The strange immortality of the toyshop icon...
One of the side effects of being a well-known actor in an iconic television series or film is that sooner of later you’ll probably get turned into a doll. It tends to affect performers in most fantasy, spy-fi and horror series, and I’ve always thought what a curious thing it must be to see your effigy in a toyshop window, a plastic plaything, an action figure that will long outlast the original. But in order to become an effigy, one must first become an icon. And David McCallum was certainly that.
For viewers of a certain age, McCallum will forever be Steel to Joanna Lumley’s Sapphire. Others will remember him as Ashley-Pitt (‘Dispersal’), the ingenious inventor of The Great Escape. He was incarcerated again in the BBC’s Colditz between 1972 and 74, and rendered see-through in NBC’s short lived The Invisible Man in 1975. Still more recently, he became familiar to modern audiences through his role in NCIS which endured for twenty years. For me, though, he will always be Ilya Kuryakin. And it was in this incarnation that he became immortalised in soft poly vinyl sometime in the late 60s by Gilbert Toys. I discovered their UNCLE action figures in an out of the way toyshop in Southern Ireland in the summer of 1970, where they had probably been gathering dust for several years. The dolls were cheaply made and not a patch on Palitoy’s definitive Action Man: simply dressed in black trousers and roll neck sweater, each came equipped with a pistol in a shoulder holster. If I’d been Robert Vaughn or David McCallum, I’d have found them laughable if not insulting, and as the image below shows, the resemblance to the actors was slight to the point of non-existent. Action-figure Ilya looks rather more like John Inman: ‘Mr. Kuryakin, are you free?’
In his UNCLE alter ego, David McCallum became a poster boy of the mid 60s. His youthful looks belied the fact that he was over thirty when the series started, and the same age as Robert Vaughn, who looked decidedly more mature. Seeing your image on the covers of books and magazines must be just as uncanny as becoming a plastic doll, and McCallum’s face was plastered all over teenage publications, not to mention the many ‘literary’ spin-offs from his TV success. In the face of such iconography, it can be hard for a performer to be taken seriously, and I always had the impression that the real David McCallum was studious and rather intense. His appearance on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury in 1960, alongside his then wife Jill Ireland was decidedly straight-faced and he was withering to the point of condescension in his assessment of some of the music on offer. Something of this seriousness comes across in his portrayal of Steel, and in the character of Simon Carter in Colditz, but he brought a much lighter, charismatic approach to Kuryakin. Both he and Vaughn always looked as if they were having a ball in the UNCLE adventures.
It could be argued that of all the pop culture heartthrobs of the 1960s, Ilya Kuryakin was an excellent role model: a Russian who was on ‘our’ side. In an era still tainted with the dregs of McCarthyism, a positive portrayal of a Soviet agent on American television was quite a daring decision, and Kuryakin’s example paved the way for Star Trek’s Mr. Chekov a couple of years later.
It’s a fine tribute to McCallum that his UNCLE character is still remembered over fifty years after the series ended, and was namechecked in every one of today’s obituaries. It was the show that made his name, put his face in hundreds of books and magazines, and his cartoon image in comic strips. It also put him in the toyshop window; not merely as an action figure but a feature on a must-have toy car, Corgi’s famous ‘Thrush Buster’ Oldsmobile, where a tiny, plastic McCallum could be made to pop out of the passenger window by pressing the periscope on the roof. It's a strange form of immortality, and it's granted to only a few of us...
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