, Paddy, 89 Chechick, Jeremiah, 97 Cheyenne (tv series), 6 Chiappessoni, Paul, 140 Chibnall, Steve, 53, 80, 148 Childers, Erskine, 21 Christie, Agatha, 115, 133 Christie, Julie, 112 Cilento, Diane, 236 Clair, René, 201 Clancy, Tom, 132 Clayton, Sylvia, 112, 186, 236 Clear and Present Danger (film), 131 Clemens, Brian, 4, 18–19, 52, 57, 58, 63, 73–4, 75, 79, 83, 85, 88, 94, 97, 139, 147, 172, 228, 229, 230, 245, 255 Cleese, John, 90 Clooney, George, 132 Cold Lazarus (tv series), 4 Cold War, 21, 26, 27, 37–9, 67–8, 95–6, 120–24, 172, 185, 221–2 Cole, Sidney, 20, 30, 156–7, 169 Collins, Joan, 236, 238 Collins, Lewis, 255 Colonel March of Scotland Yard (tv series), 6, 190 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 10, 17, 31, 32, 56 Colman, Ronald, 62, 177 Condon, Richard, 185 Confessions of a Nazi Spy (film), 106 Connery, Sean, 46, 97, 115 Conte, Richard, 20

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Saints and Avengers Conway, Tom, 108 Cook, John, 231, 236, 241–2 Cope, Kenneth, 201, 202, 209 Coppola, Francis Ford, 128 ‘cop’ series; see police series Cops, The (tv series), 3 Coronation Street (tv series), 157 Corsican Brothers, The (tv play), 140 Count of Monte Cristo, The (tv series), 7 Counterstrike (tv series), 135 Courtenay, Tom, 114 Cover Stories (book), 21 Cover Up (tv series), 158 Coward, Noël, 201–2 Creasey, John, 101, 109, 159 Crichton, Charles, 31, 75, 157 Crossplot (film), 111, 128, 226 Cuban Missiles Crisis, 28 Cummings, Constance, 201 Currie, Finlay, 128, 177 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 226 Curtis, Tony, 127, 225, 226, 227, 231, 233, 235, 238, 241 Curzon, George, 136 Cushing, Peter, 85, 85–6, 256 Cuthbertson, Allan, 121 Dad’s Army (tv series), 246 Dailey, Dan, 20, Daily Express, 24, 93, 187, 232 Daily Mail, 74, 93, 186–7, 207 Daily Mirror, 207 Daily Sketch, 186 Daily Telegraph, 112, 116, 207 Dallas (tv series), 246 Damon, Stuart, 127, 172, 176, 228 Danger Man, 2, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16–51, 26, 33, 47, 52, 56, 62, 100, 109, 118, 120, 139, 152, 156, 161, 167, 171, 178, 186, 218, 222, 230, 232, 239, 245; and fashion, 34; and genre, 19–24; production of, 16–19, 30–32; reception of, 16, 17; representation of class, 40– 46; representation of femininity, 32–3; representation of masculinity, 24–5; representation of nationhood, 40–45; visual style of, 18; [Episodes]: ‘The Affair at Castelevara’, 34, 39;‘An Affair of State’, 28; ‘The Battle of the Cameras’, 40, 46; ‘The Black Book’, 37; ‘The Blue Veil’, 28–9; ‘Colonel Rodriguez’, 27–8; ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’, 35–6; ‘Colony Three’, 43–6; ‘Deadline’, 26; ‘Fair Exchange’, 37–8; ‘The Galloping Major’, 36; ‘The Hunting Party’, 40; ‘It’s Up to the Lady’, 37; ‘Josetta’, 28; ‘The Key’, 26, 27; ‘Koroshi’, 48; ‘The Mercenaries’, 34; ‘The Mirror’s New’, 37; ‘No Marks for Servility’, 41–2; ‘Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet’, 38; ‘Position of Trust’, 29; ‘The Profes-

sionals’, 37; ‘Shinda Shima’, 48; ‘The Sisters’, 27; ‘Sting in the Tail’, 46; ‘Such Men Are Dangerous’, 42–3; ‘Time To Kill’, 29–30; ‘The Ubiquitous Mr Ludgrove’, 40; ‘Vacation’, 18; ‘View from the Villa’, 26, 49, 250; ‘Yesterday’s Enemies’, 36 Dangerfield (tv series), 58 Dankworth, Johnny, 59 Danziger brothers, 6, 18 Darbon, Leslie, 190 Daredevil (novel), 101 Darling (film), 18, 148 Dark Angel (tv series), 211 Davies, Laura, 234, 235 Davies, Rupert, 20 Day, Robert, 31, 75 Day-Lewis, Sean, 197 De Gaulle, Charles, 35 de Marney, Terrence, 107 De Sica, Vittorio, 20 Dead Calm (film), 131 Deadly Affair, The (film), 22 Dean, Ivor, 117, 203 Dearden, Basil, 169, 228, 229 decolonisation, 35–6, 167–8 Defiant Ones, The (film), 226 Deighton, Len, 21, 22, 38, 73, 161, 221 Dell, Jeffrey, 107 Demon Seed (film), 84 Deneuve, Catherine, 173 Denning, Michael, 21, 35, 160 Department of Queer Complaints, The (book), 190 Department S, 1, 2, 11, 13, 22, 171, 172, 199, 212, 213, 217, 220, 221, 230, 232; and genre, 190–95; production of, 189– 90; reception of, 196–7; [Episodes]: ‘Black Out’, 195; ‘A Cellar Full of Silence’, 193; ‘Handicap – Dead’, 193; ‘Last Train to Redbridge’, 193; ‘The Man From X’, 193; ‘The Man in the Elegant Room’, 193; ‘One of Our Aircraft Is Empty’, 194; ‘The Pied Piper of Hambledown’, 194–5; ‘Six Days’, 193–4; ‘The Trojan Tanker’, 196 Diamonds Are Forever (film), 183 Dick Turpin (tv series), 169 Dick, R.A., 201 Dickinson, Thorold, 169 Dicks, Terrance, 140 Dickson, Paul, 190 Die Hard films, 133 Dignam, Mark, 120 Dirty Dozen, The (film), 129 Dixon of Dock Green (tv series), 58, 250 Dr No (novel), 92 Dr No (film), 1, 31, 60, 195 Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow (film), 30 Doctor Finlay’s Casebook (tv series), 135 Doctor Who (tv series), 2, 8, 84, 88, 135–6, 139, 140, 142, 157, 195, 210, 261

Bibliography Index Donaldson, Marie, 75 Donat, Robert, 62 Donner, Clive, 18 Donovan’s Brain (novel), 90 Doomwatch (tv series), 135, 191 Dors, Diana, 108 Douglas, Angela, 112 Dowling, Peter, 66 Doyle, (Sir) Arthur Conan, 143 Dragnet (tv series), 6 Drake, (Sir) Francis, 25 Driver, Harry, 139 Ducrow, Peter, 152 Dudley, Philip, 140 Duffel, Peter, 157 Durable Desperadoes, The (book), 103–4 Durbridge, Francis, 212 Duvalier, ‘Papa Doc’, 38 Dynasty (tv series), 246 ER (tv series), 246 Ealing comedies, 77, 81 Ealing Studios, 20, 156, 169 Eaton, Shirley, 112, 113, 115 Echo Murders, The (film), 136 Eco, Umberto, 5, 56, 92 Eden, Barbara, 202 Eggar, Samantha, 112 Eichmann, Adolf, 117 Eisinger, Jo, 18 Elstree Studios, 11, 18, 74, 100, 109, 111, 171, 189, 212 Emergency Ward 10 (tv series), 58 Empire News, 101 Englishman Abroad, An (tv drama), 4 Epitaph for a Spy (novel), 23 Equity (actors’ union), 61 Evans, Joan, 140 Evening Standard, 4, Everyman Films, 49 FBI, The (tv series), 6, 13 Fabian of the Yard (tv series), 6 Fabiani, Joel, 191, 192, 197 Farmer, Suzan, 112 Farr, Derek, 115 Farrar, David, 136 Farrow, John, 106 Fashion House Group of London, 34, 63, 239 Fast Show, The (tv series), 209 Feely, Terence, 139 feminism, 63, 65, 235–6 Fennell, Albert, 75, 79, 88, 94, 97, 255 Fenton, Frank, 106 Fenton, Leslie, 107 Fiddy, Dick, 106 Fiennes, Ralph, 97 film noir, 66, 86 filmed tv series, 6, 7, 9 Finch, Peter, 177 Finney, Albert, 114

Fleetway Publications, 136, 138 Fleming, Arthur, 19 Fleming, Gordon, 109 Fleming, Ian, 5, 21, 23, 54, 67, 133, 185 Flesh and the Fiends, The (film), 109 Flipside of Dominick Hyde, The (tv play), 135 For Your Eyes Only (short stories), 24 Forbin Project, The (film), 84 Ford, Harrison, 132, 160 Foreign Correspondent (film), 54 Forman, Denis, 8 Forrest, Steve, 109, 159 Forsyte Saga, The (tv series), 154 Four Just Men, The (film), 21, 107 Four Just Men, The (tv series), 2, 19, 20, 23, 157, 228, 230 Four Weddings And A Funeral (film), 209 Fox, Emilia, 210 Francis, Freddie, 109, 157 Frankel, Cyril, 172, 190, 200, 243 Frankenheimer, John, 185 Frankenstein (novel), 126 Frankfurt School, 5, 248 Freeman, Nick, 237 Frend, Charles, 18, 157 Freund, Karl, 255 Friedman, Seymour, 108 Friends (tv series), 246 From Russia, With Love (novel), 24 From Russia With Love (film) 31, 34, 121, 244 Fuest, Robert, 79, 88–89 Fugitive, The (tv series), 159–60 Fugitive, The (film), 97, 160 Funeral in Berlin (novel), 22, 34, 221 Funeral in Berlin (film), 22 Gaunt, William, 173, 176 GBH (tv series), 4 Gemini Man, The (tv series), 188 George, Susan, 236 Get Smart (tv series), 32 Getaway ( novel; aka The Saint’s Getaway), 107 Ghost and Mrs Muir, The (film), 201 Ghost Breakers, The (film), 201 Ghost Squad (tv series), 2, 190 Gibson, Mel, 133, 233 Gideon’s Way (tv series), 109 Gifford, Alan, 118 Gilda (film), 18 Gilling, John, 109, 172, 190 Glen, John, 157, 162 Glover, Danny, 233 Godfather, The (film), 128, 129 Gold (film), 226, 228 GoldenEye (film), 132 Goldfinger (novel), 130, 250 Goldfinger (film), 26, 31, 34, 75, 130 Gone With the Wind (film), 87 Goodman, Johnny, 228

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Saints and Avengers Gosling, (Superintendent) John, 190 Gower, Michael, 74 Grade, Lew (Sir Lew Grade; Lord Grade), 7, 9–10, 16, 20, 51, 93, 100, 109, 110, 126, 170, 186–7, 199, 212, 213, 220–21, 225, 226–7, 242, 243, 244 Graeme, Bruce, 101 Granada Television, 8, 190 Grant, Cary, 196, 200 Great Depression, 103 Greenberg, Stanley R., 157, 169 Greene, Graham, 21, 22, 259 Greene, Richard, 7 Greenstreet, Sidney, 255 Gregory, Chris, 5 Gregson, John, 109 Grey, Berkeley, 101 Grierson, John, 57 Gruner, Tony, 17 Guardian, 16, 33, 66 Guest, Val, 228 Guinness, Alec, 241 Gunsmoke (tv series), 6, 14 Gwillim, Jack, 120 Haggard, (Sir) Henry Rider, 176 Hagman, Larry, 202 Hale, Jonathan, 106 Hammer Film Productions, 108 Hammer horror films, 86, 108 Hammett, Dashiell, 158, 203, 255 Hammond, Kay, 201 Hammond, Peter, 66 Hanley, Jenny, 236 Harmer, Juliet, 141, 141–2 Harmsworth Press, 136 Harper, Gerald, 140–1, 141, 142 Harris, Richard, 139, 157, 169 Harrison, Rex, 201 Hart to Hart (tv series), 159 Hassall, Imogen, 236 Hatch, Tony, 235 Have Gun, Will Travel (tv series), 6 Hawaii Five-O (tv series), 193 Hawaiian Eye (tv series), 6 Hawkins, Jack, 20 Hawks, Howard, 163 Haydon, Percy Montague, 103 Hayers, Sidney, 75, 228, 255 Hayward, Louis, 105, 108 Hazel (tv series), 245 Healy, David, 207 Helicopter Spies, The (film), 127 Hellfire Club, The (film), 109 Hempel, Anouska, 236 Hendry, Ian, 58, 60, 61, 62, 95,128, 240 Here Comes Mr Jordan (film), 201 Hickson, Joan, 133 High Treason, 21 Highsmith, Patricia, 140 Higson, Charlie, 209 Hill, James, 75, 228

Hilton, James, 176–7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 29, 54–5, 76, 85, 106, 146, 196 Hively, Jack, 106 Hoch, Paul, 218 Hoddinott, Derek, 154 Holmes, Ben, 106 Holt, Seth, 18 Hope, Anthony, 142 Hope, Bob, 201 Hope, Francis, 74 Horner, Penelope, 112, 236 Hornung, E.W., 102 Household, Geoffrey, 30 How to Save the World (film), 127 Howard, Leslie, 62 Hudis, Norman, 31 ‘human nature series’, 13–14, 34, 160 Hungarian Uprising, 26 Hunt, Gareth, 94 Hunt, Leon, 191, 217–18, 231, 233, 237 Hunt, Peter, 228 Hunter, Ross, 177 Hussein, King of Jordan, 36 Huston, John, 255 I Believe in You (film), 18 I Dream of Jeannie (tv series), 202 I Married A Witch (film), 201 I Spy (tv series), 22, 32 IDTV Productions, 94 Independent, 133 Independent Artists, 74 Independent Television Corporation (ITC), 7, 9–10, 16, 18, 26, 39, 100, 140, 170, 189, 198, 199, 225, 228, 242, 243 Inspector Morse (tv series), 246 International Detective (tv series), 19, 20 Interpol Calling (tv series), 2, 18, 19, 20 Invaders, The (tv series), 13 Invisible Man, The (tv series – 1950s), 18 Invisible Man, The (tv series – 1970s), 188 Ipcress File, The (novel), 22 Ipcress File, The (film), 22, 180 Ironside, Virginia, 93, 113–14, 141, 207–8 Island of Dr Moreau, The (novel), 126 Ivanhoe (tv series), 7, 110 Ivanov, Yevgeny, 37 Jack the Ripper (film), 109 Jackson, Gordon, 255 Jackson, Martin, 233 Jackson, Pat, 109, 157 Jagger, Mick, 218 James, Donald, 109, 172, 190, 194, 199, 206–7, 228 ‘James Bond’ films; see Bond films ‘James Bond’ novels; see Bond novels ‘James Bond’ (Daily Express strip cartoon), 24 Jango (tv series), 2 Janssen, David, 159

Bibliography Index Jason King, 1, 2, 13, 171, 189, 196, 198, 212–24, 215, 234, 244, 245; and ‘camp’, 213–14; and fashion, 214–15; and genre, 212; production of, 212–13; reception of, 213; representation of masculinity, 217–18; [Episodes]: ‘All That Glisters . . .’, 219; ‘An Author In Search of Two Characters’, 222; ‘Chapter One: The Company I Keep’, 222; ‘A Deadly Line in Digits’, 221; ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’, 222; ‘From Rusia . . . With Panache’, 221–2; ‘A Kiss for a Beautiful Killer’, 222–3; ‘Nadine’, 223; ‘A Page Before Dying’, 221; ‘The Stones of Venice’, 222; ‘That Isn’t Me, It’s Somebody Else’, 219, 222; ‘A Thin Band of Air’, 214; ‘Wanna Buy A Television Series?’, 220–21 Jean Varon (fashion house), 75 Jenkins, Roger, 140 Jesus of Nazareth (tv mini-series), 244 Jewel in the Crown, The (tv series), 246 Jewell, Jimmy, 89 Johnson, Donald, 31 Johnson, Laurie, 75, 213, 255 Jonathan Creek (tv series), 205, 245 Jones, Tommy Lee, 160 Journey into Fear (novel), 22 Jovial Ghosts, The (novel), 200 Joyce, Yootha, 121 Junkin, Harry W., 109, 190 Karaoke (tv series), 4 Karate Killers, The (film), 127 Kaufman, Charles, 105 Keaton, Michael, 132 Keeler, Christine, 37 Kelly, Grace, 65 Kelsey, Gerald, 190, 194 Kendall, Suzy, 236 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 71, 152 Kilmer, Val, 131, 132, 133 Kind Hearts and Coronets (film), 241 Kind of Loving, A (film), 18 Kinematograph Weekly, 7, 17, 49 ‘Kinky Boots’ (pop single), 63, 253 Kitchen, The (film), 169 Knight Rider (tv series), 230 Knight Templar (novel), 102 Knight, Peter, 50 Knock, The (tv series), 245 Knock On Any Door (tv drama), 157 Korvin, Charles, 19 Kray brothers, 163 Kruse, John, 109, 129, 228 Kwouk, Burt, 112, 123, 178 Lady Vanishes, The (film), 54, 55, 76 Lambert, Verity, 139, 140, 154, 245 Lane, Stewart, 197 Last, Richard, 50, 200, 207

le Carré, John (pseudonym of David Cornwell), 21, 22, 23, 38, 95, 121, 122, 161, 162 Leacock, Philip, 31 Leaver, Don, 66 Lee, Christopher, 123 Leigh, Janet, 226 Lenya, Lotte, 121 Leon, Valerie, 236 Lethal Weapon films, 133, 233 Levene, Philip, 4, 84–6, 87 Levison, Ken, 139, 145 Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The (tv series), 6 Life for Ruth (film), 30 Likely Lads, The (tv series), 232 Linden, Jennie, 236 Lipstick On Your Collar (tv series), 4 Live and Let Die (film), 226 Lloyd, Suzanne, 112 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (film), 209 Lockwood, Margaret, 76 Lofts, W.O.G., 105 London Weekend Television (LWT), 131 Lord, Justine, 130 Lorre, Peter, 255 Lost Horizon (novel), 176–7 Lost Horizon (film), 177 Lost in Space (film), 97 Lubitsch, Ernst, 222 Lugosi, Bela, 106 Lumley, Joanna, 94 Lynch, David, 51 McCallum, David, 72 McGoohan, Patrick, 16, 17, 24–5, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 46–8, 47, 49, 51, 56, 109– 10 McLeod, Gordon, 106 McNeile, Herman Cyril (‘Sapper’), 21, 237 Macdonald, Ross, 158 Maclean, Donald, 12, 22 Macmillan, Harold, 35 Macnee, Patrick, 55–6, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 76, 85, 86, 93, 94, 98 MacPherson, Don, 97 Mad Love (film), 255 Maigret (tv series), 19–20 Majors, Lee, 188 Malone, Mary, 194, 197 Maltese Falcon, The (novel), 203, 204 Maltese Falcon, The (film), 90, 255 Man from Atlantis, The (tv series), 188 Man from Interpol, The (tv series), 6 Man from U.N.C.L.E., The (tv series), 14, 22, 32, 34, 72, 127, 129, 134, 144–5, 153, 172, 173 Man Hunt (film), 106 Man in a Suitcase, 2, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 157–70, 172 , 199, 203, 219, 230, 232; and genre, 158–60; production of, 156–

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Saints and Avengers 7; reception of, 157, 169–70; visual style of, 162; [Episodes]: ‘All That Glitters’, 164–5; ‘The Boston Square’, 161; ‘Brainwash’, 168; ‘The Bridge’, 165–6; ‘Burden of Proof’, 162; ‘Essay in Evil’, 162; ‘Man From the Dead’, 160– 61; ‘Night Flight to Andorra’, 163; ‘No Friend of Mine’, 168; ‘Property of a Gentleman’, 167; ‘The Sitting Pigeon’, 162; ‘Somebody Loses, Somebody . . . Wins?’, 161–2; ‘Sweet Sue’, 163–4; ‘Variation on a Million Bucks’, 166; ‘Web With Four Spiders’, 164; ‘Why They Killed Nolan’, 160 Man in Room 17, The (tv series), 2, 190 Man of the World (tv series), 2, 158 Man Who Haunted Himself, The (film), 226, 228 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (film), 54, 55 Man With the Golden Gun, The (novel), 185 Manchurian Candidate, The (film), 185 Mannix (tv series), 242 Mao Tse-tung, 124 Markstein, George, 30, 49 Marie Celeste, 193 Marshall, David, 66 Marshall, Roger, 4, 69 Martin, Quinn, 159 Marty (tv play), 89 Marwick, Arthur, 9, 46, 71, 148, 149, 219 Mask of Janus, The (tv series), 2, 139 Mather, Berkeley, 60 Matt Houston (tv series), 159 Maugham, W. Somerset, 21, 23, 29 Maverick (tv series), 6, 110 May, Jack, 142 Mayne, Ferdy, 255 Mead, Margaret, 65 Mechele, Tony, 106 Medhurst, Andy, 214 Meet Sexton Blake (film), 136 Meet the Tiger (novel; aka The Saint Meets the Tiger), 101, 103 Melly, George, 14, 206 Men Behaving Badly (tv series), 232 Meredith, Hal (pseudonym of Harry Blyth), 136 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 18 Miami Vice (tv series), 232 Mills, Kim, 66 Mills, John, 218 Milton Keynes, 46 Mission: Impossible (tv series), 22, 32, 56, 242 Mission: Impossible (film), 97, 98, 99, 253 Mod Squad, The (tv series), 193 Modesty Blaise (film, novel, comic strip), 14 Monitor (tv programme), 2

Monte Carlo or Bust (film), 226 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 202 Monty Python’s Flying Circus (tv series), 90 Moonlighting (tv series), 196, 221 Moonraker (novel), 67 Moonraker (film), 70, 151 Moore, Roger, 14, 39, 100, 108, 109–10, 110, 112–15, 113, 114, 126, 129, 130, 131, 213, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 233, 235, 238, 241 Morning Star, 197 Morse, Barry, 160, 243 Mortimer, Bob, 209, 211 Morton, Anthony (pseudonym of John Creasey), 101 Mosley, Oswald, 43, 70 Most Dangerous Game, The (film), 125 Moxey, John Llewelyn, 172 Muir, Douglas, 59 Muir, Jean, 149 Muppet Movie, The (film), 244 Murton, Lionel, 23, 161 My Partner the Ghost; see Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Myers, Mike, 155 Mystery of the Wax Museum (film), 95 Naismith, Laurence, 229 Naked City, The, 6 Naked Gun films, 214 Nation, Terry, 4, 79, 88, 90, 109, 228 National Front, 43 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 10, 31, 100, 130, 171, 187 National Film Board of Canada, 57 National Telefilm Associates, 19 Neale, Stephen, 204 Neophiliacs, The (book), 62–3 New Avengers, The, 61, 94–7, 99, 131, 172, 245; [Episodes]: ‘Dead Men Are Dangerous’, 96; ‘Eagle’s Nest’, 94; ‘House of Cards’, 95; ‘K is For Kill’, 96; ‘The Last of the Cybernauts . . .??’, 95; ‘To Trap A Rat’, 95; see also: The Avengers New Statesman, 74 New York Confidential, 59 Newell, Patrick, 88, 88 Newman, Kim, 98–9 Newman, Nanette, 112 Newman, Sydney, 57, 58, 61, 135–9, 141, 145, 146, 151, 155 Nicholls, Anthony, 173 Nicols, Rosemary, 191, 192, 197 Night and the City (film), 18 Night of the Eagle, The (film), 75 Nineteen Eighty-Four (tv play), 136 Ninotchka (film), 123, 222 Niven, David, 62 Nolan, Jack Edmund, 73

Bibliography Index Norman, Leslie, 75, 109, 190, 200, 228 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 23, 24, 25, 35 North by Northwest (film), 54, 196 Notes from a Small Island (book), 217 Notorious (film), 54 Noyce, Phillip, 131–2 O’Mara, Kate, 112, 114, 236 Odd Man, The (tv series), 2 Offner, Mortimer, 105 Ogilvy, Ian, 131 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (film), 87, 178, 228 One of Our Spies is Missing (film), 127 One Spy Too Many (film), 127 Orczy, Baroness, 102, 142 Orwell, George, 112 Osborn, Andrew, 135, 140 Packard, Vance, 185 Pagett, Nicola, 236 Palmer, Jerry, 102 Panorama (tv programme), 2 Paramount Pictures, 131–2 Parker, Cecil, 107 Paul Temple (tv series), 2 Pennies from Heaven (tv series), 4 Pennington-Richards, C.M., 18 ‘permissive society’, 219, 231, 239, 241 Persuaders!, The, 1, 2, 13, 20, 42, 126–7, 213, 218, 225–42, 231, 243, 244, 245; and ‘camp’, 234–5; and genre, 230; production of, 226–8; reception of, 231–2, 242; representation of class, 233, 237–42; representation of femininity, 235–6; representation of masculinity, 231–5; visual style of, 236–7; [Episodes]: ‘Angie . . . Angie’, 234; ‘Anyone Can Play’, 230; ‘Chain of Events’, 239; ‘A Death in the Family’, 241; ‘Element of Risk’, 230; ‘Five Miles to Midnight’, 230, 238; ‘The Gold Napoleon’, 230; ‘A Home of One’s Own’, 237; ‘The Long Goodbye’, 240; ‘The Man in the Middle’, 230; ‘The Morning After’, 234; ‘The Old, the New and the Deadly’, 240–41; ‘Overture’, 229–30, 235; ‘The Ozerov Inheritance’, 230; ‘Powerswitch’, 230; ‘Read and Destroy’, 230; ‘Take Seven’, 230; ‘That’s Me Over There’, 240; ‘The Time and the Place’, 240; ‘To the Death, Baby’, 230 Pertwee, Michael, 109 Peters, Dennis Alaba, 192–3 Peters, Pauline, 145 Philby, Harold ‘Kim’, 12, 22, 67 Pinewood Studios, 132, 157, 228 Pither, Wensley, 117 Pitt, Ingrid, 223

Planemakers, The (tv series), 2, 139 Poirot (tv series), 3, police series, 2, 6, 19, 58, 244, 246 Police Squad (tv series), 214 Police Surgeon (tv series), 57–8 PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 209 Pop Art, 86 ‘pop series’, 13–14, 17, 34–5, 53 Porter, Nyree Dawn, 112, 243 Portmeirion, 49 postmodernism, 53 Potter, Dennis, 4 Powell, Vince, 139 Power House, The (novel), 252 Pratt, Mike, 201, 202–3, 209 Prelude for War (novel), 104 Price, Dennis, 219, 241 Price, Vincent, 108 Pride and Prejudice (tv series), 3, 246, 246 Priestley, J.B., 169 Prince Who Was A Thief, The (film), 226 Prisoner, The (tv series), 2, 14, 16, 45, 48, 49–51, 90 private-eye series, 6, 59, 202–3, 246 Probation Officer (tv series), 66 Professionals, The (tv series), 94, 224, 245, 255 Profumo, John, 37, 67 Protectors, The (tv series), 2, 243–4 Public Eye (tv series), 2 Purser, Philip, 14, 86, 157, 170, 186 Q Planes (film), 18, 61 Quant, Mary, 149 Quare Fellow, The (film), 30 Quatermass and the Pit (tv series), 135 Quatermass Experiment, The (tv series), 85, 135 Quatermass II (tv series), 135 Rabinowitch, Eugene, 181 Radio Eireann, 107 Radio Times, 140, 154 Raise the Titanic! (film), 244 Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (tv series), 1, 2, 4, 13, 171, 189, 191, 199– 211, 201, 232, 245; and genre, 200–3; production of, 199–200; reception of, 4–5, 207–9; [Episodes]: ‘All Work and No Pay’, 206; ‘Could You Recognise That Man Again?’, 207; ‘For the Girl Who Has Everything’, 205–6; ‘The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo’, 206; ‘The House on Haunted Hill’, 205–6; ‘It’s Supposed To Be Thicker Than Water’, 207; ‘Just for the Record’, 205; ‘The Man From Nowhere’, 206; ‘Money To Burn’, 207; ‘Murder Ain’t What It Used To Be’, 207; ‘My Late Lamented Friend and Partner’, 203–5; ‘Never Trust A

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Saints and Avengers Ghost’, 206; ‘A Sentimental Journey’, 207; ‘That’s How Murder Snowballs’, 205; ‘When Did You Start To Stop Seeing Things?’, 206; ‘Whoever Heard of a Ghost Dying?’, 206; ‘Vendetta for a Dead Man’, 207 Randall & Hopkirk Deceased (tv series), 209–11 Rat, The (film), 101 Rawhide (tv series), 6 Raynor, Henry, 86 Rebecca (film), 106 Reece, Paul, 133 Reed, Carol, 19 Reeves, Vic, 209, 211 Rennie, Michael, 19 Return of the Saint (tv series), 130–31, 245; see also: The Saint Reynolds, Stanley, 33, 47–8, 48–9, 66, 230 Richards, Jeffrey, 11 Richardson, Maurice, 142 Richardson, Michael, 243 Richardson, Ralph, 61 Rifleman, The (tv series), 6 Rigg, Diana, 74, 75–6, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 93, 94 Rivers, Johnny, 32 RKO Radio Pictures, 105–7, 108 Roach, Hal, 200 Roc, Patricia, 115 Rogue Male (novel), 30 Rohmer, Sax, 123 Rollason, Jon, 62 Root, Lynn, 106 Roswell (tv series), 211 Roszak, Theodore, 83, 254–5 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (tv series), 93 Rutherford, Margaret, 133 Sabotage (film), 54 Saboteur (film), 54 Saint, The (tv series), 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 31, 42, 46, 52, 56, 66, 100–133, 110, 113, 114, 154, 156, 158, 162, 169, 171, 172, 179, 190, 192, 203, 219, 222, 226, 227, 228, 230, 232, 236, 244, 245; and genre, 116–17, 125; production of, 100, 109; reception of, 100, 111, 112, 116; representation of femininity, 112; representation of masculinity, 114–15; representation of nationhood, 112; visual style of, 111– 12; [Episodes]: ‘The Arrow of God’, 118; ‘The Bunco Artists’, 117; ‘The Careful Terrorist’, 118–19; ‘The Charitable Countess’, 117; ‘The Death Game’, 125; ‘The Element of Doubt’, 117; ‘Escape Route’, 120; ‘The ExKing of Diamonds’, 117, 126–7, 228; ‘The Fiction Makers’, 127, 129–30;

‘The Gadget Lovers’, 122–3; ‘The House on Dragon’s Rock’, 125–6; ‘King of the Beggars’, 117; ‘The Latin Touch’, 119–20; ‘Locate and Destroy’, 117–18; ‘The Man Who Liked Lions’, 124–5; ‘The Master Plan’, 123; ‘The Organisation Man’ 120; ‘Paper Chase’, 122; ‘The People Importers’, 117; ‘The Persistent Patriots’, 117–18; ‘Portrait of Brenda’, 127; ‘The Reluctant Revolutionary’, 117; ‘The Russian Prisoner’, 120–21; ‘The Talented Husband’, 109, 113,115; ‘The Unkind Philanthropists’, 117; ‘Vendetta for the Saint’, 127, 128–9; ‘When Spring Is Sprung’, 121–2; ‘The Wonderful War’, 117 see also: Return of the Saint Saint, The (film), 97, 131–3, 209 Saint Errant (novel), 104 Saint Goes West, The (novel), 106 Saint in London, The (film), 106, 109 Saint in Miami, The (novel), 104 Saint in New York, The (novel), 104, 119 Saint in New York, The (film), 105, Saint in Palm Springs, The (film), 106 Saint Meets the Tiger, The (film), 107 Saint Magazine, The, 101 Saint Strikes Back, The (film), 106 Saint Takes Over, The (film), 106–7 Saint’s Double Trouble, The (film), 106 Saint’s Girl Friday, The (film; aka The Saint’s Return), 108 Saint’s Return, The (film; aka The Saint’s Girl Friday), 108 Saint’s Vacation, The (film), 107 Sanders, George, 106–7 ‘Sapper’ (H.C. McNeile), 21, 23, 102 Sapphire Films, 7, 20 Sargant, William, 185 Sargent, Dick, 202 Sayers, Dorothy L., 62 Schell, Catherine, 236 Schlesinger, John, 18 science-fiction series, 14, 246 Scoton Productions, 189, 243 Scott, Gordon L.T., 88 Scott, Peter Graham, 18, 49 Scott, Ridley, 140 Second World War, 9 Secret Agent (film), 21, 29, 54 Secret Agent (tv series); see Danger Man Secret People (film), 21 Segall, Harry, 201 Sentimental Agent, The (tv series), 2, 158 Serbedzija, Rade, 132 Sergeant Cork (tv series), 173 77 Sunset Strip (tv series), 6 Sewell, George, 206 Sexton Blake (tv series), 2, 139 Sexton Blake and the Bearded Doctor (film), 136

Bibliography Index Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (film), 136 Sexton Blake and the Mademoiselle (film), 136 Sexton Blake Library, 136 Shampan, Jack, 49 Sharp, Ann, 218 Sharp, Don, 75, 172 Shaw, Fiona, 98 Shaw, Martin, 255 She Was A Lady (novel; aka Angels of Doom), 106 Shepherd, Elizabeth, 75 Shepperton Studios, 30 Sherlock Holmes (tv series), 135 Shoestring (tv series), 224 Shooting Stars (tv series), 209 Shout at the Devil (film), 226, 228 Shue, Elizabeth, 132 Shulman, Milton, 4–5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 76–77, 152, 208–9 Silent Witness (tv series), 58 Simenon, Georges, 20 Simpsons, The (tv series), 246 Sims, Sylvia, 129 Singer, Campbell, 117 Singing Detective, The (tv series), 4 Siodmark, Curt, 90 Sir Francis Drake (tv series), 7 Sistrom, Ben, 105 Six Million Dollar Man, The (tv series), 188 Smart, Ralph, 18, 30, 172 Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, The (tv series), 209 Smith, Ian, 118 Smith, Madeline, 219, 236 Smith, Sydney, 69 Smith, Thorne, 200 Some Like It Hot (film), 226, 241 Son of Ali Baba (film), 226 Spanish ABC (documentary film), 169 Spanish Civil War, 39, 45, 167 Spearman, Frank H., 108 Spillane, Mickey, 200 Spooner, Dennis, 4, 11, 89, 157, 169, 171, 172, 174–5, 188, 189–90, 191–2, 198, 199, 200, 212–13, 216, 220–21, 243, 244, 245 Spies, The (tv series), 139 spy thriller (literature), 21–3 Spy-Catcher (tv series), 2 Spy in the Green Hat, The (film), 127 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (novel), 22, 38, 122, 162 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (film), 22, 122 Spy Who Loved Me, The (novel), 252 Spy Who Loved Me, The (film), 39, 70, 122 Spy With My Face, The (film), 127 Stafford, Brendan J., 49 Stanton, John, 109 Star Trek (tv series), 13, 246

Starke, Frederick, 63 Starsky and Hutch (tv series), 232 State Secret (film), 21 Stein, Paul L., 107 Stensgaard, Yutte, 236 Stepping Out (musical), 157 Stevens, Craig, 158 Stevens, Julie, 62 Stewart, Robert Banks, 139 Stribling, Melissa, 236 Stingray (tv series), 157 Stone, David, 31 structuralism, 5, 56–7 Suchet, David, 133 Suez Crisis, 35 Sugarfoot (tv series), 6 Sullivan, Barry, 108 Summers, Jeremy, 109, 200 Sun, 200 Sunday Times, 31, 145 superhero adventure, 173–5 supernatural fantasy, 200–2 Surfside 6 (tv series), 6 Survey of Viewing and Listening (BBC), 145, 153–4 Survivors, The (tv series), 135 Sweeney, The (tv series), 224, 244, 245 Sweet Smell of Success, The (film), 226 ‘Swinging London’, 127, 148, 149, 154, 165, 206, 219 Sword of Freedom (tv series), 7 Tales of Wells Fargo (tv series), 6 Target (tv series), 245 Taylor, Gill, 190 technocracy, 83, 254–5 Teddington studios, 74 ‘telefantasy’, 13, 125, 135, 171 That Was The Week That Was (tv series), 2 Thaw, John, 244 They Came To A City (film), 169 Thief Takers (tv series), 245 Third Man, The (film), 19, 160, 162 Third Man, The (tv series), 2,19, 23, 250 Third World, 26, 38–9, 181–2 This Sporting Life (film), 74 39 Steps, The (film), 21, 54, 55, 76 Thomas Crown Affair, The (film), 235 Thomas, Howard, 10, 52, 74 Thomas, James, 93, 141, 187 Thorson, Linda, 87–8, 88, 91, 93, 191 Thriller, The, 101, 102, 103 Thunderball (film), 32 Thunderbirds (tv series), 157 Thurman, Uma, 97 Tiger Bay (film), 74 Till Death Us Do Part (tv series), 2 Time, 142, 148 Times, The, 86, 144–5 To Trap A Spy (film), 127 Todd, Richard, 218 Top Secret (tv series) 2

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Saints and Avengers Topkapi (film), 253 Topper (film), 200 Topper (tv series), 202 Topper Returns (film), 201–2 Topper Takes A Trip (film), 200 Towers, Harry Alan, 108, 123 Trainspotting (film), 209 Trent, Jacky, 235 Tribune Productions, 228 Triumph of the Rat (film),101 Tronson, Robert, 109, 157, 200 Truman, Michael, 18 TV Times, 48 Twin Peaks (tv series) 51, 196 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 84 United Artists, 31 United Nations, 172, 178 Untouchables, The (tv series), 6, 13 Vahimagi, Tise, 200, 203 Variety, 17, 31, 47, 58–9, 74, 75, 93, 111, 116, 130, 157, 187–8, 192, 197, 233, 242 Vaughn, Robert, 72, 234 Vernon, Richard, 190 Vice, The (tv series), 6 Victorians, The (book), 139 videotape, 6, 7–8, 59, 140 Virgin of the Secret Service (tv series) 2 Virginian, The (tv series), 6 Wagon Train (tv series), 6 Walford, R.G., 136, 147 Wallace, Edgar, 20, 21, 73, 102, 130 Wanted – Dead or Alive (tv series), 6 Warren, Kenneth J., 129 Waterman, Dennis, 244 Watson, Colin, 111, 129 Wattis, Richard, 23 Weaver, Sigourney, 63 Wednesday Play, The, 2, 135, 165 Weinstein, Hannah, 20 Weintraub, Jerry, 97

Wells, H.G., 135 Wesker, Arthur, 169 western series, 6, 13, 246 Westerner, The (tv series), 6 White, Leonard, 55, 58 White Rider (novel), 101 Whitehouse, Paul, 209 Whittaker, Michael, 63 Whittingham, Jack, 18 Wiggin, Maurice, 31, 34, 50, 77, 141, 145– 6, 169–70, 186, 197 Wild Bunch, The (film), 129 Wild Geese, The (film), 226 Wilder, Billy, 226 Williams-Ellis, Clough, 49 Williamson, Tony, 4, 90, 139–40, 147, 154, 172, 190, 194, 199–200, 206–7, 213, 228 Willie, John, 81 Willis, Bruce, 133 Wilson, Harold, 71, 77 Wintle, Julian, 74–5, 88, 147 Wolf Man, The (film), 205 Wollen, Peter, 54, 55 Woodward, Edward, 117 Woollacott, Janet, 24, 237–8 Working Title Productions, 209 Worsley, T.C., 197, 231 Wyndham, John, 135 Wyngarde, Peter, 81, 192, 197–8, 212, 213, 215, 215–17, 256 X Files, The (tv series), 98, 191, 246 Xena: Warrior Princess (tv series), 246 Yates, Peter, 31, 109 York, Dick, 202 You Only Live Twice (novel), 48 You Only Live Twice (film), 26, 48 Young, Roland, 200 Z Cars (tv series), 2, 3, 62, 66 Zero One (tv series), 2