Before the box set: 'illiterature' and the TV tie-in

'Illiterature': a selection of the good, the bad and the indifferent TV tie-ins and spin-offs of the 60s and 70s.
Note the imaginative titles: 'Z Cars Again.' Just as well they didn't run to a third edition...

Most television series are available pretty much on demand these days. Those you can’t download instantly as box sets are usually to be had on DVD from various sources (including the company for whom I work). Only a few obscure oldies have thus far escaped the safety net of digital formats, and there are usually good reasons for those omissions (tied up in rights hell, junked, etc).

Before we had the luxury of so much content at our fingertips, how did we TV junkies preserve the memory of our favourite shows? Options were few in number: you could carefully place a microphone in front of the television set and record the soundtrack as the programme went out, complete with familial coughs and complaints about the non-delivery of groceries (our mum, during an episode of Captain Scarlet recorded on December 8^th, 1967). In the case of a very few TV series, the BBC and various record labels saved you the trouble, by releasing soundtracks on LP and EP formats. A couple of classic Steptoe & Son episodes were thus available, as were one or two of the television Hancocks (occasionally re-recorded for album release). Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 records capitalised on the popularity of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and others by releasing 33rpm 7” EPs, adapted from television soundtracks or specially written for the format. The number of Thunderbirds episodes given this treatment is truly mind-boggling, but at the time, I was aware of only a handful: I was given the Thunderbird One EP as a birthday present in 1966, but saw little or nothing of the subsequent releases, which covered about half of the televised stories. Captain Scarlet’s efforts were, in a couple of cases, comically awful. The writers of these audio episodes seemed to take a perverse delight in setting their stories in decidedly uncool locations like Bodmin Moor or Athlone: stand by for accents, of the comically stereotyped variety (one of the characters in Captain Scarlet Vs. Captain Black sounded uncannily like Mrs. Pogle).

Such efforts were as high-tech as it came in the ’60s and ’70s. Beyond the realm of the LP and EP, the only items of television memorabilia worth the candle were the various paperback novelizations and tie-ins, published to cash-in on popular contemporary programmes. During the 1970s, when such artefacts were still appearing on a regular basis, I began to discover some interesting examples of the phenomenon from the previous decade. I even began to read them. One or two of them were worth the effort, but a great many were exactly what you’d expect: hack work, quickly knocked up from supplied scripts by writers who probably didn’t even own a television set. I think of them as ‘illiterature’: books for the television generation. That’s me, squire.

Who, you may wonder, would have wanted to read a paperback novelization of Z Cars? Enough to warrant two different collections adapted from TV episodes, and published by the short-lived Oxfam imprint Trust Books. As such efforts go, these were surprisingly well-written, and, as I discovered much later with the release of some early episodes on VHS tape, extremely faithful to the scripts that provided the source material. A further, original Z Cars novel appeared in the form of Barlow on Trial, from Panther books, while the Arrow imprint provided two collections of real-life stories from Det. Inspector William Prendergast, one of the former officers who acted as advisers to the TV series. Later still, further Z Cars scripts appeared in print in a couple of Coronet paperbacks tied-in to the Softly, Softly series. The fact that these books include episodes that are now lost adds value and significance to what would otherwise be ephemeral items.

Over on the other side, ITV’s programmes were receiving similar treatment: The Avengers began appearing in various paperback imprints, beginning with a Consul books edition tied in to the Cathy Gale episodes, and running through to the end of the Linda Thorson era (by which time the paperback series had been transferred to the USA and were available as imports with their distinctive yellow-edged pages). Danger Man spawned a series of pulpy novels, from writers like Peter Leslie, who would also go on to provide some of the British Man from UNCLE series (of which more in a later blog), while Gideon’s Way, deriving from original literary sources (John Creasey writing as J.J. Marrick) received some low-key tie-in covers where the only element from the TV series was a very small inset photo of John Gregson in the title role. Surprisingly, the television series with the strongest literary pedigree of this era – The Saint – spawned only a couple of editions tied-in specifically to the televised episodes (although the series was promoted on the rear covers of the long-running Hodder paperbacks).

I was constantly surprised at some of the titles that I turned up during trawls of secondhand book shops: an original McGill (Man in a Suitcase) adventure, in the form of The Sleeping Cupid (from Daily Mirror books), and novels of The Champions and Strange Report from Hodder. The decidedly odd Champions novel (The Sixth Sense is Death) came from the pen of John Garforth, who also penned four Emma Peel-era Avengers books. The latter, despite some decent efforts at replicating the voices of the characters, included some highly wayward episodes such as a whole sequence in which Steed appears in the nude – unthinkable on television.

A selection of Armada's Gerry Anderson tie-ins. (I've got all the others before you try to sell me your spare copies).

As a child, visiting our local branch of WH Smiths, I was somewhat surprised to notice Captain Scarlet paperback books on sale. I ignored these on the innate assumption that all paperback books were intended for grown-ups, but a year later was given, as a birthday present, Joe 90 and the Raiders, an Armada Paperback novel by TV21 hack Todd Sullivan. Armada had, in fact, been issuing paperback tie-ins since the days of Stingray, many of them from the pen of ‘John Theydon’ (John Jennision) whose storylines usually featured a claustrophic sequence in a tunnel or volcano or both. I acquired them all from market stalls and second hand bookshops during the 1970s, although multiple purchases were a necessity, since Armada’s sub-standard bindings caused the books to shed their pages like autumn leaves.

It is a somewhat shaming omission that, for a good many years, TV tie-in paperbacks accounted for the entirity of my reading that wasn’t demanded by school. Even books like The Colditz Story only found their way into my hands as a result of watching the BBC series and were, naturally, specially-reprinted tie-in editions. My diaries from the 1970s catalogue an endless run of fictionalised television, interspersed with Bonds and Alastair Maclean. I don’t think I read a single ‘proper’ novel for pleasure until Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall some time around 1977.

As a collector, I’ve held onto these old paperback editions, and taken as a whole they provide a pretty good instant reference as to what was hot and what was not on television in the 1960s and 70s. There are some interesting omissions: Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) never made it into print, and neither did Department S, although paperback writer Jason King did eventually make it into print as part of a deal between ATV/ ITC and Pan books.

Of this mixed bag, the most interesting are probably Penguin’s Quatermass paperbacks, presenting scripts in book form, and the most obscure item is probably Strange Report. There are still dozens on my shelves that I’ve never read, and probably never will (life’s too short, etc), but reading them was only ever half the fun to a collector. In some cases, it was none of the fun at all...