“If you fill Ilya Kuryakin’s head with water and squeeze it, he cries real tears…” or… The Spin-Off Toys Affair

Corgi's Man from U.N.C.L.E. Oldsmobile, complete with Waverly ring (not mine, I'm sorry to say)

Back in the 1960s, it was possible to be aware of a TV series or film without ever seeing it: such was the growing power of merchandising. Aged just four, I knew all about James Bond simply because Corgi Toys had produced a James Bond car to tie-in with the release of Goldfinger: but I didn’t actually see a James Bond film for another nine years. When they produced another tie-in vehicle – a rocket-firing Toyota as seen in You Only Live Twice – I had that one as well, despite knowing nothing about the film. Likewise, the extremely cool car driven by The Green Hornet – whoever he might be. I’m not sure I cared, but to this day I find it hard to understand why a British toy manufacturer chose to produce a model tied in to a series that wasn’t even being broadcast here in the UK. For all I know, it might have made it onto some of the other ITV regions, but here in the Midlands, we certainly never had sight of it.

One series that most definitely was being shown across the UK – by virtue of its having been purchased by the BBC – was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And in the week we lost Robert Vaughn, I found myself pondering on how I first became aware of a television series which, to the best of my knowledge, I never saw when it first appeared.

The BBC scheduled The Man from U.N.C.L.E. immediately after Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings, with the first episode going out on June 24^th 1965: about a year after the series had made its debut in the USA. It was a canny piece of scheduling, because the stars of U.N.C.L.E. – David McCallum in particular – quickly became established favourites of the pop pin-up magazines. But it was too late in the evening for me. Although I remember seeing Top of the Pops during this era, its end time of 8.00pm was my bedtime: and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remained in its 8pm timeslot until 1968, when I dimly recollect it being on Saturday evenings after Simon Dee’s Dee Time. But I’d known about the series since 1966, when Corgi Toys issued their ‘THRUSH-Buster’ – a modified casting of their existing Oldsmobile Super 88…

To this day, I have no idea whether or not the U.N.C.L.E. agents employed this vehicle in their adventures, but it certainly never featured in any of the films, which, unlike the TV series episodes, I did get to see when they came to television in the early 1970s. Either way, it was a notably cool Corgi toy, with its gun-firing Solo and Kuryakin, who popped alternately out of the driver and passenger window if you pressed the periscope on top of the car. Which one was driving? Did it even matter? I still have my original ‘THRUSH-Buster’, which I believe was given to me as a birthday present in 1966 or 67.

My playworn 1966 original, not in bad shape considering... (note the Green Hornet's Black Beauty parked alongside… and Dylan and Mr. Rusty of The Magic Roundabout getting in on the act.)

As if the car wasn’t cool enough, it came with a special ‘Waverly’ ring, which showed a picture of either Mr. Solo or Mr. Kuryakin depending on which way you tilted it. This was, of course, an example of the familiar lenticular image effect that had been around since the 1940s. But in 1966, aged five, I’d never seen anything like it before, and wouldn’t again until I spotted The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request album sleeve in a branch of WH Smith about a year later. Sadly, although I tried very hard to take care of it, my own ‘Waverly ring’ was last spotted at the bottom of a box of mixed junk (bits of broken toys, badges, cereal premiums etc) sometime in the early 1970s.

Although the Corgi car certainly helped to bring The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to my notice, there were other items of merchandise associated with the series: I had at least two different cap guns, and U.N.C.L.E. adventures formed part of the disappointing TV Tornado when it launched in January 1967. I well remember having this comic and being completely aware of who the Men from U.N.C.L.E. were by this point – so maybe I’d got to see some of the TV broadcasts? If I did, then I have no recollection of it.

Although the series was shot in colour from its second season onwards, the BBC broadcasts came to an end before the debut of colour television on BBC1, and their Genome database reveals that no episodes were shown beyond the summer of 1968. Apart from a solitary episode – The Arabian Affair – shown as part of a short season of one-off oldies in 1981, the BBC never showed a single stand-alone U.N.C.L.E. episode again. One possible reason for this might be that the Corporation had been supplied with black and white prints for broadcast (although the aforementioned episode was certainly screened in colour). Maybe it was simply that the fad for spies and gadgets had waned by the end of the 1960s.

Nevertheless, it was in the 1970s that I finally got properly acquainted with Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin, via the ‘feature films’ (edited together from two-part TV episodes) which became a staple of the schedules during the decade. Curiously, although the series had been bought by the BBC, it was ITV who showed the U.N.C.L.E. movies, and their appearance on TV was usually treated as a bit of an event, with films like The Spy With My Face meriting a prime-time Sunday evening slot. To put this in context, James Bond had yet to make his television debut, and in his absence, Napoleon Solo would do very nicely, thank you...

By this time, of course, the Corgi ‘THRUSH-Buster’ was long gone from the toyshops, along with all of the other mid-60s U.N.C.L.E. merchandise. In fact, the last Man from U.N.C.L.E. toys I remember seeing on sale were a couple of cheap Action Man-type figures of Solo and Kuryakin, which I discovered in an out of the way shop in rural southern Ireland during a family holiday in 1970. These ‘dolls’ were of rudimentary construction, typical of the ‘Japanese Action Man’ figures that routinely turned up in bargain stores, and came dressed in black top and trousers, with a gun and shoulder holster. The arms and legs were simply articulated, lacking the sophisticated ball-and-socket joints of the Palitoy hero, and their squishy plastic heads were easily detached from the bodies. I discovered that, by squeezing their heads, you could induce a range of different expressions into the U.N.C.L.E. guys. Ilya Kuryakin for some reason had tiny slits in the corners of his eyes, probably a side-effect of the moulding process; this meant that, if you filled his head with water and squeezed it, he cried ‘real tears’. Notably, you couldn’t do the same thing with Napoleon Solo, which was entirely appropriate. It goes without saying that the dolls bore scant resemblance to their real-life counterparts, and in my games, Napoleon Solo was often co-opted to play the part of Captain Black against the really rather nice British-made Captain Scarlet dolly by Pedigree.

The U.N.C.L.E. dolls… the versions I had did not 'raise arm and shoot cap-firing pistol', but this pair can be yours from en ebay seller for a mere £500… so you'll need a THRUSH-type plan for world domination to afford them. 

The Sixteen Paperback Books Affair...

During the seventies, the main line of U.N.C.L.E. spin-off merchandising as far as I was concerned was the series of paperback books that had appeared in the previous decade, and were now a staple of just about every secondhand book seller or jumble sale. I found the first of them and thought it a one-off until, about two minutes later, I found number two or three at the same chuch hall-hosted book sale. There was evidently quite a range of titles, and when a friend showed me the orange-covered number nine (The Vampire Affair) I realised there had to be at least ten in the series. Then, about a year later, I stumbled upon Number 13 (The Corfu Affair). How many of these damn things were there? The same friend later produced a fourteenth edition (The Splintered Sunglasses Affair), and a fifteenth wasn’t long in coming. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I found what proved to be the final paperback outing for the U.N.C.L.E. agents, the sixteenth and last in the Four-Square British series: The Unfare Fare Affair. The title alone was enough to suggest that, by this point, the publishers and the hack writers they employed were becoming a little jaded...

Of course, anyone reading this blog in the USA (faint hope) will be thoroughly confused by all this, because there was a ‘same but different’ range of U.N.C.L.E. paperbacks published across the pond. This ‘definitive’ series ran to a staggering twenty-four titles, of which sixteen formed the British run, although the numbering was somewhat at variance; doubtless a THRUSH ploy to ensure confusion amongst collectors...

Aside from the paperback books, there had been a series of U.N.C.L.E. annuals from the reliable source of World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd, who, true to form, bound up some licensed Gold Key comic strips alongside original text stories. I found numerous editions in second hand bookshops, enough to suggest that the annuals outlived the original TV broadcasts by a couple of years. The writers of these tomes, in common with the authors employed on the paperback series, had been handed a gift by the producers of the TV series in the shape of the formulaic titling: every single episode was known as ‘The (insert increasingly absurd combination of words) Affair.’ (Executive Producer Norman Felton would try something similar when he came to the UK a few years later to create ITC’s Strange Report). So for anyone commissioned to write a Man from U.N.C.L.E. story for a book or comic, the simple act of entitling it ‘The So-and-so Affair’ immediately added an air of authenticity, no matter how good, bad or indifferent the writer’s efforts.

For me as an U.N.C.L.E. collector and viewer, interest in the series (or, more specifically, the films) extended well into the 1980s, with the movie versions seldom absent from the small screen for very long. I recall the false dawn of a possible revival in the shape of the TV movie (in other words, failed pilot) The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Although Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were still in pretty good shape, the same couldn't be said for the writing or direction, and the film was a grade A dud, enough to kill any residual interest in the format for another 32 years...

It’s easy to dismiss a series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as lightweight escapist nonsense, typical of the era in which it was produced; and although it’s true that the third season descended into self-parody, at its best it was sharp, entertaining, and never less than watchable, entirely on account of the charisma and on-screen presence of its stars. I’d been planning an U.N.C.L.E. blog for some time, when this week came the news of the sad demise of Robert Vaughn: Napoleon Solo, we salute you.

Closing channel D...

Carry On Bonfire Night...

Who can still sing the old advertising jingle? 'Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks.'

Way back before we had all this Halloween hoo-hah here in the UK, Bonfire Night was the biggest thing on any child’s calendar between half term and Christmas. Trick or Treat was unheard of: I first encountered it via the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz, and absolutely no one, but no one went from door to door blagging sweeties from strangers (and going against everything we’d been told in all those Public Information Films). Back then, ‘Penny for the Guy’ was the thing: I can still remember the sight of these ‘Guys’ being wheeled around the streets, usually in an old pram or pushchair, by a gaggle of unwashed urchins begging money to buy bangers (in the days before the sale of fireworks to minors was banned). The Guy was generally a bundle of old clothes, stuffed and sewn together, topped off by a papier-maché face mask of the style now most closely identified with the ‘Anonymous’ group, appropriated in its turn from the film adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta.

These masks were a common sight in branches of Woolworths’ and local newsagents, alongside the odd ghoul or Frankenstein, which was as close as you got to anything resembling Halloween merchandise. The whole black and orange/ pumpkin/ cobwebby range of iconography simply didn’t exist. Not here in Britain, at any rate.

That’s not to say that we knew nothing of Halloween, or the traditions associated with it. I remember producing drawings and friezes at school, including the above image which dates to around 1969 or 70. But as to the tradition of hollowing out pumpkins into Jack O’Lanterns, well, it just wasn’t possible: pumpkins simply weren’t available in the shops. I remember our mum trying to do the same thing with a turnip, after I’d seen a piece on Blue Peter. It wasn’t quite the same. Now, pumpkins may very well have been available to a BBC researcher who knew where to go for such rarely-seen gourds, but you couldn’t get them at the local greengrocers, and as supermarkets hadn’t yet evolved into anything like their modern form, you couldn’t pop down to Tesco for one, either. Over in the USA, of course, Linus had been sitting out in his pumpkin patch awaiting the ‘Great Pumpkin’ for over a decade, but we in Britain would have to wait a lot longer for pumpkins to appear in the frankly ludicrous quantities in which they are now sold.

Either way, the big autumnal event here in Britain in the 60s and 70s was still Bonfire Night, which meant November 5^th (not the nearest Saturday or the days either side, unless it was rained off). It meant garden fireworks, and sometimes a bonfire, that would invariably produce more smoke than fire. Those garden fireworks included long, spike-nosed Roman Candles that you stuck in the flower bed; small conical volcanoes; ‘screech owls’ (small cylindrical fireworks with a plastic wing attachment that would, once lit, take flight and, on one memorable occasion, fly in through the neighbour’s bedroom window); ‘traffic lights’ (basically a lot of multicoloured smoke); and, of course, the Catherine Wheel, guaranteed to leave scorch marks on the fence post forever after. Most of these were relatively benign, but I recall one particular example that exploded with such force that we all took shelter around the side of the house. In general, though, fireworks weren’t half as noisy as they would later become, and were more about display than making a big bang.

From around mid November, our local toy shop, and the newsagents’ down the street would display their wares temptingly inside glass cabinets: the boxed selections from Brocks, Benwell and Standard, the great names in British fireworks. I remember being mightily impressed by one notably huge firework, with a bore the size of a cardboard postage tube, and wondering what kind of incredible detonation might result once you’d lit the blue touchpaper and retired…

I was never bothered by fireworks, unlike a lad down the street – a year or so older than myself – who would watch the proceedings from the safety of a back bedroom window. I just thought he was missing out on all the fun – the whole idea of standing out in the cold, dark back garden was part of the experience... along with the nervous anticipation while your dad gingerly leaned over the next firework, attempting to light it with a gently glowing spill.

One year... 1966, if memory serves... bonfire night was a washout: the first time in my recollection that it had been rained off. But our dad came home with a cunning ‘plan B’ in the form of indoor fireworks. I was surprised a few years ago to discover that these weird chemical concoctions were still available. Unsurprisingly, they were entirely lacking in the kind of pyrotechnic glory you got from the average box of Standard Fireworks, and consisted for the most part of bizarre smouldering effects such as you might see demonstrated by a benign chemistry teacher. The only one I recall with any clarity was the ‘snake in the grass’, which, when lit, began to smoulder like a cigarette, and slowly exude a noxious turd-like coil of something horrible. It was certainly snake-like in appearance, but a substitute for a good old fashioned Roman Candle it was not…

As I got older, the appeal of lighting your own fireworks in the garden began to wear off, and we would occasionally go out to watch an organised display in some nearby farmer’s field. In place of fireworks, the big bonfire night tradition became the baked potato: as per my diary entry for November 5^th, 1975. You’ll notice something else here: ‘Watch Carry on Screaming.’ This was, indeed, the ‘legendary’ bonfire night screening on BBC1 that would later unite Mark Gatiss and co, the members of the League of Gentlemen, all of whom shared the same childhood memory of that particular broadcast.

This year – and, I believe for the first time since 1975 – it’s happening again: ITV have scheduled Carry on Screaming for 11.15 on Saturday evening: bonfire night. ‘Frying tonight’ indeed...