Whistle Stop

 

Remembering Roger Whittaker (1936-2023)

You had to look pretty hard to find obituaries in the British media for the singer Roger Whittaker, who died last week aged 87. A friend of mine heard it reported on the BBC World Service, perhaps unsurprising given that Whittaker always enjoyed a large following across Europe, where his popularity endured long after his last appearance on the UK charts. What you won’t find in any of his obituaries is much in the way of reference to his career on television. Wikipedia makes no mention of it, and lazy obituarists no doubt rely on that sole source of reference. Even more surprisingly, his own website (which has yet to report on his demise) deals only with his career as a singer. Yet it was on BBC television that I first came across ‘Rog’ Whittaker, back in the mid 60s when he had yet to make an appearance in the pop charts.

Whittaker, raised in Kenya to parents who hailed from Staffordshire, came to the UK in the late 50s to study biochemistry at Bangor University. His first songs appeared on flexidiscs issued with the campus newspaper, and these activities shortly led to his first professional engagements. Folk music was enjoying a spike in popularity in the early 60s, and Whittaker’s style included his unique and very accomplished whistling, a distinctive touch which allowed him to stand out from the crowd of acoustic guitar-weilding troubadours. He was soon signed to Fontana Records, who issued his first single, The Charge of the Light Brigade, in 1962. From here, until the late 60s, he was known professionally as ‘Rog’ Whittaker. It would be seven years until any of his records broke into the UK charts, by which time he was already well established on BBC television and radio. His first BBC engagement was on The Talent Spot, a showcase for newcomers broadcast on the Light Programme on Tuesday 10 April 1962. It was to be the first of many radio broadcasts that year, on programmes including The Monday Show, The Beat Show and Country Club.

In the same year, he secured his first TV spots, on Ulster Television’s This and That, then, in August, BBC Television’s The Saturday Show, a primetime 7pm variety show with an international flavour, introduced by Ted Ray. Whittaker's Kenyan roots were specifically mentioned in the Radio Times billing. In 1964, billed as ‘Roger’, he appeared in Open House on the recently inaugurated BBC2, a programme described in the Radio Times as ‘People – Places – Pops’, on a bill that included Acker Bilk, Vince Hill, Dusty Springfield and The Swinging Blue Jeans.

In 1965, he became a regular contributor to BBC2’s pop/folk showcase Gadzooks! sharing billing on his first appearance with The Byrds and Sonny and Cher. 1967 saw appearances on The Rolf Harris Show, Crackerjack, and a regular guest spot on Now For Nixon, a children’s entertainment hosted by avuncular magician David Nixon and including contributions from Basil Brush. It must have been these appearances on children’s television that first introduced me to the bearded balladeer, with his trademark whistling. His self-penned ‘Mexican Whistler’ became a kind of musical calling card around this time, despite failing to chart in the UK. It turned up regularly on the radio and would almost certainly have been a playlist favourite on the likes of Junior Choice.

'Rog' and his fellow performers on Whistle Stop, 1967

These guest spots on BBC television paved the way for Whittaker to host his own show, aimed at a young audience, which took over the 4.55pm slot from Now For Nixon on Friday 18 August 1967. The new show was called Whistle Stop, its title playing on the host’s trademark performing style. A preview panel in Radio Times summed it up as ‘a fast-moving tour with music, puppetry, quizzing, car-racing and comedy.’ The forty-five minute show was certainly all that. Whittaker, still billed as ‘Rog’, would sing songs and preside over a variety of entertainments, with Richard ‘Mr Pastry’ Hearne and Dodi West as regular contributors. Also on board was puppeteer Larry Parker and his white rabbit glove puppet Theodore – who even received his own billing in the Radio Times. 

The ‘quizzing’ referred to in the Radio Times took the form of a quick-fire contest named, inexplicably, ‘Baddlewat’. ‘The questions are quite simple,’ read the article, ‘ – the accent is on the swiftness of the replies by the two teams of five.’ I can remember this part of the show quite well, but have no clue as to the mystifying title which baffled me then as now. Perhaps it was a call sign like ‘bingo’ that the contestants had to shout out? Either way, ‘Rog’ presided over the game, with assistance from Larry Parker and Theodore. The show also featured a ‘grand prix’ – which to judge from the Radio Times piece was run using slot cars of the Scalextrix variety – and film inserts featuring the misadventures of Richard Hearne in charge of a Scout troop. The show ran for seven weeks, and returned in February 1968, with Whittaker billed as ‘Rog’ in the Radio Times for the first week only. Thereafter, he appears to have settled on Roger for all future performances. For this second series, Dodi West was replaced by Dilys Laye, and Jack Haig’s exploits as ‘Mr Wacky Jacky’ took the place of Richard Hearne’s filmed inserts. This second run lasted an impressive fifteen weeks.

Alongside his TV series, Whittaker was still making regular appearances on radio, contributing songs to The Piano Magic of Ronnie Aldritch during the spring of 1968, and turning up as a guest on various other shows. In April 1969 he hosted a one-off evening show My Kind of Folk on Radio One, and would eventually be given his own mid-morning show on Radio Two commencing in October 1970. By this time, Whittaker had scored his first major chart success with Durham Town (The Leaving), the first of several chart entries that would see him into the early 70s. On BBC television, he returned to guest spots on the likes of Crackerjack and even The Kenneth Williams Show, whilst over on ITV he presented Whittaker’s World of Music, a compilation of which can be seen on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG9q_jYpiJA This was very much of its time, with a studio set that had seen service in many previous pop music productions, and a line-up slanted towards the easier listening end of the genre. It was all a far cry from ‘Rog’’s folk roots. Also on ITV, in 1971, he made a surprising appearance on the soundtrack to an episode of LWT’s Budgie, in which he can be heard singing (and whistling) the songs Two Little Boys and Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, their lyrics illustrating Budgie’s daydream of becoming a ‘have-a-go’ hero. Even further away from his customary territory was Whittaker’s contribution of the title song to Cornel Wilde’s unhinged apocalyptic movie No Blade of Grass. His thoughtful ballad sounds remarkably modern with its warning of environmental hazards and impending natural disaster.

1973 saw him participating as a panellist in a BBC wildlife quiz The Animal Game, which continued into the following year, while the latter half of the decade brought appearances on The Vera Lynn Show, Going For a Song and It’s a Celebrity Knockout amongst others.

Two years later, his chart career underwent an unexpected revival when his song The Last Farewell went to number two in the UK Top Forty. It was only the massive sales of Rod Stewart’s Sailing that prevented Whittaker’s song from topping the charts. It owed its origins to Roger’s Radio Two show, wherein he would invite listeners to send in lyrics which he would then set to music, and had been recorded and released without fanfare on his 1971 album New World in the Morning. The single release came about when the song was discovered by the wife of a radio programme director in Atlanta Georgia. Airplay popularity led to a single release and the song was soon in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It would go on to become Whittaker’s biggest success, selling over eleven million copies worldwide. Promoting the track on British television saw him make a return visit to Top of the Pops. Aged only 29, he still cut a mature figure amongst the post-glam pop idols of the era, but it was not to be his last appearance on the show. His duet of The Skye Boat Song with Des O’Connor became a surprise chart hit in 1986, reaching number 10 and earning him a final appearance on the iconic pop programme.

Whittaker continued to record until 2012, releasing many albums in German during the 1980s and 90s, a reflection of his enduring popularity in that country. At home, he tended to be consigned to the Golden Oldies/ Where Are They Now category, and his sporadic television guset spots had more or less come to an end in Britain by the beginning of the 90s.

For me, it will always be those early TV spots that I remember, Whistle Stop in particular. Information on the show is scant, and it’s taken several years of trawling through archives to unearth anything useful. His obituaries have nothing to say about his TV career, yet as we’ve seen, it was these appearances that established him as a household name and face, well before his chart appearances. His unassuming, avuncular style made him a natural presenter, and it’s surprising he didn’t do more work of this kind. But music was his calling – he’d given up a potential career in science to pursue his real ambition – and it was music that ultimately made him an international star. Roger Whittaker’s career should serve as a reminder that there was once, not so very long ago, a time when talent and originality were all you needed to make it in the entertainment industry. It was his trademark whistling that first set him apart. Now he’s come to his final whistle stop.

Class of '73

 

'Ding-dong, what went wrong? ' Leslie Phillips prepares to trash his career in Casanova '73

TV Highlights (and Lowlights) of September '73

Last time, I looked back at the week I started secondary education, fifty years ago. Until this point in time, TV had tended to take out a sizeable chunk of my weekday evenings (although glancing through old schedules only seems to prove that I never spent as much time in front of the box as I remember). Now, with the accession to Grammar School education, there would be the obligation to do homework of an evening. TV would, increasingly, be taking a back seat... and it was probably for the best.

Coincidentally, the autumn of 1973 proved to be a fallow season on television – at least as far as I was concerned – with few big new series on offer from either BBC or ITV. Britain was sliding into economic crisis under Ted Heath’s Conservative Government, who faced pressure for wage claims from the increasingly militant NUM. By the end of the year, the infamous Three-Day Week would come into force, and the autumn would see fuel costs escalate alarmingly as new conflict kicked off in the Middle East. Belts were being tightened all round, and TV production budgets suffered accordingly. ITV had been clobbered with new rules on taxation of advertising levies, which would effectively shut down the lavish filmed productions like The Persuaders! that Lew Grade’s ITC had bankrolled since the early 60s. With ITV increasingly reliant on American imports and the BBC creatively treading water, there was very little to tempt viewers in the autumn line-up. New programmes were appearing in the schedule before the end of August, but big hitters were in decidedly short supply...

My clearest televisual recollection from September ‘73 is seeing Derek Nimmo’s new ecclesiastical comedy Oh Father! which began its one and only series on BBC1 commencing Wednesday 12 September. This largely forgotten series has, surprisingly, found its way onto DVD and episodes are available online for what they’re worth. I’m sure I only remember it on account of its launch coinciding with the new term, and just to hear the theme tune again would evoke a Pavolvian response to go into the back room and do my homework. The series followed on from Nimmo's popular late-60s comedy Oh, Brother! and saw his character Dominic leaving his monastic life to become a Catholic priest. It can't have been a success, as the series lasted a mere seven weeks and would not return. 

The BBC dominated the week’s schedules in our house, from Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game on Saturday evenings through to Jeux Sans Frontiers on Friday. On Sunday evening, two days before term began, I was tuned in for the first of a new science fiction series on BBC1. Moonbase Three offered a ‘realistic’ view of life on a lunar colony in the dizzying future of – wait for it – 2003. Back in 1973, with NASA’s Apollo programme still active, it seemed quite reasonable to assume that, thirty years hence, humanity would have established such outposts on the moon. The series, which ran for just six episodes, was frankly a bit of a dud. This wasn’t science fiction in the exciting mould of Star Trek or Doctor Who – it was more like The Brothers in outer space: a talky, stagey drama, with no aliens, explosions or any of the other futuristic trappings that Gerry Anderson was in the process of applying to the forthcoming Space:1999. We wouldn’t get to visit Moonbase Alpha for another two years, and in the meantime we’d just have to make do with Moonbase Three. It looked like a lot of plastic egg boxes. It probably was.

Moonbase Three meant we would no longer be tuned in to the sitcom Bowler over on ITV, but that was no great loss. George Baker played the titular character, who was a kind of social-climbing spiv, seen originally in Please Sir! spin-off The Fenn Street Gang. A spin-off from a spin-off. Like Oh Father!, it may be forgotten but found its way onto DVD a few years ago. I should know, I designed the sleeve. Comedy giants John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were the writers. Bowler may have been a dud, but The Good Life awaited them…

Returning for a second series on Wednesday evenings was popular Amsterdam detective Van der Valk. The jolly theme music (originally a library piece) was already on its way up the pop charts where it would spend no less than four weeks at number one. I didn’t watch Van der Valk myself, but that music, more than any other piece of pop culture, has infused my memories of that far off autumn…

Elsewhere on the commercial station, American imports held sway. You couldn’t turn on the telly on a weekday evening without encountering the likes of Columbo, McMillan and Wife or, um, Hec Ramsay (nope, me neither). Fridays brought Hawaii 5-0 and The Streets of San Francisco, while Gerry Anderson’s glossy but shallow offering The Protectors kicked off the evening schedule at 7pm. I didn’t bother with any of them myself.

Star Trek had, by this time, taken up almost permanent residence in the BBC’s evening schedule, and was usually to be found on Mondays around 7pm. 10 September’s episode was one of the worst. The Alternative Factor, despite belonging to the show’s first series, had been deferred in Britain and didn’t air until December 1971, making this only its second screening. The story started well enough, with a mysterious shock wave causing the whole of creation to ‘wink out of existence’ for a second. Unfortunately, it quickly descended into an impenetrable plot about an unhinged alien and his ‘anti-matter’ double who spent the rest of the episode beating each other up. Trek producer Robert H Justman was also behind a new offering this week on BBC1. Search Control followed Oh Father! on Wednesday evenings, with the Radio Times describing it as ‘a new film series starring Hugh O'Brian, Tony Franciosa, Doug McClure as three electronic space-age agents ready for action - anytime, anywhere…’ Known as plain Search in America (the BBC changed the title to avoid confusion with its own series of the same name), the show ran for only one season and from YouTube clips looks to have been typical ‘spy-fi’ hokum. Homework guaranteed I never saw it, but 30 seconds online is enough to be sure I didn’t miss anything…

One of few new arrivals that autumn was a series that, on paper, looked guaranteed for success: Leslie Phillips starring in scripts by Galton and Simpson. What could go wrong? It might be easier to ask what went right. Galton and Simpson completely misread the mood of the nation when they dreamed up this contemporary take on the Italian author and amorous adventurer Giacomo Casanova. Billed as ‘the adventures of a 20th Century Libertine’, Casanova ’73 featured Leslie Phillips as Henry Newhouse (his surname a literal translation of Casa Nova), a typical bawdy, chauvinist, womanising product of his era. The first episode was met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects, and by week two it had been bumped from its 8pm slot to a safely ‘post watershed’ 9.25. I most likely saw that first episode, but it’s the scandal I remember more than anything else. Viewers were tired of being patronised with smutty inuendo and the series did no one any favours. Leslie Phillips would be absent from the small screen for the next twelve years whilst his movie career would remain mired in cheap smut for the rest of the decade. As for Galton and Simpson, Casanova ’73 sunk what was left of their scriptwriting reputation at the BBC. A disappointing effort to revive the old Comedy Playhouse format at ITV lasted only one series and Simpson would retire just five years later.

Finally, a curiosity in the week's schedule that's worth mentioning: Monday afternoon on BBC1 included a series entitled The Fanatics, focusing on ‘people with unusual enthusiams’ to quote the Radio Times. The subjects of this week’s edition? The England Women’s Football Team…

Back to School, 50 Years On

 

September 11 is a date that has gone down in history, for all the wrong reasons. To me it has rather different associations, for it was on Tuesday September 11, 1973 that I started my secondary education, at Sutton Coldfield’s ‘poshest’ seat of learning, Bishop Vesey’s Grammar. The school’s heritage went back to Tudor times. It would be unfair, if not entirely inaccurate to report the same of some of the teaching staff...

To get to Bishop Vesey, one had to pass the eleven plus exam which, for my generation, had been bumped on a year to the age of twelve. In practical terms, this meant wasting a pointless additional year at junior school: a year spent more or less treading water, educationally speaking. That’s not to see we didn’t enjoy it. During that final year, our teacher, Mr. Bashford, was a young, cool guy who, when he wasn’t strumming Simon and Garfunkel songs on his guitar or reading to us from a book of Brian Aldiss short stories, attempted to engage our curiosity by such endeavours as sawing a pig’s head in half (the head was already detached from the pig).

Mr. Bashford may have been a man of his time, but the teachers that awaited us at the Grammar School belonged to a different era. Every five years, a school photograph was taken – the classic line-up of pupils and masters with the school buildings as a backdrop – and each one duly took its place along the corridor walls, to be pored over while we waited to go into our lessons. Amongst the line-ups from the 40s and 50s were faces still recognisable if no longer so youthful. A couple of venerable types might even have been gathering dust since the 1920s.

Their teaching methods were every bit as archaic as one might expect. I recall my very first physics lesson, delivered by a balding, boffinish character called Crook, who looked almost exactly like the headmaster from the sitcom Please, Sir! He was probably better suited to dealing with sixth formers gearing up for university degress, but as far as I was concerned, his lessons were incomprehensible. He marked down my first attempt at homework, but failed to explain where I’d been going wrong.

Crook may have been boring and beyond comprehension, but at least he was reasonably civil, unlike the character who terrorised the biology department. In his old fashioned specs he bore a remarkable resemblance to gangster Ronnie Kray, and was every bit as feared by those unlucky enough to have him for a teacher. Fortunately, our biology master was somewhat more benign, and in his light cream suits looked more like a product of the early 70s. Rather than bawling at the class in the manner of his colleague, he adopted a manner of understated menace.

There was something about the sciences that seemed to foster eccentric or sociopathic tendencies in the teaching staff. Most of ours were either boring, bellowing or bonkers. ‘Dingle’ Dann was all three. I never had the dubious pleasure of being taught chemistry by this ageing boffin/buffoon, who came across as a kind of off-colour Charles Hawtrey, and became a butt for all manner of schoolboy pranks. In my first year, I was taught chemistry by the school’s then headmaster, nicknamed ‘Spock’. He was every inch the balding, slightly bonkers stereotype of the nutty professor, with a kind of manic quality but without the menacing air of some of his colleagues. For all that, his efforts to teach us stuff like the periodic table fell on deaf ears as far as I was concerned. When we returned after the summer break in 1974, it was to the news that ‘Spock’ had died during the vacation. He was replaced by a mathematician with a broad West Country accent and a bantering comic personality, whose most memorable moment was appearing on the BBC’s Ask the Family in 1977.

Not all the masters were knocking on heaven’s door. Some of them were fresh out of teacher training colleage, via Oxbridge (a mandatory requirement to secure a job on the staff). The best of this bunch earned our respect for their easygoing manner – step forward Mr. Fisher of the English department – while the worst came across as tyrants in waiting. Tempers would flare, but always ineffectually.

It wasn’t long before I took to caricaturing some of them. A master in the RE department was known for his prominent chin, and drawing him was easy. Balding, bespectacled history teacher Nick Malden was easier still: all you needed was an oval, a hint of hair at the temples, two blank spectacle lenses and a simple nose and mouth. These activities reached their natural conclusion in the sixth form when I presented an, ahem, entertainment based on imitations and drawings of selected members of staff. Such endeavours are often cited in the biographies of comedians like Steve Coogan. So what went wrong? 

Let’s return to September 1973. I have surprisingly little recall of that first day and how it panned out. Somehow, we were allocated into forms – mine was 2.4 (styled as two/four). No ranking was implied by the numeric system – not this year at any rate. I found myself in a classroom at the dead end of the deepest and dingiest corridor in the whole building, under the form mastership of ‘Herr’ Arthur Cash (he taught German). Mr. Cash was one of the good guys, and as if in Karmic payback, would live to a ripe old age. Many years later, he came to the assistance of our mum when she suffered a fainting fit whilst waiting for a bus in Sutton Coldfield. He was that kind of man: helpful, never angry, endlessly patient and with a warm, avuncular personality.

I don’t remember if we had any actual lessons on that first day, but we would certainly have been issued with timetables which we dutifully filled out, probably copying it all down from the blackboard. I entered mine into my diary for the following year, and it’s reproduced here for what it’s worth. Monday was a horror: double physics first thing (little wonder I couldn’t get to grips with the subject) and the entire afternoon devoted to ‘games’. No self respecting grammar school allowed soccer on the curriculum, so rugby was the order of the day. Aged twelve, I had absolutely no appreciation of what a hard and violent game this was. I soon found out, and despise it to this day. During the winter months, it was either rugby or cross country on those afternoons, and cross country meant a mile walk to the nearby Sutton Park before the run even started. The route was specially chosen to include plenty of swampy, muddy terrain, and it was a long time before I could go back to Sutton Park without rekindling memories of those afternoons of torture.

The school buildings, like the teaching staff, were an uncomfortable blend of ancient and modern. The oldest wing dated back to the 19^th century and strongly resembled Colditz castle, which I knew well from the BBC series. It even had architectural features like light wells, which figured in at least one escape attempt (from Colditz, not school). The heart of the site comprised two wings that had been added on in the 1930s, and contained ‘Big School’ where assemblies for the older years were held. Former science classrooms had recently been turned over to other departments, which meant that our history room had a kind of miniature greenhouse window jutting out at the far end. From this block, a glazed link bridge allowed access to the almost brand-new science block, opened a mere six years earlier, where purpose built labs were available for physics, chemistry and biology. In addition, there was a large art room, complete with a north light – although it’s fair to say that subjects like art weren’t actively encouraged in a school that favoured hard academic subjects. The modern block also contained the school canteen, although modernity did not extend to the menu.

School dinners were dished up on a first come first served basis, with a rota system in operation. Each year would be allocated its place, with sixth formers free to come and go as they pleased. Anything half way decent like fish would soon ‘sell out’, whilst the likes of liver and onions would endure until the end of service, so it was pot luck if your year was last in the rota for the day. It was not unknown for some of us to come away with nothing more than a serving of mashed potato when the meat courses were just too awful to contemplate. Nothing tasted the way one expected. ‘Faggots’ were grey instead of brown, and tasted plain weird. Meat consisted of a lot of scrag end and fat. Even the fish was fake – the price of cod was being driven skywards by the so-called ‘Cod Wars’ of the era, so the education authority specified a cheaper alternative, ‘coley’. It was okay, but you had to watch out for the bones. If all the hot meals were unappealing, there was always the choice of a salad, but – and I’ll never understand how this was possible – school salads always, always tasted odd. They also came with hard boiled egg as standard, and to this day I can’t take hard boiled egg at any price. One was on slightly safer ground when it came to dessert, with a range of tray-baked sponge puddings proving popular (even if the custard tasted slightly odd). Semolina was the one everyone avoided. It might have been quite nice, although I kind of doubt it. It’s best described as white sludge with pink bits. I never indulged. If all else failed, there was always the reliable staple of cheese and biscuits, which came pre-packed in cellophane wrappers. The small oblongs of cheese had an unerring knack of finding their way onto the floor, or even into the water jugs. But at least they were edible. Just.

Like many others, the school was divided into ‘houses’, for the purpose of competitive sporting events. As I avoided sport wherever possible, I took little part in these activities. The junior years all wore ties with a coloured stripe identifying your house. Mine was ‘red’ (someone somewhere lacked imagination – at junior school, our houses had all been named after explorers). In all my years at the school, I think the only thing I ever ‘did for the house’ was to produce a play in 1977.

The regime was not entirely unlike what one might have expected to find in prison. Apart from houses, there were various clubs and societies which one could join, although I also avoided most of these, as meetings tended to be held at lunchtimes when there were often better things to do like, er, hanging around outside. One of the few societies I joined was the weekly film club, which hired out 16mm prints of movies to be projected in ‘Big School’ after hours on Friday afternoons. A few of these passed into school legend. One week, the schlock horror Theatre of Blood was on the schedule, but when the afternoon’s sport was rained off, it was shown to the second years, many of whom either fainted, vomited or both. Needless to say, no one else got to see it. Another entry, 1965’s One Way Pendulum caused a minor stir for being utterly incomprehensible, but I’d wisely chosen not to attend that week. I finally saw it last year, confirming the wisdom of my decision in 1973. It is the worst film ever produced.

The six years I spent at Grammar School feel, in retrospect, much as they did at the time: a kind of cross between Colditz and The Prisoner (we had black blazers but no big white balloons). I was not a number, but I wasn’t free either, and escaping was forbidden (although I don’t recall anyone actually being shot). Tuition methods were slowly adapting themselves to a more contemporary model, but the process was as slow as glaciation. I’ve read accounts of the school careers of writers and actors a couple of generations older than myself, and they tally very closely with my own recollections. The Grammar School experience hadn’t changed much in the hundred years before I started, but fifty years on is unrecognisable. In the 1970s, I used to draw comics at home as a hobby. Today, that would be on the curriculum, and don’t think I’m joking.

All that remains of my old school is the building itself, and the less said about school buildings, the better. Although heavily extended in the decades since we left, the original fabric remains intact: no mean feat considering some of the buildings date from the era of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete. A quick visit online also reveals that the uniforms have stayed the same, rugby is still played, and the pupils, once exclusively male, now include girls. The school has also recently courted controversy over its decision to sell alcohol on the premises. Not, it should be stated, to pupils, but to parents during out of hours events.

As to the teachers, many are long dead, whilst others soldier on into retirement. History teacher Mr. Malden was sighted in the last ten years by my mother, who fell into conversation with him at the local bus stop. The man had a photographic memory for names and initials, and incredibly, after all that time, he still remembered my brother and myself: ‘P.J. Cater, brother of M.G.A.’

This essay is probably longer than anything I produced during my school career, and I have no doubt that the gimlet eye of 'Ron' Homer, one of our English masters, would still take me to task on the question of style if not grammar. I almost feel obliged to add a diagram of a castle keep or a drawing of the Egyptians building the pyramids... 

May Contain Nuts

“Keith… what does it mean, Keith?”

This single line of dialogue was the first I knew of Mike Leigh’s classic BBC play Nuts in May, delivered in a surprisingly accurate impersonation of Alison Steadman’s wheedling tones by a (male) friend of mine. He was wont to quote chunks of the play’s dialogue at appropriate moments, usually on car journeys. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was all about until he explained it to me.

Play for Today was a series I never bothered with, indeed tended to avoid. It was angst-ridden, issue-driven, bleak and contemporary – at least that’s the way I saw it. Even today, I find it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for the long running strand of BBC television plays, with one or two notable exceptions. My aversion to the series meant that I failed to see Nuts in May on any of its original three broadcasts – 1976, 1977 and 1982 – following which it was left to gather dust in the archive for over a decade.

By the time I finally got to see it – as part of an evening of television curated by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – I already knew about half the dialogue, courtesy of my friend’s imitations, and I was intrigued to see it done for real. The plot, such as it is, needs little or no explanation – a self righteous couple go on a camping holiday in Dorset. The names of the two protagonists, Keith Pratt and his wife Candice-Marie, tell us all we need to know about their personalities. They are, simply, a pair of Pratts. Keith, memorably portrayed by Roger Sloman, is a neurotic obsessive with a controlling personality, who has planned their holiday down to the smallest detail. When a road closure scuppers his plans to drive to Lulworth Cove, he won’t alter the schedule and go tomorrow instead: ‘we’re going to a quarry tomorrow,’ he patiently explains to Candice-Marie.

Candice-Marie, on the other hand, is a drippy passive-aggressive who can’t pronounce her ‘R’s and nags at Keith constantly. When a fellow camper, Ray, pitches nearby with a noisy radio, Keith feigns ignorance and tries to read a book. But Candice-Marie, like the externalised voice of his own righteous indignation, keeps urging him to do something about it. When Keith’s efforts come to nothing, Candice-Marie still won’t let it go: ‘he’s just ignored you, Keith.’

The pair are vegetarians, of course, and earnest proselytisers of their ‘better’ way of living. They chew their food 72 times – although, as Keith explains when Candice-Marie takes less time to masticate a mushroom, “the important thing is to use your discretion.” When Ray is finally invited over for a cup of tea, Keith lectures him on the various types of sugar: “glucose, sucrose and frucrose. Did you know that, Ray?” His tiny slip – frucrose instead of fructose – reveals that Keith isn’t quite as knowledgable as he likes to think he is. He takes a keen interest in the weather, and can later be heard marvelling at the ‘nimbo cumulus’ clouds towering above the landscape. He means ‘cumulo-nimbus’ and he’s wrong in any case. When he assures Candice-Marie that the rainy weather is just passing showers from low stratus that will be over soon, it’s a safe bet that the rain won’t stop. He’s the type that knows everything but understands nothing.

Having conceived a manic jealousy when he sees Candice-Marie visiting Ray to innocently show him some pebbles collected from the beach, Keith’s true nature begins to show itself. When Candice-Marie won’t stop talking about Ray’s problems with his college course, Keith angrily stomps across to Ray’s tent to demand he explain things for himself. Candice-Marie insists that Keith apologises, which he eventually does – in the middle of the night, shining a torch through the canvas of Ray’s tent. This is a man who, in modern parlance, has issues.

A power relationship has now been established, and Keith begins to take control, clearly in his element. The play’s best remembered scene has Keith and Candice-Marie coercing Ray into singing along with their inane ditty about visiting the zoo. Keith laboriously explains the structure of the simple song, leaning in manically towards Ray every time his turn to sing comes around: ‘ready Ray? Your turn now!’ Meanwhile, the camera cuts tighter and tighter in on Ray, so that the audience really gets to share his squirming embarrasment.

With this, the play’s first sequence reaches a peak. Candice-Marie and Keith have attained a kind of simple nirvana, strumming away together in a rendition of Careless Love. What can possibly go wrong? Plenty. They haven’t even finished the song before a motorcyle arrives in the field, ridden by a pair of cartoonish Brummies, ‘Finger’ and his girlfriend Honky. Despite there being acres of open space in the camp site, they elect to pitch their tent only a few feet away from Keith and Candice-Marie (who have already moved once to avoid Ray’s radio).

Finger and Honky are the polar opposites of the Pratts. They put up their tent inside out, and have less than no idea about the niceties of camping. Finger is surprised when he finds the ground wet the following morning. ‘It’s the dew’, Ray explains. ‘Lot of ‘em about,’ laughs Finger, in a joke I’d like to bet gets cut from any future BBC broadcasts. Morning brings the clash of values between the Pratts and their new neighbours to a head. Finger goes off gathering wood with the intention of getting a fire going. Keith attempts to advise him – ‘for your own good’ – that open fires are not permitted on the camp site. When Finger ignores him, the situation spirals out of control. All pretence at civilized behaviour is stripped away as Keith grabs a huge branch and goes after Finger, bellowing “I’ll knock your head off!” The pair have become cave men, arguing over the right to gather wood and make fire. Deep down, behind his veneer of thoughtful, civilized existence, Keith is just like any other animal – fiercely territorial.

Ironically, for all his insistence on upholding the letter of the law, it is ultimately Keith who falls foul of the boys in blue when a bored patrolman decides to look over his elderly Morris Minor. The spare wheel is found to be in a bald condition. “You know that’s an offence?” the policeman advises. By this time, the Pratts have been driven off their original camp site, and ultimately end up in a field belonging to a dairy farmer. While Candice-Marie strums a ditty about litter and pollution on her cheap guitar, Keith goes off with a shovel to do his toilet. Our last glimpse of him is as he crosses a barbed wire fence into a field inhabited by pigs – a final metaphor for all that has unfolded during the past hour and twenty minutes.

In the 70s, when Nuts in May was filmed, proto ‘new age’ types like the Pratts were an easy target, with their obsessively healthy lifestyle and rigidly middle class morality. A similar family was depicted in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and viewers were left in no doubt as to the absurdity of their priggish behaviour. Mike Leigh’s attitude toward his own characters is crystal clear. They are laughable, ludicrous, comic stereotypes. Leigh would explore similar territory the following year with Abigail’s Party, again featuring Alison Steadman (Leigh’s then wife) playing a middle class grotesque of an altogether different stripe.

Watching Nuts in May in 2023, it’s easier to find oneself in agreement with some of the Pratts’ values. Keith is right to be upset at the failure of others to consider anyone else, an attitude that has become endemic in modern society, helped along by the ‘me-first-and-screw-you’ mindset that emerged from the Thatcher years. These days, Candice-Marie would probably be singing songs about climate change. One can’t imagine the Thunberg generation finding anything to laugh at here. Po-faced eco friendly attitudes are no longer quite the ‘legitimate target’ they must have appeared in 1975 when the play was written, and coincidence or not, it’s now almost ten years since Nuts in May last had an outing on BBC television. One senses the Corporation’s own values are closer, in the twenty first century, to those of Keith and Candice-Marie, and that should the play be broadcast again, it will come prefaced with the now obligatory warning about ‘attitudes and language of its time.’ May contain nuts, indeed...

Whizz for Atomms

 

How pop culture and I split the atom...

This summer, a fair few people will likely have been pondering on the genesis of the atomic bomb, having seen the big film of the season, Oppenheimer. The BBC has also dusted off its own telling of the story, filmed in 1980. Watching the BBC series – which is an excellent primer for anyone with more than a passing interest in how atom bombs work – I was set to thinking about how the public derives its ideas about such a big and complex subject, through the media, and via pop culture.

The first most people knew about atomic energy was the use of the Manhattan Project’s prototype weapons against the Japanese in 1945. Atomic power emerged, seemingly from nowhere, as an inconceivable new existential threat, whose shadow has loomed over the world ever since. But even as the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still being treated in makeshift hospitals, new US President Harry S Truman was assuring the world at large that atomic energy would be harnessed for peaecful purposes.

Thus it was that when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II opened Britain’s first atomic pile at Calder Hall in 1956, it was presented to an awed public as a piece of engineering genius, proof of Britain’s global status as a pioneer of white hot technology. What was not revealed until much later was the true purpose of the atomic pile at Calder Hall: producing plutonium for use in Britain’s own atom bomb.

By the mid-50s, atomic science was beginning to look like a bit of a lark, as typified by Geoffrey Willans’ third Molesworth book, Whizz for Atomms, published in 1956. Atomic structures were being referenced by designers around the world, especially here in Britain where the iconography of nuclear science could be seen in cultural endeavours like the Festival of Britain (1951). Atomic design meant lots of little dots or, in physical terms, globes, influenced by the laboratory models that scientists used to depict atomic structures. It was all harmless, clean, futuristic fun. What came to be known in retrospect as ‘atom age’ design influenced every aspect of suburban life. Kettles, kitchenware, curtains and all manner of domestic appliances suddenly began to assume a new and futuristic appearance, best exemplified by American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss’s iconic Hoover Constellation vacuum cleaner, launched in 1956. With its shiny spheroid casing, the Constellation anticipated the look of the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor at Windscale, which would be commissioned in 1963. So much so that when the modelmakers on Thunderbirds needed an atomic reactor to appear in an episode, they ended up customising a Hoover Constellation. Art imitates life, imitates science...

In the realm of popular culture, you couldn’t move for atomic concepts in the 1950s. ‘Atomic’ was, to the science fiction writers of the era, what the term ‘quantum’ is to today’s. You could put it in front of anything and it sounded instantly futuristic. You couldn’t write science fiction and not use the term ‘atomic’, any more than you could ignore other buzz words of the age like ‘cybernetic’ or ‘video’. Atomic was a concept that did double duty: on the one hand, you could use it to power your spaceship to the stars – hooray! On the other, you could use nuclear tests or accidents to explain away horrors like Godzilla. Science fiction writers had never had it so good.

By the time I was born, in 1961, the whole ‘atom age’ thing was beginning to look a bit jaded. When the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of Armageddon in October 1962, ‘atomms’ didn’t look like quite so much fun any more. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been spreading its message since 1957, and the Cuban crisis only served as a wake-up call to the rest of the world. Stanley Kubrik delivered his own devastating message the following year in the form of Dr. Strangelove. No other pop cultural endeavour speaks so clearly to the paranoiac mood of the times.

I’m not sure exactly when I first became aware of the existence of a thing called atomic science. It was most likely through the worlds of Gerry Anderson, where nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles made frequent appearances. They may have been disguised as ‘planetomic bombs’ and the like, but the intention was clear. Nuclear reactors were shown to be tricky and temperamental: in an episode of Fireball XL5, Lieutenant Ninety almost perishes in outer space when the nuclear reactor in his space capsule malfunctions. Later, in Thunderbirds, an entire atomic station went up in smoke, releasing a deadly radioactive cloud. At the time, it looked like science fiction, but Dennis Spooner’s script was almost certainly inspired by a fire at the Windscale reactor in 1957.

Exposure to the science fiction of the 1960s added new words to my vocabulary. I was aware of the term ‘nuclear bomb’ by around the age of seven or eight, without having the remotest idea of what such a weapon could do. Amongst our dad’s record collection was a Count Basie album entitled The Atomic Mr. Basie, whose colourful cover featured a photograph of an American test of an experimental thermonuclear device. Codenamed ‘Hood’, the test had been conducted on 5 July 1957, producing a yield equivalent to 74 kiltons of TNT. This was almost certainly the first picture of a genuine nuclear explosion that I ever saw, and yet it still didn’t convey to me the horror of what I was looking at. If anything, it looked pretty incredible. Sure, it was obviously a bloody big bomb, but the picture told me nothing about fall out, or radiation, or the effects they had on human tissue. It was just a great album cover, and if it signified anything, it was that 'atomic' stood for cool, modern, space-age, jazz.

For a long time, I remained blissfully unaware of how close the world had sailed to the brink of Armageddon when I was a mere eighteen months old. Nuclear paranoia had cooled off somewhat in the aftermath of Cuba, but it didn’t deter filmmaker Peter Watkins from directing the first serious attempt to depict the reality of nuclear confrontation on film. His harrowing documentary style production The War Game, made in 1966, was banned by the BBC – but 16mm copies were still allowed to be shown in schools, which rather defeated the object of the ban. It’s hard to fathom quite whom the BBC imagined it was serving in concealing the ‘truth’ in such a manner. Most likely the same ‘persons of a nervous disposition’ who had to be given advance warning of things like Quatermass.

The terrifying reality of the atom bomb was finally brought home to me on 24 April 1974 when Thames’ landmark series The World at War dealt with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The episode pulled no punches, and included graphic scenes of the victims, and interviews with survivors. Also interviewed was Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay. I watched all this in a kind of horrified fascination. Until this point, I’d never considered the possibility of what might happen in the event of a Third World War. But this was all history, and even after watching the episode, I didn’t lie awake at night worrying about the bomb.

Nuclear paranoia only really kicked in for me in 1980 when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Suddenly, the media was rife with speculation about a Third World War. Before long, the BBC lifted its ban on The War Game, and even more harrowing fare arrived on the small screen in the form of Threads. By the autumn of 1980, even pop groups were getting in on the act. The Piranhas’ updated take on Tom Hark began with the cheerful query ‘does anybody know how long till World War Three’, whilst XTC’s single Generals and Majors played on the paranoia of the times. By mid decade, it was hard to turn on the television news without seeing film of the protests at Greenham Common or another CND march.

For much of the 1980s, I remained if not convinced then genuinely worried that nuclear war would come in my lifetime. Many people even believed that such a war would be started accidentally. Incidents in 1979 and 1983 saw first America and then Russia believing that pre-emptive strikes had been launched, on the basis of false alarms. War did not come. But the nuclear nightmare took on a new form in April 1986 with the explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl, an accident which had been forseen as far back as 1965. It was number 4 reactor that had exploded in Thunderbirds. The imaginary world of Gerry Anderson was bleeding through into reality, from the fictional nuclear future of childhood,to the real life world of grown-up paranoia.

Nearly eighty years on from the dawn of the atom bomb, it’s intriguing to look back on an age when nuclear power was similtaneously the shiny new future of humanity and potentially the end of the world. Today, the promise of cheap, clean energy has been shown up as a sham. Calder Hall, opened to such excitement and fanfare in the 50s, is now known as Sellafield and in process of being decomissioned, work which will endure well into this century, while the spent nuclear fuel at the plant will remain hazardous for a quarter of a million years.

Knowing all this, would Nigel Molesworth have been quite such a Whizz for Atomms, I wonder?

Did exactly what it said on the masthead

 

TV Comic: a personal reminiscence

It was a forward-looking publication, the first British comic to feature content derived from TV programmes, and it went on to become one of the longest lasting of such endeavours, enduring all the way to 1984. It came from the Daily Mirror group, and it did exactly what it said on the masthead. Its name was TV Comic.

My first sighting of it was at Christmas 1965, in the form of that year’s annual (above), bought for my brother. It was quite a bit too old for him, being aimed, I would guess, at readers in the 8-10 age range (my brother was just two and a half). The purchase was probably a mistake: the previous year, he’d been given TV Land Annual, a publication intended for much younger readers. TV Comic had also, originally, been targeted at the very young, featuring Muffin the Mule as its cover star when it debuted in November 1951.

By the time I set eyes on TV Comic, its contents had been revamped to appeal to a slightly older age group. It certainly didn’t appeal to me, as it included three of my least favourite TV shows: Dr. Who, Space Patrol and The Telegoons. I was scared of all of them in their TV incarnations, but in comic strip form they were a bit easier to take. Dr. Who is interesting, because we avoided watching the series in our house: I found the music, and the Daleks much too frightening. So what little knowledge I had of the show came principally from that annual; and Dr. Who was very different in its TV Comic incarnation. There were no Daleks – not yet, at any rate – and the Doctor’s travelling companions were two children, John and Gillian, who referred to him as their ‘grandfather’. This tinkering with the format was the result of licensing deals with the BBC which allowed for the use of the name Dr. Who, the likeness of William Hartnell, and the Tardis, but did not extend to his on-screen companions or any of the monsters, all of whom required separate licensing agreements with their creators.

TV Comic Annual was, therefore, a book that I approached with a certain amount of trepidation. Its endpapers featured two colour photographs of the cast of Space Patrol, which I avoided looking at, as the puppets were so creepy. The strip stories, on the other hand, I could just about tolerate. The same applied to The Telegoons. On TV, the puppet characters – based on the radio originals – were simply too grotesque. Bill Titcombe’s illustrations toned down their appearance somewhat.

This trio were not the only stories originating on TV. There was also a comic strip derived from The Dickie Henderson Show, a variety/comedy format of which I was only dimly aware – and a humour strip based on British animation studio Halas and Batchelor’s Foo Foo series. These had certainly been shown on TV, but by the mid 60s had been off the air for nearly five years. There was also a Popeye comic strip, another character whose appearance I found off-putting. If a comic editor had set out to create a publication designed specifically not to appeal to me, then he couldn’t have done a better job than TV Comic circa 1965!

Had we been bought the previous year’s annual, things might have looked a little different, for two Gerry Anderson series were strongly featured in colour comic strips. Supercar and Fireball XL5 had been mainstays of TV Comic for several years, but in 1965 were lost to the new kid on the block that was TV Century 21. Thus it was that, some two years after its screen debut, Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol joined the line-up. It was nicely drawn by Bill Mevin, who intriguingly gave Galasphere crew members Slim and Husky blue and green skins respectively, whereas the photos showed them with normal flesh tones.*

Alongside all this TV originated content, TV Comic had its own cast of characters, who would prove to be remarkably enduring: Mighty Moth was a simple tale of the titular insect’s war with a character known only as ‘Dad’, while TV Terrors were a gang of kids who constantly tried to sneak into the local TV studio, whose uniformed commissionaire Hoppit would send them on their way with a kick up the arse. Different times…

There was one contributor to this annual whose work puzzled me, then as now. Neville Main had been TV Comic’s cover artist back in 1951, with a naive line and wash style that was ideally suited to the juvenile content of the publication’s early years. By 1962, however, he was drawing Fireball XL5, in a style which, whilst faithful to the cartoonish appearance of the characters, was seriously at odds with the more dramatic work being produced elsewhere. In the 1966 annual, his contributions amounted to two Dr. Who strips, and a few pages of jokes, two of which I didn’t understand then or now. He was also allowed to sign his work, which few comic artists did at the time. When I say ‘sign’, what he actually did was to write out his name in his distinctive wobbly capitals...

What's the gag here? Neville Main's oblique, nay inexplicable humour from a page in the 1966 TV Comic Annual.

As a child, I was very aware of the work of artists in comics. There were those whose work I liked – Eric Eden in the Fireball XL5 Annuals, Ron Embleton in TV Century 21 – and those whose drawings I found either creepy or unappealing or both. Neville Main certainly belonged in the latter category. Much later, I saw some of his ‘Muffin’ covers, and his work on Gerry Anderson’s Four Feather Falls, and there’s no denying that, given the right subject matter, he was perfectly cast, as it were. But in his hands, Dr. Who looked naive and silly.

The 1966 annual was my only encounter with TV Comic for a good few years. I didn’t actually get to read the comic itself until 1969, by which time its cover now featured a strip cartoon of Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, drawn by Bill Titcombe (who for some reason liked drawing secondary outlines around his characters). Dr. Who was still present, in colour across the centrespread and now in the (slightly) more conventional hands of John Canning. I was still avoiding the show itself, but was vaguely aware of the changes that had occurred in the format, which were reflected in the strip. Another new arrival from television was The Avengers, a series I’d been introduced to on Saturday evenings around 1967. Space Patrol was, by this time, long gone.

I’m not sure how often I was bought TV Comic in this era: my recollection is of its being a one-off purchase. Our mum sometimes bought us a different comic when our regular title was unavailable for whatever reason. It wasn’t until 1971 that I began to receive TV Comic on a regular basis, and by this time it had settled into a format that placed more emphasis on humour. Tom and Jerry were now the cover stars, and over the next few years the comic would find room for The Pink Panther, The Inspector, Droopy and even Dad’s Army. Dr. Who had been drafted into sibling publication Countdown earlier in the year, but The Avengers was, surprisingly, still running. This format would see TV Comic through the next couple of years with only minor changes. In the summer of 1973, it absorbed Polystyle’s ailing TV Action, but my interest in comics was on the wane, and I stopped reading it around this time.

Following the 1966 annual (published 1965), there was a gap of a few years before I got to see another example. This would have been around 1970. There was a visual quirk with the TV Comic Annuals in that their covers tended to favour yellow backgrounds. On the 1966 edition, the yellowy sky lends a threatening, thundery appearance to the illustration of a helicopter packed with the comic’s cartoon stars, but the examples from the 70s had a brighter, more saturated look. The contents were still the same mix of full colour and duotone illustration.

The idea of a comic based on television was certainly innovative in its day, but it had its drawbacks in that once a particular series had vanished from the screen, it would also need to be replaced on paper. Revamping contents is one way in which comics editors sought to keep their young readers’ interest levels up, but it meant that a title like TV Comic couldn’t settle into the kind of decades-long formatting beloved of other publishers like D.C. Thomson. Anyone reading in 1960 wouldn’t have recognised the comic in its 1965 incarnation, and it was different again by the end of the decade. Only the old troupers Mighty Moth and TV Terrors along with the perennial Popeye kept up any kind of continuity with the past.

On account of its Dr. Who associations, the mid 60s run of TV Comic can now command high prices on ebay, Some, it must be said, are outrageously over priced. In 1967, the publication finally gained a licence to use The Daleks, and the issues around their return are considered especially desirable. Compared to other British comics of the same era, TV Comic offered above average production values (being printed on magazine quality paper as opposed to the pulps favoured by D.C. Thomson and others), and the artwork was always of a high standard, especially those strips featuring animated characters. It rode the wave of interest in television admirably, but once the medium ceased to be such a novelty, it fell into decline. When I last had sight of a copy in the early 80s, it was a shadow of its former self.

As a footnote, in the early 2000s I laughingly thought of myself as a comics illustrator, and drew strips for a number of publications. One week, flipping through the latest edition in search of my contribution, I noticed some illustrations in a familiar style, and instantly recognised the hand of Bill Titcombe, illustrating the adventures of some boy band or other, and still using his 'secondary outlines' technique. He'd come a long way from The Telegoons, I reflected. I just wasn't sure in what direction...

I didn't get it then and I still don't: what's happening here? Is it meant to be a dog driving? It looks more like a rabbit.
Why is that sign on the boot? Another 'classic' from Neville Main.

* Although no colour stills exist from Space Patrol's second series of thirteen episodes, close inspection of the monochrome tones does suggest that the puppets had been repainted in the colours used by Bill Mevin, and their uniforms upgraded from monochrome to red.

A Tale of Two Saints

'The Man in the Beige Suit': Ian Ogilvy's Simon Templar

For the past few years, I have been slowly working my way through Roger Moore’s tenure as Simon Templar – all 118 episodes. It’s not the greatest TV series ever made, but it’s consistently entertaining. And whatever one thinks of Roger Moore as an actor (lazy reviewers always refer to the eyebrows), he was perfectly cast. I never quite bought into the idea of him as James Bond, but Simon Templar is the role he was born to play.

By way of complete contrast, and by accident rather than intent, I found myself this week watching an episode of the short lived 1978 revival Return of the Saint. This was a series whose arrival in September 1978 I welcomed. Nobody seemed to be making those old school adventure series any more, and the earlier ITC titles had ended their afterlife in repeat broadcasts. I stuck with Return... through twenty-four episodes, but I was never quite convinced. My friends at school were less equivocal, denouncing it as rubbish when it came up for discussion in the playground. With hindsight, I have to concede they were probably right. Watching a random episode in the middle of my Roger Moore repeat run really brought home the differences between the two eras of Simon Templar. Roger Moore’s Saint was fun, bantering, a believable and fully realised character, eyebrows and all. He had the same sparring relationship with Scotland Yard’s dogged Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal that had provided so many comic moments in the books, and despite the contemporary setting, he was still recognisable for Leslie Charteris’ iconic creation. But what can we say of Simon Templar circa 1978?

Ian Ogilvy is a fine actor. His comic turn in the pilot episode of Ripping Yarns was splendid. So why couldn’t be have brought some of that ‘school bully’ brilliance to Return of the Saint? Where Roger Moore constantly lit up the screen, Ogilvy’s Saint never really catches fire. The Simon Templar of 1978 has a personality as beige as his wardrobe. Indeed, beige seems to have infused the whole production. Even the colour has a hint of oatmeal about it. Was it the lighting? Were they using different negative stock? Whatever had happened, I’ve noticed it in other productions of this era. They look somehow flat. The ‘classic colour’ ITC productions have a sharpness, clarity and brilliance that’s entirely lacking from Return of the Saint. But there’s more to this than just picture quality.

On paper, Return of the Saint had plenty going for it: Ian Ogilvy beneath the halo and original Saint executive producer Robert S Baker running the show – to say nothing of the imprimatur of ITC. And where the Roger Moore episodes had seldom ventured more than a few miles from the production base in search of, ahem, exotic locations, Return... actually decamped to Europe. Italian state TV network RAI's co-funding of the series must have been a factor here. But for all this, I’d still take all 118 Roger Moore episodes in preference to one outing with Ian Ogilvy. What went wrong? Well, the scripts for a kickoff. The episode I chanced to see, The Arrangement, shamelessly pinched its plot from Strangers on a Train. It had a somewhat darker tone than others in the series, with references to heroin, and a scene set in Soho that sees Simon Templar visiting the Marquee club – the real venue, not a studio set (punk band The Saints are on stage: how tediously obvious!) Then there’s the acting. Carloyn Seymour takes care of scenery-chewing, turning in a raving bonkers performance as the bored wife who sets up the ‘arrangement’ to swap murders with a reluctant friend. Michael Medwin blots his copybook with a turn as a drunken husband that ticks every box in the Michael Caine manual of ‘how not to act drunk’. It’s painful to watch.

Then there’s the Saint himself. I really can’t imagine what the producers were thinking here: the Simon Templar of the Saint books was variously described as a ‘buccaneer’ or a ‘modern day Robin Hood’ who operated at the periphery of law and order and often beyond. For the original TV series, his act had to be cleaned up somewhat, and Templar was never seen to commit a crime other than as a means to catch the villain of the week. Even so, Inspector Teal and his many counterparts always treated him with caution, and were aware of his reputation. This was a neat way of keeping the character true to his origins without depicting him as an out and out lawbreaker. 

Ian Ogilvy’s Saint, by complete contrast, is squeaky clean. He owns a mews house in London, and jaunts around the world seemingly doing nothing save for becoming embroiled in mysteries. There’s no sense of his being roguish, like Moore, or an opportunist out to earn a bit of money wherever he can. To this Saint, being Simon Templar is like a profession. He’s the chartered accountant of playboy adventurers, a bit boring and bland. He gets angry at times. He weilds a firearm in a manner reminiscent of Avon in Blakes Seven, posing with gun in hand and his other arm outstretched like a pop singer, as if he’s waiting to have his photo taken.

Ian Ogilvy’s performance comes across like a muted imitation of Cary Grant. There are attempts at bantering humour, but they never quite convince, thanks to some diabolical lines from the scriptwriters. Quite a lot of the time, he looks, well, what’s the word? Constipated. This Saint does a good line in self-righteous indignation, a characteristic entirely absent from Roger Moore’s portrayal. His wardrobe doesn’t help, either. It’s very Man at C&A: lots of blazers with double rows of gold buttons, flared trousers and those bloody beige suits. 

In fact, the only aspects of the series that resemble the 1960s Saint are the names of Bob Baker and Leslie Charteris on the credits, the stickman, his car number plate ST1, and the name Simon Templar. This is a safe, polished but too perfect late 70s take on a classic character and it just won’t do. It’s a bit late for criticism now, of course, and at the time, aged 17, I could find no fault with it (until the episode where he utters a line about British Intelligence resembling a boiled potato). It’s telling, though, that I never sought it out again. Years later, I designed the sleeve for Network’s DVD release, but I’d have to go and search my shelves to see if I actually own a copy. If I do, I’ve never taken it down to watch a single episode. It is, in a word, ‘meh’.

If we can believe Wikipedia, the series was well received in Britain and Europe, but even in 1978 it sat awkwardly in the contemporary landscape of film and television. It wasn’t hard hitting like The Sweeney or The Professionals, but neither was it as tongue-in-cheek as The New Avengers or James Bond. It would prove to be ITC’s last endeavour in the arena of television production, as Lew Grade’s sights were by this time set elsewhere: specifically, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Was it simply the case that the day of the ‘famous international playboy’ was over? But there’s something else missing from Return of the Saint, and I think it’s a key difference. In the Roger Moore series, Simon Templar is a world famous character, recognised wherever he goes. Ian Ogilvy’s Saint, by contrast, has to introduce himself. ‘I’m Simon Templar’ he tells a character in the episode I saw. I bet Roger Moore never had to say that.

Back in the 70s, I made up some stupid lyrics to fit the series’ theme music: ‘Its the Return of the Saint/ Yes it is/ No it ain’t.’ I think that just about sums it up.