Mystery and Imagination - Dracula (1968)

Another feature-length episode from Thames TV’s Mystery and Imagination gothic horror anthology series, this one dating from 1968.

The decision to tackle Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t quite as crazy in 1968 as it would have been a decade later. The 1970s saw numerous Dracula movie and TV adaptations but in such an adaptation could really only be compared to Universal’s 1930s version and Hammer’s version.

The Mystery and Imagination Dracula is reasonably faithful to the book although with a few significant changes. In this version the Renfield character is actually Jonathan Harker (played by Corin Redgrave) who had become Dracula’s servant on his business trip to Transylvania. He is a much more central character here compared to the book or to other screen versions.

Dracula is played by Denholm Elliott, a rather odd casting choice. Elliott does his best but he lacks the necessary charisma. The principal structural flaw of the novel is that Dracula is relegated for long periods to being a mostly unseen presence lurking in the background. This fault also applies to this TV version and this makes it difficult for Elliott to establish the Count as the truly dominating character he needs to be. At times Elliott is very good; at other times his performance is perilously close to parody.

Bernard Archard is a rather elderly Dr Van Helsing who takes quite a while to realise exactly what he is up against. Dr Seward (James Maxwell) actually has more substance than most of the other characters. He plays Seward as very much the sceptic, very determined not to admit that anything supernatural could possibly be occurring in 19th century England.

A major theme of the novel is a cultural clash between the aristocracy (represented by Dracula) and the rising middle class (represented by Dracula’s enemies). Dracula’s opponents deploy the full force of late 19th century science and technology against a menace whose power rests on tradition and superstition. This theme is not brought out to any great extent in this TV version, although it’s fair to note that the same criticism applies to most other TV and movie versions of the story.

The mystery and danger of sexuality is however very much to the fore here, largely due to Susan George’s hyper-sexualised performance as Lucy Weston. Susan George is the best thing about this particular version and once she becomes vampirised Lucy becomes considerably more menacing, more disturbing and more frightening than Dracula himself. Suzanne Neve as Mina Harker is also impressive. In this version the vampire’s threat to society is very much based on the power and destructive capabilities of sex.

This episode was shot in black-and-white and suffers from the studio-bound feel common to British television of this era. This is no great disadvantage and is even perhaps an asset. The claustrophobic feel of 1960s studio-bound television compensates to some extent for the limited sets and the cheapness of the special effects. For some reason film-makers insisted on including the vampire’s ability to change into a bat even though they lacked the technology to make the transformations convincing and this version falls into the usual trap. And as usual the bat scenes fall flat and come across as slightly silly.

Dracula is not quite as successful as the other episodes of this series but despite a few problems it’s worth a look, if only for Susan George’s performance.

Battlestar Galactica (1978)

The original Battlestar Galactica series first aired in 1978. It was an expensive and ambitious series and folded after one season. It was of course revived a quarter of a century later. The later version was more successful but not as much fun.

The story of the last survivors of the human race making an epic voyage through space in search of a legendary planet known as Earth has some obvious biblical overtones. Series creator Glen A. Larson is a Mormon and this series also utilises elements from Mormon theology and history. Fortunately it’s done fairly subtly and most viewers probably didn’t even notice.

There’s a famous story that Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek to NBC by telling them that it would be Wagon Train in space, Wagon Train being a very popular late 50s TV western series. That was just a way to sell the network on what would otherwise have been a much too unfamiliar concept, but it really is true of Battlestar Galactica. Battlestar Galactica really is Wagon Train in space, with occasional hints of Little House on the Prairie (as in the episode The Lost Warrior). This isn’t a major problem and the series combines science fiction and western tropes fairly effectively. The Magnificent Warriors is another episode that is pure western and succeeds surprisingly well.

Harlan Ellison apparently used to refer to Glen A. Larson as Glen A. Larceny due to his habit of borrowing ideas a little too freely from other writers. It’s true that there’s very little original in Battlestar Galactica. It’s mostly a conglomeration of fairly old ideas but they’re blended into an entertaining enough mixture.

Much of the fun comes from identifying which movies and TV series each particular episode has been inspired by (or put less charitably stolen from).

Despite the obvious borrowings the series does have a distinctive flavour of its own, and it does have a certain sense of style. I particularly love the fact that the Viper pilots’ helmets have a vaguely ancient Egyptian look to them.

The Cylons, a malevolent and remorseless robotic civilisation, make effective villains. Mechanical man-type robots are difficult to do convincingly. All too often such robots just look like a guy in a tin man costume. It’s even more difficult to make them seem genuinely menacing. This is one area where Battlestar Galactica succeeds pretty well - the Cylons do look sinister and nasty.

The special effects still look good. There’s an abundance of action with enough battles between the Vipers and the Cylon fighter ships to keep any reasonable person happy. 

Starbuck (Dirk Benedict) is the character who made the most impact on viewers, a good-natured Han Solo-type hero. He provides a good deal of the comedy whilst also being a classic action hero. Richard Hatch as Captain Apollo is a more straightforward square-jawed noble hero type, rather overshadowed by the more flashy Starbuck. Lorne Greene pretty much reprises his most famous role as the kindly but deceptively tough patriarch of the Ponderosa Ranch from the long-running Bonanza series. Greene’s presence in the cast is yet another nod to the classic western genre.

Battlestar Galactica’s biggest problem is that it was a very expensive series to make. Its initial ratings were quite favourable but expensive series need to rate very well indeed to have a chance of survival. They tend to make TV networks very nervous and when the ratings faltered after a switch in time-slots ABC pulled the plug after one season. The series was revived in 2003 although in my personal opinion the original series was vastly superior.

The entire series is available on DVD and the transfers are very acceptable.

If you like the idea of a space western then Battlestar Galactica should keep you pretty happy. Recommended.

Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67)

One of the less known British television adventure series of the 1960s was the BBC’s Adam Adamant Lives! which ran for two seasons in 1966 and 1967. Most of season 1 survives but unfortunately almost all of season 2 is lost.

The premise was a clever one that offered the opportunity for some satirical observations on the social mores of the past and present. Fortunately the fun adventure elements predominate. Adam Adamant (Gerald Harper) was an Edwardian adventurer and secret agent who disappeared in 1902. In fact he was deep-frozen by a dastardly enemy. In 1966 he is revived and resumes his career as crime-fighter, adventurer and secret agent.

Adam finds the world of Swinging London in the 1960s rather perplexing and he finds much of which he disapproves. His old-fashioned attitudes and sense of honour might seem to be a disadvantage in the world of the 1960s but they actually turn out to be more of an asset than a hindrance. Adam is both courageous and determined and wrong-doers find him to be a surprisingly formidable enemy. Adam prefers to use his sword-cane rather than firearms, a habit that causes amusement to his foes until they discover just how dangerous and skillful he is with such a weapon.

Naturally a hero has to have a sidekick and Adam’s sidekick is Georgina Jones (Juliet Harmer), a Swinging 60s chick whose modern attitudes are often disturbing to our hero. In spite of often disapproving of her he can’t help also being rather fond of her. Georgina is brave to the point of foolhardiness and is always getting herself into scrapes but if there’s one thing Adam admires it is courage. Although Adam is a gentleman of the Edwardian era and Georgina is a free-spirited modern girl a considerable mutual respect develops between the two characters. The interplay between Adam Adamant and Georgina Jones is always a delight. Even more unusually, the attitudes of both Adam and Georgina are treated with a surprising degree of respect. There’s considerable humour from their clash of attitudes but neither character is treated as a mere figure of fun. 

Mention should also be made of Adam Adamant's gentleman's gentleman Simms (Jack May) who provides further amusement.

I hadn’t realised until I looked at the relevant chapter in James Chapman’s excellent study of British TV adventure series of the 60s and 70s, Saints and Avengers, that Adam Adamant Lives! was originally going to be based on the popular fictional detective Sexton Blake (a sort of low-budget pulp version of Sherlock Holmes). It was originally to be called Sexton Blake Lives! The late Victorian crime-fighter was to be frozen in 1895 and resurrected in the Swinging 60s.

Unfortunately the Sexton Blake copyright holders wanted to be paid for the use of the name and the character and that was enough to scare the BBC off. But the head of the Drama Group (Television), Sidney Newman, was still keen on the idea so he simply tweaked it a little by creating an original character.

The BBC hierarchy in those days was of course very hostile to science fiction or fantasy. They wanted to make gritty social realist dramas. Audiences however did not agree. They were switching off the BBC to watch shows like The Avengers on commercial TV. Sidney Newman was looking for a formula that audiences would go and that would also satisfy the  BBC hierarchy, and that was part of the appeal behind the idea of Adam Adamant Lives! - he could sell the idea to the BBC on the basis that it would be a program that would explore the social mores of the 60s and contrast them with the traditional values espoused by the title character. The interesting thing is that Adam Adamant Lives! really does do just that. It just happens to do it in an entertaining way and with a surprisingly light touch. In fact it’s one of the more successful attempts of that era in dealing with the social revolution of the 60s and the rise of youth culture. It manages to do this whilst still being a fun light-hearted action adventure series. 

Adam Adamant Lives! is an excellent example of a program that has a very English feel to it, but in a very good way. It has not only the Swinging London of the 60s vibe but also a London of the 1890s vibe as well. And the very English flavour is in this case very definitely an asset. 

It is also, for a BBC production, extraordinarily good fun in a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek way. It’s one of the few BBC series that captures the same kind of witty, sexy and good-natured feel that made series like The Avengers so successful. The scripts weren’t always up to the standards of The Avengers but it benefits from a truly wonderful cast with all three recurring characters being just right.

Despite the BBC’s legendary reluctance to spend real money on mere light entertainment such as this the production values are reasonable, a tribute to the ability of BBC producers  to make a very small amount of money stretch surprisingly well. The program started shooting in 1966 with a budget of £4,900 per episode. By way of comparison, ITC’s The Champions started shooting the following year with a budget of £40,000 per episode. Unlike the BBC, ITC’s chairman Lew Grade recognised that to have a chance of overseas sales British series needed to be able to match the production values of American television.

The BBC remained unrelentingly hostile to the series and cancelled it after the second season in spite of good ratings and a steadily improving reputation with viewers. And of course the BBC had its final revenge by destroying almost all of the second season.

The stories are fairly typical of 1960s secret agent/crime-fighter series but the unusual nature of the hero gives the series an original and very engaging feel.

The surviving episodes have been released on DVD. Adam Adamant Lives! is immense fun and is very highly recommended.

Sergeant Cork, season 1 (1963)

Sergeant Cork was a British ATV crime series devised by Ted Willis that ran from 1963 to 1968.

The idea was to do a series set in the Victorian era, but with a police detective as hero rather than a Sherlock Holmes-style private investigator. Since most actual detective stories of that era focused on the Sherlock Holmes type of detective the decision was made to create an entirely new character and to rely on entirely original stories.

The late Victorian era seemed ideal. Official police detectives had existed before then but this was the period that saw such officers beginning to adopt recognisably modern and even scientific methods of solving crime. The central character, Detective-Sergeant Cork (played by John Barrie), would be an officer who personified the new police methods.

Sergeant Cork has a side-kick in the person of Bob Marriott (played by William Gaunt who went on to star in the cult favourite series The Champions). Marriott is introduced in the first episode as a young man who has tried various professions, with a singular lack of success. Now he has used personal connections to secure for himself the opportunity to pursue a new career as a police detective. He is given a chance, initially on probation. Marriott turns out to have, surprisingly, something of a flair for the job. Sergeant Cork is in desperate need of an assistant and he sees Marriott as the sort of keen intelligent young man he can mould into the kind of forward-thinking detective officer Scotland Yard will need in the future.

John Barrie does a splendid job. Cork is a bit of an eccentric, rather gruff and very blunt, but a dedicated policeman who lives for the job. Barrie manages to make him more than just the stereotypical gruff older cop with a heart of gold. William Gaunt is equally impressive as the slightly bumptious but enthusiastic Marriott and he and Barrie play off one another perfectly.

The stories are, by the standards of police procedurals, not particularly complex. The identity of the criminal is usually fairly obvious. This may have been a deliberate choice, with the intention of showing a detective solving the everyday sorts of cases he would really be dealing with rather than with far-fetched but ingenious locked-room mysteries or “impossible crime” stories. Some of the stories are a little more adventurous. On the whole the series succeeds fairly well in giving a impression of real policemen investigating plausible cases.

The first season (which is all I’ve seen so far) has the typical very studio-bound feel of 1960s British television. There’s virtually no location shooting at all, in fact in the episodes I’ve seen so far there’s absolutely none at all. Fortunately viewers of the time would have expected a crime series set in Victorian times to feature a great deal of fog, and fog is wonderfully good for covering up the fact that everything is taking place in the studio. The feel of the period is captured reasonably realistically (or at least it conforms to the popular conception of the period created by the Sherlock Holmes stories).

The series proved to a great success, eventually running to six seasons and a total of sixty-six episodes. The producers were lucky enough to be able to keep the partnership between John Barrie and William Gaunt intact throughout the entire six seasons.

The first season gets off to an impressive start with The Case of the Reluctant Widow, a case of poisoning that provides a considerable challenge to Sergeant Cork’s deductive powers an offers him the opportunity to demonstrate the importance of professional police methods. It sets the tone for the series very effectively.

The second episode, The Case of the Girl Upstairs, is even stronger. The new “science” of psychology was becoming fashionable in the 1890s and this story is a dark twisted little domestic tragedy involving a sinister psychiatrist. 

These were the days before Special Branch had been created and on occasion Sergeant Cork has to deal with terrorism and international intrigue, as in the very fine episode The Case of the Persistent Assassin.

In keeping with the series’ intention to portray the work of the police realistically Sergeant Cork’s cases are not all sensational murders (although there are a few such cases). 

As is inevitable in any series set in the past the present does occasionally intrude, with characters expressing views that are rather too much of the 1960s to be convincingly Victorian. On occasions it falls into the easy trap of portraying the upper classes as nasty and stupid and the working class as the noble downtrodden poor. In the 1960s though television producers at least made some effort to portray the past authentically whereas today period dramas are populated entirely by 21st century characters, making the whole exercise completely pointless. Generally speaking Sergeant Cork doesn’t offend too badly in this respect.

Network DVD have released all six seasons in single-season boxed sets. Picture quality is about as good as can be expected for a 1960s shot-on-videotape series.

Sergeant Cork is fine entertainment. Recommended.

Mystery and Imagination - The Suicide Club

The Suicide Club was one of the later episodes of the excellent and unjustly rather forgotten British gothic horror anthology television series Mystery and Imagination. This episode was originally broadcast in 1970. It is a feature-length adaptation of three connected short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson’s original idea was delightfully twisted and this adaptation captures that perverse quality extremely well. A bored Bohemian prince, Prince Florizel (Alan Dobie) wanders London at night in disguise, looking for the sorts of adventures that will appeal to his jaded tastes. Accompanied by his faithful Master of the Horse (Colonel Geraldyne, played by Eric Woofe) he finds an adventure that is too rich even for his blood.

The Suicide Club is a club for those who have grown weary of life and who lack even the energy to end their lives themselves. Each Friday night the cards are dealt at the club. Whoever draws the ace of spades is destined to be that week’s victim while the man who draws the ace of clubs will be his executioner. It’s the sort of Russian roulette that appeals to those who wish to end their existences in the most dissipated and decadent manner possible.

Prince Florizel has his suspicions that the Suicide Club may be even more sinister that it appears to be. The President of the club (Bernard Archard) and his beautiful, mysterious and creepily cold assistant (played by Hildegard Neil) may be playing a game of their own, a very profitable if very cold-blooded game.

In order to gain admittance to the club Prince Florizel had to sign the articles of membership. As a man of honour he will have to settle matters on his own account without any assistance from the police. The prince is a man of courage and of intelligence and he will be a formidable adversary, but the President of the club is also a very dangerous man.

The period detail is done well, as you expect from British television of this era. The club rooms of the Suicide Club are the right mixture of decadence and gothic excess.

Alan Dobie makes a fine hero and the role gives him the opportunity to indulge himself in some rather theatrical but very effective acting. Bernard Archard and Hildegard Neil play their roles to the hilt.

This is a fine adaptation of one of the perverse classics of gothic literature.

Unfortunately only a handful of episodes of this very fine series have survived. Those that have survived have been released by Network DVD in Region 2. Picture quality is good by the standards of British television of that age.

Highly recommended.

Mystery and Imagination - Frankenstein

Mystery and Imagination was a gothic horror anthology series broadcast on British television from 1966 to 1970. Each episode was based on a classic work of gothic fiction. Sadly only eight of the original twenty-four episodes survive and have now been released on DVD by Network DVD. One of the more interesting of the surviving episodes is the feature-length adaptation of Frankenstein.

The early episodes were made by ABC, which after their merger with Rediffusion became Thames Television. Thames Television went on to make six further episodes.

The intention was clearly to produce an adaptation of the novel that was closer to both the letter and the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel. In this it succeeds reasonably well. This version makes use of one clever trick that had surprisingly not been tried in previous screen versions. I won’t reveal the trick as it does constitute a minor spoiler.

Ian Holm was always a fairly reliable actor and he does well in the title role. The supporting cast is solid with Richard Vernon being memorable as a crusty old professor of anatomy.

Obviously the producers didn’t have the kind of budget to play with that most film versions of the story have had but they still do a fine job of evoking the gothic atmosphere and the crucial bringing-the-monster-to-life scene works well. Frankenstein’s laboratory is less spectacular than in most Frankenstein movies but still looks reasonably impressive.

This television version puts more emphasis on Dr Frankenstein’s conscious efforts to emulate a God that he professes not to believe in, and in this respect it is probably closer to Mary Shelley’s intentions than are most of the movie versions. Mary Shelley’s father was a socialist agitator, her mother was an nearly feminist and her husband a strident and aggressive atheist. In spite of all this, or more probably because of these things, Mary Shelley was rather sceptical of our ability blithely to dispense with God.

This Frankenstein focuses to a large extent on Dr Frankenstein’s responsibility towards his creature, and the psychological horror of his guilt over his creation. This is in general a much more psychological approach than has been taken in any film version.

Although Ian Holm was nearly forty when the program was made his Dr Frankenstein seems in many ways to be a very young man. His arrogance comes across as being partly at least the arrogance of youth, which makes his actions perhaps slightly more forgivable.

On the downside this version is rather talky at times, which is perhaps inevitable in a television production that obviously cannot rely as heavily on visual images as a movie would. Ian Holm at times gives the impression that he’s giving a stage performance.

Network DVD's release is of reasonable quality given that the majority of British television programs of this era have not been particularly well preserved and are not in the best condition. We can be thankful that at least some of this series survives at all. 

This production has its interesting features and it's worth a look.

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.