The Sandbaggers (season one, 1978)

The Sandbaggers is a British television espionage drama, originally broadcast between 1978 and 1980. It takes the gritty realist approach to spy dramas about as far as it can be taken, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view.

The series is concerned with an elite but entirely mythical unit within the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6). This elite unit is known as the Sandbaggers. Their job is to carry out dangerous and/or politically sensitive covert operation.

The idea behind the series was to get as far away as possible from the popular glamourised “guns, girls and gadgets” conception of the world of espionage. The series was created by Ian Mackintosh, a former naval officer who had established a reputation as a television writer with the successful BBC series Warship. Mackintosh wrote the first two seasons and the early episodes of season three before his death in 1979. The mystery surrounding his death (his light aircraft with two other passengers aboard including his girlfriend) disappeared over the Gulf of Alaska, fueling speculation that he had been a real-life spy.

The series emphasises the political machinations behind espionage operations. In fact it emphasises this aspect so much that it ends up being to some extent a political drama series rather than a spy series. Given the focus on the political side it was probably inevitable that the series would be very talky. And it is very talky indeed. Ironically, given that the series was intended to be a reaction against the older style of TV spy series, this actually makes the series seem in some ways a little dated. It can also also make for deadly dull television if not done well.

The series seems to be at pains to show the British government in the worst possible light. Politicians are portrayed as cynical, corrupt, self-serving, short-sighted and stupid. All of which was probably true at the time, and is certainly even more true today. 

The Sandbaggers adopts a rather unusual technique for a spy show. We see very little indeed of any actual operations. What we see in the early episodes are people in the London headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service planning operations, people in offices discussing operations, people in offices waiting for telephone calls telling them the results of operations, but to a large extent the actual operations take place off-stage so to speak. This technique was clearly adopted as part of a frantic attempt to distance the program from  any hint of a James Bond-type approach. In some circumstances it can be a very effective tension-enhancing dramatic technique to have crucial events take place off-stage. On the other hand  when you have a program that is already very talky such an approach can result in a program that is less than exciting. I’m inclined to think that the technique is overused here and that this series desperately needed to have a bit more action. In the later episodes of season one there’s rather more action so perhaps the producers came to the same conclusion

The surfeit of talk and the lack of action leaves very little scope for location shooting and as a consequence this series has, by the standards of the late 70s, a rather studio-bound feel to it that makes it seem somewhat old-fashioned.

While the series is aiming for a very realistic feel that there are one or two aspects that are perhaps less than convincing. I cannot believe that any British government would have the nerve even to contemplate political assassinations, and I certainly do not for one moment believe  that a British government would countenance the idea of killing a very senior British civil servant suspected of being about to defect. This is James Bond licence to kill stuff. It’s not that I don’t think a British government would be cynical enough to consider such courses of action but no western government at any time since the Second World War would have had the guts to take such actions.

The motivation for introducing far-fetched James Bond licence to kill elements was clearly not to make the series more exciting but to serve a political agenda, a political agenda that is unfortunately all too obvious and all too heavy-handed. In this series politicians and senior civil servants are all assumed to be members of the upper-class old boys’ network, a network that we are clearly expected to consider as corrupt and incompetent.

Apart from its other flaws at times Mackintosh is guilty at times of plain old-fashioned bad writing, of plot twists that are clumsy and predictable and, worse still, of manipulating the viewer.

The head of operations and the man in charge of the Sandbaggers is Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden). I don’t know this for certain but I’m fairly confident that a real-life spy holding such a position would spend more time getting on with the job and less time complaining and behaving like a spoilt petulant child.

I honestly can’t imagine any organisation run the way Burnside’s section is run surviving for any length of time. No organisation can survive unless it makes at least a token effort to look after its own. Again my feeling is that the desire to push an agenda has overruled genuine realism.

I can see why a certain type of British television critic would have gone into raptures over this series. The sort of critic who dislikes television that is entertaining. The Sandbaggers is slow, talky, anti-British, very political, it takes itself very seriously and at times it’s dull. So, for that type of critic, it ticks all the necessary boxes. And as the icing on the cake for those critics, it manages to be even more anti-American than it is anti-British.

The Sandbaggers does certainly have its virtues. It does quite rightly recognise that espionage has political dimensions and that these can make life almost intolerable for those who are simply trying to get on with the job. The focus on the planning side of operations as well as the actual field work is a strength and adds to the feeling of verisimilitude. 

Ray Lonnen as Willie Caine, the senior sandbagger, is an interestingly different kind of television secret agent. For one thing he has a horror of guns!

I have to be honest and say that the approach adopted by this series is not on the whole one that appeals to me very strongly. It’s not quite to my personal taste, but those with different tastes may well enjoy the series very much. It’s well-made and well-acted and (except when agendas seem to intrude to an excessive degree) generally well-written.  

The cynical approach to television espionage series was pioneered by Callan in the late 60s and early 70s. For my money Callan did it better, with subtler characterisations and without too much of an obvious agenda. By the late 1970s the dark and edgy approach was becoming de rigueur in British television and in my personal opinion it quickly became overdone. While it initially offered the advantage of less predictable outcomes, without the inevitable triumph of the good guys and their equally inevitable escapes from seemingly impossible situations, it has its own perils. When taken to excess it can, paradoxically, be just as predictable as the earlier approach. Inevitable downbeat endings can quickly become just as conventional as inevitable upbeat endings. At times The Sandbaggers seems to me to fall into this trap with its outrageously high body count.

If you’re the type of person who loves the ultra-cynical British style of political drama then you’ll find a great deal to enjoy here. If that sort of thing doesn’t float your boat then you may find the series to be heavy going.

Sapphire and Steel, Assignments One to Four

Sapphire and Steel is one of the oddest but most interesting of British science fiction series of its era. It was produced by ATV and was broadcast, rather sporadically, from 1979 to 1982.

The series was created by P. J. Hammond who has had an interesting career as a television writer, his credits including episodes of police procedural series such as Z Cars and The Sweeney and science fiction series like Ace of Wands. More recently he has written for Midsomer Murders and Torchwood. Hammond’s original idea was for a children’s series, which probably explains the format - each story was broadcast as a series of from four to six half-hour episodes, in the manner of Doctor Who. At some stage the decision was made to do Sapphire and Steel as a fully fledged science fiction series for an adult audience with a distinctly darker tone.

The two leads were both major television stars, David McCallum having achieved fame with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in the 60s and Joanna Lumley having starred in The New Avengers in the mid-70s.

The two central characters, Sapphire (Lumley) and Steel (McCallum), are space-time trouble-shooters, their job being to locate and neutralise time anomalies. Time is conceived of as being somewhat unstable, and the instabilities are highly dangerous. Sapphire and Steel look human but are in fact aliens. They can be thought of as being vaguely similar to the Doctor Who concept of Time Lords but with some important differences. Their primary job is to safeguard time and to prevent the past from breaking through into the present. Saving any humans who are threatened by time anomalies is a secondary consideration. They do try to save humans in such cases but it’s clear that neutralising problems in time is a far more important consideration, such problems having the potential to do so much harm that the survival of a few humans is of rather lesser importance.

That’s one of the most interesting elements of the series - Sapphire and Steel are not the caring sharing Doctor Who type of aliens. They regard humans with a certain detachment, and at times even as something of a hindrance. This is particularly true of Steel who is a long way from the traditional science fiction hero. He is, for the most part, cold and emotionless. Sapphire has more empathy for humans but for her as well the job comes first. They are distinctly ambiguous and not always entirely sympathetic heroes. 

P. J. Hammond wrote five of the six stories in the series. These are stories involving time that are far more complex and disturbing than those to be found in series like The Time Tunnel. The dangerous time anomalies often result from situations in which people have inadvertently created temporal confusion. In Assignment One the problems arise in a house that is filled with too many elements from the past, and elements from too many time periods. The house was built 250 years ago on the foundations of buildings of an earlier era and the couple who inhabit the house with their two children have filled it with old objects such as furniture and (most dangerously) clocks. Even worse the wife has a great enthusiasm for old nursery rhymes many of which have associations with historical events. Time is a kind of corridor inhabited by creatures (which appear to people as ghosts) that are trying to break out of the corridor into the present. These creatures can use old paintings, old books or old nursery rhymes as triggers to break out of the time corridor.

A recurrent theme is that it is extremely hazardous to mix different time periods. For example a house built in the 17th century containing pictures painted in the 18th century, furniture built in the 19th century and various everyday objects from various decades of the 20th century would be a kind of (quite literal) time bomb. It would contain a multitude of triggers any one of which could cause potentially catastrophic space-time disruptions.

The idea of ghosts as reflections of time is intriguing. Hammond’s initial inspiration came from spending a night in a supposedly haunted house and he has managed to take the traditional English ghost story and give it a clever science fictional twist whilst still retaining the essential atmosphere of the ghost story. 

Assignment Two further amplifies Hammond’s conception of the nature of ghosts and ghostly hauntings. It also emphasises the alienness of the agenda of Sapphire and Steel - they are guardians of time, not of the human race. Compassion cannot be allowed to prejudice the success of their task.

Assignment Two makes wonderfully effective use of its setting, an abandoned railway station. With just a handful of sets it achieves an extraordinary sense of claustrophobia, melancholy and at times stark terror. It is an exceptionally clever and unconventional ghost story, of ghosts who have been cheated.

After the brilliance of the first two stories Assignment Three comes as a major disappointment. Since it deals with the present and the future rather than the past it lacks the spooky uncanny feel of the past haunting the present. It also lacks the essential elements of tragedy and melancholy that made the first two stories so effective, and it resorts to some rather silly, sentimental emotionally manipulative ideas. While the low budgets were no problem in the first two stories this story unfortunately looks cheap and crude.

Assignment Four is a vast improvement. A ghost in this series can be a kind of echo from the past, or it can be a person (alive or dead) from another time. It can even be a figure from a photograph that is brought, not exactly to life, but to a kind of shadowy existence. This idea is explored in depth in Assignment Four. Photographs can act as a species of portal, and one of the most interesting ideas is that every photograph is a photograph of infinity. It contains not just those people and objects visible in the photograph, but everything within the frame of the picture - the people  who were behind a wall, or inside a house, or in the street behind a house in the image. There really is more to a photograph than meets the eye.

In this story an amateur photographer playing around with photographs, mixing images from different photographs into one photograph, has unknowingly opened a portal and something has entered. His big mistake was to mix images from photographs taken at different times, thus creating an extremely powerful potential time anomaly. Now figures from century-old photographs are inhabiting the present day. They are ghosts, but ghosts of living people rather than dead people.

McCallum and Lumley resist the temptation to play their characters in a traditional heroic manner. Both give nicely ambiguous performances with Lumley in particular adding some wry humour.

One of the series’ great strengths is that it doesn’t try to give tidy explanations. It’s content to leave the viewer slightly mystified, with the sense that some answers have been given but further questions have been raised that remain unanswered.

This series was made on a very small budget, a circumstance that becomes an asset rather than a liability. Being shot entirely in the studio on a very small number of sets contributes to the sense of all-pervasive unease. The lack of money for elaborate special effects necessitates attention being given to atmosphere rather than spectacle. And it achieves the right atmosphere extremely well.

Anyone who enjoys ghost stories with a science fictional twist should certainly check out this fascinating series. It’s available on DVD in Britain, Australia and the United States.

The Caesars (1968)

The Caesars is a six-episode British historical drama series set in ancient Rome, made by Granada in 1968. It covers more or less the same time period and the same events as the BBC’s much better-known 1976 I, Claudius series, but deals with these events in a somewhat different way.

The Caesars was written and produced by Philip Mackie, a television writer who had a very distinguished career from the late 1950s up to his death in 1985.

The Caesars has been overshadowed by I, Claudius because it had the misfortune to be the last large-scale historical drama series filmed in black-and-white. As a result it has fallen into obscurity although it is in fact an exceptionally interesting and subtle series.

The most notable difference as compared to I, Claudius is that The Caesars takes a very much less sensationalistic approach. I, Claudius was based on two novels by Robert Graves and while Graves was a very great writer of historical fiction it does need to be remembered that it really was historical fiction that he wrote, with as much emphasis on the fiction as the history. Graves certainly knew his history but he had his own hobby-horses his own agendas to pursue and his approach to history, although brilliant, was more than a little eccentric. 

Graves was also a writer who delighted in historical scandal. Of course he was in good company, given that many (if not most) of the great Roman historians who are our main sources for the period also loved a good juicy scandal. Suetonius, who wrote in the early second century AD, was particularly addicted to scandalous gossip. Basing a work of historical fiction largely on his work makes for splendid entertainment but it’s a bit like basing a history of modern Britain on the tabloid newspapers.

Philip Mackie took a more conservative approach. That does not mean that The Caesars is dull. Far from it. It just isn’t possible to make a dull television series about ancient Rome.  

Like I, Claudius this earlier series also benefits from superb performances from some very fine actors, most notably André Morell as Tiberius, Ralph Bates as Caligula and the criminally underrated Freddie Jones as Claudius. Viewers approaching this series for the first time will inevitably be comparing Freddie Jones’ interpretation of the role to Sir Derek Jacobi’s iconic performance in I, Claudius. The comparison is by no means unfavourable to Jones.

Having been made in 1968 this series is, unsurprisingly, rather studio-bound and has the characteristic shot-on-videotape look of 1960s British television.  In some ways this is a plus rather than a minus. It means the focus has to be on the writing and on the characters and their very complicated relationships, and in these areas the series scores very highly indeed. Don’t go into this series anticipating spectacle. There are no epic battle scenes. This is intelligent and subtle psychological and political drama and the claustrophobic feel of studio-bound shot-on-videotape 1960s television enhances the tension. This is a drama about people trapped by their destinies, people who have in many cases been dealt a very bad hand by fate and whose very survival depends on their ability to play that hand for all it’s worth.

The drama of Mackie’s writing comes not just from the characters, but from the way various key characters understand, or fail to understand, one another’s motives. Mackie is confident that his audience will pick up the subtleties in these understandings and misunderstandings. One of the key moments in the first episode comes from a simple question Augustus asks of his grandson Agrippa Postumus. Agrippa’s answer to what he takes as a harmless question will have momentous consequences for Agrippa and for Rome. Tiberius’s assessment of the character and the likely behaviour of his nephew Germanicus (his most credible rival as Augustus’s successor), and Germanicus’s reading of Tiberius’s character and likely actions, are absolutely crucial and again Mackie trusts the viewer to follow both men’s reasoning and to comprehend their subsequent actions.

Philip Mackie is particularly interested in the psychology of power. The first two episodes are entirely devoted to the events immediately preceding and immediately following the death of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. They are dominated by the personality of Tiberius. Tiberius was a strange and complicated man. He was the natural successor to Augustus but he was by no means the only possible successor. Tiberius made a great show of being extremely reluctant to take on the duties of emperor and claimed to be anxious to restore the republican constitution which had been in practice (although not in theory) swept away by Augustus after a century of almost continuous political violence and civil war. 

What makes Tiberius interesting is that in some ways he was quite sincere in his stated beliefs on these subjects. At the same time he was certainly never lacking in ambition, and he was very much aware that democracy had proved to be a catastrophic failure. He was therefore a man who was quite capable of holding perfectly sincere opinions that were utterly contradictory, and at the same time intelligent enough to recognise the contradictions. He was in other words very much an enigma. Mackie’s intelligent script and Morell’s subtle performance combine to turn the enigma of Tiberius into riveting drama. Tiberius’s nephew Claudius sums him up rather neatly when he says that Tiberius moves so slowly that he appears to be standing still until you suddenly realise that he has somehow contrived to be miles ahead of you.

This is of course a drama about power, a subject that has been dealt with many times but Mackie approaches it with intelligence and subtlety. Augustus created a state in which immense power was concentrated in the hands of one man. That is a situation that is sustainable only in exceptional circumstances, when that power is in the hands of a man with not only the skill and the judgment to exercise that power, but also the personality to do so. There is an old Chinese proverb that states that the problem with riding a tiger is that it is impossible to dismount. This is the situation faced by Tiberius, a situation made more bitter by the fact that he only mounted the tiger against his will. Tiberius is a shrewd and conscientious ruler who finds that governing well does not ensure popularity. He tries to deal with his unpopularity by retiring to his villa on the island of Capri but even there he cannot escape. He must continue to exercise power, even if he does so indirectly. And if he does so indirectly he may not only become more unpopular but also become fatally isolated, making his situation both more dangerous and more unpleasant. Absolute power can become a prison.

Mackie uses the reign of Caligula to illustrate other dangers of power. In order to exercise absolute power you have to have someone to enforce that power. In order for them to exercise that power on your behalf you must give them a great deal of power. As a result your power is no longer absolute. Caligula has his Praetorian Guards to enforce his power but it does not occur to him that their power has now become potentially greater than his own. Caligula also discovers, too late, that you cannot oppress everybody. If you want to tyrannise the poor you need to maintain the favour of the rich, and if you want to tyrannise the rich you had better make sure not to offend the poor. Tyrannise everybody and you will find yourself with no support base at all, and even the most absolute power will not help you then.

Ralph Bates gives an extraordinarily chilling performance as Caligula. It is not Caligula’s madness or his savagery that is truly terrifying; it is his capriciousness, his horrifying unpredictability. It is possible to endure even the most extreme tyranny as long as it is predictable, but Caligula’s unpredictability makes it unendurable. The terrors of living under unpredictable tyranny are conveyed with remarkable effectiveness. Bates does not resort to ranting; it is the cheerfulness of his viciousness that chills us. Other fine actors have attempted the role, with some success, but I don’t think anyone has surpassed Bates’ performance. 

While this series is somewhat less sensationalistic than I, Claudius it does not back away from the more lurid aspects of the era of the first emperors. In fact it must have pushed the edge of the envelope very far indeed by the standards of 1968. There is a great deal of violence, some of it quite horrific (although the horrific nature of the violence often comes more from the implications than from what we actually see). And there is plenty of perversity, sexual and otherwise.

Network DVD have released the complete six-episode series in a two-DVD boxed set. Tragically the source materials are not in very good shape, the picture being at times very grainy and occasionally just a little muddy. Despite the problems The Caesars is so good (and makes such a fascinating companion piece to the BBC’s I, Claudius) that it is an essential purchase for any serious fan of television historical drama at its best. Highly recommended.

The New Avengers (1976-77)

I know that The New Avengers has its detractors but I’ve always been fond of this series. I’ve been slowly working my way through the series again and I’m finding that it holds up rather well.

I think a lot of people underestimate the difficulties the producers faced in resurrecting this show. By the mid-70s, after series like Special Branch (at least in its last two seasons), Callan and The Sweeney,  British TV audiences had become accustomed to a lot more realism and a lot more violence in their action/spy series and if The New Avengers was not to look incredibly dated there was simply no alternative - they had to ratchet up the violence. The problem was how to do this while still retaining the essential Avengers flavour. I think the results worked better than anyone could have expected. 

And in 1976, with Patrick Macnee eight years older and quite a few pounds heavier and with the requirement for more violence and more action, there was no real choice other than to introduce a second male character who would be an action hero type. Many fans of the original dislike Gambit (Gareth Hunt) intensely but I found that he does eventually grow on you.

The revamped series did have two major assets. The first was a generous budget which allowed for lots of location shooting and some quite impressive sets. Brian Clemens has said he wanted the look of The New Avengers to be feature film quality. Watching the show on DVD it’s clear he went pretty close to achieving this objective.

The second big asset was of course Purdey. For my money Joanna Lumley is very nearly as good as Diana Rigg, if not just as good. She handles the comedy very adroitly and she’s superb in the action sequences (she was an athlete at school and trained as a dancer so she knows how to move). And she trades witticisms with both Steed and Gambit quite delightfully. If the scripts had been able to maintain the level of wittiness of the original I think she’d be recognised as the best of the Avengers girls. 

The producers were certainly not unaware of her sex appeal. Within the first three episodes we see her in bed, ripping off her skirts for a fight scene and romping about in her underwear. 

The show hit the ground running with the first episode, The Eagle's Nest (an episode I’d never seen prior to this), getting great value from a wonderful guest star in the person of Peter Cushing. It’s obvious that the producers wanted this opening episode to look impressive and spent lot of money on it. It pays dividends.

The Midas Touch is pure Avengers with mad scientists and a diabolical criminal mastermind. House of Cards is more a pure Cold War thriller, reminiscent of the Cathy Gale era but with a lot more action. The scene where Purdey flattens the Russian spy with a single punch to the jaw is particularly memorable and Joanna Lumley makes it look utterly convincing.

Episodes such as Cat Among the Pigeons, House of Cards, Tale of the Big Why and Target! (scripted by Dennis Spooner) compare favourably to anything done in the original series. The climax on the shooting range in Target! is a wonderful action set-piece.

The one real weakness of this series was its reliance on too few writers. This was probably due to the chromic financing problems that beset the series throughout its run. At one point   Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens were paying the entire cast and crew out of their own pockets and thirty years later both were still owed money by the financiers. So financially there was probably little choice other than to have Brian Clemens write most of the episodes himself. 

The series ran into production problems halfway through with its French and Canadian backers causing difficulties. The general consensus is that the first thirteen episodes were pretty good while the later episodes (some of which were filmed in Canada) saw a major falling off in quality. There’s some truth to this although some of the later episodes are actually quite decent, and a few (such as Angels of Death) are excellent. 

It has to be admitted that there are certainly a few real clunkers in this series, like Trap and Gnaws. 

The unevenness of the scripts is a problem, but a bigger problem is that there’s not quite enough of the wit that characterised the original series. That’s a pity because when the three stars do get a good script to work with there’s plenty of chemistry there. Gareth Hunt and Joanna Lumley play off each other quite well, when the scripts give them something to work with. Patrick Macnee doesn’t always seem entirely comfortable and he had mixed feelings about the series. 

On the whole the good episodes do outnumber the bad and some are very good indeed. If nothing else the series is worth watching for the fact that it launched Joanna Lumley’s career, and Purdey remains one of her most memorable roles.

The Region 2 boxed set boasts extremely good transfers which highlight another of the series’ strengths, the generally high production values. The New Avengers is considerably better than its reputation suggests and is worth a look. Recommended.

Baffled! (1973)

Baffled! is a real oddity. This 1973 Anglo-American made-for-TV movie got a theatrical release in Britain but it was actually intended as the pilot for a television series that never got off the ground. It’s easy to see why the series was not greenlighted but although it’s a failure it’s an interesting and strangely entertaining failure.

Leonard Nimoy is a racing car driver named Tom Kovack. He’s leading a race in Pennsylvania when he has a vision and crashes his car. He’s shaken up but unhurt and that night in a TV interview he talks about the vision he saw. Psychic researcher and occult expert Michele Brent (Susan Hampshire) watches the interview and realises immediately that Tom’s vision was the real thing, that he’s a genuine psychic.

She contacts him. He’s sceptical but she is very charming and very beautiful so he hears her out. She fails to overcome his scepticism but when Kovack has another, even more disturbing, vision he realises she was right. He agrees that they should go to Britain, to Wyndham in Devon, the site of his vision. The manor house that he saw in the vision is a stately home whose owner rents out rooms during the tourist season. Michele and Tom book rooms in the house.

They uncover some very strange goings-on. Movie star Andrea Glenn (Vera Miles) and her daughter Jennifer are staying in the house, Andrea hoping for a reconciliation with her estranged husband who lives in the village nearby, Jennifer hoping to finally meet her father. Then Jennifer starts behaving very oddly. It’s as if she’s gone from being twelve years old to being fifteen overnight. Michele has warned Kovack that dark forces are at work and it seems these dark forces are working through Jennifer.

But there is more. Why does the landlady (played by Rachel Roberts) seem to be getting younger every day? And why has Andrea’s husband not appeared?

The plot certainly has potential - it boasts an evil child, eternal youth, missing husbands, psychic visions, kidnappings and a general air of extreme weirdness. The basic premise, a reluctant psychic and a psychic expert acting as amateur occult detectives, is excellent and offers plenty of flexibility.

Susan Hampshire is superb. She is a fine actress and she was no stranger to this sort of material, having got her first big break in the excellent science fiction TV series The Andromeda Breakthrough in the early 60s, and having also made an excellent horror fantasy movie in 1971 called Malpertuis (in which she plays no less than seven roles and acts Orson Welles off the screen). She’s perfect for the role. She manages to be obsessive without seeming weird or crazy, she’s likeable without being cloying, she’s sexy in a classy sort of way and she’s pert and lively.

So far it all sounds good. So what went wrong? Sadly the answer to that is Leonard Nimoy. His performance is all over the place. One suspects that he was concentrating too hard on not being Spock rather than just being natural. But worst of all, there is absolutely no chemistry between the two lead characters. The script makes it obvious that there is supposed to be both a sexual and romantic attachment building between the two characters as well as a sense of camaraderie. It just doesn’t happen onscreen. Susan Hampshire tries her best but Michele and Kovack are just too badly mismatched.

The screenplay also struggles with the task of introducing the two characters who were to be the stars of the series while trying to hold the story together and it perhaps throws too much into the mix.

The production values are reasonably high and the atmosphere of subtle strangeness is suggested quite effectively.

Had it been given a second chance and bit of a re-think it might have had potential. There was nothing particularly bad about the concept. As it stands, despite Nimoy’s outrageously wrong performance it all ends up being fun in a campy sort of way. Enjoyable enough, and worth a look for its curiosity value if nothing else.

The original TV-movie pilot episode of Baffled! has been released on DVD in Region 2 by Network DVD and it looks pretty good.

Mannix, the first season (1967)

Mannix is a show that I thought I’d remembered quite well, but when I started rewatching the first season (which went to air on CBS in 1967) recently it seemed strangely unfamiliar. The fact is that the format was changed radically after the first season, and apparently I had never actually seen any of those early episodes before.

I have to say I think it’s a great pity they changed the format. The first season rather neatly avoids most of the tedious private eye TV series clichés. Joe Mannix isn’t a struggling PI working out of a seedy office, nor is he a glamorous wealthy lone wolf PI. He works for a gigantic corporation. Intertect is the Microsoft of private investigation firms. They employ hundreds of staff, and dozens of operatives. Their headquarters is a skyscraper. 

And this is a seriously high-tech detective agency. They have computers. Lots of them. Big ones. The very latest thing in information technology, 1967 style. Punch cards and flashing lights! And they have communications technology as well. Mannix has a car phone that puts him in instant contact with Intertect headquarters, and gives him access to whatever information he needs. 

Apart from offering a fresh slant on the private eye genre this set-up has some other major advantages. It makes sense that Mannix doesn’t spend much time doing boring routine investigative work. Inertect has office staff and computer programmers to do that stuff. And it makes sense that Mannix’s cases are glamorous high-profile cases. He’s the top operative with the biggest detective agency in the business, so naturally he gets the glamour cases.

Unfortunately the first season was at best moderately successful and the series looked like being cancelled. The show was a Desilu production and Lucille Ball, who ran the studio,  felt that the series had enough potential to warrant persevering for a second season. To persuade CBS to take the second season Desilu had to agree to revamp the series and the decision was made to drop Intertect and the computers and make Joe Mannix a regular private eye. One story is that Lucille Ball thought the computers were boring anyway. 

The series went on to run for eight seasons, so maybe in strict commercial terms the decision was correct. To some extent the problem was that no-one had really thought out the kind of enormous potential that computers would have for police and private investigative work and so the writers often failed to integrate the computer side of Intertect into the story lines. It was something of a lost opportunity because the series was well ahead of its time in envisaging that in the future detective work was going to become very high-tech. They just needed to put a bit more thought into that part of the show’s formula and to make the computer side more exciting. The season format has a characteristic late 60s slickness to it, and more emphasis on the technological gadgetry could have resulted in a series that combined the best of the standard private eye format with a hint of the glamorous high-tech world of the James Bond movies. 

As it is though we still have season one and it provides a fascinating hint of the direction private eye series could have taken. And season one stands up very well today.

Mike Connors makes an ideal private eye detective, good-looking in a slightly weather-beaten way the way a television private eye should look. The sometimes strained relationship between Mannix and his boss at Intertect (played by Joseph Campanella) adds additional interest, as does Mannix’s frustration at having to function as part of a team when he’s not really by nature a team player.

The Region 4 DVD release looks good and includes as an extra an interview with stars Mike Connors and Joseph Campanella both of whom remember the series with a great deal of affection.

The Saint - the black-and-white years

Like many long-running television series The Saint went through a sort of mid-life makeover. The first two series were co-produced by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman and were based on Leslie Charteris’s own stories. When Berman departed in 1965 Roger Moore and Baker took over as producers, the series switched to colour and there were several minor format changes. The distinctive opening sequence in which Simon Templar breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly was dropped. While some of the later episodes were based on Charteris’s stories others were completely original stories.

Since Network DVD has released this series in two boxed sets, one comprising the black-and-white episodes and the other the colour episodes, it will be convenient to discuss the two phases of the series’ history separately. At this point it is the earlier black-and-white episodes I will be discussing.

Leslie Charteris created the character of Simon Templar in the late 1920s. By the 1950s The Saint stories had made Charteris one of the world’s best-selling authors. Making a television series based on the character was an obviously attractive idea but the problem was that Charteris had been very unhappy with previous big-screen and radio adaptations and was reluctant to sanction a TV series. He had been particularly displeased by the popular RKO Saint movies starring George Sanders, considering Sanders to have been totally wrong for the role. While Sanders had some of the necessary characteristics to play the character (the smoothness and the hint of ruthlessness) on the whole Charteris was correct. Sanders was too languid and lacked the energy and physical presence the character required.

In the early 60s Charteris finally gave ITC the go-ahead. After considering Patrick McGoohan ITC (very wisely) abandoned that idea and cast Roger Moore, who had wanted to play the role for years. Despite initial misgivings Charteris was happy enough with the choice of star, although he increasingly disliked the series itself. Charteris was never able to accept that adapting a short story for television required some changes in order to fill an hour-long episode.

The literary version of The Saint had gone through several major changes, starting off as a an extravagantly larger-than-life devil-may-care and very very English leader of a gang of amateur crime-fighters, then being toned down somewhat and made somewhat transatlantic and finally emerging in the 1950s as a romantic if slightly world-weary loner. Since ITC wanted to give the series a contemporary setting it was Charteris’s later 1950s version of Simon Templar who provided the basis for the TV series. The 1955 short story collection The Saint on the Spanish Main has very much the feel of the TV series.

The best portrayal of the 1930s version of The Saint was Louis Hayward’s performance in The Saint in New York. Hayward captures the manic energy and the schoolboy sense of mischief perfectly. Roger Moore would have been entirely wrong as the Simon Templar of the 30s but he is absolutely perfect for the later version of the character - sophisticated, amused, slightly world-weary and even at times with just a subtle hint of melancholy and even loneliness.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the famous signature tune that signals Simon Templar’s appearance onscreen was composed by Charteris himself, and Charteris was also responsible for the equally famous stick-figure Saint logo. Charteris loved the fact that his creation became a pop culture icon. Many writers eventually become disillusioned by their most famous creations. Agatha Christie disliked Hercule Poirot and Conan Doyle grew so weary of Sherlock Holmes that he tried to kill him off. Charteris by contrast was delighted by Simon Templar’s popularity, even editing the Saint fan magazine himself in the 50s.

One major problem for a TV adaptation is that while Simon Templar was a hero and very much on the side of justice he operated outside the law. In fact his methods were often quite frankly wildly illegal. The TV series would have to tone this down a little but they could not abandon this aspect of the character altogether. Templar’s disdain for the letter of the law and his decidedly uneasy relationship with the police was an absolutely crucial part of the character’s appeal. You can’t be a modern Robin Hood unless you are also to some extent an outlaw. On the whole the TV series handles this problem reasonably well.

When production started in 1962 the series was very much state-of-the-art as far as television action-adventure series were concerned. By the standards of its day it boasted high production values and looked as slick and professional as any contemporary US series. This was very much in keeping with Lew Grade’s long-term strategy for ITC, to make series that could compete in world markets and most importantly have a chance of cracking the US market. And in the case of The Saint that strategy paid off handsomely. After achieving success in syndication the series was picked up by NBC. Apart from The Avengers it became the most internationally successful British television series of the 60s. 

Initially the producers had assumed that British car companies would jump at the chance to have one of their cars featured in a TV series, but to the surprise none were interested. Finally in desperation Volvo were approached and the Swedish car company was delighted to help out. It proved to have been a wise move as sales of their P1800 sports car soared once the series went to air. Roger Moore was so pleased with the car that he bought one himself.

Much of the show’s success was certainly due to Roger Moore. His extremely laid-back acting style and his ability to play the role in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner without overdoing it and without mocking the character suited the character and the series perfectly. 

While the series became a 1960s pop culture phenomenon it’s notable that Simon Templar himself has more of a 1950s rather than a 1960s sensibility. He regards many of the manifestations of 1960s pop culture with amused contempt. He remains throughout the series a slightly old-fashioned hero. Rather than being a weakness, that turned out to be one of the show’s strengths. Had the series tried to make him a truly 1960s character it would have failed. His old-fashioned view of the world makes him something of an exotic, much as John Steed’s old-world manners and dress sense made him an exotic. In fact many of the most successful characters in 1960s British television share this quality. Patrick McGoohan regarded the 1960s as marking the beginning of the degeneration of western civilisation and insisted on playing his iconic 1960s TV characters as characters who were in revolt against the modern world. Adam Adamant’s Edwardian values in Adam Adamant Lives! equally obviously mark him as a rebel against the world of the 60s.

Simon Templar’s 1950s sensibility makes this series rather politically incorrect by today’s standards, a major factor in its favour. 

Network DVD’s boxed set of The Saint black-and-white episodes offers very pleasing transfers plus quite a few extras, including several commentary tracks.

The Saint still holds up remarkably well. The exotic locations that provided the settings for most episodes were achieved in the standard manner for 1960s television, with some stock footage and some imaginative set dressing. While this dates the program it adds to its charm. As producer Robert S. Baker points out in one of the commentary tracks the idea behind the series was not to aim for realism. The show was intended as a tongue-in-cheek fantasy, this being the main reason for having Roger Moore breaking the fourth wall at the start of each story - the viewer is expected to take the stories as stories rather than real life. When you approach the series in this way it still provides an enormous amount of stylish entertainment. Highly recommended.