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...
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