In an era when archive television series have become, for the most part, readily available online or on physical media, it’s sobering to look back to a time when television aficionados were entirely at the mercy of the schedulers – who could at times be perverse and capricious in their handling of a beloved old series...
Forty seven years ago this week, ITC’s Strange Report was staggering to the end of what would prove to be its last outing on terrestrial television. As repeat broadcasts go, it’s hard to think of a more inept example. The series had been on air since March of that year, when ATV Midlands dusted off the episodes for a third and final run under the prevailing repeats agreement with the actors’ union Equity. My diary noted its return with some celebration: I dimly remembered Strange Report from its first run back in 1969, when it had been heavily promoted as part of ITV’s big new autumn season, but I had hardly seen any of it: the first few episodes had gone out on Sunday evenings in the family-friendly timeslot of 7.25pm, but quite soon the series was bumped to 9.10pm, possibly on account of some darker storylines that didn’t sit well in a slot more often associated with sitcom and variety. I remembered the series in particular for Anthony Quayle’s very watchable and avuncular Adam Strange, and a rather splendid theme tune. Roger Webb’s memorable piece had found its way onto a Geoff Love TV themes compilation, issued as late as 1972, and having the record in the house served us as a reminder of what had looked like a rather superior offering in the annals of detective drama.
A late night repeat run in 1970-71 had escaped my notice, and was academic, as its 11pm slot was way past my bedtime at the age of ten. So the 1976 repeats looked like a long overdue opportunity to catch up on the series. Unfortunately, ATV had other plans. When Strange Report returned on the afternoon of Sunday 14 March, 1976, it was simply filling a temporarily vacant slot. By 4 April, with only three episodes broadcast, a season of Glenn Ford movies occupied the mid-afternoon schedule, and there would be no further sightings of Adam Strange for the time being. The next episode I got to see, Report 3906: Cover Girls – Last Year’s Model, turned up as morning filler during the half term holiday, and another episode, Lonelyhearts, was shown in a similar timeslot when I was at school and unable to watch.
It wasn’t until the summer that the series settled into a predictable pattern, with episodes occupying a Tuesday mid-afternoon slot at 3.25pm from mid June onwards. This was still no use to me, as we didn’t break up for the summer holidays until 16 July, by which time the episodes Revenge, Epidemic, Swindle and Hand had all been broadcast. We’d taken the initiative, however, by setting up our dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder to enable our mum to tape two of these broadcasts. My friend Tim Beddows, however, thought nothing of bunking off school to watch what had quickly become his favourite TV series.
Opt-outs for racing coverage meant that the six week school holiday yielded only three more episodes that I was able to watch: X-Ray on 3 August, Kidnap the following week, and Heart on 24 August. Our family holiday in July meant I was away for the week in which ATV had scheduled the episode Racist, but in the event it was replaced by Sniper. Tim saw the unscheduled episode, but couldn’t quite remember the title: ‘It was called “Cousin” or something’ he reported to me on my return. As compensation, I’d been able to watch an episode of Danger Man on HTV Wales, where Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet was shown on Tuesday 20 July, complete with its original ad break captions (and a transmission error that saw reel three transmitted in place of reel two: the error was noticed and corrected after a couple of minutes).
Only three more episodes of Strange Report remained to be broadcast, and frustratingly, the series returned to its inaccessible morning slots in September, with Shrapnel broadcast at 11.10am on Tuesday 7 September, and Grenade in the same slot the following week. Of the missing-in-action episode Racist, there remained no sign. In fact it would take another two and a half years for ATV to make good the defecit, and they couldn’t have done a worse job. Racist finally went out, unscheduled, on Wednesday 3 January 1979, as a replacement for a cancelled race meeting. A near neighbour of Tim’s saw it and reported as much a few days later. What made this even more infuriating to us was that the unscheduled broadcast had fallen during the Christmas holidays when we would easily have been able to see it. An angry letter went off to ATV’s head of audience relations, no less an eminence than ‘Aunty’ Jean Morton of Tingha and Tucker fame, but to no avail. The good ship Strange Report had sailed, and would not be seen in the waters of terrestrial television again.
If we’d had to wait for the series’ return to the small screen, we’d have been sitting around until the 1990s, when the episodes turned up on the now defunct satellite channel Bravo in 1996. But by the end of the 70s, both Tim and myself were collecting films, and an episode of Strange Report had, incredibly, been made available in the 8mm format. Unfortunately, it was the supreme dud of the series, Shrapel, featuring a dreary guest appearance from Gerald Flood, and a storyline that was just plain dull.
We did better on 16mm, in which format Tim acquired the episodes Revenge and Swindle: good news in that I’d missed them both on the 1976 broadcasts, and knew Revenge only from its recorded soundtrack.
In the early 90s, a few ITC series began appearing as pre-recorded video tapes, and Tim excitedly reported that Strange Report was due out in this format. One afternoon in 1994, we went into Birmingham where we obtained the tapes from the HMV store. The four episodes released included a couple of decent examples – Heart and Cult – alongside the lightweight Covergirls and the misery fest that was X-Ray.
When the series next appeared in a home media format, it was Tim himself who was responsible. Having set up the Network DVD label in 1997, by 2004 he was able to persuade ITV to agree to a one-off release of his favourite series, using brand new copies prepared for BBC Studios by remastering genius Jonathan Wood. It says a lot about Tim’s loyalty to this oft-overlooked series that he chose it as the very first ITC release on his label, and during the preparation of special features for the release, he met and made a lifelong friend of Anneke Wills. He also asked me to design the sleeve – my first work for the label – as he deemed Network’s in-house designer insufficiently sympatico with Adam Strange. It was a good move, for I would go on to design the packaging for the bulk of Network’s ITC releases. Now, almost twenty years on, it’s mildly gratifying to see my old Strange Report sleeve design being used as iconography on imdb.
Network would go on to release the series' soundtrack in our curious 'CDs in DVD cases' format. A vinyl release was mooted (I went so far as to design a cover) but never materialised. A solitary episode – Kidnap – was upgraded to blu-ray as part of Network's HD sampler series Retro Action. Unfortunately, Tim got his titles mixed up when ordering up the master: he mistook Kidnap for Hostage (our favourite episode) and the error went overlooked. And for anyone wondering why Strange Report never got the full series blu-ray treatment, the answer is simple: Tim was quite happy with the 2004 DVD restoration, and considered a blu-ray upgrade low priority. That's not to say that it wouldn't have come along eventually – like Adam Strange's taxi – but without Tim, and without Network, Strange Report looks destined to remain in standard definition for the forseeable future.
In part two of this article, I’ll take a closer look at Strange Report and examine how well it stands up after fifty four years...
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| A candid shot of Anthony Quayle during filming of an insert for the opening titles. |
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