From the Riviera to the Back Garden

 

The Persuaders! at Fifty

Surely the most fondly remembered of television’s ‘playboy’ adventure series, ITC’s The Persuaders! reaches its half century this week. It may be fifty years ago, but I can clearly remember the sense of excitement and anticipation that preceded the arrival on our screens of Lord Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde. In the week or so prior to the series coming on air, ITV ran an action-packed trailer, cut together from key episodes; a montage of punch-ups and car chases, peppered by comments from Judge Fulton (Laurence Naismith), the man who, in that first episode, brought together ‘nitro’ and ‘glycerine’ and then lit the fuse... The trailer was enough to convince myself and my brother to be in front of the television set on the evening of Friday 17 September, when it all kicked off.

1971 was, for me, the second year in which I’d been aware of a certain amount of ballyhoo emanating from our two UK television stations with the onset of autumn: new programmes and new schedules to usher in the long, dark evenings. I remember returning from the newsagents’ with the latest copy of TVTimes, which had The Persuaders! featured on the front cover. If it was on the cover of the TVTimes, it had to be good!

Needless to say, The Persuaders! did not disappoint. The first episode delivered everything the trail had promised, and no 10-year-old TV-infatuated kid could fail to be impressed at the outrageous antics of Messrs. Sinclair and Wilde as they fist-fought their way through expensive hotels on the Riviera. This seemed to me like the kind of lifestyle one might aspire to as a grown up: fast cars, a funky wardrobe, dolly birds a-plenty. If that sounds like an unrealistic fantasy, it’s worth pointing out that, aside from the, ahem, dolly birds, the crime fighting and the Riviera lifestyle, one of our uncles conformed almost exactly to the Wilde/Sinclair model: rich, flash-car owning (Jensen Interceptor), and kitted out in all the requisite groovy clobber (a fair amount of which passed into our hands when he cleared out his wardrobe later in the decade). If your uncle could look like and (almost) live the life of one of those TV playboys, then why on earth shouldn’t I, a few years from now? My brother and I took several small steps towards achieving the look when our mum bought us each a flowery cravate, and I also owned a maroon blazer with gold buttons that was totally Brett Sinclair.

We had for some time played games of TV spies at home, the downside of which was that one of us had to play the sidekick while the other got to play the hero. The Persuaders! with its dual leads, was a much better format for us: my brother had curly hair and was a bit more feisty in temperament than myself, so he was perfect casting as Danny Wilde. I, on the other hand, had straight, mid-brown hair with a slight wave, and, of course, the requisite wardrobe, so I fitted perfectly into the Brett Sinclair role, while the back garden became our French Riviera. What these games consisted of, apart from running around with toy guns, I can no longer recollect, but in due course it was whittled down to the simple suggestion of ‘let’s have a Persuader-fight’, which was the cue for throwing fake punches, missing by miles and accompanied by vocalised ‘bish’ sound effects.

One Persuaders! game we were denied was the use of toy cars. Whilst Dinky toys already offered a red Ferrari that bore a passing resemblance to Danny Wilde’s mode of transport, there was nothing on hand we could use as Brett’s golden Aston Martin. I still feel the lack of the Persuaders! gift set I’d been expecting for Christmas 1971 from Corgi or Dinky, and am certain it would have shifted more units than Corgi’s disappointingly gadget-free ‘Diamonds are Forever’ Ford Mustang of the same year.

 

We had better luck on the comics front. My brother had been getting Countdown comic since its launch earlier in the year, and now the comic underwent a minor face-lift, drafting in The Persuaders! as its cover stars at issue no. 35 with a cover date of October 16 – less than a month after the series had gone on air. Promising as this might have looked, the series’ popularity as a merchandising money-spinner proved to be short-lived. By April of 1972, Countdown was revamped yet again, relaunching as TV Action. The Persuaders! was still on board, but had been annexed from the cover by a certain bouffant-haired timelord. An annual appeared in time for the Christmas market in autumn 1972, while Pan issued a number of paperback novelisations of selected scripts; but the most lucrative Persuaders! spin-off was arguably the 7” single of John Barry’s theme, which made it to a very respectable No. 13 in the UK top 20. With its modish blend of cymbalom and synthesiser, ‘Theme from The Persuaders!’ was almost a reimagining of Barry’s Ipcress File main title, outfitted for the groovy new decade. As a piece of music, it was clearly never intended as anything other than a 30-second long TV theme, and extended to single length, there was nowhere else for Barry’s haunting melody to go. But that didn’t stop people from going out and buying it in the thousands.

The series itself, whilst promising glossy action at the outset, soon got bogged down in a number of dreary-looking tales filmed in the English countryside in the middle of winter, although the change of scenery didn’t trouble my ten-year-old self unduly: if anything, it brought the series closer in spirit to our games in the back garden.

I remember a palpable sense of disappointment when The Persuaders! reached its last episode in the spring of 1972. Friday evenings would never be quite the same again, and with Roger Moore elevated to Bond-in-waiting, a second series was never going to happen. The era of the TV playboy adventurers was drawing to a close. Instead of the hoped-for second series of The Persuaders!, autumn 1972 brought us the lacklustre double act of The Adventurer and The Protectors filling the same Friday evening slot. I hated them both from the first night. ITC seemed to be sending out a message to viewers: ‘we can keep on churning out this stuff indefinitely, but look how bad it’s going to be.’ Gene Barry and Robert Vaughn may have been international stars, but they both looked ready to take the money and run, where Curtis+Moore had clearly been enjoying themselves immensely.

The Persuaders! is remembered as the high water mark of the whole playboy adventurer genre, for all that it was, if anything, a swansong. Despite being aimed squarely at the American market, the series enjoyed its greatest success across Europe, where the appetite for glossy, implausible action/adventure series showed no signs of abating, and several episodes did good business at the box office when edited together into feature films. Feature production was, of course, the Holy Grail for Lew Grade’s ITC, which was gearing up for an ultimately ill-fated move into the Hollywood blockbuster arena.

By the summer of 1973, Roger Moore was James Bond and Tony Curtis was between roles. The back garden was back to being the back garden, and on television, The Persuaders! enjoyed a brief run of midweek repeats before ending its UK broadcast days as late-night and afternoon filler. As for my ambitions to become an international playboy myself, I suspect that ship has sailed. I did, however, add my own small contribution to Persuaders! history by designing the packaging for the DVD and blu-ray releases of the series; and, at an event to celebrate the series' fortieth anniversary in 2011, I found myself opening a bottle of champagne at the request of Lord Brett Sinclair himself. Maybe my destiny was not to be Roger Moore after all, but Ivor Dean...*

 

(* Who played Lord Sinclair's butler)

Platoon, Hup!

With its cover date of one hundred years hence, and content drawn from the science-fiction imagined worlds of Gerry Anderson, the comic TV21 seems like a strange place to encounter the character of Sgt. Ernest Bilko, late of Fort Baxter, Roseville, Kansas; but it was here, in the autumn of 1967, that I first became properly aware of the character.

TV21 had always contained a number of funny pages, usually based on popular American television comedies of the era. My Favourite Martian was there from week one, slickly drawn by Bill Titcombe; and although I have never to this day seen an episode from the series (haphazardly shown across the ITV regions and never troubling our screens here in the Midlands), it always felt like a good fit with TV21’s sci-fi slant. By the same token, Mel Brooks’ spy-spoof Get Smart, debuting on BBC One in October 1965, played well alongside TV21’s spy in residence, ‘Agent 21’. The Get Smart strip, drawn by artist Tom Kerr, made its debut in January 1966, along with The Munsters. So far, so good. But hold on, Sgt. Bilko? How does he fit into the TV21 melting pot? And, as Colonel Hall might add, staring bemusedly into the middle distance,‘why?’

* * *

The Phil Silvers Show had debuted on British television in 1957, quickly becoming a perennial favourite, and retaining a place in the primetime schedules until well into the next decade. Late in 1966, BBC One began a repeat season variously billed as ‘Bilko Returns’ and ‘The Best of Bilko’. The episodes did exactly what it said in the Radio Times, presenting a selection of classic episodes drawn from across the show’s four seasons, but leaning heavily on the superior first and second years. After a short lay-off, these broadcasts recommenced in April 1967. The early evening timeslot, placed directly after the news, meant that the series registered, if only dimly, on my personal TV radar, although I didn’t really take much notice at the time. It was only when I saw it later in TV21 that I remembered the barrack-room comedy I’d seen snatches of several months earlier. The masthead photos also served as a reminder that the strip’s origins were on television, as did the Columbia Broadcasting System copyright credit at the bottom of the page. 

Bilko’s presence in TV21 was almost certainly a result of those 1966-67 repeats. The series filled a gap between the second series of Get Smart and the return of The Munsters. Someone in the TV21 office must have been keeping tabs on both titles, and when Bilko hove into view, his place in the comic was assured, albeit short-lived: Ernie’s first appearance was in issue 139, with a cover date of September 16, 1967, just two weeks before a facelift that would see the introduction of Gerry Anderson’s latest series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Missing a single week (issue 153), Bilko continued in TV21 until its next revamp at the end of the year, clocking up 14 strips in all. Once again, Tom Kerr was on artwork duty, and provided some passable likenesses of Bilko and Colonel Hall. Of the other platoon members, only Doberman was recognisable, although Paparelli was often referred to, despite his likeness bearing no resemblance to actor Billy Sands. The single-page strips were, of necessity, very simple, but stuck to the series’ formula of involving Bilko in various finagling get-rich-quick schemes and gambling.

Bilko's first appearance in TV21 (September 1967)

By the time he was given his marching orders from TV21, Bilko had also departed the small screen, for a lay-off that would last six years: no episodes were shown between March 1967 and April 1973. When he returned, it was in what would become the series’ best known timeslot, late Saturday night, once considered a graveyard slot, but latterly revered for its ‘post-pub’ potential. Despite being recognised as a ‘thing’ only relatively recently, the ‘back from the pub’ effect almost certainly helped to foster a revival of interest in Bilko, with episodes in this time slot scoring notably higher ratings than might have been expected. A tradition was born: Sgt. Bilko would retain his Saturday night commission (with occasional sideways moves into the Sunday/Monday small hours) for another ten years. I was well aware of these late night repeats, but even on Saturdays, they felt a little too late for me. I didn’t know then what I was missing.

A fact which surfaced occasionally in my readings on the subject of vintage television around this time concerned what might be called the ‘DNA’ of Hanna-Barbera’s series Top Cat, which had been a long-time favourite since childhood. Now and then, I would come across the suggestion that Top Cat’s format and characters had been derived from Sgt. Bilko. Every time I turned up this fact, I made a mental note to check out Sgt. Bilko some time, if only to play the game of ‘spot the voice artiste’.There seemed no hurry to do so: a casual glance at the Radio Times on any given week usually revealed Bilko to be present and correct in his customary place in the schedule; a reliability record that Colonel Hall would have found it hard to credit...

During 1980, I must have stumbled on the old Top Cat fact again, because it was on Saturday 7 June of that year that I finally burned the midnight oil, staying up to the ungodly hour of 12.15am to take in my first ever episode of Sgt. Bilko, which aired that night at 11.50. The Radio Times had long since stopped printing episode titles, but I accidentally ‘invented’ the correct title when making the entry in my diary: The Song of the Motor Pool. (The diary also notes, with an exclamation mark, that the episode’s copyright date was 1956, making it the oldest programme being shown on television at the time.) As Bilko episodes go, it’s not in the first rank, but it came from the second series (which I would later come to revere as the show’s ‘golden era’), and the plot, concerning an attempt to win a cash prize for composing an original platoon song, was classic Bilko fodder.

The Top Cat connection was immediately apparent when I heard the voice of Doberman, instantly recognisable as Benny the Ball, whose rotund physique also recalled the appearance of actor Maurice Gosfield – a name I recognised from Top Cat’s end credits. The rest of the platoon vaguely suggested Top Cat’s other cohorts, while the authority figure of Colonel Hall became Officer Dibble. As to Bilko himself, it was clear that, in the lead vocal role, Arnold Stang had based his T.C. peformance on that of Silvers, but it was more than mere imitation. Curiously, I know people who love Top Cat but can’t get on at all with Sgt. Bilko...

The next episode I caught, on 5 July, was Bilko’s War Against Culture, which saw the Sarge counteracting the influence of a Cultural Officer who arrives on the post with the aim of taking the men’s minds off gambling. With Bilko’s influence, her lectures soon provide ripe fodder for betting. A further episode followed on 26 July, and a couple were missed through clashes with other late-night shows (The Outer Limits and a horror film). Thereafter, a lull intervened, with no further episodes airing until a single night in October. By the time a more organised run of repeats began early in 1981, I now had the means to capture the series on video tape, and the 25-minute episodes provided a neat way of filling up the blank space at the ends of 3-hour tapes. VHS also meant that, when an episode proved to be a classic (The Twitch, Empty Store, Eating Contest, Rest Cure, Sick Call Ernie), I could watch it again and again. Which is why, today, and without looking it up, I can tell you the average weight of Richardson’s Owl...*

The 1970s and 80s repeats of Bilko were a completely random collection of episodes, initially deriving from the first and second series, but delving into the third and fourth years as time wore on. Later episodes were instantly identifiable from Bilko’s headgear: his peaked cap, pale khaki in the first two series, was now in ‘dress uniform’ dark green (or grey as we saw it on TV). It wasn’t long before I began to notice a slight decline in quality from the high water mark of series two, with episodes often replaying earlier plot devices, generally to poorer effect. There was also less of Bilko’s so-called ‘fatal flaw’, an empathic side to his character that saw him back off when he realised a money-making scheme would cause hurt or upset. On the other side of the fence, Colonel Hall gradually became less of a bumbler, and was sharper in picking up the scent of another Bilko scheme.

One week, an episode turned up which I guessed – correctly, as it turned out – to be the last ever produced. Weekend Colonel sees Bilko employing a lookalike of Colonel Hall to get round camp regulations, a scheme which ends up with the Sergeant and his cohorts Henshaw and Barbella behind bars and monitored on closed-circuit TV. In a deliberately ironic piece of dialogue, the Colonel, gazing at his TV set, remarks: “It's a wonderful show, and as long as I'm the sponsor, it will never be cancelled.” Bilko the series wasn't as lucky, and without the Colonel's sponsorship, was cancelled at the end of its fourth season, seemingly on account of the actors’ payroll – maintaining such a large cast can’t have come cheap. In America, the series immediately sold into syndication on rival network NBC, who reportedly did well out of the deal. Here in Britain it remained on BBC television, where as we’ve seen, repeats would endure initially until the mid 60s. Over on ITV, Phil Silvers’ replacement vehicle – imaginatively titled The New Phil Silvers Show, tried but failed to transplant the Bilko formula from barrack room to factory floor.

Back in the 1980s, I was amassing dozens of Bilko episodes on tape, some of which would be played time and time again. I was still relying on made-up titles to tell the episodes apart, and eventually, in search of some better information, I visited Birmingham’s old Central Reference Library, where a complete run of Radio Times resided in the stack. These soon furnished me with proper titles and a good overview of the series’ broadcast history in Britain. BBC repeats remained a cross-series grab bag until 1984, when, in recognition of the show’s continuing popularity (and the surprisingly high ratings of the late-night broadcasts), a new time slot was found: 6.15 on BBC2. This must have been a little too early for some: indeed, I could rarely get home from work in time myself, but video saved the day. This repeat run, prefaced by a short Bilko documentary (narrated, somewhat incongruously, by Kenneth Williams), finally presented the episodes in their original, American first-run order. With 142 episodes to get through, it would prove hard to keep track of the repeats, and I’m afraid I never quite did. Many years later, I was still turning up episodes like Bilko the Potato Sack King (series 4, episode 4) that had sat unwatched on the shelf for decades.

When DVD arrived to supplant VHS as the home entertainment medium of choice, Bilko seemed like a certainty for release: a video edition would have been simply too much bulk to contemplate, but on DVD, the four series could be accommodated across a more modest number of discs. It was a long time coming – first we got a ‘best of’ compilation, followed by a standalone series one. Eventually, the long hoped for complete set emerged, and while there were noticeable quality issues with the encode (and, in some cases, poor source material), we did at last have all four series within our grasp. I still haven’t got through all the episodes... 

Back on the BBC, repeats of Bilko continued into the 90s and beyond. By this time, I’d given up trying to keep track of the episodes, which were now liable to turn up almost anywhere in the schedule. But even the greatest TV series of all time has to end somewhere, and after fifty two years on air, Bilko drew his last breath on terrestrial television on Bonfire Night 2004 with the episode Bilko and the Flying Saucers. (My own summary of Bilko’s BBC career can be found on Wikipedia where I posted the results of various Genome trawls around five years ago).

Bilko may be over sixty years old, and its production limitations all too apparent on screen, but it is still, for me, the single funniest television series ever created. Highlights are too numerous to list, but honorable mentions must go to Rest Cure – for the funniest scene ever mounted (Colonel Hall’s barnyard imitation: a scene so funny you can tell where it was edited because everyone on set surely cracked up) – and Bilko’s TV Idea: arguably the first example of post modernism on television and a sharp dig at the clichés of the ‘comedy situation’ at a time when the genre was still in its infancy.

I’ll take even the poorest Bilko episode in preference to anything that modern TV has to offer: and while Bilko may hail from an age when different values held sway, it is refreshingly free from the kind of casual, cheap racism and sexism that provided so much fodder for so-called comedians of the same era. Nat Hiken, the series creator, was, simply, a comedy genius, who had an extraordinary facility for creating mini-comic masterpieces. Bilko is, simply, better than anything else, before or since; even the revered Fawlty Towers cowers in its shadow. It will never be bettered...

A museum dedicated to the career of Phil Silvers can be found, somewhat unexpectedly, in Coventry:

www.sgtbilkosvintageemporium.com

(* Three pounds, six ounces: It’s For the Birds)

'It must be funny, the grown-ups are laughing'

 

Growing up with comedy

It may seem surprising – indeed, it surprised even myself when I realised it – but the first comedies I remember seeing on television were all American: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Car 54, Where Are You, Bewitched, The Beverley Hillbillies. Of contemporary British sitcoms – The Rag Trade, Marriage Lines, Bootsie and Snudge, etc – I have no recollection whatsoever. Was there a reason for this? Were American comedies more plentiful in the early 1960s? Were they scheduled at times when I would have been more likely to see them?

Taking a popular British sitcom of the era as a baseline – Steptoe and Son – we find that, around 1965, it was being shown at a typical timeslot of 8pm: quite late for me as a four-year-old, but hardly post-watershed; by 1965 it was on even earlier (7.30pm) and it is around this time that I first became aware of the series: although I didn’t sit down to watch an episode until much later. Curiously, I remember taking note of the show because it was being promoted on air as the end of an era: the current series was to be the last, a fact which prompted comment from my parents and grandparents. The programme trail – containing clips from the episode Those Magnificent Men and Their Heating Machines – is my earliest memory of this iconic series, and dates, I believe, to a Sunday evening in the autumn of 1965, with the trail promoting the following night’s broadcast.

So, I knew something of Steptoe and Son, but what of, say, Tony Hancock? Like many other series of the very early 60s, Hancock remained well off my personal radar until much later. I have the vaguest recollection of my dad commenting regretfully on his passing in 1968, but the name meant nothing to me at the time. Of ITV’s crop of comedies, the only one I knew at all was Just Jimmy, the televisual vehicle for diminutive Lancashire child impersonator Jimmy Clitheroe, and then only on account of its family-friendly teatime slot on ABC television. Clitheroe was also familiar from Sunday afternoon radio broadcasts; but in spite of the plethora of comedy emanating from the ‘wireless’ at this time, I remained oblivious to almost all of it.

It’s safe to say that, at the age of four or five, I didn’t understand comedy in anything other than in the broadest, slapstick terms. Laurel and Hardy had been broadcast on BBC television since 1947, and their antics were familiar to me from an early age, alongside Bob Monkhouse’s Mad Movies, a weekly showcase for silent-era knockabout comedy from the Mack Sennett stable. But sitcoms?

American imports certainly lay thick on the ground in the early 60s, if only because studios were able to crank them out in such quantity and on film, which lent itself to broadcasting in the UK without the compatibility issues that would dog later, colour VT shows from the States. The Dick Van Dyke Show was very familiar to me, and it had the advantage of a relatively early evening timeslot, having moved from 8.50pm to 7.35pm early in 1964. By May 1966 it could be seen even earlier, at 7.05pm. I must have seen (or sat in front of) plenty of these, although the only things that remain in my memory are his comedy tumble in the opening credits, and his portrait beneath the closing captions. I do, however, remember a kind of warm, happy feeling that this show seemed to exude, although I can’t detect any of this from looking at a sample episode today – the humour is fairly forced, although DVD himself is amusing to watch.

Also around ‘64 or ‘65, I got to see a show with some serious comedy credentials: Car 54, Where Are You came from Bilko creator Nat Hiken, and featured as its leads two comic actors who had both been seen in the Phil Silvers Show – Joe E Ross had memorably portrayed luckless Sgt. Ritzik across three seasons, whilst Fred Gwynn (later to achieve immortality in the role of Herman Munster) had been in two episodes as the preternaturally gifted but downbeat Ed Honegar. Car 54... was, mysteriously, scheduled during children’s programming hours, with a slot at 5.25pm, which explains how I got to see it. I’m not sure I even twigged it was meant to be funny, although the laughter track (a subject I will return to in a future post) must have provided a clue.

Another familiar show from the same era was Bewitched, although this tended to air in a later timeslot, debuting at 8pm in October 1964. Despite this handicap, I’m sure I saw at least the cartoon title sequence at this date, with full episodes coming a little later: by July 1966, Samantha and co had landed in the more kiddy-friendly slot of 7.35pm. Again, I remember the same sense of cosy, domestic warmth that Bewitched gave off. I’m even convinced that I acquired my love of mid-century interiors from watching this and The Dick Van Dyke Show: barring the obligatory big telly, my living room of 2021 could have been set-dressed for a revival of either.

Aside from these few grown-up examples, the place for humour on TV at the age of five or six was cartoons: and with their laughter tracks, Hannah-Barbera’s offerings like Top Cat and The Huckleberry Hound Show were a kind of sitcom for kids. But again, we’re looking at American imports. When, exactly, did British comedy – specifically, the sitcom – arrive in my life?

Aside from the aforementioned Jimmy Citheroe, the earliest example of a British-made situation comedy that I know I watched – and enjoyed – at the time of its first appearance, was Oh Brother! This was a monsatic comedy vehicle for Derek Nimmo, whose slightly effete, fluting-voiced performance struck me as funny at the age of seven (the series debuted as part of the BBC’s autumn season in 1968) but now is beyond endurance. That same autumn, ITV gave us Please, Sir! which quickly became established as a favourite in our house. It was somewhat too old for me, but I could just about relate to the schoolroom setting.

The actual experience of watching comedy as a child is interesting: taking an example like On the Buses, I was immune to most of the smutty innuendo, but I could still appreciate the comic qualities of a character like Inspector Blake. Watching sitcom in childhood was often a case of ‘the grown-ups are laughing, so it must be funny’: even if I didn’t quite get what everyone was laughing at. And, as previously mentioned, there was a feelgood quality to shows like Bewitched that you could still appreciate even if you couldn’t understand the gags.

* * *

By the dawn of the 1970s, American comedies were losing ground on British screens, with the BBC ditching almost all of its examples, the few that survived the cull being relegated to Sunday afternoons (Here’s Lucy) or late nights (Bilko). ITV offered the likes of Nanny and the Professor, but it was deemed kiddie-fare and scheduled accordingly, whilst others, such as Jimmy Stewart’s belated entry into the sitcom arena, were thwarted by regional variations in scheduling. By this time, though, ITV ruled the airwaves as regards home-grown sitcoms, with a slew of what would prove to be enduring titles rolled out from the late 60s through to the mid-70s: On the Buses, Man About the House, Rising Damp, George and Mildred, Father, Dear Father.

The working-class credentials of many of these titles was a clear factor in their popularity. The BBC had rejected On the Buses and seemed reluctant to abandon the decidedly middle-class arena it had carved out for itself in the genre – a trend that can be traced back to the likes of Marriage Lines (1964) and was still in favour by the mid 70s – cf. The Good Life, Butterflies and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Steptoe and Son, of course, was a very notable exception...

Class distinctions didn’t make any difference to me: I was only interested in series that made me laugh. By the age of 10, my tastes were expanding to accommodate the anarchy of Marty Feldman, whose Comedy Machine was a staple of Saturday nights, and Bob Todd’s forgotten lavatorial sitcom In for a Penny. That same year (1971) I discovered The Goodies, which finally breached the gap between the madcap slapstick of cartoons, and the verbal humour of the sitcom. It was a golden age for comedy on television, an era in which considerations of taste and decency were kept at arm’s length, and comedy dampers like political correctness and ‘wokeness’ lay decades distant, allowing us to enjoy unfettered nonsense without any self-righteous finger-wagging. But that was then...

Looked back on, much vintage comedy looks outrageously ill-advised and offensive: and scripts are often lazily reliant on cliché, where they aren’t simply unfunny. But such is the nature of reality: things change, ideas evolve, we move on. Whether modern comedy is still funny or not is a different question entirely, and clearly a matter of personal choice and taste. I just know that much of what I see or hear presented today as comedy (especially anything broadcast post-10pm on Radio 4 Extra) seldom raises a smile and is frequently annoying (cf. John Finnemore).

I’ve found, in fact, that I seek out comedy less and less these days: if only to avoid disappointment, as the advertiser’s cliché goes. Even the older series have lost their sheen, aside from a few notable exceptions – Rising Damp, The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles. Yet, if it’s comedy I want to see, I always resort to the DVD player, where I can get to see what is still, for me, television’s outstanding comedy, and the funniest series ever to go before the cameras...

I’ll tell you what it is next time...

 

The Afterlife of ITC

 

Stuart Damon was one third of The Champions, Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner’s ITC adventurers of the late 1960s, and an occasional visitor to other television classics of the era including UFO and The Saint (where he teamed up with Roger Moore in an episode that was effectively a dry run for The Persuaders!) His death, announced this week, caused me to reflect on The Champions – a series I’ve not spent a huge amount of time with in recent years, despite designing various iterations of DVD packaging – and in doing so, I found myself considering the state of archive television over forty years ago.

The Champions was a Friday night favourite in our house during its first run, and I remember it being followed at 8.30 by Doctor in the House: a great night of television when you’re eight years old. Unlike many of the other ITC series, which I saw only piecemeal, if at all, The Champions was a programme we watched every week. It had a superficial sheen of international glamour (all faked up in the studio, of course), and there was plenty of action, as well as three watchable performers in the starring roles. For all this, I think I was most impressed by the opening titles, especially the shots of the huge fountain, which our mum told us was located in lake Geneva. It also had one of my favourite TV themes, a bright upbeat piece from Tony Hatch – whose name I knew very well from those famous rolling credits at the end of Crossroads, and a couple of Petula Clark singles we owned. For a few months in 1968 and 69, The Champions was a weekly event, and that music became as much a part of the ‘zeitgeist’ as anything in the hit parade. The series also became one of the few ITC titles to be enshrined in the medium of the comic strip, featuring in the Joe 90 comic when it debuted early in 1969. For a time, The Champions was a small, but welcome part of our lives. And then it was gone.

A glance through TVTimes listings of the early 70s confirms that The Champions went through one or more repeat runs at this time, but usually at hours when we wouldn’t have tuned in – Sunday lunch or late nights post-News at Ten. So beyond its original run, I didn’t get to see The Champions again for a very long time. Ten years were to elapse before I next had sight of a single episode.

In 1979, vintage programmes like The Champions were as inaccessible as they would ever become. Repeat runs of the ITC series had stumbled to a halt in the late 70s, and it would be another five years before we saw the first of many revivals. The only way to see an episode of anything was to own it yourself, on a film print, or, alternatively, hire it from a film library, strategies adopted by myself and my friend Tim Beddows from around 1978 onwards. A surprising number of ITC series made it onto the medium of 8mm film, some of them complete episodes. These prints originated in Italy and appear to have been quite legitimate copies, produced and distributed by a company called Techno Film. In terms of quantity, you rarely got more than one or two episodes of a given series, but with rarities like Strange Report on catalogue, it was an avenue well worth investigating. Of more uncertain origin was an 8mm print of The Champions, fortunately with a magnetic soundtrack, which turned up in the hire library of Dudley-based film specialists Derrann. Dudley was hard to reach on public transport, and neither Tim nor myself could drive. Nevertheless, one Saturday at the end of September in 1979, Tim made the pilgrimage.

That evening – 29 September 1979, to be exact – was one of potent nostalgia. I hadn’t seen The Champions in over a decade, and the music kindled a warm glow of reminiscence which I took home with me in the early twilight, having walked round the corner to see the film projected in Tim’s living room. Looked back on, it feels like a key moment – a glimpse into the future (there would be many more film screenings to come) and a nostalgic look back into childhood. On the Monday following that memorable evening, I started college, one day after the debut episode of BBC1’s Shoestring. Times were changing, but in a good way. Things were going to be okay. We couldn’t know it back then, but in time, all of those great old ITC series would be returned to us, and both Tim and myself would have a hand in their revival on the as yet undreamed of medium of DVD. 

I didn’t meet him myself, but Stuart Damon lent his name, his time and support to the DVD release of The Champions when it came out back in 2006. He may have left us, but Craig Stirling will always be there, as will so many others – John Drake, Simon Templar, Jason King, Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde – all part of what we might call the 'afterlife of ITC'.

 

From Larkin to Larkins...

 

Essence of ‘71... part one

 

I have started to say

'A quarter of a century’

Or ‘thirty years back’

About my own life.

So wrote Philip Larkin in 1971, in a short poem that would not see publication until after his death. Larkin was 49 when he wrote it. I’m now sixty... and I have started to say ‘fifty years back’ about my own life...

My memories begin around the age of two... hazy from 1963 into 1964, gaining greater clarity during 1965, sharply focused by 1966-67. In 1971, I was ten, and I can remember scenes from that year as if they had taken place last week. It was half a century ago, but I can still conjur up ‘essence of 1971’ with no special effort of memory. It wasn’t a year I remember enjoying particularly, but it’s most vividly recalled through some of the artefacts, cultural and otherwise, that surfaced at the time. For some reason, the summer months are particularly sharply focused. I remember weeks of heat and sunshine during the school holidays, particularly the afternoon of the school sports day. In fact, this short heatwave was something of a blip in what was actually an unremarkable summer. Met Office records tell us that June had been unusually cool and rainy, and August was notable for its frequent thundery breakdowns. It’s July, then, that I’m remembering: the end of term shading into the beginning of the school holidays. This is the story of how it felt to live through those few weeks, such a long time ago, conjured up through the time machine of memory and association... 

 

Endless weeks at number one:

I didn’t care much for the pop music of 1971. Tony Orlando and Dawn had annexed the top of the hit parade in mid-May with the amiable, lightweight tosh of ‘Knock Three Times’. It was somewhat unusual for a single to stick so long at number one – five weeks in total – and even more remarkably, it was replaced at the top spot by yet another song destined to outstay its welcome with another five weeks at the top. I was only ten years old, but I still regarded the inane nursery rhyme twaddle of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ as being aimed at a much younger age group. Like the unborn. Nobody liked it, which begs the question as to how it did so well, for so long. It sounds as bad today as it did fifty years ago, with its half-way-to helium vocals (the master tape was almost certainly sped up). But what it does do is kick down the door to let in a draft of memories from the same time...

The rest of the top twenty didn’t offer much in the way of improvement. Another song that feels saturated in essence of summer 71 is Blue Mink’s ‘Banner Man’. I neither knew nor cared what a ‘banner man’ might be, but this slab of pomp-pop with its ‘sing-a-long-with-the-brass-band’ production was hardly off the radio during those weeks. Hearing it today gives me an instant Proustian rush of sight, smell and taste, beginning with...

 

Refreshing Ferrero Mints:

Nowadays known as ‘Tic-Tac’, these enduringly popular mint capsules were a new arrival on the sweet counter in 1971. I remember being particularly taken with the unique packaging with its flip-up lid. They were introduced to me by a kid who lived down the street, was probably mildly autistic, and looms large in memories of the early 70s. At least they still exist, unlike other confections of the same era: and the mere act of popping one today instantly tops that ‘Blue Mink’ sugar rush of memories, bringing us to...

 

The Munch Bunch: 

Later used as the name of a brand of kids’ yoghurt, back in 1971, the ‘Munch Bunch’ were in fact a series of anthropomorphic fruit characters designed as novelty pencil toppers. My friends and myself collected them as playthings and never put them to their intended use, instead inventing games or building lego vehicles and houses for them. I was introduced to these soft plastic creations by a lad in our class at school: I think he had an ‘Oswald Orange’ (they all sported alliterative monikers). Oswald’s mates included Perry Pear, Bertie Banana and Larry Loganberry amongst others. The first one I acquired was a pineapple (Percy, presumably...) I can still vividly recall the strange sweet scent that it gave off, redolent of Macintosh’s ‘Caramac’, the mere memory of which sets us off again in the mental time machine, arriving at (or perhaps in...)

 

The school swimming pool: 

Our modest suburban primary/infants school had managed to raise sufficient funds to pay for the construction of an outdoor swimming pool, which was ready for use by the early summer of 1971. I don’t believe I’d ever been in a swimming pool before, and was accordingly reduced to bobbing around with a piece of polystyrene as I attempted, without success, to learn to swim. No amount of public information films or entreaties from Rolf Harris could convince me that I needed to be able to swim, and the situation remains the same fifty years later. In any event, I wasn’t keen on any school activity that necessitated getting undressed, so the opening of the pool held no special appeal for me. What I do remember clearly is waiting for that swimming lesson, on Wednesday afternoons, whilst listening to a tape recording of a schools radio broadcast of... 

 

Singing Together: 

This BBC series for schools had been a regular fixture on the radio since 1939, although I never experienced it until this year, and perhaps for that reason it’s Summer 1971’s line-up that remains with me. Last year, I managed to acquire a copy of the accompanying music book (shown above), with its lyrics and simple sheet music for songs including ‘Linden Lea’ and ‘Donkey Riding’. ‘Linden Lea’ in particular, despite hailing from much earlier in the century, is steeped in summer of ‘71 for me, as are several other radio series, heard at the time and barely heard from since... 

 

Many a Slip: 

Like ‘Singing Together’, this was another well-established radio favourite, that had been on air since 1964, although once again, 1971 marked the first time I’d ever heard it. This only happened because a) the BBC had just changed the broadcast time from evenings to lunchtimes at 12.30, and b) I was coming home for dinner during 1971. I think I got home about half way through a typical episode, and I never understood exactly what was going on: two teams comprising, on one side, ‘The Gentlemen’ (David Nixon and Richard Murdoch) and on the other, ‘The Ladies’ (Isobel Barnet and Eleanor Summerfield) had to spot deliberate solecisms in short passages composed for the programme by Just a Minute creator Ian Messiter. It’s actually very entertaining when you’re of an age to follow the proceedings, but back in 1971, all I noticed about it were the familiar voices of David Nixon, host Roy Plomley, and ‘Musical Mistakes Man’ Steve Race. Most vivid of all, though, was the idiosyncratic theme tune composed by John Baker of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, using his standard technique of tape cut-ups. This was a fairly recent arrival, with earlier episodes going out sans intro or outro music, and with its burbling, synthetic soundscape, the MAS theme sounded exactly like ‘essence of early 70s’. Sadly, only a handful of episodes survive, the nearest to this era hailing from 1973. I only heard the series for this one season, and never again until a one-off repeat around 1991, when the theme song instantly transported me back to ‘that’ summer...

Those radio lunchtimes are, indeed, a particular feature of my recollection of 1971, with the schedule comprising a panel game, comedy or drama series at 12.30 followed by ‘The World at One’, presented at the time by veteran broadcaster William Hardcastle. Wednesday lunchtimes featured a programme I have never heard since and which, by extension, is almost certainly lost. Bernard Miles and Betty Marsden starred in ‘Just Perfick’, a series adapted from the popular Larkins novels of H.E. Bates. I can still hum the theme music, or most of it, but the rest is gone. Hearing it on those warm Wednesday lunchtimes was a reminder that an afternoon of Singing Together and swimming lessons lay ahead... and in retrospect, there's something very H.E. Bates about that songbook cover...

And, Larkin being where we came in, Larkins feels like an appropriate point to go out on... but we’re not done yet with 1971.. 

 

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN SUMMER

Barlow and Watt pose on the Ripper trail for a Radio Times cover in 1973

The right programme, the right time...

It’s summer... the days are warmer and longer, there’s no excuse to be indoors staring at the television, with the curtains closed. That’s the theory, as espoused during the 1970s by our mum (and, I’m sure countless other parents). The reality was, of course, rather different. Summer holidays meant morning repeats of Stingray and The Adventures of Tintin amongst others. During the afternoons, if you picked your moment (according to which ITV region you were living in) you could spend an hour in the company of Adam Strange, Frank Marker or John Drake. But what happened in the evenings? Some of my TV memories are so specific to long summer evenings that it feels almost obligatory to watch those programmes at this time of year. I’m re-running one at the moment.

Jack the Ripper, a curious documentary-drama hybrid, presided over by the fictional characters of Detective Chief Inspector Barlow and Detective Inspector Watt (late of Softly Softly:Task Force) turned up on BBC1 during the summer of 1973, and although I wasn’t a fan of Softly Softly at the time, I was curious to find out more about this notorious episode of Victoriana. The programmes are slow, very talky, and consist in large part of actors in period costume reading archive documents aloud. They’re frankly, a bit boring. But the low budget studo-based production made for a unique atmosphere, no small part of which owed to the marvellously evocative theme tune, courtesy of Bill Southgate (who had previously arranged the title music for Softly Softly). Southgate’s darkly eerie theme for woodwind ensemble, featuring bass clarinet, instantly became my favourite aspect of the series: and when it was re-used, somewhat less appositely, for Barlow and Watt’s follow-up investigative series Second Verdict, I recorded it on a cassette. Watching Jack the Ripper again, forty-seven years later, I still feel the same way: hearing that theme playing out over a rostrum camera shot of an engraving of old London, on a summer evening, just gone twilight outside, makes for a genuinely nostalgic atmosphere. More to the point, back in 1973, it felt somehow right to be watching that series at that time of the evening, and not just because of its emphasis on darkness and dark deeds.

Watching TV back then, when there was no possibility of time-shifting, I often felt that particular programmes gained something from being seen under what might be termed the ‘right conditions’. Strange Report was best experienced on a hot, sunny afternoon in 1976 with the curtains closed, whilst The Prisoner, with its bright, mediterranean colours, struck just the right incongruous note when viewed at 11pm in the late summer of that same year. Morning viewing was the same: even today, I only ever feel the need to watch an episode of Stingray on the ‘right kind’ of summer morning: calm, bright, the air still cool but holding the promise of a sultry afternoon to come. By contrast, Stingray’s eeriest episode, Invisible Enemy, was once seen by my brother and myself on a gloomy late afternoon just ahead of a gathering thunderstorm (7 May, 1970), and was such a good fit with the brooding menace outside that we would talk forever after about the ‘Invisible Enemy Storm’.

Other series that had their moments: The Persuaders! Stumbling across a repeat episode (A Home of One’s Own) on a rainy late spring evening in 1973 felt exactly right. Once again, the episode’s atmosphere was enhanced by the rainy twilight without. Trinity Tales: this neglected but glorious Alan Plater production was given a repeat run on Wednesday evenings in June 1977. I’d seen the earlier broadcasts in late 1975, but the atmosphere properly clicked on those warm June evenings.

Moody & Pegg: ITV’s whimsical flat-sharing comedy drama turned up on the communal telly in the ‘TV lounge’ at ‘Sandilands’, a seaside guest house in Llandudno where our family went for a week in the summer of 1974, and another series was set forever in its given time and place... Murder Most English: first shown in the late spring/early summer of 1977 and repeated at about the same time the following year, these comic tales of murder and intrigue in a very English community felt to me like ideal summer evening viewing: midsummer murders, one might say... Shillingbury Tales... one of the more obvious candidates, but well placed at about 7.30 on a summer Sunday evening. I could go on. In fact, I will...

Budgie, unearthed by Channel 4 in the mid 1980s after gathering dust for over a decade, felt perfectly placed on Friday evenings during the summer, even if I mostly ended up watching them on VHS the following day. The BBC’s Star Cops, from the same era, was another example – it felt more at home on a light evening than it might have done during the autumn or winter. And don’t ask me to explain why because I can’t. In all these cases, where the programmes are still available to watch on DVD, I always favour a repeat run at the ‘right time of year.’ I’ve long maintained that, in the arena of TV and film nostalgia, you get a better ‘hit’ the more you’re able to recreate the circumstances of your original viewing experience. If you can get hold of the right chocolate bar or savoury snack, so much the better. For years, I couldn’t open a bag of Walkers’ Roast Chicken crisps without a Proustian mental image of the opening credits of Fireball XL5...

Of course, some of the strongest memories attach to those series we shall never see again. It’s a Knockout was tailor-made for long summer evenings, and as it was shown on Fridays, it meant you got to stay out longer in the garden, devising ingenious games to be played with buckets of water...

What this all means is that, for me at any rate, archive viewing is not so much a question of what one wants to watch as what it feels right to watch at a specific moment. It still applies, even today. I never watched Columbo during the 1970s, but I’ve latterly found the ideal home for it, at about 6.30-7.00pm on a Sunday evening. Equally, certain Ealing comedies play very well for me on summer evenings at around 8pm, so that they’re coming to an end just as the twilight is coming on. ‘The aesthetic fool’, you may think, and you’re probably right... now, where’s that Columbo box set?

 

 

THE FULL ENGLISH

 

 

Nostalgia, the 1990s, and the Missing Postman

‘1990s’ and ‘nostalgia’ are two terms that don’t quite go together for me, but if I had to argue a case for there being such a phenomenon, I’d look to a pair of documentary series aired on BBC2 early in the decade, which are as good a portait of the times and the prevailing zeitgeist as you’ll find anywhere. Directed by Nicholas Barker, and with a distinctive aesthetic that was much imitated at the time, Signs of the Times* (1992) and From A to B (Tales of Modern Motoring) (1994) allowed ordinary individuals to talk about their lifestyle and motoring choices without the moderating influence of a presenter or voice-over. This made for a revealing set of programmes which probably tell us as much about the inhabitants of 1990s Britain as any demographic survey, and were also highly entertaining. But they’re not the subject of this blog.

I recently revisited a BBC comedy drama hailing from later in the same decade, which is what got me thinking about the subject of 1990s nostalgia. Because despite having been filmed over the summer of 1996, on location across a broad swathe of ‘Middle England’, I’d argue that this particular artefact of the decade is actually a form of nostalgia for another era altogether. Its heart is certainly in the right place, but that place is the 1950s, or perhaps more specifically, that mythic ‘golden age’ 1950s as depicted on screen in numerous old British movies, particularly those emanating from Ealing Studios.

The Missing Postman was offered up by BBC1 as a holiday treat across two nights over the weekend of Easter 1997. I watched it at the time and found it a warm, feelgood production with strong overtones of earlier British drama/whimsy hybrids such as The Beiderbecke Affair. The resemblance is more than coincidental, as former Beiderbecke front man James Bolam stars here as a similarly low-key, undemonstrative character. In The Missing Postman, he plays Clive Peacock, a Dorset postman who, unwilling to accept early retirement, cycles across Britain, delivering the letters from his final collection to the farthest corners of the nation. En route, he meets up with a collection of mildly eccentric characters, any one of whom might have been plucked from some Ealing classic like The Titfield Thunderbolt. With its theme of the little man fighting the system, Postman is, indeed very much like Titfield...

The film takes about twenty minutes to hit its marks, and is almost derailed early on by an ill-judged, exaggerated turn from Robert Daws as Clive’s manager at the sorting depot. Once he’s off screen, however, it settles down and, barring an encounter with Roger Lloyd Pack (who seems to have driven in from an episode of The Avengers), it’s a smoother ride from thereon in. Whimsy is never far from the surface, and the preoponderance of jaunty ‘English’ incidental music occasionally lends an air of Wallace and Gromit being done with real people. Without Bolam in the title role, it may well have been too cloying a mixture, but his performance is admirably restrained throughout, in contrast to some of the comic stereotypes we find elsewhere. Jim Carter is always watchable, but the comic cop he plays in a double act with his WPC ‘oppo’ Gwynneth Strong (best known for her role as Rodney’s girlfriend Cassandra in Only Fools and Horses) is a shade too contrived for the mix, and their bumbling sub-plot is often at odds with the film’s more human, thoughtful moments.

Comic stereotypes aside, The Missing Postman is a veritable who’s who of British acting talent, with room for everyone from the likes of Alison Steadman (as Clive’s DIY-manic wife) and Stephen Moore, to Roger Sloman and Milton Johns. Barbara Dickson gives a creditable performance as an obsessively epistolary widow with whom Clive shacks up for a night or two on the Isle of Arran. There’s even a moment when the script dallies with post-modernism: taken up by a smart PR operator (Larry Lamb), Clive has his appeal explained to him over breakfast in a posh London hotel: ‘You’re the full English, red telephone boxes, Morris Minors’. Which is, of course, a neat summary of The Missing Postman itself.

The Missing Postman may have been filmed in the 1990s, but it was nostalgic for a different era. Sure there’s modern technology (it puts Clive out of a job) and even mobile phones (their use reserved for the gaggle of media types who doggedly pursue Clive in his quest), but it’s as much a portrait of the 1990s as The Titfield Thunderbolt or Genevieve were portraits of the 1950s. The Britain they all aspire to never really existed. It’s the world in which Bertie Wooster, Steed and Mrs. Peel and the old codgers from Last of the Summer Wine beetle down leafy country lanes in a glorious, endless English summer. Not a bad place to be, all things considered: and after a year under lockdown, The Missing Postman is an ideal viewing tonic for anyone sick of confinement to quarters: we get to see a broad swathe of Britain from the Solent to the Scottish islands, and very pretty it all looks. Does any of it ring true? Not really, but one could argue it isn’t supposed to, and it’s fun while it lasts. This is a little slice of Brit fantasy, an alternate reality where a runaway postman becomes a national hero and everyone lives happily ever after.

If there’s one aspect of the film that seems firmly rooted in its time and place (aside from the awful, dull-as-ditchwater 90s cars) then it’s Alison Steadman’s insane DIY makeover which forms a subplot to the main chase story: while her husband is ‘on the run’, she transforms their modest suburban home into a gothic nightmare, with wall decorations made from tagliatelli, fake cobwebs and mock baronial swags in the dining room: all of which brings us back to where we started, because her off-kilter stylistic decisions echo much of what was seen in Nicholas Barker’s Signs of the Times, where an unusual number of interviewees had adopted eccentric neo-gothic interior design schemes, and bold colours were the order of the day.

The Missing Postman evidently found favour with viewers and critics, going on to win the award for Best BBC Comedy Drama at the 1997 Comedy Awards (one might, however, wonder exactly how many comedy dramas the Corporation produced that year). It’s not the kind of film one can imagine the BBC commissioning today, although its DNA can still be found in the likes of BBC4’s Detectorists (there’s even a metal detecting scene which strongly prefigures the later series).

Television offers up a lot of what might be called comfort food for viewers, but The Missing Postman served up something a shade more substantial. A full English, indeed.

 

 [* At time of writing, Signs of the Times is available to download on the BBC iPlayer] 

THE UBIQUITOUS UNCLES AFFAIR

 

COLLECTING THE BOOKS FROM U.N.C.L.E. 1974-77

 

The Holy Trinity Affair

I can still remember where I found the first of them. It was 1974, and I was in a small hall, adjacent to Holy Trinity Church in Sutton Coldfield, the venue for a small book fair, no doubt raising money for some worthy cause. The books, comprising mostly of old paperbacks, were layed out, spines uppermost, around the room on trestle tables. In my recollection I was the only person in the room, apart from whoever was collecting the money. A cloistered, almost respectful silence hung over the dimly-lit interior as I wandered around.

I usually expected to come away from such events with a handful of titles and, as I’ve written elsewhere, these were, without fail, all related to film and television. Amongst the serried ranks of old paperbacks, I noticed the title ‘The Man From UNCLE’ on one of the spines. I’d never seen a Man From UNCLE paperback before, and duly pulled it out. The cover was black, with a colour photo of a gun-toting Napoleon Solo. The author was someone called ‘Michael Avallone’ (a made-up name if ever I heard one). It appeared to be a one-off edition. I bought it for a few pence, later to discover that one of the pages was missing...

“... so saying, Napoleon Solo pointed to.... men, are you skinny?” *

I had no idea at the time, but this was merely the first stage in a collecting quest that would endure over the next two or three years. Because there was not merely one Man from UNCLE paperback... there were... well, how many exactly? Finding a defintive answer to this question would take me a surprisingly long time...

In a nice blend of randomness and logic, the next UNCLE book I discovered was number 2. As well as a number, it had a title: The Doomsday Affair (adopting the familiar form of the titles from the TV series). So far, so good. Two novels seemed like a reasonable number to expect of such a series... until a few months later when a friend from school, also bitten by the collecting bug, showed me a copy of number nine. Nine? Logic dictated that no series would end on nine, and we not unreasonably expected there to be a Man From UNCLE number ten out there waiting to be discovered...

Around this time, I was gradually finding new sources of supply of old paperback books. Bookshops, obviously, although not all dealers went in for the kind of pulp tat I was after. Junk shops were another source, along with various market stalls and, of course, jumble sales. Each new source added to the likelihood of uncovering more UNCLE titles. From Erdington’s Wilton Market I found copies of numbers three, four and five in the series... The Copenhagen Affair, The Stone Cold Dead in the Market Affair and The Finger in the Sky Affair. Before too long, a sixth volume turned up, The Dagger Affair. How many more might there be?

Quite soon, a pattern began to emerge. Certain editions in the series were much more common than others. Numbers three, four and five in particular. I soon lost count of the number of times I came across copies of The Finger In the Sky Affair, with its amateurishly colourised black and white cover photo of David McCallum. It wasn’t long before numbers seven and eight could be ticked off the list – The Radioactive Camel Affair and The Mad Scientist Affair respectively. Number eight was soon vying with number five as the most commonly encountered edition. But where was number ten? Did it even exist?

My friend from school soon threw a spanner into the works by finding a copy of not number ten, but number eleven! This meant, of course, that there must be twelve in the series, for no series would finish on eleven. Still no number ten, of course, and without a checklist of titles to refer to, we didn’t even know what it was called or, crucially, what colour the spine might be to guide us towards our goal on some dusty bookshop shelf...

The Weston Super-Mare Affair

I was on holiday in Weston Super Mare in the hot summer of 1975 when I turned up an unexpected addition to the list... number 13, The Corfu Affair. This was getting out of hand now. I ought to mention that I was, in a sense, collecting these books for the sake of collecting them. I hadn’t actually read many of them, and even today, some forty five years later, I still haven’t caught up. I’m not even sure why I bought them in the first place: The Man From UNCLE wasn’t a series I’d watched on television (although I’d still been bought Corgi’s ‘Thrush-Buster’ car when it came out in 1966), and I really only knew it from the sporadic appearance on television of some of the ‘movies’ (ie. two-part episodes edited together). These were treated with a surprising amount of fanfare whenever they turned up in the early 70s, and were often given the star treatment of a big Saturday or Sunday evening slot. If this seems unbelievable, remember that we’re talking about the days before television had acquired the rights to the James Bond films, and a slick but available 60s spy-flick like one of the UNCLE ‘movies’ felt like far more of a big deal than it had any right to be...

Back on the paperback trail, we were knee deep in Mad Scientists, had maxed out on Stone Cold Dead in the Markets and couldn’t move for Radioactive Camels. But still no number ten! My mate came back from a weekend away with his mum and dad proudly waving a copy of – my God, number fourteen! Or The Splintered Sunglasses Affair to give it its ‘proper’ title. The trail seemed never ending. Another school friend soon lent me a copy of a fifteenth title – The Power Cube Affair – which I duly read and returned. It would be a while before I turned up a copy of my own, and as for Splintered Sunglasses, the best I could manage for a long time was a very scruffy copy from one of the markets in Erdington (which smelled of disinfectant: the book, I mean... and the market as well, come to think of it).

The trail finally ended in a junk shop in Walsall, one Saturday in, I think, 1977, almost three years on from my discovery of the first UNCLE paperback. It was here that I found what looked to be a mint, unread edition of Number 16 in the series – The Unfare Fair Affair (a title I challenge you to utter aloud without sounding like Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours). Of course, there was still no guarantee of this being the absolute last in the series, and I still held out some faint hope of there being as many as twenty. But no, it turns out that we were done...

Ah, but no so fast Mr. Solo... what about that elusive number 10? What about number 12? These remained the hardest editions of the series to pin down, and I remember it being a good few years before I finally lucked onto a copy of number 12, The Monster Wheel Affair. Number ten, The Diving Dames Affair did eventually come to light, but by this time it was merely a gap to be filled on the shelf... because nobody wants a series of books that jumps from nine to eleven, do they?

 

The Sorry About the Cover Affair

And even then we’re not finished; because unknown to me at the time, there had been a related book from the same publisher, The Man from UNCLE ABC of Espionage, never to join the others in my collection. Later still, I discovered that the original American series had run to the decidedly odd number of 23 titles, some of which occasionally surfaced here in England. Their covers, however, were a sorry affair which, despite including some good photographs, suffered from inappropriate typography (American paperbacks have always had badly designed covers...)

Looking back on the British series – and I still have them all ranked on a bookshelf – it occurs to me to wonder why some of the titles turned up in such quantity whilst others were much harder to find. Was it that David McCallum’s mug sold more copies? Certainly he featured on both of the most common titles, numbers 5 and 8, but he was also on the scarcer editions too (for the record, Solo and Kuryakin each clocked up nine covers, appearing together on just two). Of one thing we can be fairly certain: the editions which were turning up in the greatest number had clearly sold more copies at the time of publication, and any that failed to sell would have been returned and pulped, hence their scarcity. The series was at the height of its popularity in 1966-7, which is when the most common editions were printed, but by 1968, fewer people were willing to blow their three shillings and sixpence on a copy of The Splintered Sunglasses Affair. Another question we might consider is why the British series stalled at sixteen when there were still seven more titles available? The most obvious answer is simply that 1968 saw the end of the BBC’s broadcasts of the series, the last episode going out on Saturday 31 August. With no TV shows to fuel demand, sales of the books no doubt dried up fairly quickly. The BBC wouldn’t broadcast another episode until a one-off in 1981, while it was over on ITV that the films became a scheduling staple during the early 70s.

There is, of course, one final point to address before we exit Del Floria’s tailor shop by the street exit. Was any of those sixteen titles I spent so long in acquiring actually worth reading?

What do you think?

 

* For those not in the know, a reference to the Tony Hancock TV episode The Missing Page. Or The Stone Me Affair, whichever you prefer...

 

 

 

Countdown to Look-In: The Comics of 1971

 Part Two: The Space-age Comic

By early 1971, TV21 was failing. What had once been the most prestigious comic in Britain, with the best artists, and content sourced from some of the most popular television titles of the day had been reduced to a travesty: Marvel characters abounded (fine in Marvel, but unwelcome in TV21); original material was dull and derivative, the page size was the smallest of any British comic, and the paper was cheap. Of the science-fiction content that had once been its raison d’etre, only Star Trek remained, and its one-time artist Mike Noble was long gone, having vanished through the time-barrier to Look-In. There was no earthly reason to carry on having TV21, and Look-In had been its de facto replacement for me. But within weeks a new comic emerged, a comic that not only featured UFO (plus Dr. Who to boot), but which promised its readers nothing less than the entire Gerry Anderson universe. Countdown had arrived...

With its funky futuristic masthead, cute ‘reverse page numbering’ gimmick and science fiction/ science fact content, Countdown was an impressive new arrival, at least from where I was standing. And they had me taped from day one by promising all of those Gerry Anderson series. They couldn’t all fit into one edition, of course, and instead, Countdown would rotate new comic strips of every Anderson series from Fireball XL5 to date, mixing serial stories with ‘Countdown Complete’ adventures – these being self-contained stories told within a single issue, their pages spread evenly throughout the comic.

I'd pitched hard for Look-In and had it bought for me from day one. Having bagged this prize, however, I was out of luck when Countdown came along. All things being equal, our mum decided that this new comic would be bought for my brother. Which didn't really matter, because I still got to read it, but it did mean that the groovy space wallchart that came free with issue one would hang above my brother's bed, not mine. Still, I had my Magpie studio cut-outs to play with (Look-In’s enticements with issues one and two), and the ‘Star Wheel’ free gift out of isssue three. I’m fairly certain they’re still around somewhere...

Like Look-In, Countdown was heavily promoted via TV advertising: indeed, this was probably how we found out about it. I'd been getting its sibling title TV Comic on a semi regular basis since 1969, so it's likely we would have seen some promotional items in there; but it was the TV ad, with its clips of Gerry Anderson's UFO that really sold Countdown to us. At last it became clear why Look-In had no Gerry Anderson content: Countdown had pre-empted the lot!

Countdown arrived in our house on Saturday 13^th February, 1971. It was immediately clear to me that I’d backed the wrong horse with Look-In: this was much more my kind of comic. I don’t think there was a single item in that first edition that didn’t have some kind of appeal for me, with the possible exception of the titular strip – of which, more later.

Issue One featured a complete UFO story, whose interstitial photographs look like a nod back to TV21. The UFO artwork was, sadly, not of the first rank, coming from the capable, but uninspired Jon Davis, whose art I recognised from the by now defunct Joe 90 comic. Crediting the artists was a laudable development in Countdown, as British comic artists were very rarely acknowledged in print, and only a very few were allowed even to sign their pages. Elsewhere in that same issue there were two very nice Thunderbirds pages from Don Harley (his tight, realistic style always found favour with me), a double page colour Dr. Who from Harry Lindfield (great art, but his style was too loose for my hyper-critical 9-year-old self), another page of Jon Davis (Joe 90) and some very rushed Captain Scarlet art from John Cooper that looked more like a rough visual (I know a lot of comic fans seem to like John Cooper, but I’ve hated his art from the first time I saw it in TV21).

There were two more colour pages inside that first issue, and these were given over to the comic’s sole original creation – Countdown. Featuring spaceship designs licensed from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and some extremely stylish art from comic strip giant John M Burns, Countdown looked and read like a feature one might have expected to find in some hard-nosed sci-fi periodical aimed at a much older readership. By comparison, the Gerry Anderson fare seemed naïve. Countdown told the story of the titular ship’s return to Earth after a long voyage of discovery. Unfortunately, the planet is now in the grip of a Hitlerian dictator, William Costra, who orders the craft’s destruction, and the first episode swiftly sets the scene for an ongoing struggle between the Countdown crew and the forces of Costra’s evil empire. Sounds familiar? I wonder if Terry Nation ever saw a copy... ?

Today, I can see John Burns’ artwork for the genius it undoubtedly was, but back in 1971, my opinion was more equivocal. Burns’ work seemed to set the bar for art in Countdown, with an almost psychedelic style that employed hard coloured shadows and innovative line work that made the characters or their faces seem to merge into their backgrounds. If Top of the Pops had made an episode of Dr. Who, it would probably have looked like this. Similar techniques were employed by Harry Lindfield and Gerry Haylock, whose colour UFO strip appeared from issue 2. I liked Haylock’s artwork a lot – his work on Land of the Giants for the Joe 90 comic had been superb, resulting in strips that made the TV series look rubbish by comparison. But whereas Haylock and Lindfield mixed realistic and psychedelic effects on a single page, and generally erred more on the side of realistic depictions and colouring, John Burns took more chances. Faces were seldom flesh-toned, and his pages often had a dark, green/pink/magenta vibe suggestive of a black mass held in a funky discotheque. For me, this was several steps too far into the realm of experimentalism, and accordingly, I tended to skip the Countdown strip.

The mature tone of the Countdown storyline was echoed by the comic’s approach to editorial, a sizeable chunk of which (in issue 1, at any rate), came courtesy of the editor of the UK journal Flying Saucer Review. Features on space exploration were clearly intended for consumption by budding James Burkes, and in general, there was a technocratic tone to the proceedings that probably hadn’t been seen in British comics since the glory days of Eagle. TV21 had certainly never patronised its readers, but it didn’t take them half so seriously as did Countdown...

It wasn’t all rocket science, though: Countdown found room for a single humour page every week, in the form of Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines. Printed in blue and black line and wash, this was a splendidly-illustrated strip, perfectly in tune with the original cartoons. Ironically, though, the artist went uncredited, while lesser contributors were getting their names in print...

Countdown’s second issue saw an editorial mis-step in the decision to feature Gerry Anderson’s seldom seen The Secret Service as its complete story. Even at the time, I found myself wondering what they were playing at. The one redeeming feature of this story is that it did what the TV series itself had been incapable of, by supplying an origin story for Father Unwin and his ‘minimiser’. This was probably deemed necessary, given that most ITV regions had passed on the series and new readers would have understandably wondered what the hell was going on. I’d watched The Secret Service and derived a certain amount of enjoyment from it, but it certainly wasn’t Thunderbirds; and to feature it so prominently so early in the run of a new comic must have been close to editorial suicide. Jon Davis’ art didn’t help, either: his Father Unwin was unrecognisable as the real world or even puppet version of Stanley Unwin, looking more like the bespectacled half of avant garde artists Gilbert and George...

After four issues, Countdown’s stylish masthead changed colour from blue and purple to a less attractive red/ magenta scheme. Red has always been seen as a classic ‘stand out’ colour for comic and magazine covers, so the change is perhaps understandable: but I always preferred the look of those first four editions. Editor Dennis Hooper didn’t go back on his Gerry Anderson promise though, and as the weeks went on, Countdown found room for every series from Fireball XL5 up to present: with, it has to be said, some mixed results.

The covers of Countdowns Nos 1 through 3 had been excellent, featuring photographs of UFO, a solar prominence and Jon Pertwee’s Dr. Who respectively. Thereafter, science-based images prevailed, with an odd mix of press agency material featuring Nasa astronauts, hot air balloons, formula one racing cars and a vintage London omnibus with the result that Countdown began to look less like a comic for kids and more like a niche magazine for men of a certain age. Someone must have said something, because after a time, the comic strip content, which had previously been confined to the inner pages, began to break out onto the covers. Someone may also have noted that, with its sci-fi and hard science pitch, Countdown was failing to find an audience. Interest in space and science fiction had fallen off a cliff after the first few Nasa moon missions. The general public, and that includes the average comic reader, quickly began to accept the space programme as commonplace. You’ve seen one man land on the moon, you’ve seen them all. You’ve even seen them abort and turn back in a nail-biting drama that makes a smashing film... Science fiction had been all well and good in the early days of the space race, but science fact was taking the sheen off the average space opera, and it would take the phenomenon of Star Wars, still six years in the future, to remind everyone that deep down, they still liked spaceships, robots and ray guns...

None of this cut any ice in 1971, and in the autumn of the year, after some 34 editions, Countdown began a slow process of reinventing itself. The Gerry Anderson and science fiction content was still present, but was now elbowed out of the spotlight by those two playboy adventurers Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde, known collectively as The Persuaders! This was the big television event of autumn ‘71, and Countdown quickly took it on board; one might imagine them beating off Look-In’s Alan Fennell with a big stick to secure the rights. The inclusion of a non-SF strip was the first sign of a sea change at Countdown, which soon began to include the tagline ‘for TV Action’ as part of its masthead. The change would finally come on April 1, 1972, with a de facto relaunch that saw Countdown ‘absorbed’ by an all-new title: TV Action...