The Sixty Years Later Affair

It was Thursday 24 June 1965 when British viewers were first introduced to the pop cultural phenomenon that was The Man From UNCLE. At 8pm that evening, BBC1 embarked on a run of broadcasts that would go all the way through to August 1968, encompassing episodes from all four series of the spy-fi classic. British viewers were behind the curve – the series had got started stateside back in September of 1964, and the UK broadcast order deviated radically from the American NBC screenings, commencing at episode three (The Quadripartite Affair), followed, logically enough, by episode four (The Shark Affair) before jumping to episode 18 – The Mad, Mad Tea Party Affair. It’s easy to see why the BBC placed this episode so early in its running order. Its ‘through the looking glass’ plot sees a girl bystander accidentally brought into UNCLE HQ, and serves as a useful introduction to the fictitious organisation’s modus operandi (today, it also happens to be the top rated of all 105 Man From UNCLE episodes on imdb).

I’ve wracked my memory for any recollection of seeing The Man From UNCLE's original BBC broadcasts, and I can find nothing. The 8pm screening time was rather late for me, but that’s not to say I wasn’t aware of the series. At my birthday in March 1967, I had the famous Corgi ‘Thrush-Buster’ bought for me. It was a cool toy, and it didn’t really matter that I’d never seen an episode of the series that inspired it. If anything, the ‘Waverly Ring’ included in the packaging impressed me even more than the car, with its alternating lenticular images of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. Lenticular images had become popular in the 1950s, but this was the first example I’d ever seen, and it felt not unlike magic.

I must have had some knowledge of UNCLE by this time, as the series had featured in the newly-launched TV Tornado comic (14 January 1967), which I had bought for me over a number of weeks. The UNCLE stories were presented as text rather than strip cartoons, typical of the comic’s cheeseparing production values, and I can still remember trying to get our teacher to read one of these tales to the class, a story that pitted UNCLE against the abominable snowman…

Over the coming years, a few items of UNCLE merchandise found their way into my hands including a cap-firing pistol that came mounted on card bearing the images of Napoleon Solo, Ilya Kuryakin and the famous UNCLE logo. Not being a regular viewer of the series, The Man From UNCLE became, for me, more of a toy merchandising operation. On holiday in Ireland in 1970, I found two Action Man-size figures of Solo and Kuryakin in an out of the way toy shop. I’m still unsure whether I knew the series in any more detail by this time, but I had the dolls bought for me nevertheless – they came in black roll necks and trousers, with guns in shoulder holsters. Unlike the examples that can be found online, this pair did not ‘raise arm and shoot cap-firing pistol’. I’m not even sure how such a thing was possible? How could an Action Man-sized pistol fire caps?

By this time, the series had ended its run on BBC1, where it would not be seen again until a solitary episode (The Arabian Affair) aired in 1981. Unlike Star Trek, which the corporation kept on endless repeats, The Man From UNCLE was allowed to slip out of the schedules, even when the episodes could have been seen in colour. Perhaps the series felt too much of its time.

But it was not the end for Solo and Kuryakin on British television: in the early 1970s, ITV acquired the rights to the ‘feature films’ that had been compiled from extended two-part episodes. The UNCLE movies were initally shown in primetime slots. One of my first encounters with them – if not the very first – was The Spy With My Face, shown by ATV Midlands on Thursday 24 August 1972 at 7.30pm. Others in the series would turn up as the ‘Sunday Star Movie’ and similar prestigious slots until well into the decade, before being demoted to summer holiday morning filler.

By the early 70s, I’d taken to collecting second hand books, specifically any titles that had been published to tie in with television series. Scouring a local book sale, I discovered a Man From UNCLE paperback. A few minutes later I found another. It was the beginning of a collecting fad that was to last several years as I slowly amassed the complete run of 16 titles that had been published during the mid 60s by Souvenir Press (in America, the series ran to 24). In addition to these, I located copies of no fewer than four Man From UNCLE annuals, published between 1966 and 1969 and relying heavily on reprints of American comic book material.

On paper, I knew The Man From UNCLE very well by this time, but aside from the films, I still hadn’t had sight of a single television episode, and this remained the case until the one-off broadcast mentioned above. By the time the BBC got around to a more comprehensive repeat run in the 1990s, my interest had dwindled and I didn’t bother to tune in. Since then, the series has surfaced occasionally on satellite channels, but it’s only the colour episodes that get shown.

Around ten years ago, the first series made it onto a Region 2 DVD release, which I acquired at the time and am still (at time of writing) working my way through. Series one isn’t quite as campy and fun as the later episodes, but it’s far from being full-on serious. The format’s trope of involving an innocent party (usually female) in each week’s caper lends a lightweight quality to many storylines. This ‘innocent party’ was intended as someone with whom the audience could identify, but the prevalence of scatty or ‘dizzy’ types, and their tendency to get romantically involved with Napoleon Solo quickly becomes tedious. After a handful of episodes, one also starts to notice the same locations cropping up time and time again – the city street where UNCLE’s secret entrance is located was a well-used backlot that can be seen in many TV series of the era – and even when venturing father afield, there was a tendency to rely on the same bits of countryside (probably privately-owned ranches). The cumulative effect is that, after a few weeks, you’ve seen just about everything the show has to offer.

For all that, The Man From UNCLE was still enjoyable, escapist entertainment, reflecting an era when pop culture was awash with spies, glamour and intrigue. It benefited from having two memorable characters, portrayed by charismatic actors, and the sight of an American and a Russian working on the same side must have come as a welcome contrast to the reality of international relations in the cold war era. Even Star Trek took a leaf out of the UNCLE manual by introducing its own friendly, mop-topped Russian. Like so many other pop culture classics of the 60s, the format has been revived – once with the original actors, and again in 2015, but the format and characters don’t work when removed from their 1960s context, and it’s still the original that endures in the memory.

For me, the show represents something of a gap in my personal pop culture experience, and I still get a kind of retrospective FOMO when I look back on those original BBC broadcasts. I loved Batman, and was watching The Avengers at age seven… why did it take me so long to get behind The Man From UNCLE? There’s every chance now that I will never get to see all four series complete (if that even matters); but I still have my Corgi Thrush-Buster, so that’s okay... 

The Story of Pop

 

Part Two: On the air 

The early 70s was a time of 1950s revivalism in pop music. The styles and clichés of an earlier decade began to resurface in contemporary hits from bands like Wizzard, Showaddywaddy and even artists like Elton John – his 1972 hit “Crocodile Rock” was the first time I’d ever heard the clichéd arpeggiated guitar pattern that had been part of the 1950s’ musical DNA (originating in songs like Paul Anka’s 1957 hit “Diana” and Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat"). I decided I rather liked these sounds, but it would be a while before I got to hear any authentic period pieces.

In early 1974, spurred on by the resurgence of interest in rock and roll, Bill Haley’s seminal hit single “Rock Around the Clock” was reissued (and not for the first time). This, at least, was a bona fide 1950s artefact, and more to the point, I liked it. I liked that Haley was weilding a huge semi-acoustic Gibson guitar, which by the early 70s was totally unhip; and I liked the sounds his band produced.

As to Elvis, I’d known next to nothing about him during the 1960s, when his visits to the British charts were infrequent. In fact, when his single “In the Ghetto” charted in 1969, I thought he was a new arrival on the scene. “In the Ghetto” was a long way from the likes of “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel”, and I didn’t care for its maudlin production. For the moment, however, the earlier Elvis remained out of reach.

It was in the Story of Pop book (see previous entry) that I first began to get an idea about what had been happening in the pop charts of the 1950s. If I’d listened to the radio more often, I’m sure I’d have picked up on various golden oldies getting airplay, but in the early 70s my radio listening in musical terms was confined to the weekly chart rundown. Then, in 1975, another programme came along that was to change everything.

The Double Top Ten Show had in fact been running since the autumn of 1973, its arrival quite likely inspired by the contemporaneous Story of Pop broadcasts. Forming the first hour of Jimmy Savile’s Sunday lunchtime show, it did exactly as the title suggested, playing the top tens of two different years. Typically, a late 50s chart might be paired up with one from the mid to late sixties, and whilst nostalgia was the name of the game, some of the featured charts were, at the time, only a couple of years old. 

A school friend tipped me off about the programme, and it first merited an entry in my diary on Sunday 6 July 1975. It must have taken some persuasion on my part to convince our mum to retune from Radio 2, thus usurping the perennial Two Way Family Favourites from its time honoured position of Sunday lunchtime listening in our house. Once established, The Double Top Ten Show became essential listening. I was slightly put off by the fact that it was presented by Jimmy Savile, whose weird mannerisms never held any appeal for me, but at the time he came across as merely laughable or embarrassing rather than creepy and dangerous. 

Savile’s schtick included awarding imaginary points to listeners for knowing the precise title of a disc as it appeared on the centre of the record. For instance, you might think that Zager and Evans’s 1969 number one hit was called “In the Year 2525” whereas the title on the disc was in fact “In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)”. Savile loved trying to catch out listeners with stuff like this, and would award himself points for a particularly obscure item. The programme usually went out live, and often purported to be going on in a club rather than a radio studio. I could never work out if this was just a bit of studio verité – some of the crowd sounds came from Savile's signature tune, Ramsey Lewis’ 1965 live instrumental version of “The In Crowd”:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsFST-7Hx-Y 

On the days when the show had been recorded in advance, Savile referred to himself as ‘Herbert Hologram’. Records were always 'zoom-zooming up the charts' or 'on their way down slowly as befits a good record.' Aside from this nonsense, the only memorable bit of his drivel I remember was when he referred to Peter Sarstedt as “Doctor Vinegar” (I’m sure you can work that one out…)

From the very first week that I heard it, The Double Top Ten Show threw open the doors on music that I would never have got to hear anywhere else. Fitting two top tens into an hour meant that a few tracks had to be omitted, with priority accorded to the week's climbers and new entries. Occasionally, the show found room for records that had failed to chart, such as Marty Wilde's 1968 release "Abergavenny", while discs that had formerly been subjected to airplay bans were now deemed acceptable listening, including Serge Gainsbourg’s notorious pop musical orgasm “Je T’Aime (Moi Non Plus)".

Perhaps the best aspect of the show was the fact that we got to hear these vintage hits in context, and after a few weeks of hearing the charts of, say, 1959, I could almost imagine I’d been alive at the time. Each ‘Double Top Ten’ was played in rotation, so that one week we might get to hear the charts from 1967 and 1970 – then, after a few weeks, the same pair of charts turned up again. This really helped to give an idea of how pop music had developed as various fads came and went. It was here, on the DTTS (as my diary constantly referred to it) that I got my first exposure to some of pop’s undisputed classics – Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over”, Cliff Richard’s “Move It”, and countless discs by the Shadows, whom I barely knew at this point in time.

By the end of 1975, I knew for a fact that I preferred the music of the late 50s to anything I was hearing in the contemporary charts. From jumble sales, I began to pick up old singles that I’d heard on the DTTS, from artists including Adam Faith, Conway Twitty, Anthony Newley and Lord Rockingham’s XI (I may never have heard their hogmanay hit “Hoots Mon” if it hadn’t been for the DTTS). I even found myself a copy of Charlie Drake singing “Splish Splash”. I was vicariously living the charts of the 1950s at a remove of almost two decades...

More critically, those 50s charts regularly included hits from the likes of Elvis, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, whose careers I could read up in the Story of Pop book. Another artist I discovered through the DTTS was Lonnie Donegan. Up to this point in time, I knew next to nothing about skiffle music, and whilst I was already familiar with Donegan’s 1960 comedy hit “My Old Man’s a Dustman”, his earlier, 'straight' skiffle numbers like “Cumberland Gap” were new to me. I wasn’t just widening my own musical horizons, I was beginning to understand where artists like the Beatles had come from – those charts of 1957, 58 and 59 contained the music that had inspired them.

I kept up with the DTTS over the coming years, picking up not only on music that pre-dated my lifetime, but also filling in various gaps when, for one reason or another, I’d stopped following the charts. From January 1978, the programme was billed as 'Jimmy Savile's Old Record Club' in the Radio Times, although the listing still referred to 'The Double Top Ten Show'. The programme now extended over two hours, bringing an end to Speakeasy and Savile's Travels (some would say not before time).

Eventually, Savile moved on, and the show, now re-christened Pick of the Pops, was picked up by Alan Freeman, who brought along his old signature tune “At the Sign of the Swinging Cymbal” replacing the old Ramsey Lewis theme. The show had by this time been moved to Saturday lunchtime, where it would become a fixture for over twenty years, with the presenter baton passed along to Dale Winton, Tony Blackburn and Paul Gambaccini before ending up with Mark Goodier.

“Pick of the Pops” still exists today on Radio 2 and has recently been relocated to the Sunday teatime spot that was once occupied by the chart countdown – a reflection, perhaps, of how little interest there is in today’s chart music. Sadly, it rarely ventures back further than the 1980s, and only a selection of the chart is played, with much of the show given over to info dumps and listeners’ reminiscences. Back in the 70s, we might have had to put up with Jimmy Savile, but we had more and better music from a show that was, for me at any rate, a genuine musical education. There’s not a lot we can thank Jimmy Savile for, but I’ll grudgingly allow him that much.

The Story of Pop

Part One: in print

For its first decade and a half, pop music was a phenomenon not much given to looking over its shoulder. It was of necessity immediate, contemporary, of the moment. To maintain chart success, acts must keep one eye on the present and the other on the future. Nobody gave much thought to what had gone before or to the fact that history was being written around them. Music journalism was all about current developments and future plans – sometimes anticipating events that would never happen.

This left music fans in a quandry – there was no shortage of news and comment about the latest 'chartbound sounds', but unless you’d kept a mountain of back issues of New Musical Express and its ilk, there was nowhere you could look for information about the music of earlier eras. Today, you’ll find a healthy selection of music reference works and biographies in any decent bookseller (and a truckload of worthless AI-generated crap on Amazon), but back in the early 70s, music fans would have searched the shelves in vain. There had been a smattering of biographies, such as Hunter Davies’ The Beatles, The Authorised Biography (1968); and The Shadows had ghost-written their own story way back in 1961. But works like these were the exception, and, critically, no one had yet risen to the monumental chllenge of compiling a complete history of pop music.

That all changed in 1973. In collaboration with Phoebus publishing, the BBC launched an ambitious 26-week radio series, tied in to a weekly partwork of the same title: The Story of Pop. The magazine was impressively produced, featuring copious photographs and incisive articles from leading music journalists. This was to be a history of everything that belonged under the pop/rock banner, the serious and the not-so-serious, by turns informative, analytical and critical. Styling itself ‘The First Encyclopaedia of Pop in 26 Weekly Parts’, the first issue – adorned by an airbrushed cover image of Elvis and Bowie – appeared at the end of September, with the series launching on Radio One that same week, on Saturday afternoon (with a Sunday afternoon repeat). I remember tuning in for some – though by no means all – of this ground breaking series. The magazine, meanwhile, launched with a series of adverts on commercial television, which was highly unusual for an endeavour involving the BBC.

The magazine wasn’t cheap – its cover price of 25p was five times the cost of the Radio Times, and five pence more than the most expensive glossies like Cosmpolitan. But this was a partwork rather than a magazine, and its 38 pages were all content, with no financial support from advertising. As such, it was remarkably good value: by the end of 26 weeks, for an outlay of just £6.50, readers would have in their possession the best and most comprehensive guide to rock and pop music that had yet been committed to print, and for an additional £1.55 you could send away for not one but two heavy duty binders to hold your collection (by comparison, the hardback book version, when it appeared in 1974, comprised only a selection of highlights from the magazines and cost £3.95).

Pop music itself had entered a phase of revivalism in the early 70s, with many acts looking back to the sounds of the 1950s, and it must have seemed like the right moment to step back and consider its origins. The BBC Omnibus strand had had a tentative stab back in 1968 with the overview documentary All My Loving, but nothing on this scale had ever been attempted. As a story, it was well beyond the remit of a single writer, and while the radio episodes were mostly handled by Tim Blackmore and Charlie Gillett, the partwork drew on the cream of British music journalism to ensure all bases were covered.

The magazine was astutely conceived, with the Elvis/Bowie cover clearly designed to appeal to fans of contemporary sounds as much as the rock revivalists. Taking 1956 as its starting point, but eschewing the obvious chronological approach, each issue juxtaposed articles on past acts and current superstars, whilst ongoing features examined the wider aspects of pop culture, and focused on specific genres. A weekly A-Z roundup of artists old and new provided a handy at-a-glance reference guide to who was who in the rock and pop arena, and the first issue was accompanied by a fold-out poster, ‘The Story of Pop Star Trek’ which illustrated, in typically colourful 1970s fashion, the network of influences that had contributed to the enormous diversity in contemporary pop. This was more than just a history – it was bang up to date with analysis and features on the latest acts. Pop fans could hardly have asked for more.

When the radio series came to an end in 1974, the magazine's run was extended for a further fourteen issues, alongside standalone specials devoted to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and 50s Rock & Roll. These publications (which would today be styled ‘bookazines’) brought together the best of the parent mag’s features in each subject area. I had The Beatles edition bought for me in August of 1974, just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in their back catalogue, and my brother had the hardback Story of Pop book bought for him that Christmas. I can’t overstate the importance of this book to me in opening up the history of pop music. Over the coming years, I read up on the bands that interested me, and even those that didn’t – the chapter on Bob Dylan was hugely influential in convincing me to listen to his albums, as were those on The Kinks, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. Its features on 50s artists from before my time shone a light onto a musical era that I might otherwise have ignored.

Despite its 300,000 word remit, the partwork couldn’t find room for absolutely everyone. Those artists judged to have been the most important and influential had whole articles devoted to them (including the likes of Adam Faith and Tom Jones), whilst others were covered in overview articles examining specific genres such as Merseybeat and Acid Rock. All of the big names were there, from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran through Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Byrds, all the way to contemporary artists like Marc Bolan, Slade and Sweet.

The book, condensing the magzine’s vast panoply of content (and largely reprinting the pages as they they had originally appeared), was organised into five sections: ‘Rock & Roll’, ‘Black Music’, ‘The Beatles & British Rock’, ‘Dylan & American Rock’ and ‘70s Rock’. It’s interesting to note which of the artists profiled in the magazine were deemed significant enough for inclusion in the hardcover edition. Of the British acts, aside from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, only The Animals, Cream, The Bee Gees, Tom Jones, The Kinks and The Who made the final cut – Tom Jones’ inclusion being particularly intriguing. American rock was represented by Dylan, The Band, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Simon & Garfunkel, whilst the 1950s section featured Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly amongst others.

The magazine continued beyond the life of the radio series, with a series of ‘special volumes’ extending the run to 40 issues. Such is the nature of any document that attempts to summarise an ongoing and ephemeral phenomenon – pop music didn't conveniently end in 1974 and still hasn't (although one could convincingly argue for its being dead in the water). For me, though, The Story of Pop book was as much as I needed to know about pop music circa 1974. It was an era when I was taking less of an interest in contemporary pop, and between those covers lay the future of my own personal musical investigations. In the next part of this article, I’ll go on to look at how and where I tuned into the sounds of the 50s and 60s on the radio.

The original run of 26 Story of Pop magazines have been uploaded online as pdfs, and can be found here:

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Radio-One-Pop/Radio-One-Story-of-Pop-26.pdf

Dad's Cars

‘To 1 Standard 8 Saloon 1955, complete as inspected: £400’ So reads the earliest item of paperwork I have relating to my dad’s cars. Our dad was never what you’d call a petrol head, although in his younger days, during his national service, he’d ridden a motorcycle, a fact I always found hard to equate with his mild-mannered persona. Cars or occasionally vans were a necessity – as a semi-pro musician, he needed transport to get himself and his drum kit to gigs all over the Midlands and occasionally further afield. As a young musician, he’d had to take his drums on the bus to engagements, fitting them under the stairs, so it’s easy to see why, in an era when car ownership was much less commonplace than it is today, he chose to get himself mobile at an early age.

The Standard 8, registration RNA 883, wasn’t dad’s first car, although he would often reminisce about it in later years. As the garage receipt shows, he traded in a van, of which no details survive. He owned the Standard until June 1961, when it was traded in against an Austin A35, XOJ 62. This was, I believe, another van, the same as the one later made famous by Wallace and Gromit (dad would have appreciated the connection). I have no recollection of this vehicle, which was with him for just over a year. In its place came 799 HDH, a Triumph Herald in two-tone cream and brown. I got to know this car very well over the coming years. Dad later claimed that he would let me sit on his lap and hold the steering wheel as he drove down our quiet suburban street, unlikely as this sounds. Either way, I soon became fixated on Triumph Heralds and even got to own one myself – a pedal car version made by Tri-Ang. There weren’t may production saloons available as pedal cars, so I was unusually lucky in being able to own a miniature version of ‘daddy’s car’.

Some time in the summer of 1964, aged three, I was dismayed to see, from my bedroom window, a canary yellow Vauxhall Victor pulling onto the drive with dad at the wheel. What had happened to the beloved Triumph Herald? I would never see it (or, indeed, the Victor) again. The Vauxhall was a temporary car supplied by the garage from which dad got his next vehicle, a white Hillman Minx, registration KRF 467B. It arrived in time for the family summer holiday that year, when it was captured briefly on film, showing its grey/white paintwork and red upholstery.

On 7 May, 1965, the Minx was involved in an accident. I was completely unaware of this at the time, and only discovered it when going through a folder of very old paperwork, which yielded up the documents seen here. The paperwork, from insurers Beddall Bradford and Co, shows that dad’s policy was bought through his membership of the RAC. Of even greater interest is a copy of a letter that dad sent to the insurance company detailing aspects of the claim and how the repair was handled. The Minx was temporarily replaced by a Ford Anglia, mentioned on a cheque book stub from June ‘65.

By this time, dad was travelling around not merely in his part-time role as a drummer, but in his full-time job working for the G.E.C., and in the summer of 1966 he was given the use of a company car. This time, it was a Vauxhall Victor, DDD 567C, in pale grey. One of its first long hauls was to take the family down to Weston Super Mare for the annual summer holiday, a trip that was made in awful conditions of heavy rain, at a time when the M5 was still incomplete. For a while, we were a two-car family, although the Minx was kept in the garage, with its insurance cover suspended while the Victor was in daily use. This situation continued until April 1966, when dad paid off the finance outstanding on the Minx.

In September 1967, the company car was returned and dad bought himself a brand new Singer Gazelle, HRF 821F, in deep maroon. Like the Minx, this model also came from the Rootes Group, a Midlands-based manufacturer that was taken over by Chrysler in 1970. The Gazelle featured modern styling, with a very rectangular appearance and a body shell shared by other models from the group including the Hillman Hunter. It was a first for us in having a radio, which none of the earlier cars had included. I remember dad seemed particularly proud of this vehicle at the time, and there were several visits to dealerships before the deal was done. It wasn’t the first car he’d owned from new, but somehow this one seemed special, for all that it was really no more than a modest mid-range family saloon.

The Gazelle saw us through holidays to Llandudno in 1968 and 69, Ireland in 1970, and a summer season in 1971 when dad’s musical activities become his full-time job with a residency at Pontins’ holiday camp, Brixham. A garage receipt survives detailing a routine service that was carried out at a dealer in Paignton: you’ll notice that the receipt is now headed Chrysler, following the Rootes Group takeover. An undated note, probably from around this time, totted up dad’s annual mileage – his band work accounted for 7,400 miles, whilst travel for his 9-5 job amounted to 12,000: a total of nearly 20,000 miles. It’s no wonder he changed his cars with such regularity – the average saloon car of the 1960s had a far shorter life expectancy than today’s models, with many developing mechanical faults within a matter of months, and most models being prone to rust.

In the autumn of 1971, the Singer Gazelle was involved in an accident, this time more serious than the minor bump with the Hillman Minx. Dad set out for his Saturday night gig only to return within the hour – the car had been broadsided at a junction less than a mile from home. He was shaken but unhurt, though I believe the car to have been declared a write-off. Unfortunately, no paperwork survives from this incident, or indeed any later than 1971, and from here I have to rely on diaries.

‘Daddy gets new car, Austin 1800’ was my entry for Tuesday 20 June 1972. Between the Gazelle accident and now, he’d had the use of a red Vauxhall Victor, which I believe to have been a company car during a brief period of employment with Cressall, a manufacturer of electrical resistors. The new car, VOV 900J, finished in plain white, took us on holidays to Llandudno (for a third time) in 1972, and Blackpool the following year. On Good Friday 1973, arriving home from work early, dad scraped it against the wall at the end of the drive – not a major incident, but he wasn’t best pleased.

Perhaps the most unusual journey I remember making in this car was on the evening of Sunday 24 June 1973. There was a thunderstorm at the time, and I think the power had gone off. We couldn’t watch television or play records, and it was too gloomy to sit and read. On an impulse, dad decided that we were all going out in the car. Where to? It didn’t matter. Just as long as it got us out of the house. In the event, he drove us as far as West Bromwich, a journey of some twelve miles and a round trip of about an hour. 

The Austin 1800 was the contemporary version of a saloon that had been in production since 1964, with a body style that has become known as the ‘land crab.’ I remember it as being a reasonably comfortable car, with the usual vinyl upholstery typical of the era (on a hot day it gave off a distinctive smell), and curious door handles that comprised a plastic flap locked into place by a clip. As a back seat passenger, I appreciated the folding armrest that was incorporated into the bench seat. Of course, we didn’t have seatbelts in the back during this era, and even for front seat passengers they weren’t yet mandatory. I’m sure our dad used them, and remember some of the early examples as having quite fiddly locking and release mechanisms. The 1800 wasn’t quite a prestige vehicle, and always struck me as having a kind of dowdy appearance. Of dad’s earlier cars, I preferred the Herald, Minx and Victor, and was bought die-cast versions of them all. Dinky made a model of the 1800, liveried as a taxi, which I owned and later repainted in Humbol enamel to resemble dad’s example.

Sales brochure for the Morris 2200 (identical to the Austin) showing it in the, 'ahem', desirable shade of Harvest Gold

Dad no sooner took possession of the car than he began to covet an upgraded version of the model, with a more powerful six-cylinder engine. The Austin 2200 had been launched at around the same time that he acquired the 1800, and quickly became a car which he aspired to (for comparison, our uncle, who owned an estate agency, drove a Jensen Interceptor). The most desirable colour, as far as dad was concerned, was ‘Harvest Gold’, a kind of mustardy shade, ‘complemented’ by an orangey-brown interior, that told you in no uncertain terms that you were living in the 1970s. Dad finally got to own this ‘dream car’ on Wednesday 3 July 1974, as noted in my Letts Schoolboys’ Diary. It saw us through family holidays to Llandudno (again!), Weston Super Mare, and a Welsh farm cottage before being replaced, in January 1978, by a white Austin Maxi, SOV 781S. This was our first ‘hatchback’, a feature which must have been very helpful to dad in moving his drums around, as he was still playing four or five nights a week. I didn’t care for the Maxi… if the 1800 had been dowdy, this was positively plain, a really drab and unimaginative car from an era when British motor manufacturing was in steep decline.

It was replaced, in 1980 and in considerable style, by a Ford Granada, EOX 983V, finished in a kind of metallic greenish gold. This was the most prestigious car our dad ever owned, as well as being the largest. It wasn’t the famous ‘Sweeney’ style (theirs was actually a Consul), but the MkII, introduced in 1977, and looking very much like the example below, illustrated on Wikipedia. It was around for a long time, and by this time I wasn’t given to noting such things in my diary. Alongside it came a bright orange VW Beetle, followed by an Opel. Dad didn’t drive these himself: they were provided (courtesy of a local haulage company) as cars for my brother and myself to use should we wish to do so. I hadn’t yet learned to drive, so never availed myself of the opportunity. The Opel’s most memorable moment came when it caught fire, while parked directly in front of our house. Remarkably, the house sustained no damage, although the car was written off.

Dad’s last car, which he still owned at the time of his passing in August 2001, was a Vauxhall Cavalier MkII hatchback, in silver. It says something for the reliability of cars during this era that he was able to keep it on the road for so long – it dated from the mid 1980s and was still perfectly driveable over a decade later.

These, then, were dad's cars – spanning over forty years of motoring and goodness knows how many thousands of miles. None of them, with the possible exception of the Granada, was anything more than an average family saloon. Some, like the Maxi, aren't well regarded today, whilst others like the A35 and Triumph Herald are considered classics. They all served him well – it was rare for any of them to be off the road for more than the occasional service – and in that respect they did exactly what they were built to do, providing reliable family motoring to an unassuming and unpretentious man who put family above all other considerations.

Sunday in Even Older Money

Nine Years of Nostalgia...

On 14 June, I will have been writing this blog for nine years. Memories that I was writing about in 2016 are now almost a decade older than when I set them down. And yet, strangely, none of them seem any further back in time. Perhaps this is a quirk of memory: once something is remembered, is it somehow set in aspic, never to retreat any further into the past?

Sunday In Old Money began with my diaries. Starting at the age of nine, in January 1971 – and with many gaps over the first few years – I kept notes of anything I'd seen on television, books I was reading or had bought for me, and anything else I thought worth recording. They're hardly a rival to Samuel Pepys, but in an admittedly rather shallow way, they do shine a light onto the pop culture of the era, in a time when viewing and reading habits were rather different than they are today – there was no internet, no CDs, DVDs or any of the modern formats in which we consume music, film and television.

In those nine years, I’ve posted 207 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory. I doubt if they’ve been read by more than a dozen individuals – and whilst it would have been nice to get some conversations going on some of these topics, that was never really the point. I began writing this blog for myself, preserving memories while they’re still accessible. In doing so, I discovered that the most potent form of nostalgia comes from contextualisation. Mention of an old comic, piece of music or television series in isolation is all well and good, but when it’s placed within the wider cultural landscape in which it emerged, one gets a much keener appreciation of how it felt to be around during those times.

Beginning with my own diaries, I’ve drawn on sources including TV listings, pop charts and even weather records in an effort to recapture specific moments in time. In doing so, I’ve unearthed memories that I’d actually forgotten, and this is where context becomes critical. Hearing an old record may give you a hit of nostalgia, but when you hear an entire chart from say fifty years ago you begin to sense other things – where you were and what you were doing, even what the weather was like (which is why I so often refer back to Met Office records). Place that pop chart alongside the TV listings for the same week, and still more memories begin to emerge by association. It’s the nostalgia equivalent of placing two pieces of plutonium next to one another – a chain reaction of memory. Probably the bext example of this can be found in my entry from March 2017, “Daydream – a Time Detective Story” wherein I described how I’d taken a random memory and found a precise date for it. I did it by combining radio and TV listings and weather records, along with the release date of a specific piece of music. In the course of writing the item, I went from a vague memory of a random moment in time to a much clearer picture of an entire Saturday back in April 1970. If you didn’t read it at the time, you can find it here:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2017/03/daydream-time-detective-story.html

Here's another example: for some reason, I’d always remembered a random remark my dad made one evening in the early 1960s. He said something about watching a television series called ‘The Aeroplane Story’ which was on that same evening. There was never a television series with such a title, but it sounded exciting to me, which is probably why I remembered it. But what TV series might he have been talking about? ITV's boardroom drama The Plane Makers was very popular in the 1960s, so I looked up the transmission dates. I noticed that the third series began on Tuesday 20 October 1964. What else was happening at that time? The Tokyo Olympics. Knowing that fact sparked off another memory – at the time our dad was speaking, the television was on in the background, tuned to the early evening news – which was reporting on the Olympics. All of which strongly suggested that this random fragment of memory belonged to Tuesday 20 October 1964. It's hardly an exact science, but in the absence of a time machine, it's near enough.

None of this will mean anything to anyone else, but I’m using it here as an example of how memory can be pinned down in this manner. No other individual will have precisely the same network of memories and associations – but I hope that readers will occasionally find moments here that they can relate to their own lives, or that these essays might serve to give a better idea of how it felt to live in the 1960s and 70s than can be had from the many nostalgia-focused items one finds on television these days. 

When I started this blog, I was writing it in my spare time between holding down a full-time job (albeit one in which I worked from home 100% of the time). You can see from the right hand column those years when I had more to do and less time to devote to blogging – 2019 and 2022 were, for whatever reason, particularly busy times. On the other hand, since my job came to an end, writing these entries has often been the only thing I’ve had to do on a given day, and their number has shot up (2024’s tally of 60 having been ‘artificially’ increased by a ‘twelve days of Christmas’ series). As long as I can find subjects to write about, I will continue to do so, regardless of how few people are reading. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus. And if you find it interesting yourself and know someone else who might enjoy it, pass it on...

Moved by The Move

 

I was utterly oblivious of The Move for most of the 1960s. Their run of hit singles was nearing its end when I finally became aware of them with the release of their only number one hit, “Blackberry Way”. It held the top spot for just one week in February 1969, around the time of my brother’s sixth birthday. He had the record bought for him, so we heard it a lot. As a song, I rather liked it, but when I saw the band miming to it on Top of the Pops, I was aghast. In response to Roy Wood’s lyric ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ I replied, instantly: “get a haircut.” The single had been released on EMI’s Regal Zonophone label, an antiquated imprint that had been revived in the wake of the mid 60s fad for Victoriana and Edwardiana. I had no knowledge of this, of course, but noticed the old fashioned logos on the label and sleeve and wondered why the band wasn’t on a more modern label...

Hailing from Birmingham, The Move were bona fide local heroes. People were always saying they’d seen members of the band around Sutton Coldfield where we lived, and this knowledge seemed to confirm what I’d thought all along – “Blackberry Way” had surely been inspired by the real life Blackberry Lane, only a mile or so from where we lived. The song also seemed to be referencing Sutton Park with lyrics like ‘down to the park/ overgrowing but the trees are bare’ and ‘boats on the lake/ unattended now for all to drown.’

Our dad, a semi-pro drummer, even played on the same bill as the Move: going through some of his old reel-to-reel tapes many years later, I found a very muffled recording of a band doing a number of incongruous cover versions and an interesting version of “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” with different lyrics. I knew that The Move had played cabaret dates in the late 60s and asked my dad if it was them on the tape. He confirmed that it was. I was much too young to have seen them myself, though my partner Julia, seven years older than me, saw them playing an outdoor date in Sutton Park at which, she reports, Carl Wayne was completely drunk.

Back in 1969, The Move were finally on my radar. Their next single came along at the end of the summer holidays in the form of “Curly”, an upbeat folky number featuring a recorder and detuned acoustic guitar. There was a story going around at the time that the song had been written about Carl Wayne’s pet pig, and the BBC’s local news magazine Midlands Today even ran a short feature that seemed to confirm the tale. The Move’s next venture into the charts, however, was radically different – the plodding, proto-metal “Brontosaurus” was the heaviest sound I’d ever heard on a pop single. Too heavy for me – I preferred the lighter touch of “Curly” and “Blackberry Way”. The band dropped off my radar for a couple of years during which time Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were busy getting their new project, The Electric Light Orchestra off the ground, and the next time I heard them on the radio was at the time of their last chart entry, “California Man” (its fifties-tinged sound foreshadowing Roy Wood’s future musical direction with Wizzard).

In all this time, the only Move record to have made it into our household was the “Blackberry Way” single. Then, around 1974, my brother found a compilation album in our local branch of Woolworths. Fire Brigade was a collection of singles and B-sides that had been put out on EMI’s budget label Music For Pleasure in 1972, the first Move compilation LP ever to be issued. Being an EMI release, the album omitted the band’s early hits on the Deram label, picking up their discography with “Flowers in the Rain”, but it was nevertheless an outstanding collection. It was this album that really introduced me to the band, and the songwriting genius of Roy Wood.

MFP’s sleevenote on the album was, frankly, a joke, clocking in at a mere fifty-six words: ‘A lengthy commentary on this superb collection of titles by The Move would be superfluous,’ it ran, neatly excusing the writer from having to say anything more or do any research. This left new listeners like me with no clear idea which tracks had been singles, and when any of them had been released. The centre label at least provided copyright dates, giving some idea of chronology, and you could clearly hear the developments in the band’s sound, from the light, jangling pop of “Flowers…” all the way through to the heavyweight “Brontosaurus.” 

The album kicked off with what is probably the band’s best remembered hit, “Flowers in the Rain”, followed by its B-side “(Here we go round) the Lemon Tree”. But “Lemon Tree” sounded like an A-side to me, as did every other track on the collection. Track three, “Beautiful Daughter”, was a ballad with strings that had been intended for single release but pulled at the last minute when lead singer Carl Wayne left the band in 1970. This was followed by the band’s flop single “Wild Tiger Woman” – released in 1968, the track clearly showcases the influence of Jimi Hendrix with whom The Move had been hanging out, playing support and singing backing vocals on a couple of his own recordings. It was too much for the BBC, who banned it on account of the line ‘tied to the bed, she’s waiting to be fed’. Tony Blackburn reportedly didn’t think much of it either. Side one was rounded off with “Blackberry Way”, whose pedigree was familiar enough to me, and I well remembered “Curly” which kicked off side two. This was followed by “Omnibus” – surely another single? But no, this catchy, commercial song had been relegated to the B-side of “Wild Tiger Woman”, a decision the band later regretted. The psychedelic “Walk Upon the Water” came next and again, it was hard to believe that this hadn’t been a chart hit back in 1967. It too was a B-side, the flip of "Fire Brigade", and was, in fact, the earliest recording on the album, having been taped back in January 1967. The band can be seen playing a very tight live version on the German TV show Beat Club, in a performance recorded in June ‘67. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6AA0qWI4dQ

The album took a heavier turn with “When Alice Comes Back to the Farm”, an unsuccessful single from 1970 – I didn’t care so much for this kind of sound – before reverting to psychedelia with the apocalyptic stomp of “Yellow Rainbow”. The album’s closer was the plodding “Brontosaurus” which I’d heard back in 1970. As the cursory sleevenote assured us, ‘this, undoubtedly [was] the best of The Move.’

At this time (1974), the Move’s original album releases were unobtainable, but luckily MFP made a second collection available, this time comprised of album tracks. I acquired this shortly afterwards, and while some of the heavier, experimental tracks were less immediately appealing, it included the sublime “Mist on a Monday Morning”, a baroque folk tune that outclassed everything else in its field. Once again, it was more than strong enough to have been released as a single, but ended up tucked away on the band’s first LP released in 1968. The same album also found room for the psychedelic smash-that-never-was “Cherry Blossom Clinic”. The song had been slated for single release in 1967 but was relegated to album track status after fears that its mental illness theme might result in bad publicity. The Move had had quite enough of that already, following a recent legal spat with Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Between them, the two MFP collections harvested all the band’s best cuts, ignoring the cover versions that bulked out albums like Shazam! (1970) and passing over the final album Message From the Country (1971). It wasn’t until some years later that I turned up the original albums at various record fairs only to discover that I already owned all the best tracks on them. I wasn’t interested in cover versions like Moby Grape’s “Hey Grandma” or cabaret schmaltz like their ill-advised cover of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”. All of Roy Wood’s numbers from their first two LPs had been included on the MFP collections, so for many years these remained the only Move albums in my collection. My brother turned up a copy of the single “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” at a school record fair, and with that we more or less had the band’s entire singles output covered, save for the first release “Night of Fear”.

When their output began to be collected on CD, collectors were finally able to hear rare cuts including the unreleased “Vote For Me” and a few other early efforts, but nothing came close to the quality of the songs on those old MFP albums.

* * *

The Move are probably one of the most underrated bands of all time. Whilst their contemporaries like The Kinks and The Who would go on to acquire legendary status, The Move have never been held in quite such high regard. When did you last see a documentary on the band? Never, that’s when. And how many books and articles have interrogated their career? Very few.

Why is this? Roy Wood’s songs were some of the best examples of psychedelic pop ever recorded, and The Move were arguably the first British band to fully realise the commercial potential of psychedelia. It may sound like heresy, but I’d choose any of the Move’s chart hits from 1967-69 in preference to the Beatles’ singles of that same period. The only downside to the Move’s catalogue is that some of the mixes are decidedly iffy. “Cherry Blossom Clinic” should sound fabulous, but it’s all tinny and top end, with little or no low or middle in the mix. Their singles were all mixed for mono, and often rather badly at that. Yet the songs still shine through on account of their inherent quality. 

Why doesn't Roy Wood get the plaudits so often showered on his 1960s and 70s contemporaries? There's no questioning his songwriting genius, yet even his own band members could be unmoved by his talents – Carl Wayne refused to sing lead vocal on “Blackberry Way”, while Trevor Burton felt the song was too commercial, preferring the harder, bluesy sound of cuts like “Wild Tiger Woman”, and ultimately choosing to leave the band.

Roy Wood still lives in the Midlands, and over the past couple of decades, I’ve seen him on several occasions – twice in a branch of Tesco, and more recently in a Lichfield pub that is also frequented by 70s crooner Tony Christie. Every time, I’ve wanted to go up and thank him for giving us so much great music, and every time I’ve stopped myself – he doesn’t need me to tell him he’s a genius. For me, it was tantamount to running into Paul McCartney (and at least Roy has never blotted his copybook with a Frog Chorus). ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘this guy in the purple specs pushing his shopping trolley around Tesco is the bloke who wrote Blackberry Way… Omnibus… Flowers in the Rain… Fire Brigade...’

When Alan Partridge was asked to name his favourite Beatles album he answered, unconvincingly, ‘The Best of the Beatles.’ But if you asked me what’s my favourite Move album, the answer has to be that old MFP compilation, Fire Brigade. I dug it out and played it this afternoon. It’s not just the best of The Move – for sheer songwriting quality, it’s one of the best albums I know of.

Credit Where It's Due...

 

Ten Years of Talking Pictures

It is ten years this week since the digital channel Talking Pictures TV first began broadcasting. When they started out, TPTV were the only broadcaster out of hundreds across the Sky and Freeview platforms to base their schedules around vintage film and television. The channel grew out of the Renown Pictures DVD label, a small publisher that specialised in obscure and neglected relics of British cinema, with a strong focus on the immediate postwar era.

Back in 2015, TPTV’s output was comprised mostly of old movies from the Renown catalogue, plus a handful of vintage American TV series like Amos Burke and Honey West. It was a very black and white channel, and the preponderance of old movies probably accounts for why it chose to present itself in the manner of a fifties cinema – a stylistic trope that persists to this day.

I was, of course, involved in the business of old film and television myself, employed by the Network DVD label, who had been instrumental in resurrecting vintage and forgotten gems from both media. At first, there was no crossover in content, and TP had no access to the ITV archive which was such a prime source of material for us. 

I soon became aware, however, that there was a big difference between Network and Talking Pictures – public awareness. TPTV very quickly became a talking point across the mainstream media – I even heard it used as a gag on the radio comedy series Dead Ringers. They’d made an impact. Whereas Network had not. Granted, we had our supporters in the form of a small but loyal fanbase, but we remained unknown to the wider audience who had picked up on Talking Pictures.

It wasn’t long before the new channel started making inroads into Network’s back catalogue. The biggest early success was when they secured the rights to the dimly remembered ITC crime drama Gideon’s Way. They got a lot of praise when it debuted on their channel, with viewers welcoming its return after an absence of over fifty years... Except that it hadn’t been absent – anyone wishing to revisit Gideon’s Way could have done so on the medium of DVD: Network released the series way back in 200x – it was one of our earliest ITV releases. We just forgot to tell anyone we were doing it – or rather, we didn’t make enough of a song and dance about it, and a potential audience slipped through our fingers.

Before long, more and more Network titles were appearing in Talking Pictures’ schedule, and each new title won plaudits from viewers and critics for their dedication in reviving lost classics. They’re still showing Budgie, yet it had been available on Network DVD for years. Eventually, they added the Gerry Anderson series to their roster, and again, were showered with praise. Well, why not? They were making the effort where others didn’t – there are very few broadcasters willing to chance their arm on obscure black and white television of sixty plus years’ vintage.

Now that Network is no more, TPTV seems increasingly like the label’s afterlife. From our own archives, they have bought rights to series including Space Patrol, Dial 999 and The Cheaters, none of which would have been available had it not been for the efforts of Tim Beddows in acquiring the rights in the first place. I’m not saying this in a spirit of criticism – quite the reverse, in fact. It’s good that this old archive material is being brought to air instead of being left to rot (quite literally) in film archives or sold off to collectors. I know for a fact that rarities from Tim's personal archive are being broadcast on TPTV – today's schedule includes an archive film of the Blue Pullman railway service, which we watched some years ago when it resided in his collection, and other items have turned up on the weekly Footage Detectives programme. It's just a shame that Tim never gets more credit for his efforts in preserving vintage films and television series.

Some years ago, Network sold TPTV broadcast rights to the BBC TV series Maigret – but it went to air without any on-screen credit for Network (who had spent a lot of money on rights and restoration). Why had we not appended a ‘Network Presentation’ credit to the Maigret masters? None of this would really matter were it not for the fact that, once again, it was TPTV who got showered with praise when they brought Maigret to air. I even had people asking me if I’d seen it. Seen it? I’d only set the whole thing in motion back in 2018 when I recommended to Tim Beddows that we should try to release it. I don’t often blow my own trumpet, but, honestly, without me, those old Maigrets would still be in the BBC's vaults...

In the past decade, Talking Pictures has flown the flag for vintage television and film, finding an audience that more mainstream broadcasters have always sought to avoid. They’ve shown the way for others to follow, and viewers can now take their pick from a number of other channels dedicated to archive content. Newcomer Rewind TV has been going for exactly a year, and others are following their example – although in some cases, there is plenty of room for improvement.

Talking Pictures has successfully carved out a niche for itself as a provider of 'I thought I'd never get to see that again' televisual moments. If they've proved anything in these past ten years, it's the simple fact that a broadcaster will always find an audience where a physical media provider might struggle. Is it my kind of television? Undoubtedly. My only regret is that Network was never as successful in promoting the same kind of vintage content.

Oh, and one last thing – is anyone ever going to give that flustered usherette the right change?

Ra-Boom De-Aye!

 

Revisiting the Tara King Avengers

There’s a lot of received wisdom in popular culture. It’s hard to approach any book, film, comic or TV series without being influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the prevailing consensus of opinion. You don’t need to have seen any of the Bond movies to know that, for most people, Sean Connery was the best in the role; and it goes without saying that Thunderbirds was Gerry Anderson’s finest hour. That’s all well and good: but what if you don’t happen to agree? In this blog, I’m going to argue for a contentious point of view regarding one of cult TV’s most beloved properties: The Avengers.

I first got to see The Avengers towards the end of the Diana Rigg era, when it was being shown late on Saturday evenings by ABC television. The company had less than a year left of its franchise, and when it ended, in August 1968, it effectively became Thames. This move signalled a shift in scheduling for the series, and here in the Midlands it now occupied a Friday evening slot when, in September 1968, the Tara King episodes began transmission. When this run ended, in the spring of 1969, it was replaced by Diana Rigg repeats. Thereafter, it would be almost a decade before I saw anything more of The Avengers. Late night repeats continued until around 1971, but these were well after my bedtime.

By the late 1970s, my friend Tim Beddows and myself were soon trying to launch an Avengers Appreciation Society, unhindered by the fact that we’d seen barely half a dozen episodes from only one of the six original series. In the second edition of our very occasional newsletter, I found myself with half a page to spare and for want of anything better to go in it, I wrote a short critique of the Tara King era, arguing that the introduction of Patrick Newell as ‘Mother’ had been to the detriment of the series. The article prompted at least one letter of criticism, from no less an authority than Brian Clemens. A nerve had clearly been touched, and knowing what I now know, I can understand why. Clemens himself had brought in Mother as part of an attempt to salvage the series which was failing under the production of John Bryce.

When I wrote that short critique, I’d not had sight of a ‘Mother-era’ episode in over ten years. Not long afterwards, Channel 4 began a repeat run of The Avengers, beginning, logically enough, with the most popular era, series five… the colour Diana Rigg episodes. The repeats continued into the Tara King era. And then I lost interest…

It wasn’t until a few years ago, and a repeat run on ITV4, that I finally sat down to watch the Tara King era in earnest, and when the channel ran them again, I watched them once more. At time of writing, I’ve just completed a third run through, this time on the That’s Action channel, which means that I’ve now seen most of the Tara King episodes at least four times.

It was around the beginning of this fourth time around that realisation dawned – I was enjoying the Tara King episodes more than those of the Emma Peel era. This couldn’t be right, could it? But more to the point, why did I prefer them? 

I will, of course, concede that there are episodes from series six that are almost without merit – Terry Nation’s Invasion of the Earthmen is diabolical, and The Rotters plays out like an amateur’s attempt to create a ‘classic’ Di Rigg episode. These are by no means the only examples. Yet, taken as a whole, the series has, for me, something that the Emma Peel episodes lack.

One aspect of this was the more imaginative use of location filming during series six. The Emma Peel era established a milieu for the stories that has since become known, quaintly, as ‘Avengerland’, typified by the bucolic scenery to be found in the immediate environs of the series’ production base at Elstree studios. Aside from the London mews where Steed lived, the location work never ventured into urban areas: it was all country lanes and chocolate box villages, like Aldbury (used as a location in Murdersville and Dead Man’s Treasure). Watching the Tara episodes, I began to notice a greater diversity in the location work, none more so than The Morning After, which all takes place in the streets of St. Albans. Elsewhere, we even get to see some council estate backdrops (False Witness), and a memorable lighthouse (All Done With Mirrors). The whole look of the series is different.

On top of all that scenery, we now have Mother: Patrick Newell’s irascible performance definitely adds entertainment value, and his ever-changing headquarters provide some of the most bizarre visuals seen in any of the six series. Newell may have been ten years younger than Patrick Macnee, but there’s no denying he was perfect casting as Steed’s superior.

Perhaps the most important aspect that sets this series apart from its predecessors is the direction, and here I would argue for Robert Fuest as the most creative and innovative director the show ever employed. His name on the credits can salvage an otherwise average episode like Game or The Rotters. Fuest directed only seven episodes, including the oft-reviled Pandora (which I actually rather like), but his style feels like a signature for the whole series.

The stories themselves are different – there’s less of the tounge-permanently-in-cheek vibe that had become a calling card of series five in particular, and some of the stories are much darker in tone, occasionally venturing into the realm of the psychological dramas that Brian Clemens would explore in his famous Thriller series. There are, of course, a few duds, or episodes that try too hard to be off the wall – I don’t personally like Look… Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One (etc), which is too campy and theatrical and plays like a bad Emma Peel storyline, but on the whole the series managed to maintain quite a high standard of writing and direction. Most fans agree that it all ended on a sour note with the oddity that is Bizarre, and it’s clear that Brian Clemens had by this point totally lost interest and simply played the self-indulgence card: "Bagpipes??" The tag scene with Steed’s home-made space rocket is preposterous and Mother even breaks the fourth wall. It’s all a bit end of term, frankly.

Then, of course, there’s Tara herself. I’d never argue for her in preference to Emma Peel, and outside of the tag scenes her character never quite develops quite the same on-screen chemistry with Steed; but she works. She’s tough, but also vulnerable, and in some episodes actually arrives at the eleventh hour to save the day. Perhaps the producers sensed that the Steed/Tara relationship wasn’t as successful as Steed/Peel because the characters are kept apart for whole episodes at a time – The Morning After sees Tara sleep through the whole story, and in Killer she’s on vacation, replaced by Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney. On the other hand, Tara does get to carry several stories almost single-handed, including All Done With Mirrors and the Prisoner-inspired Wish You Were Here, both superior entries in the series.

I think the problem with series six is inconsistency: after a shaky start, it takes several episodes to establish a style and atmosphere, but once it does, there’s enough variety both in terms of ideas and visuals to keep viewers hooked week after week. With the few notable exceptions I’ve mentioned above, none of the episodes is quite as bad as popular opinion seems to suggest, and for myself, I’d still rather watch Bizarre than almost any episode of The Champions.

The Avengers series six may be a bit of a curate’s egg, but where it’s good, I’d argue it’s up there with the best of Diana Rigg. Maybe I’m biased, as series six was the first Avengers era that I got to watch from start to finish, but even allowing for nostalgia, I still feel that these episodes have much to recommend them. Perhaps it’s time to set aside received wisdom and bang the drum for Tara King: “Ra-boom de-aye!”