1976: Summer of Nostalgia

Part Three: Episodes on Holiday

During the summer of 1976, most ITV regions were showing old ITC series on weekday mornings and afternoons. On Tuesdays London had The Saint at 11am; Yorkshire and Southern were showing Jason King at 3.25, whilst ATV had Strange Report in the same slot. These were likely to be the last outings for programmes that were now as much as ten years old, and viewers could hold little hope of seeing them again. There would, of course, be further repeats of ITC titles during the mid 1980s, but back in the 70s, it seemed highly unlikely that such vintage material would ever be broadcast again. In an age when most if not all such series are still readily available to own on DVD, others on streaming platforms, it’s hard to convey just how much it meant to see as much as a single episode in any of these 1970s repeat runs.

Our family took its 1976 annual summer holiday in late July, staying in a rented cottage in Wales. The dates meant I would miss episodes of both Strange Report (Tuesday 20 July) and Stingray (Thursday 22 July) but as compensation I would get to see Danger Man, which HTV were repeating in the same Tuesday afternoon slot as Strange Report. Outside it was brilliant holiday weather, with wall to wall sunshine – but on that Tuesday afternoon I chose to sit inside where a small black and white portable television sat within an inglenook in the lounge. At least I wasn’t missing anything by watching in monochrome, as Danger Man had been shot in black and white.

Back at home in ‘ATV land’, Danger Man had last been repeated on Friday afternoons in 1973, and I’d caught a random episode during that broadcast. That aside, I scarcely knew the series, so getting to see even a one-off episode was something of an event to anyone with an interest in those old ITC shows. I took in as much as I could, even drawing the opening title panel in my diary entry for the day, and writing up a synopsis which I summarised as ‘all in all, a pretty good one’.

The episode I’d chanced to see was Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet, first broadcast on 16 March 1965 as episode 22 of series 2, the first run of hour-long episodes. In Macolm Hulke’s storyline, Drake is sent to Haiti where a husband and wife scientist couple have disappeared from a beach. The trail leads to a mine where other captured scientists are being forced to work on an atom bomb for a rogue African state. Malcolm Hulke wasn’t one of the usual Danger Man writers – I knew his name for his work on Doctor Who – and this was his sole contribution to the series. With its sound stage ‘exteriors’ of Haitian beach and jungle, Parallel Lines... had rather the look of James Bond on the cheap, but on the tiny portable I scarcely noticed, and what the hell – it was Danger Man after all! Just to hear that famous harpsichord-driven theme provided an instant burst of nostalgia.

In common with this last round of ITC repeats, the programme was shown with all of its original commercial break captions intact: in this case, the ‘adcap’ took the form of a jagged hole framing John Drake’s eyes, accompanied by a sting reduction of Edwin Astley’s famous theme music. But after the first ad break, something odd happened. The storyline had jumped ahead, and didn’t follow on logically from the end of part one. Someone at HTV had got the reels mixed up and accidentally started up the third reel in place of the second. The programme ran for a couple of minutes before someone noticed, stopped it, and started it again in the right place. This is interesting because it tells us that, rather than whole reels, or even a video transfer, the episode was supplied as three individual reels of 35mm film. These kind of technical errors, though uncommon, were par for the course in the era when material was still broadcast direct from physical film. A few weeks later, one of ATV’s Stingray episodes ground to a halt mid way through the opening titles, forcing continuity announcer Simon Bates to fill in for a few seconds while the fault was fixed. We were recording the soundtrack, so his ad lib was captured for, er, posterity…

While I was watching Danger Man, viewers back home were sitting down to an episode of Strange Report – but it was not the one billed in the TV Times (Report 1533:Racist – A Most Dangerous Proposal). Tim Beddows saw it but afterwards couldn’t remember the complicated title. ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ was the best he could report back, and we had no TV Times listings to go on. The correct title was, in fact Report 7931: Sniper– When is Your Cousin Not. I’d actually got the best of the deal with Danger Man, as Sniper is a candidate for the weakest episode of Strange Report. For the record, the scheduled episode, Racist, remained on the shelf at ATV where it was finally pulled out as a last minute replacement for a cancelled race meeting in January 1979. Tim missed it and, incensed, wrote to ATV to complain. You can see the reply he received below:

Next year's summer holiday saw us return to the same cottage. By this time, ATV had run out of ITC repeats, but HTV was still working its way through repeats of the last episodes of The Saint. In fact, we only just caught the series before it finished. The episode we got to see – on the same black and white portable TV – was The Man Who Gambled With Life, the antepenultimate outing for Roger Moore as Simon Templar. This time it was my turn to get the title wrong, misremembering it from Templar’s closing speech as The Man Who Gambled With Death – actually, a much better title, but unlikely to go down well on the American networks who always baulked at ‘death’ in the title of anything.

The biggest surprise on this occasion was the music that played over the opening titles. I well remembered Edwin Astley’s famous theme that had accompanied the first five series, but by series six he had been prevailed upon to write a new theme incorporating Leslie Charteris’ own whistling motif, which I’d never heard before. Tim had supplied me with a tiny tape recorder – almost small enough to fit inside one of John Drake’s shavers – and a correspondingly small reel of tape, with instructions to record the beginning and end titles of The Saint. The recording was dire quality, but that tape – comprising the whole ‘cold opening’ as far as the end of the main titles, and the tail of the final scene running into the titles – got played an awful lot over the coming months!

That 1977 Saint broadcast was one of the last ITC repeats of the era, and the whole experience of seeing different series when holidaying in different regions was a decidedly 1970s phenomenon. Before the end of the decade, the repeat rights on all the old 1960s series had expired and wouldn’t be renewed until the mid 1980s. As time wore on, the whole regional nature of ITV was slowly eroded until today, when the only difference you’ll notice from one region to another is in the local news programmes.