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'.
