The Persuaders! at Fifty
Surely the most fondly remembered of television’s ‘playboy’ adventure series, ITC’s The Persuaders! reaches its half century this week. It may be fifty years ago, but I can clearly remember the sense of excitement and anticipation that preceded the arrival on our screens of Lord Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde. In the week or so prior to the series coming on air, ITV ran an action-packed trailer, cut together from key episodes; a montage of punch-ups and car chases, peppered by comments from Judge Fulton (Laurence Naismith), the man who, in that first episode, brought together ‘nitro’ and ‘glycerine’ and then lit the fuse... The trailer was enough to convince myself and my brother to be in front of the television set on the evening of Friday 17 September, when it all kicked off.
1971 was, for me, the second year in
which I’d been aware of a certain amount of ballyhoo emanating from
our two UK television stations with the onset of autumn: new
programmes and new schedules to usher in the long, dark evenings. I
remember returning from the newsagents’ with the latest copy of
TVTimes, which had The Persuaders! featured on the front
cover. If it was on the cover of the TVTimes, it had to be good!
Needless to say, The Persuaders! did not disappoint. The first episode delivered everything the trail had promised, and no 10-year-old TV-infatuated kid could fail to be impressed at the outrageous antics of Messrs. Sinclair and Wilde as they fist-fought their way through expensive hotels on the Riviera. This seemed to me like the kind of lifestyle one might aspire to as a grown up: fast cars, a funky wardrobe, dolly birds a-plenty. If that sounds like an unrealistic fantasy, it’s worth pointing out that, aside from the, ahem, dolly birds, the crime fighting and the Riviera lifestyle, one of our uncles conformed almost exactly to the Wilde/Sinclair model: rich, flash-car owning (Jensen Interceptor), and kitted out in all the requisite groovy clobber (a fair amount of which passed into our hands when he cleared out his wardrobe later in the decade). If your uncle could look like and (almost) live the life of one of those TV playboys, then why on earth shouldn’t I, a few years from now? My brother and I took several small steps towards achieving the look when our mum bought us each a flowery cravate, and I also owned a maroon blazer with gold buttons that was totally Brett Sinclair.
We had for some time played games of TV spies at home, the downside of which was that one of us had to play the sidekick while the other got to play the hero. The Persuaders! with its dual leads, was a much better format for us: my brother had curly hair and was a bit more feisty in temperament than myself, so he was perfect casting as Danny Wilde. I, on the other hand, had straight, mid-brown hair with a slight wave, and, of course, the requisite wardrobe, so I fitted perfectly into the Brett Sinclair role, while the back garden became our French Riviera. What these games consisted of, apart from running around with toy guns, I can no longer recollect, but in due course it was whittled down to the simple suggestion of ‘let’s have a Persuader-fight’, which was the cue for throwing fake punches, missing by miles and accompanied by vocalised ‘bish’ sound effects.
One Persuaders! game we were denied was the use of toy cars. Whilst Dinky toys already offered a red Ferrari that bore a passing resemblance to Danny Wilde’s mode of transport, there was nothing on hand we could use as Brett’s golden Aston Martin. I still feel the lack of the Persuaders! gift set I’d been expecting for Christmas 1971 from Corgi or Dinky, and am certain it would have shifted more units than Corgi’s disappointingly gadget-free ‘Diamonds are Forever’ Ford Mustang of the same year.
We had better luck on the comics front. My brother had been getting Countdown comic since its launch earlier in the year, and now the comic underwent a minor face-lift, drafting in The Persuaders! as its cover stars at issue no. 35 with a cover date of October 16 – less than a month after the series had gone on air. Promising as this might have looked, the series’ popularity as a merchandising money-spinner proved to be short-lived. By April of 1972, Countdown was revamped yet again, relaunching as TV Action. The Persuaders! was still on board, but had been annexed from the cover by a certain bouffant-haired timelord. An annual appeared in time for the Christmas market in autumn 1972, while Pan issued a number of paperback novelisations of selected scripts; but the most lucrative Persuaders! spin-off was arguably the 7” single of John Barry’s theme, which made it to a very respectable No. 13 in the UK top 20. With its modish blend of cymbalom and synthesiser, ‘Theme from The Persuaders!’ was almost a reimagining of Barry’s Ipcress File main title, outfitted for the groovy new decade. As a piece of music, it was clearly never intended as anything other than a 30-second long TV theme, and extended to single length, there was nowhere else for Barry’s haunting melody to go. But that didn’t stop people from going out and buying it in the thousands.
The series itself, whilst promising glossy action at the outset, soon got bogged down in a number of dreary-looking tales filmed in the English countryside in the middle of winter, although the change of scenery didn’t trouble my ten-year-old self unduly: if anything, it brought the series closer in spirit to our games in the back garden.
I remember a palpable sense of disappointment when The Persuaders! reached its last episode in the spring of 1972. Friday evenings would never be quite the same again, and with Roger Moore elevated to Bond-in-waiting, a second series was never going to happen. The era of the TV playboy adventurers was drawing to a close. Instead of the hoped-for second series of The Persuaders!, autumn 1972 brought us the lacklustre double act of The Adventurer and The Protectors filling the same Friday evening slot. I hated them both from the first night. ITC seemed to be sending out a message to viewers: ‘we can keep on churning out this stuff indefinitely, but look how bad it’s going to be.’ Gene Barry and Robert Vaughn may have been international stars, but they both looked ready to take the money and run, where Curtis+Moore had clearly been enjoying themselves immensely.
The Persuaders! is remembered as the high water mark of the whole playboy adventurer genre, for all that it was, if anything, a swansong. Despite being aimed squarely at the American market, the series enjoyed its greatest success across Europe, where the appetite for glossy, implausible action/adventure series showed no signs of abating, and several episodes did good business at the box office when edited together into feature films. Feature production was, of course, the Holy Grail for Lew Grade’s ITC, which was gearing up for an ultimately ill-fated move into the Hollywood blockbuster arena.
By the summer of 1973, Roger Moore was James Bond and Tony Curtis was between roles. The back garden was back to being the back garden, and on television, The Persuaders! enjoyed a brief run of midweek repeats before ending its UK broadcast days as late-night and afternoon filler. As for my ambitions to become an international playboy myself, I suspect that ship has sailed. I did, however, add my own small contribution to Persuaders! history by designing the packaging for the DVD and blu-ray releases of the series; and, at an event to celebrate the series' fortieth anniversary in 2011, I found myself opening a bottle of champagne at the request of Lord Brett Sinclair himself. Maybe my destiny was not to be Roger Moore after all, but Ivor Dean...*
(* Who played Lord Sinclair's butler)