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| Corgi's Man from U.N.C.L.E. Oldsmobile, complete with Waverly ring (not mine, I'm sorry to say) |
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 24th
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.
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| 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.
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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...
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