Did exactly what it said on the masthead

 

TV Comic: a personal reminiscence

It was a forward-looking publication, the first British comic to feature content derived from TV programmes, and it went on to become one of the longest lasting of such endeavours, enduring all the way to 1984. It came from the Daily Mirror group, and it did exactly what it said on the masthead. Its name was TV Comic.

My first sighting of it was at Christmas 1965, in the form of that year’s annual (above), bought for my brother. It was quite a bit too old for him, being aimed, I would guess, at readers in the 8-10 age range (my brother was just two and a half). The purchase was probably a mistake: the previous year, he’d been given TV Land Annual, a publication intended for much younger readers. TV Comic had also, originally, been targeted at the very young, featuring Muffin the Mule as its cover star when it debuted in November 1951.

By the time I set eyes on TV Comic, its contents had been revamped to appeal to a slightly older age group. It certainly didn’t appeal to me, as it included three of my least favourite TV shows: Dr. Who, Space Patrol and The Telegoons. I was scared of all of them in their TV incarnations, but in comic strip form they were a bit easier to take. Dr. Who is interesting, because we avoided watching the series in our house: I found the music, and the Daleks much too frightening. So what little knowledge I had of the show came principally from that annual; and Dr. Who was very different in its TV Comic incarnation. There were no Daleks – not yet, at any rate – and the Doctor’s travelling companions were two children, John and Gillian, who referred to him as their ‘grandfather’. This tinkering with the format was the result of licensing deals with the BBC which allowed for the use of the name Dr. Who, the likeness of William Hartnell, and the Tardis, but did not extend to his on-screen companions or any of the monsters, all of whom required separate licensing agreements with their creators.

TV Comic Annual was, therefore, a book that I approached with a certain amount of trepidation. Its endpapers featured two colour photographs of the cast of Space Patrol, which I avoided looking at, as the puppets were so creepy. The strip stories, on the other hand, I could just about tolerate. The same applied to The Telegoons. On TV, the puppet characters – based on the radio originals – were simply too grotesque. Bill Titcombe’s illustrations toned down their appearance somewhat.

This trio were not the only stories originating on TV. There was also a comic strip derived from The Dickie Henderson Show, a variety/comedy format of which I was only dimly aware – and a humour strip based on British animation studio Halas and Batchelor’s Foo Foo series. These had certainly been shown on TV, but by the mid 60s had been off the air for nearly five years. There was also a Popeye comic strip, another character whose appearance I found off-putting. If a comic editor had set out to create a publication designed specifically not to appeal to me, then he couldn’t have done a better job than TV Comic circa 1965!

Had we been bought the previous year’s annual, things might have looked a little different, for two Gerry Anderson series were strongly featured in colour comic strips. Supercar and Fireball XL5 had been mainstays of TV Comic for several years, but in 1965 were lost to the new kid on the block that was TV Century 21. Thus it was that, some two years after its screen debut, Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol joined the line-up. It was nicely drawn by Bill Mevin, who intriguingly gave Galasphere crew members Slim and Husky blue and green skins respectively, whereas the photos showed them with normal flesh tones.*

Alongside all this TV originated content, TV Comic had its own cast of characters, who would prove to be remarkably enduring: Mighty Moth was a simple tale of the titular insect’s war with a character known only as ‘Dad’, while TV Terrors were a gang of kids who constantly tried to sneak into the local TV studio, whose uniformed commissionaire Hoppit would send them on their way with a kick up the arse. Different times…

There was one contributor to this annual whose work puzzled me, then as now. Neville Main had been TV Comic’s cover artist back in 1951, with a naive line and wash style that was ideally suited to the juvenile content of the publication’s early years. By 1962, however, he was drawing Fireball XL5, in a style which, whilst faithful to the cartoonish appearance of the characters, was seriously at odds with the more dramatic work being produced elsewhere. In the 1966 annual, his contributions amounted to two Dr. Who strips, and a few pages of jokes, two of which I didn’t understand then or now. He was also allowed to sign his work, which few comic artists did at the time. When I say ‘sign’, what he actually did was to write out his name in his distinctive wobbly capitals...

What's the gag here? Neville Main's oblique, nay inexplicable humour from a page in the 1966 TV Comic Annual.

As a child, I was very aware of the work of artists in comics. There were those whose work I liked – Eric Eden in the Fireball XL5 Annuals, Ron Embleton in TV Century 21 – and those whose drawings I found either creepy or unappealing or both. Neville Main certainly belonged in the latter category. Much later, I saw some of his ‘Muffin’ covers, and his work on Gerry Anderson’s Four Feather Falls, and there’s no denying that, given the right subject matter, he was perfectly cast, as it were. But in his hands, Dr. Who looked naive and silly.

The 1966 annual was my only encounter with TV Comic for a good few years. I didn’t actually get to read the comic itself until 1969, by which time its cover now featured a strip cartoon of Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, drawn by Bill Titcombe (who for some reason liked drawing secondary outlines around his characters). Dr. Who was still present, in colour across the centrespread and now in the (slightly) more conventional hands of John Canning. I was still avoiding the show itself, but was vaguely aware of the changes that had occurred in the format, which were reflected in the strip. Another new arrival from television was The Avengers, a series I’d been introduced to on Saturday evenings around 1967. Space Patrol was, by this time, long gone.

I’m not sure how often I was bought TV Comic in this era: my recollection is of its being a one-off purchase. Our mum sometimes bought us a different comic when our regular title was unavailable for whatever reason. It wasn’t until 1971 that I began to receive TV Comic on a regular basis, and by this time it had settled into a format that placed more emphasis on humour. Tom and Jerry were now the cover stars, and over the next few years the comic would find room for The Pink Panther, The Inspector, Droopy and even Dad’s Army. Dr. Who had been drafted into sibling publication Countdown earlier in the year, but The Avengers was, surprisingly, still running. This format would see TV Comic through the next couple of years with only minor changes. In the summer of 1973, it absorbed Polystyle’s ailing TV Action, but my interest in comics was on the wane, and I stopped reading it around this time.

Following the 1966 annual (published 1965), there was a gap of a few years before I got to see another example. This would have been around 1970. There was a visual quirk with the TV Comic Annuals in that their covers tended to favour yellow backgrounds. On the 1966 edition, the yellowy sky lends a threatening, thundery appearance to the illustration of a helicopter packed with the comic’s cartoon stars, but the examples from the 70s had a brighter, more saturated look. The contents were still the same mix of full colour and duotone illustration.

The idea of a comic based on television was certainly innovative in its day, but it had its drawbacks in that once a particular series had vanished from the screen, it would also need to be replaced on paper. Revamping contents is one way in which comics editors sought to keep their young readers’ interest levels up, but it meant that a title like TV Comic couldn’t settle into the kind of decades-long formatting beloved of other publishers like D.C. Thomson. Anyone reading in 1960 wouldn’t have recognised the comic in its 1965 incarnation, and it was different again by the end of the decade. Only the old troupers Mighty Moth and TV Terrors along with the perennial Popeye kept up any kind of continuity with the past.

On account of its Dr. Who associations, the mid 60s run of TV Comic can now command high prices on ebay, Some, it must be said, are outrageously over priced. In 1967, the publication finally gained a licence to use The Daleks, and the issues around their return are considered especially desirable. Compared to other British comics of the same era, TV Comic offered above average production values (being printed on magazine quality paper as opposed to the pulps favoured by D.C. Thomson and others), and the artwork was always of a high standard, especially those strips featuring animated characters. It rode the wave of interest in television admirably, but once the medium ceased to be such a novelty, it fell into decline. When I last had sight of a copy in the early 80s, it was a shadow of its former self.

As a footnote, in the early 2000s I laughingly thought of myself as a comics illustrator, and drew strips for a number of publications. One week, flipping through the latest edition in search of my contribution, I noticed some illustrations in a familiar style, and instantly recognised the hand of Bill Titcombe, illustrating the adventures of some boy band or other, and still using his 'secondary outlines' technique. He'd come a long way from The Telegoons, I reflected. I just wasn't sure in what direction...

I didn't get it then and I still don't: what's happening here? Is it meant to be a dog driving? It looks more like a rabbit.
Why is that sign on the boot? Another 'classic' from Neville Main.

* Although no colour stills exist from Space Patrol's second series of thirteen episodes, close inspection of the monochrome tones does suggest that the puppets had been repainted in the colours used by Bill Mevin, and their uniforms upgraded from monochrome to red.

A Tale of Two Saints

'The Man in the Beige Suit': Ian Ogilvy's Simon Templar

For the past few years, I have been slowly working my way through Roger Moore’s tenure as Simon Templar – all 118 episodes. It’s not the greatest TV series ever made, but it’s consistently entertaining. And whatever one thinks of Roger Moore as an actor (lazy reviewers always refer to the eyebrows), he was perfectly cast. I never quite bought into the idea of him as James Bond, but Simon Templar is the role he was born to play.

By way of complete contrast, and by accident rather than intent, I found myself this week watching an episode of the short lived 1978 revival Return of the Saint. This was a series whose arrival in September 1978 I welcomed. Nobody seemed to be making those old school adventure series any more, and the earlier ITC titles had ended their afterlife in repeat broadcasts. I stuck with Return... through twenty-four episodes, but I was never quite convinced. My friends at school were less equivocal, denouncing it as rubbish when it came up for discussion in the playground. With hindsight, I have to concede they were probably right. Watching a random episode in the middle of my Roger Moore repeat run really brought home the differences between the two eras of Simon Templar. Roger Moore’s Saint was fun, bantering, a believable and fully realised character, eyebrows and all. He had the same sparring relationship with Scotland Yard’s dogged Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal that had provided so many comic moments in the books, and despite the contemporary setting, he was still recognisable for Leslie Charteris’ iconic creation. But what can we say of Simon Templar circa 1978?

Ian Ogilvy is a fine actor. His comic turn in the pilot episode of Ripping Yarns was splendid. So why couldn’t be have brought some of that ‘school bully’ brilliance to Return of the Saint? Where Roger Moore constantly lit up the screen, Ogilvy’s Saint never really catches fire. The Simon Templar of 1978 has a personality as beige as his wardrobe. Indeed, beige seems to have infused the whole production. Even the colour has a hint of oatmeal about it. Was it the lighting? Were they using different negative stock? Whatever had happened, I’ve noticed it in other productions of this era. They look somehow flat. The ‘classic colour’ ITC productions have a sharpness, clarity and brilliance that’s entirely lacking from Return of the Saint. But there’s more to this than just picture quality.

On paper, Return of the Saint had plenty going for it: Ian Ogilvy beneath the halo and original Saint executive producer Robert S Baker running the show – to say nothing of the imprimatur of ITC. And where the Roger Moore episodes had seldom ventured more than a few miles from the production base in search of, ahem, exotic locations, Return... actually decamped to Europe. Italian state TV network RAI's co-funding of the series must have been a factor here. But for all this, I’d still take all 118 Roger Moore episodes in preference to one outing with Ian Ogilvy. What went wrong? Well, the scripts for a kickoff. The episode I chanced to see, The Arrangement, shamelessly pinched its plot from Strangers on a Train. It had a somewhat darker tone than others in the series, with references to heroin, and a scene set in Soho that sees Simon Templar visiting the Marquee club – the real venue, not a studio set (punk band The Saints are on stage: how tediously obvious!) Then there’s the acting. Carloyn Seymour takes care of scenery-chewing, turning in a raving bonkers performance as the bored wife who sets up the ‘arrangement’ to swap murders with a reluctant friend. Michael Medwin blots his copybook with a turn as a drunken husband that ticks every box in the Michael Caine manual of ‘how not to act drunk’. It’s painful to watch.

Then there’s the Saint himself. I really can’t imagine what the producers were thinking here: the Simon Templar of the Saint books was variously described as a ‘buccaneer’ or a ‘modern day Robin Hood’ who operated at the periphery of law and order and often beyond. For the original TV series, his act had to be cleaned up somewhat, and Templar was never seen to commit a crime other than as a means to catch the villain of the week. Even so, Inspector Teal and his many counterparts always treated him with caution, and were aware of his reputation. This was a neat way of keeping the character true to his origins without depicting him as an out and out lawbreaker. 

Ian Ogilvy’s Saint, by complete contrast, is squeaky clean. He owns a mews house in London, and jaunts around the world seemingly doing nothing save for becoming embroiled in mysteries. There’s no sense of his being roguish, like Moore, or an opportunist out to earn a bit of money wherever he can. To this Saint, being Simon Templar is like a profession. He’s the chartered accountant of playboy adventurers, a bit boring and bland. He gets angry at times. He weilds a firearm in a manner reminiscent of Avon in Blakes Seven, posing with gun in hand and his other arm outstretched like a pop singer, as if he’s waiting to have his photo taken.

Ian Ogilvy’s performance comes across like a muted imitation of Cary Grant. There are attempts at bantering humour, but they never quite convince, thanks to some diabolical lines from the scriptwriters. Quite a lot of the time, he looks, well, what’s the word? Constipated. This Saint does a good line in self-righteous indignation, a characteristic entirely absent from Roger Moore’s portrayal. His wardrobe doesn’t help, either. It’s very Man at C&A: lots of blazers with double rows of gold buttons, flared trousers and those bloody beige suits. 

In fact, the only aspects of the series that resemble the 1960s Saint are the names of Bob Baker and Leslie Charteris on the credits, the stickman, his car number plate ST1, and the name Simon Templar. This is a safe, polished but too perfect late 70s take on a classic character and it just won’t do. It’s a bit late for criticism now, of course, and at the time, aged 17, I could find no fault with it (until the episode where he utters a line about British Intelligence resembling a boiled potato). It’s telling, though, that I never sought it out again. Years later, I designed the sleeve for Network’s DVD release, but I’d have to go and search my shelves to see if I actually own a copy. If I do, I’ve never taken it down to watch a single episode. It is, in a word, ‘meh’.

If we can believe Wikipedia, the series was well received in Britain and Europe, but even in 1978 it sat awkwardly in the contemporary landscape of film and television. It wasn’t hard hitting like The Sweeney or The Professionals, but neither was it as tongue-in-cheek as The New Avengers or James Bond. It would prove to be ITC’s last endeavour in the arena of television production, as Lew Grade’s sights were by this time set elsewhere: specifically, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Was it simply the case that the day of the ‘famous international playboy’ was over? But there’s something else missing from Return of the Saint, and I think it’s a key difference. In the Roger Moore series, Simon Templar is a world famous character, recognised wherever he goes. Ian Ogilvy’s Saint, by contrast, has to introduce himself. ‘I’m Simon Templar’ he tells a character in the episode I saw. I bet Roger Moore never had to say that.

Back in the 70s, I made up some stupid lyrics to fit the series’ theme music: ‘Its the Return of the Saint/ Yes it is/ No it ain’t.’ I think that just about sums it up.

'It has to be said' – A Memoir of Glenn Ashcroft, 1968-2023

A rare cartoon of Glenn, in Newcastle United shirt, circa 2000

Once again, I find myself writing a tribute to an old friend who has passed away... 

I met Glenn when I went to work for a Birmingham advertising agency in 1998. Amazingly, he’d been living about a hundred yards from my house for several years without our paths ever having crossed. I got at once that he shared the same ironic sense of humour as myself: within hours of my starting in the job, the conversation had turned to On the Buses – then being repeated daily on satellite TV – and from there to other neglected corners of pop culture, usually of the ‘so bad it’s good’ variety. Within a week, we were summoned to the boardroom by one of the directors – a candidate for angriest man in the universe – and told we were ‘laughing too much’. Because one isn’t supposed to have fun at work, right? It was like On the Buses coming true – he was Blakey, and we were Stan and Jack (don’t ask me which was which).

From that moment on, we formed a united front against the management, privately taking the proverbial at every possible moment. Our impressions of Angry Man’s co-director – let’s call him Posh Buffoon – became legendary, as did our cartoons. At Christmas that year, I gave Glenn the one and only copy of the ‘Steve Harland Annual’… Steve was our mild mannered head of studio, who was constantly put upon by Angry Man. He never saw our cartoons of him: I’m not sure what he would have thought of being turned into a creation worthy of The Dandy. In return, Glenn gave me a rubber effigy of Angry Man that he’d customised from an executive toy. It came in its own special box that Glenn created himself (and printed out on the company’s time).

Company director 'Angry Man' looks on as Steve Harland's mac explodes... cover illustration from the 'Steve Harland Annual 2000' (1999)

Glenn and myself were supposed to be a creative team, but the only ideas we were ever allowed to work on were those handed down to us by Angry Man and Posh Buffoon… a computer monitor with duck’s feet? That actually happened, and provided more ammunition for our satirical mickey taking. By 1999 we were commuting to Leamington, a drive of over an hour every day. Without Glenn to share the driving, it just wouldn’t have been tolerable. For most of the drive, we conversed in the voice of Posh Buffoon, satirising his attitudes towards the ‘proles’ and ‘pond life’ whom he saw everywhere: basically, everyone below his rung on the social ladder. That level of insanity kept us sane in a job that never rose above the level of predictable drudge. When, at last, I was deemed ‘surplus to requirements’, the only thing I missed about my ex-career was Glenn. He very thoughtfully copied the folder of salacious material I kept on my work computer, and gave it to me on a CD, deleting the orginal before it could fall into the wrong hands.

We stayed in touch even after I’d moved away to Sheffield: the quirky gifts and cranky cards kept on coming. I still have them to this day. So, Glenn, the final word (in the voice and favourite catchphrase of ‘Posh’…) “It has to be said… you were one of the best.”

Glenn, in leather jacket, appears in the final frame of this satirical office cartoon (1999)

REPORT 6823: REVIEW – A critical appraisal

A curious thing, Strange Report. While most ITC series were British-made but aimed at America, the short-lived adventures of Adam Strange and friends were the result of a co-production deal with US network NBC’s film arm Arena, with former Man from UNCLE executive producer Norman Felton stepping into the same role on the new series. Felton must have had a thing about quirky titles – where every UNCLE episode had been styled ‘The …. Affair’, Strange Report’s titles were presented as numbered ‘reports’, with a single word descriptive title followed by a longer sub-title. The numbering makes no sense at all: if Adam Strange numbered his reports sequentially, then he appears to have handled 8,295 cases in the course of the series… or 11.36 cases per day over a two-year period...

Strange Report was intended as series of two halves: the first sixteen episodes followed criminologist Adam Strange and his scientific sidekick Hamlyn Gynt as they pursued mysteries around London. At the mid series point, the characters were intended to relocate to the USA, for reasons unknown (Ham hints at a return to his homeland in one episode), presumably dragging Strange’s neighbour Evelyn along for the ride. But as things panned out, both Anthony Quayle and Anneke Wills demurred on the stateside relocation, and the series stalled at a mere 16 episodes. NBC were evidently unimpressed: although shooting on the London episodes was completed by March 1969, the network kept them on the shelf until January 1971. This can’t have done Strange Report any favours at all. The series clearly set out to capitalise on whole ‘Swinging London’ fad, but came rather too late to the party. 1967 would have been an ideal broadcast year, but the cameras didn’t start rolling until July 1968. Even in Britain, ‘Swinging London’ as a pop cultural concept was beginning to feel decidedly outré by the time Strange Report went to air in September 1969, and an episode like Covergirls, with its Mary Quant style fashions, looked instantly dated.

The series certainly set out to be topical, with storylines influenced by events and ideologies of its time: heart transplant surgery was one of the biggest news stories of 1967, so that went in. 1968 had seen widespread student unrest in Paris and the USA, so that was another certainty, whilst episodes like Racist and Epidemic reflected the racial tensions of the era. The tone of certain storylines was much darker than viewers had come to expect of most ITC output, and the ‘issue’ episodes had more in common with serious drama than the lightweight hokum served up by the likes of The Saint and The Baron. And unlike those examples, whose location work seldom ventured further afield than the car park at Elstree studios, Strange Report made use of extensive location filming around London, with the producers seeking out some interesting and often atypical surroundings – most notably, the shabby villa in Little Venice that was home to Adam Strange (it looks like a building site in several early episodes, on account of development going on across the street). If nothing else, the series always looked good, and has the most realistic milieu of any ITC production bar Gideon’s Way.

Strange Report boasted a major star of film and theatre in the shape of Anthony Quayle, taking on his first starring role in a television series (he had made earlier guest appearances in ITC series Man of the World, The Saint and Espionage). Quayle reportedly grew a beard because he felt it suited the character, and coupled with Strange’s habitual pipe-smoking, it lent him the air of a fatherly figure watching over his two young friends Ham and Evelyn.

Kaz Garas was a relative newcomer, who had been seen in a few bit parts in the likes of Hawaii 5-0 before his casting as Ham Gynt, whilst Anneke Wills had not long finished a stint on Dr. Who, and would have been a familiar face to most British viewers, even without her long blonde wig. On paper, the three stars weren’t given a great deal to work with: Adam Strange was a widowed, retired police commissioner who now operated in a freelance capacity rather like a latterday Sherlock Holmes, with Gynt serving as a kind of forensic Dr. Watson, with a side interest in Egyptology. Evelyn McClaine (Adam/ Eve – geddit?) was Strange’s neighbour, a jobbing girl-about-town who divided her time between modelling assignments and painting. It was entirely down to the individual actors’ charisma that the series worked at all, and their on-screen bonding gave genuine warmth to a portfolio of stories whose scripts were a decidedly mixed bag.

Having contemporatry issue-driven stories filmed on the real streets of 1960s London was all very laudable, but the scripts simply weren’t up to the job and the majority don’t stand up to scrutiny today. Behind the thin veneer of reality lurked some decidedly iffy writing. TV journeyman Arthur Dales’ effort REPORT 1553: RACIST – A Most Dangerous Proposal deals with a white supremacist politician who aims to frame himself for murder and create a media frenzy. This is all well and good as an idea, but it comes to pieces in the execution. Clive Francis stands out for all the wrong reasons as an unhinged expat South African who is co-opted into the murder plot, and in the leading guest roles, Jane Merrow and Guy Doleman are simply wasted. The episode’s most interesting sequence takes place at Lydd Airport in Kent, where Adam Strange and his taxi follow their quarry on board a Bristol 170 Air Freighter of a type that regularly flew cars and their passengers to the near continent during the 50s and 60s. The story also includes a sequence wherein Strange is briefed on his mission by a mysterious civil servant, ‘Sir George Davies’ who takes a ride in his taxi to clue Strange and the viewers in on the plot. This looks as if it had been intended as a recurring plot device (“it’s him”, mutters Ham when Strange is summoned by telephone). If so, then the idea was abandoned immediately. The scenes with Sir George just don’t play well (the back projection doesn’t help), and the idea of Strange reporting to a government official was simply too restricting for the series’ freewheeling format.

Racist was the second episode to go before the cameras, following on from REPORT 4407: HEART – No Choice for the Donor, which presented the morbid idea of a heart transplant donor being selected and murdered for the operation. In order for such a preposterous idea to appear even remotely plausible, the protagonists had to be members of a foreign power from a made-up country, and the results, whilst entertaining, never succeeed in convincing us to suspend our disbelief.

The series did rather better when it ventured into the realm of criminal psychology, with REPORT 2475: REVENGE – When a Man Hates proving to be one of the more memorable and successful entries, thanks to strong support from Julian Glover and Rosemary Leach, who do their best to inject some realism and humanity into their cardoard cut-out characters.

My first experience of the series, in 1969, was the episode chosen to open the run, REPORT 5055: CULT – Murder Shrieks Out (actually the fourth episode as filmed). The characters and format are all well settled by this time, and the story is one of the series’ more original examples, with its tale of corruption and fraud hiding behind the facade of a charitable organisation. It also includes a climactic helicopter crash (off screen, naturally), which is always a favourite with TV and film moguls, and probably accounts for its elevation to first-night status. It’s not all good, though: the murder device of electrically altering the wiring in a guitar is impossible – electrocution by completing a circuit between a guitar and microphone was certainly a reality, (ironically, there were a couple of well publicised examples a few years later), but such real-life accidents were caused by badly-earthed microphones, and no amount of tinkering with a guitar’s wiring could induce the same effect.

Watching the series aged 15, on its repeat run in 1976, I was fairly well satisfied with the handful of episodes I got to see. Clear contenders for best in series were REPORT 2641: Hostage – If You Won’t Learn, Die! (featuring a rare guest appearance by the always watchable Kenneth Haigh) and REPORT 0649: SKELETON – Let Sleeping Heroes Lie: I was fortunate in being able to catch both of these before ATV began tinkering with timeslots (as covered in part one of this article). I wasn’t so enamoured of the fashion-conscious REPORT 3906: COVERGIRLS – Last Year’s Model, but some of its location work in Hampstead helped to elevate what was otherwise a relatively trivial storyline.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that I was finally able to assess Strange Report in its entirity, courtesy of a full screening on retro satellite channel Bravo. Of the episodes I’d missed to date, only REPORT 8319: GRENADE – What Price Change stood out, even if it included the risible device of molotov cocktail light bulbs and a stodgy performance from Bernard Lee.

Unfortunately, far too many of the scripts depended on unbelievable occurrences, such as the fraudulent printing of banknotes in REPORT 4977: SWINDLE – Square Root of Evil. The writers try with varying degrees of success to persuade the viewer to believe in some of their far-fetched plot ideas, but ultimately old school hokum wins the day. REPORT 8944: HAND – A Matter of Witchcraft plays out promisingly enough – and throws the spotlight onto Evelyn for once – but it all turns to palpable tosh in the final five minutes.

For me, there’s a tie for worst in series between REPORT 4821: X-RAY – Who Weeps for the Doctor and REPORT 1021: SHRAPNEL – The Wish in the Dream. This is Strange Report at its closet fo full-on daytime soap opera, and none of the guest cast does anything to enliven the very downbeat proceedings. X-Ray came from scriptwriter Roger Parkes, who also provided medical and forensic storylines for BBC’s The Expert and Doomwatch, as well as The Prisoner’s ‘frontal lobotomy’ episode, A Change of Mind. It’s hard to imagine how he saw X-Ray as fit for purpose, unless the script was substantially altered before filming. The audience is asked to accept that a medical professional, confronted with an X-ray showing he has an inoperable brain tumour would take his own life a) without obtaining a second opinion and b) without experiencing any of the ‘red flag’ symptoms that one would expect in such a case. This basic flaw renders the whole story unbelievable, and is typical of the series’ occasional forays into the realms of implausibility. It doesn't help having Dad's Army’s John Laurie along for the ride: one expects him at any minute to roll his eyes and cry out: ‘rubbish!’

It was a shame that these two episodes became some of the more readily available examples for fans wishing to revisit the series in the pre-DVD era: Italian 8mm imprint Techno Film chose Shrapnel to release on the Super-8 format, and in the 1990s, ITC Video included X-Ray on one of its two VHS releases.

The Techno Film is notable for being one of only three items of spin-off merchandising generated by the series, the others being a Hodder paperback adapted by the perennial John Burke from the episodes Cult and Skeleton, and Roger Webb’s theme music which was released as a 7” single on Columbia records in certain territories (a cover version by Geoff Love's orchestra was also available on the 1972 album Your Top TV Themes).

For all its flaws, Strange Report is still an enjoyable series to revisit, if only to spend some time in the company of its three very engaging characters, and its heavy use of real streets locations adds a nostalgic quality that was already apparent during the 1976 repeat run. Just eight years had elapsed since the filming took place, but so much appeared different – cars, fashions, interior décor. I doubt one would notice the same thing today watching a series filmed in 2015!

With its bright colours and often sunny location work, it still feels like the perfect series for a summer afternoon – and that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now!

'They're watching Columbo': the vanishing world of ITC, 1970-77

A typical midweek evening, 1976. Note the 'hilarious' mistake in the title of Columbo.

When ITV introduced colour broadcasts on 15 November 1969, the ITC catalogue must have looked like a scheduler’s dream of ready-made colour programming. Since 1966, all ITC productions had been filmed in colour, which was by now essential in securing sales to the American networks. Gerry Anderson had jumped the gun, and was filming in colour from 1962 onwards. By the dawn of colour, and including series that were then midway through their first run, ITC could offer over two hundred hours of filmed drama, in colour, as well as filmed comedy (From a Bird’s Eye View) and a further 170 colour episodes from the Gerry Anderson stable.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to note how little ITC material featured in ITV’s first week of colour. Not every region could receive colour broadcasts at this stage, but on ATV in the Midlands, colour was available from the beginning of programmes on Saturday 15 November. After an introductory ‘Welcome to Colour’ presentation, programmes kicked off with an episode of Thunderbirds (Cry Wolf). So far, so good.

Strange Report was a couple of months into its first run, but on this particular Sunday it had to make way for the full colour spectacle of the Royal Variety Performance. As compensation, viewers could watch one of Simon Templar’s colour adventures (The Man Who Gambled With Life) at 10.35pm. But elsewhere in the schedules, there were no further ITC offerings to be found, aside from Friday’s first-run episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

By January 1970, not much had changed. Aside from Gerry Anderson productions (Stingray and Thunderbirds), there were no ITC productions to be found in a typical week’s programming on ATV Midlands. Viewers in the Anglia region did somewhat better: the station had not yet upgraded to colour broadcasts, so it was still possible to catch up with some earlier series – the hour-long Danger Man episodes were going out on Sunday afternoons, while the WWII drama Court Martial was tucked away late on Saturday night. Sunday also saw Strange Report at 9.10pm, still on its first run, and The Baron at 11.25pm, albeit both of these colour series could only be seen in monochrome. This wasn’t entirely a bad thing, and February 1970 saw the station embark on a repeat run of Gideon’s Way, a series which would soon disappear from the ITV network: being in black and white made it less attractive to schedulers. But what of those other 200-odd colour episodes of ITC productions?

A typical week in the early 70s might see two or three series dotted across the schedules, with popular titles like The Saint and The Champions still going out at prime time. Most regions offered a similar mix of first-run and first-repeat-run episodes from the ITC stable: Department S and Man in a Suitcase could still cut it in a mid-evening 7.30/8.00pm slot, but if you were a fan of The Baron, you needed a mug of Horlicks on the go: it was hard to catch John Mannering much before 11.00pm. Similarly, The Prisoner, now on its first repeat run, gravitated towards the post-News at Ten slot, as did regional repeat runs of ABC’s The Avengers.

Not much changed through 1971. The novelty value of seeing older programmes in colour kept many ITC titles in the schedules, and a typical week on ATV Midlands in the spring of 1971 included repeats of The Saint, Strange Report and The Prisoner, alongside Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Fireball XL5, the latter now a rare sighting on account of its lowly monochrome status. Brand new ITC material was, of course, still appearing, albeit not in anything like the quantity that had been seen in the late 60s. The Persuaders! joined the line-up in September 71, but with fewer new British filmed productions available to schedule, ITV’s film buyers were looking increasingly across the Atlantic for their programming. By September 1971, a typical Saturday line-up for Midland viewers still included a repeat of Joe 90 at lunchtime, but the evening was dominated by American imports: It Takes a Thief at 5.00pm, a Henry Fonda Western at 6.30pm, and David Janssen’s post-Fugitive starring vehicle, O’Hara: U.S. Treasury Agent at 8.35pm.

The reliance on imported filmed material began to give a skewed look to ITV’s schedules. ATV, who had always modelled themselves on the lines of an American network, began buying in more and more imported films and drama series, as the cost of home-grown productions continued to spiral upwards. Autumn ‘72 saw the arrival of just two new ITC action series – The Protectors and The Adventurer, and in the Midlands, they were stripped together to fill the slot that had last year been allocated to The Persuaders! Two for the price of one, as it were, but neither came close to the bar that had been set by Brett and Danny’s antics.

By 1973, the old ITC titles – many of them still less than five years old – were getting hard to spot. In the Midlands, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) had been demoted to Sunday lunchtimes, and The Persuaders! was repeated on midweek evenings through the summer. Even Gerry Anderson’s series, which had once been ubiquitous across ATV’s schedules, were looking a bit thin on the ground, with an odd Thunderbirds episode occasionally appearing on a Saturday morning, and Stingray going out in the summer holidays.

1974 brought just one new ITC offering in the form of The Zoo Gang, but at a mere six episodes it felt a far cry from the heady days of 30-episode runs. UFO, Department S and The Persuaders! all found a home on Sunday lunchtimes, but it was rare to find a complete, uninterrupted run of anything and repeat runs could extend over a year from start to finish.

Spring of 1975 saw most ITV regions maintaining a weekday afternoon slot in which one of the ITC titles might appear, and a few were still wont to turn up last thing at night. ATV were mopping up what remained of Department S on Wednesday afternoons, before moving onto a short run of black and white Saint episodes. A couple of orphaned episodes of UFO popped up on weekday afternoons and late nights, while the likes of Stingray and Captain Scarlet were now being stripped into the new Saturday morning format Tiswas – no good at all if you relied on the TV Times for your programme information as neither was mentioned in the listings. At least we got Space:1999, which was more than can be said for a lot of the ITV network. But the golden ‘oldies’ were increasingly hard to find.

'Halo, goodbye': Simon Templar gets a rare black and white outing on ATV, April 1975

‘They’re watching Columbo’: so said the man in the television detector van in a famous scare-mongering advertising campaign of the mid-70s. And viewers certainly were watching Columbo, along with dozens more imported American productions, many of them in the now popular ‘Mystery Movie’ 90-minute format. What they weren’t watching in the mid 70s was The Saint, or Man in a Suitcase or, indeed any of the ‘classic’ ITC era productions that had featured so prominently in the schedules of just a few years before, certainly not at prime time. Hawkish viewers with magnifying glasses might spot an occasional repeat in the minuscule TV Times listings for ‘other regions’, but in the ATV area where I was viewing, it was beginning to look like the end of an era.

1976, of course, saw what one might call a ‘slight return’ of ITC product, with Strange Report and, more famously, The Prisoner both seeing repeat runs on ATV. Midsummer afternoons became a ‘take your pick’ of ITC across the regions, with the likes of Danger Man, Jason King and Strange Report on offer depending on where you lived. Late nights in Wales and Southern also found room for Department S (now something of a rarity) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). By the following year, ITC material had all but vanished from most of the ITV network. ATV repeated Space:1999 on Sunday lunchtimes, but that was all we got. In the absence of ITC product, fans of vintage filmed drama picked up on a surprising first-run of the Fox/Hammer co-production Journey to the Unknown. It had only taken ATV nine years to get around to it. 

It was still possible to find the likes of The Champions (Yorkshire) and The Saint (HTV) in an afternoon slot, but for the most part, the three-repeats-and-out rule had kicked in, meaning that old ITC titles could not be shown again without renegotiating the original Equity agreement. This would effectively keep those old shows off air for the next seven years.

At the time, there seemed no reason to expect to see any of those old series again. Nostalgia for old television was a phenomenon that had only just kicked in, and ITV saw little mileage in it: their telly-nostalgia panel game Those Wonderful TV Times was hidden away in a lunchtime slot, with schedulers presumably imagining it would appeal only to OAPs. The show, when you could get to see it, was an intriguing source of archive clips. But clips were all we got.

By comparison with the videotaped drama of the era, the ITC series hadn’t done too badly. Some series (eg LWT’s Budgie) didn’t even make it to a first repeat run, and the same applied to much of ITV’s sitcom output. A series like On The Buses would return with new episodes each year, but it was rare for earlier series to get a repeat run. It should also be borne in mind that this was an era in which the word ‘repeat’ as applied to television was always used pejortatively. Repeats were a bad thing: this was the accepted mindset of viewers as perceived by those who scheduled our TV programmes. It would take the concerted efforts of a small number of dedicated fans to bring about a sea change in attitudes, but such things took time, and there would be many ‘wilderness years’ to endure before fans could once again revisit their old favourites from the 1960s.

Back in 1977, no one, not even Lew Grade himself, would have imagined you could make money by packaging up and selling old television in formats that didn’t yet exist. The home entertainment boom in video and, more significantly DVD would extend the ‘afterlife’ of those old ITC series well into the next century: but even that era is now drawing to a close. Don’t imagine for a moment that ITVX is going to rush to find room in its streaming service for the likes of Danger Man or Man in a Suitcase. Only a few digital channels still include archive television in their listings, but this is, if anything, a retrograde step, leaving viewers once again at the mercy of those who schedule content. It’s all too easy to imagine those old series retreating into the obscurity in which they languished during the late 70s. If you want to watch them in the future, you’d better hold onto those blu-rays and DVDs...

REPORT 0876 – REPEAT: No Choice for the Viewer

In an era when archive television series have become, for the most part, readily available online or on physical media, it’s sobering to look back to a time when television aficionados were entirely at the mercy of the schedulers – who could at times be perverse and capricious in their handling of a beloved old series...

Forty seven years ago this week, ITC’s Strange Report was staggering to the end of what would prove to be its last outing on terrestrial television. As repeat broadcasts go, it’s hard to think of a more inept example. The series had been on air since March of that year, when ATV Midlands dusted off the episodes for a third and final run under the prevailing repeats agreement with the actors’ union Equity. My diary noted its return with some celebration: I dimly remembered Strange Report from its first run back in 1969, when it had been heavily promoted as part of ITV’s big new autumn season, but I had hardly seen any of it: the first few episodes had gone out on Sunday evenings in the family-friendly timeslot of 7.25pm, but quite soon the series was bumped to 9.10pm, possibly on account of some darker storylines that didn’t sit well in a slot more often associated with sitcom and variety. I remembered the series in particular for Anthony Quayle’s very watchable and avuncular Adam Strange, and a rather splendid theme tune. Roger Webb’s memorable piece had found its way onto a Geoff Love TV themes compilation, issued as late as 1972, and having the record in the house served us as a reminder of what had looked like a rather superior offering in the annals of detective drama.

A late night repeat run in 1970-71 had escaped my notice, and was academic, as its 11pm slot was way past my bedtime at the age of ten. So the 1976 repeats looked like a long overdue opportunity to catch up on the series. Unfortunately, ATV had other plans. When Strange Report returned on the afternoon of Sunday 14 March, 1976, it was simply filling a temporarily vacant slot. By 4 April, with only three episodes broadcast, a season of Glenn Ford movies occupied the mid-afternoon schedule, and there would be no further sightings of Adam Strange for the time being. The next episode I got to see, Report 3906: Cover Girls – Last Year’s Model, turned up as morning filler during the half term holiday, and another episode, Lonelyhearts, was shown in a similar timeslot when I was at school and unable to watch. 

It wasn’t until the summer that the series settled into a predictable pattern, with episodes occupying a Tuesday mid-afternoon slot at 3.25pm from mid June onwards. This was still no use to me, as we didn’t break up for the summer holidays until 16 July, by which time the episodes Revenge, Epidemic, Swindle and Hand had all been broadcast. We’d taken the initiative, however, by setting up our dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder to enable our mum to tape two of these broadcasts. My friend Tim Beddows, however, thought nothing of bunking off school to watch what had quickly become his favourite TV series.

Opt-outs for racing coverage meant that the six week school holiday yielded only three more episodes that I was able to watch: X-Ray on 3 August, Kidnap the following week, and Heart on 24 August. Our family holiday in July meant I was away for the week in which ATV had scheduled the episode Racist, but in the event it was replaced by Sniper. Tim saw the unscheduled episode, but couldn’t quite remember the title: ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ he reported to me on my return. As compensation, I’d been able to watch an episode of Danger Man on HTV Wales, where Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet was shown on Tuesday 20 July, complete with its original ad break captions (and a transmission error that saw reel three transmitted in place of reel two: the error was noticed and corrected after a couple of minutes).

Only three more episodes of Strange Report remained to be broadcast, and frustratingly, the series returned to its inaccessible morning slots in September, with Shrapnel broadcast at 11.10am on Tuesday 7 September, and Grenade in the same slot the following week. Of the missing-in-action episode Racist, there remained no sign. In fact it would take another two and a half years for ATV to make good the defecit, and they couldn’t have done a worse job. Racist finally went out, unscheduled, on Wednesday 3 January 1979, as a replacement for a cancelled race meeting. A near neighbour of Tim’s saw it and reported as much a few days later. What made this even more infuriating to us was that the unscheduled broadcast had fallen during the Christmas holidays when we would easily have been able to see it. An angry letter went off to ATV’s head of audience relations, no less an eminence than ‘Aunty’ Jean Morton of Tingha and Tucker fame, but to no avail. The good ship Strange Report had sailed, and would not be seen in the waters of terrestrial television again.

If we’d had to wait for the series’ return to the small screen, we’d have been sitting around until the 1990s, when the episodes turned up on the now defunct satellite channel Bravo in 1996. But by the end of the 70s, both Tim and myself were collecting films, and an episode of Strange Report had, incredibly, been made available in the 8mm format. Unfortunately, it was the supreme dud of the series, Shrapel, featuring a dreary guest appearance from Gerald Flood, and a storyline that was just plain dull.

We did better on 16mm, in which format Tim acquired the episodes Revenge and Swindle: good news in that I’d missed them both on the 1976 broadcasts, and knew Revenge only from its recorded soundtrack.

In the early 90s, a few ITC series began appearing as pre-recorded video tapes, and Tim excitedly reported that Strange Report was due out in this format. One afternoon in 1994, we went into Birmingham where we obtained the tapes from the HMV store. The four episodes released included a couple of decent examples – Heart and Cult – alongside the lightweight Covergirls and the misery fest that was X-Ray.

When the series next appeared in a home media format, it was Tim himself who was responsible. Having set up the Network DVD label in 1997, by 2004 he was able to persuade ITV to agree to a one-off release of his favourite series, using brand new copies prepared for BBC Studios by remastering genius Jonathan Wood. It says a lot about Tim’s loyalty to this oft-overlooked series that he chose it as the very first ITC release on his label, and during the preparation of special features for the release, he met and made a lifelong friend of Anneke Wills. He also asked me to design the sleeve – my first work for the label – as he deemed Network’s in-house designer insufficiently sympatico with Adam Strange. It was a good move, for I would go on to design the packaging for the bulk of Network’s ITC releases. Now, almost twenty years on, it’s mildly gratifying to see my old Strange Report sleeve design being used as iconography on imdb.

Network would go on to release the series' soundtrack in our curious 'CDs in DVD cases' format. A vinyl release was mooted (I went so far as to design a cover) but never materialised. A solitary episode – Kidnap – was upgraded to blu-ray as part of Network's HD sampler series Retro Action. Unfortunately, Tim got his titles mixed up when ordering up the master: he mistook Kidnap for Hostage (our favourite episode) and the error went overlooked. And for anyone wondering why Strange Report never got the full series blu-ray treatment, the answer is simple: Tim was quite happy with the 2004 DVD restoration, and considered a blu-ray upgrade low priority. That's not to say that it wouldn't have come along eventually – like Adam Strange's taxi – but without Tim, and without Network, Strange Report looks destined to remain in standard definition for the forseeable future.

In part two of this article, I’ll take a closer look at Strange Report and examine how well it stands up after fifty four years...

A candid shot of Anthony Quayle during filming of an insert for the opening titles.