Peter Gunn, season two (1959-60)

In 1958 NBC started airing Peter Gunn, a private eye TV series that enjoyed considerable success. It ran for two seasons on NBC and then for a third season on ABC. It’s probably the best remembered such series of its era. Peter Gunn was created and produced by Blake Edwards who also wrote and directed a number of episodes. Henry Mancini, a frequent Blake Edwards collaborator, provided what was to become one of the best-known theme tunes in TV history. 

The program adheres to the half-hour format that was then standard on American television. The visuals have a definite and conscious film noir feel.

Craig Stevens in the title role is a reasonably convincing tough guy private eye but he's just a little too stolid and even perhaps a bit of a Boy Scout. The world of Peter Gunn is the world of night-clubs and jazz clubs. His cases take him into more sordid surroundings at times but his own world is a fairly classy one. He has a swanky apartment. He always seems clean, maybe too clean to be a private detective. Peter Gunn naturally has some underworld connections, as you would expect in his line of work. He is however very much at home with the arty and literary crowds, the world of pretentious urban sophisticates.

The series is in marked contrast to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer which started screening on rival network CBS in the same year. Mike Hammer is definitely not at home with the arty crowd. Sleazy bars are more his scene. Peter Gunn is a fairly tough guy but he’s totally outclassed in the tough guy department by Mike Hammer as played by Darren McGavin. Gunn also lacks the edge of craziness that Hammer has, and he certainly lacks Hammer’s unapologetic enjoyment of violence. 

What this all adds up to is that Peter Gunn is a less interesting series than Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Less interesting, but it has its strengths.

Herschel Bernardi plays Gunn’s cop friend Lieutenant Jacoby, and he’s one of the show’s strengths. Lola Albright plays Gunn’s girlfriend Edie, a singer whose main function is to get herself kidnapped on a regular basis so that Gunn can rescue her.

Gunn spends much of his time at a moderately up-market somewhat trendy bar called Mother’s. He spends more time there than in his office. In fact I’m not even sure that he has an office!

Jazz is not as central to this series as it is to Johnny Staccato but it’s still an important ingredient. The jazz in Peter Gunn though is a much more sedate kind of jazz. Despite his arty connections Peter Gunn is a guy with pretty mainstream tastes. He’s a sharp dresser but far from flashy. He’s somewhat bemused by the excesses of modern art. He represents Middle America flirting cautiously with modernity (and I can’t say I blame Middle America for being cautious about such tendencies).

The overwhelming impression I get from this series is its unevenness. A lot of episodes are really quite routine private eye stories. Murder Is the Price for example is a very conventional revenge story. The Wolfe Case is better but it’s still nothing out of the ordinary. Then just as one starts to lose faith in this series along comes an episode like The Briefcase. This is one of the episodes directed by Blake Edwards and it’s mayhem laced with a little comedy, as you might expect from Blake Edwards. It also has a convoluted but clever story, with everyone trying to get their hands on a briefcase full of incriminating documents. For a semi-comedic story it has a remarkably high body count. The Briefcase is a sparkling and very entertaining little tale. 

In The Game Gunn acts as go-between for an insurance company paying off jewel thieves, and he gets a beating for his troubles. The Game has a definite hint of cynicism to it. 

Then there are episodes like Edge of the Knife and The Comic (one of the episodes written and directed by Blake Edwards), which are remarkably grim and downbeat by the standards of 50s network television with more than a hint of a genuine film noir sensibility.

I guess what Blake Edwards was trying to do with this series was to avoid making his hero into a Mike Hammer clone, and to avoid the taint of vigilante justice that surrounded Hammer. Peter Gunn is not a one-man army and he’s not a maverick. He’s a solid dependable professional. Craig Stevens certainly succeeds in making Gunn more respectable than most screen private eyes, but at the cost of making him just a little bland. Peter Gunn will kill bad guys when he has to and he’ll do it without hesitation but he’ll do it in a very dispassionate manner. It’s just part of the job. Craig Stevens lacks the exuberance, the edginess and the sheer panache that Darren McGavin brought to the rôle of Mike Hammer, and he lacks the humanity that John Cassevetes brings to Johnny Staccato.

Peter Gunn on the whole is middle-of-the-road entertainment executed with a certain amount of style. It’s far from being my favourite private eye series of that era but it’s reasonably enjoyable and it’s worth a look.

The Secret Service (1969)

The Secret Service was the last of the classic Gerry and Sylvia Anderson Supermarionation series (although Gerry Anderson did attempt to revive the format some years later with Terrahawks. Originally broadcast in the UK in 1969, The Secret Service was also the least successful of all the Supermarionation series.

The Reverend Stanley Unwin (played by the real-life comedian of the same name) appears to be an ordinary country parish priest. In fact he’s a secret agent working for an organisation known as BISHOP. His assistant, who masquerades as his gardener, is Matthew Harding. Matthew handles most of the dangerous work, and does so in a rather strange way. The Reverend has a device known as the Minimiser that can shrink Matthew to one-third of his normal size. This allows him to go places where an ordinary man would be too easily detected. In fact much of the time he travels hidden inside the Reverend Unwin’s briefcase.

By 1969 Gerry Anderson was starting to feel that he’d gone just about as far as he could with puppets. In fact his problem was that the puppets were now too good. They were so lifelike that he might just as well use real actors, who were (generally) better actors than the puppets. 

The Secret Service was a transitional program insofar as, in an attempt to achieve even more realism, it uses live actors for some scenes, particularly scenes involving movement (always the weakness of the puppets). It also uses both miniatures and real cars and aircraft. This, combined with the technique of having the same characters played by both puppets and real actors, gives the series a rather strange feel that doesn’t quite work.

There are many other oddities about this series. The quirky nature of the program is apparent right from the start with the very strange theme music. Stanley Unwin also had a running gag that he’d been using in his comedy routines for years, of suddenly starting to talk in a strange gobbledygook which he called Unwinese. It’s basically incomprehensible nonsense but it sounds like it means something. This is incorporated into the show as a device the Revered Unwin uses to confuse his opponents. Whether this is an amusing or an irritating feature depends on your own personal taste. I find it mildly amusing.

Another strange and uneasy feature of this series is the ambiguous setting. Most of the time it appears to have a contemporary setting, which seems to be confirmed by the use of what are clearly real 1968-vintage commercial airliners (which I think are actually Vickers Viscounts) in the first episode, A Case for the Bishop. But then in the next episode, A Question of Miracles, we see miniatures representing futuristic cars and helijets. This is all somewhat disconcerting. The great strength of previous Supermarionation series such as Captain Scarlet  and Stingray was that they took place in fully-realised future worlds which were internally consistent. The partial abandonment of this future world was in retrospect a mistake.

Lew Grade took one look at the series and cancelled it immediately. As a result only thirteen episodes were made. Gerry Anderson was actually quite pleased with the show’s cancellation since it allowed him to concentrate on his next project, UFO, in which he would switch entirely to the use of live actors. Interestingly enough, UFO reverted to the kind of futuristic world that had made the earlier series so successful.

While the weaknesses already enumerated certainly counted against it the real reason for the failure of The Secret Service was that it was just too quirky for its own good and Lew Grade was probably correct in his judgment that it would be impossible to sell to US networks. It’s also unfortunate that the first episode, A Case for the Bishop, is rather weak. The following episode, A Question of Miracles, is very much better and is closer in feel to the classic Supermarionation series.

To Catch a Spy is a routine sort of story but The Feathered Spies is unusual and entertaining. An episode like The Deadly Whisper sums up the series quite neatly. Donald James contributed scripts to most of the British sci-fi and action adventure series of the period. There was no doubting his ability to deliver perfectly serviceable scripts and The Deadly Whisper, involving a plot to use a top-secret high-tech gun to destroy an experimental aircraft, could have been a thoroughly satisfactory episode for any series of that type. And mostly it works quite well, except that in practice it has just a little too much of the series’ characteristic whimsicality.

My impression from what I’ve seen of the series so far is that as it progresses it becomes more firmly anchored in the expected future world of other Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series.

The miniatures work is impressive, as was the case in all of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation series, although the format of this series offers fewer opportunities for special effects compared to the earlier series. The secret agent in a suitcase idea is a good one and having the suitcase equipped with a periscope is a nice touch.

The idea of a village priest being a secret agent might have worked but with the series already suffering from a surfeit of whimsy it's just a bit too much. Having him drive a bright yellow Model T Ford adds to the problems, which are exacerbated even further by having even more comic relief being provided by Father Unwin's housekeeper. 

The Secret Service cannot be described as a real success but it does have an odd charm and it’s worth a look.

Special Branch - season one (1969)

Special Branch was a rather unusual police drama series produced by Britain’s Thames TV. It ran from 1969 to 1974 (although with a lengthy hiatus between seasons 2 and 3).

The series was unusual because it reflected the unusual role of the real-life Special Branch (as it existed at the time). They were police officers, and they were in fact part of the Metropolitan Police, but they worked in conjunction with the security services. The duties of the Special Branch could range from arresting spies to protecting VIPs to border security. They did background checks on people in line for appointment to sensitive jobs and they collected intelligence on subversive organisations. They were not exactly spy-hunters, that was left to the Security Service, but they were in effect the enforcement arm of that service. 

The series reflects these wide-ranging duties, which in themselves provide plenty of material for interesting television, while also dealing with the complex problems such duties brought with them. They have to walk a fine line between respecting the rights of citizens in a free country and protecting those citizens from very real threats. It’s not just a fine line, at times it becomes very blurred indeed. The biggest problem of all is political interference by politicians desperate to pander to public opinion, and senior bureaucrats more interested in advancing their careers than in seeing the job done properly.

They also have a very uneasy relationship with the Security Service, in the person of Charles Moxon (Morris Perry). Moxon gives them information they need but he can be very selective in doing so, and quite devious in withholding the most important facts of all. 

Detective Superintendent Tom Eden (Wensley Pithey) is close to retirement age and is anxious not to jeopardise his pension while at the same time he is determined to do his duty. His duty as he sees it, which is not always the way either his superiors or his subordinates see it. Chief among his subordinates is Detective Chief Inspector Jordan (Derren Nesbitt). Jordan is young and ambitious. He is also flamboyant, a snappy dresser in the very latest styles, and a man with a definite fondness for the opposite sex.

This sounds like a classic setup, with Eden as the crusty conservative old school copper and Jordan representing the new breed of forward-thinking policeman. The series however avoids falling into that obvious trap. In fact Eden is a bit of a bleeding heart and a stickler for civil liberties while Jordan, despite his trendy Carnaby Street threads, is far more conservative at heart. While Eden is inclined to bend over backwards not to tread on the toes of the protest generation Jordan has no patience for such nonsense and certainly has no patience with the counter-culture of the 60s. Jordan is also a very dogged and very conscientious policeman.

Detective Constable Morrissey (Keith Washington) is the new boy at Special Branch, as keen as mustard but painfully inexperienced. Despite his youth he regards any manifestation of 1960s youth culture with horror and contempt.

The mix of characters is excellent and gives the show not just balance but some nice dramatic tension as loyalties are tested in dealing with some exceptionally complex cases.

Some of the episodes could qualify as out-and-out spy thrillers while others focus on much more mundane cases. Good writing and fine acting allows the more mundane cases to be just as interesting as the glamorous ones.

The writers are clever enough not to indulge in too much cynicism. The good intentions and hard work of the Special Branch officers comes to naught in many episodes due to political machinations but they are still professionals doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. The series does not veer too far in the direction of moral relativism. These are cops working to uphold a system that is far from perfect but it is always made clear that however imperfect the system might be, the alternatives are much more unpalatable. The job can on occasion be unpleasant but these are still the good guys. There is moral ambiguity in this series, but there is still right and wrong.

It was very common at this time for series to be given mid-life revamps but very few series ever underwent as drastic a revamp as Special Branch got in 1973. After two series virtually the entire cast was replaced. Even more importantly, Thames TV’s Euston Films division took over production of the show for this third season. Up until this time British TV shows were usually shot on videotape with location shooting done on film (which accounts for the sometimes jarring difference in picture quality between inside scenes and outside scenes), and were mostly shot in the studio. Euston Films changed all that with the last two seasons of Special Branch, with everything done on film and on location, and in so doing changed the face of British television, although the revolutionary nature of the change did not become fully apparent until the next series they tackled, The Sweeney.

As a result the last two seasons of Special Branch have tended to overshadow seasons one and two. That’s a pity because those first two seasons are in fact superb television. They might have been made in a visual style that would soon start to look old-fashioned but they are well-written well-crafted stories with real depth and complexity to them. And Detective Chief Inspector Jordan is, for my money, one of the classic British TV cops.

Special Branch has been released on DVD in Region 2, and the first two seasons have been released in Region 4 as well. Unfortunately only seasons 3 and 4, which are very different in style, have been released in Region 1.

Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1955-56)

Colonel March of Scotland Yard was a British television crime series starring Boris Karloff that was screened by ITV in 1955-56. It was based on the short story collection The Department of Queer Complaints by John Dickson Carr. 

Colonel March (Karloff) is head of Department D.3 at Scotland Yard, popularly known as the Department of Queer Complaints. His job is to investigate crimes that are too strange or too baffling to be solved by conventional police methods. It is in this respect a forerunner of later series such as Department S.

Twenty-six episodes were made, of which at least twelve survive. Three episodes were combined to produce Colonel March Investigates which was released theatrically in 1955.

Unfortunately the series has never had an official DVD release. There are I believe a couple of grey market releases although I haven’t personally come across them. The episode Error at Daybreak is included in a Mill Creek public domain boxed set. That episode plus the three episodes that comprise Colonel March Investigates are the only ones I’ve seen.

Error at Daybreak concerns the sudden death of an industrialist but nothing is as it seems to be. Was it murder or a heart attack? And why has the body mysteriously disappeared?

Hot Money involves a bank robbery. A young bank teller is implicated in the robbery. He tries to clear himself by following one of the robbers, thereby leading the police to the money. He tells the police that the money is concealed in the office of a crooked solicitor, but the money cannot be found. Colonel March believes the teller is innocent but the only way to clear him is by finding the money and the police have already conducted a very thorough search.

Death In The Dressing Room is an excellent story with a touch of the exotic and a definite hint of the bizarre. The vital clue is a message contained within a Javanese dance. 

The New Invisible Man is even stranger. An old man who watches his neighbours (a little too closely) with a telescope is convinced that he has seen a man murdered by a pair of disembodied hands clad in gloves.

Many of the episodes are based directly on Carr’s short stories. This is a crime series with a distinctly odd touch, with stories of inexplicable events. Inexplicable to any ordinary person, but to a man with Colonel March’s acute and unconventional intelligence even the inexplicable can be explained.

Colonel March is a quietly spoken, very charming and apparently slightly dotty elderly gentleman but appearances are deceptive. He’s a determined and very canny crime-solver. Karloff is delightful in the role.

Colonel March Investigates is available on DVD in Region 2 from an outfit called Simply Media.

Colonel March of Scotland Yard is a fine offbeat crime series. Highly recommended.

Johnny Staccato (1959-60)

The rise of television in the late 40s and the 50s more or less killed the traditional crime B-movie. But that doesn’t mean that tough guys, two-bit punks and no-good dames disappeared. They found a new home in the new medium. The edges were softened a little but some of the TV crime series of the 50s still managed to be surprisingly gritty. 

Private eye series were especially popular. Unfortunately some of the best-known examples have not yet appeared on DVD (most notably Hawaiian Eye and 77 Sunset Strip) or are only available in very poor quality public domain prints (such as the excellent Richard Diamond Private Detective starring David Janssen).

One series that is available on DVD and that is worth a look is Johnny Staccato. It only lasted for one season, airing on NBC from 1959 to 1960. 

John Cassavetes plays the eponymous hero. I’ve never much cared for him as either an actor or a film-maker but he’s not bad in this show. He plays Johnny Staccato as a rather hip and rather cocky character but surprisingly he manages to avoid making him too irritating. He's a jazz musician as well as a private eye and he's very much at home in the world of late 50s Greenwich Village. He has discovered that his musical talents aren’t quite sufficient to pay the rent so he does private detective work on the side. It’s not quite clear if he actually has a private detective’s licence or if he is merely an amateur. He does carry a gun although he seldom uses it.

Johnny Staccato inhabits the world of night-clubs and jazz clubs but with a definite bohemian ambience. John Cassavetes (an actor I normally dislike intensely) does a surprisingly fine job. 

The mood of the show is a mix of film noir and late 50s jazz/beat culture cool and it works quite well. Cassavetes is not quite convincing as a tough guy but he does bring a slight edge of melancholy to the character which is quite interesting. Although mostly shot in a studio it doesn’t feel as studio-bound as many series of the era. The most effective scenes are the ones that show Johnny stalking the streets of New York at night, a slightly sad figure but determined to do his best for his various clients.

Much of the action is set in a jazz club and it’s a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era.

Some episodes really do manage to achieve a genuine film noir feel. Of course there’s a limit to what you can do in a half-hour episode but in well-written an well-crafted episodes like Tempted it succeeds surprisingly well. The Poet’s Touch is another interesting episode, dealing with the deeply unwholesome fascination that intellectuals have with violent thugs, a fascination that the literary luminaries of the beat generation were especially prone to. 

The tone does become somewhat dark at times, with some stories having endings that are ambiguous or even tragic. The quality of the writing is generally quite impressive.

The visuals are as close as 1950s television was going to get to film noir and at times it generates a pretty effective atmosphere of glamour with an undercurrent of danger and just the faintest hint of sleaze.

Cassavetes was always ambitious to get behind the camera and this is where he first cut his teeth in that role, directing no less than five episodes.

The late 1950s was a kind of golden age for American private eye television series - Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Peter Gunn and Richard Diamond, Private Detective all appeared at the tail end of the 50s. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was the most uncompromisingly tough and two-fisted of the bunch - it was genuinely hardboiled and overall it was the most satisfying of them all. Peter Gunn and Johnny Staccato both aimed at fusing the world of film noir with the bohemian world of jazz clubs. In my opinion Johnny Staccato does this much more convincingly and entertainingly  than the more popular but rather bland Peter Gunn. Audiences at the time obviously did not agree with me and sadly Johnny Staccato was axed after a single season.

The DVD set is not outrageously expensive and the series looks great on DVD. Johnny Staccato has its own distinctive flavour and is very definitely worth checking out. Highly recommended.

Public Eye: The ABC Years

Public Eye, which ran from 1965 to 1975, is about as far removed from the world of the adventure TV series we’ve been discussing recently as any program could possibly be. It represents a very different but equally interesting side of British television in the 60s and 70s.

The series was originally produced by Britain’s ABC Television. In the late 60s a shakeup of British commercial television saw ABC merged with Associated-Rediffusion to form Thames Television, which continued production of the series.

The idea of the series was to do a completely unglamorous private eye series. And Frank Marker is about as unglamorous a hero as could be imagined. Public Eye is determinedly seedy. Frank Marker is a very decent guy but his life is as far removed as could be imagined from the popular image of the private eye. He’s a rather battered and not overly successful middle-aged private enquiry agent. He doesn’t drive a sports car and he isn’t surrounded by beautiful women. His cases do not involve the international jet set. He does credit checks, divorce work, looks for missing dogs and strayed husbands, and in fact takes any work he can get.

It might sound dull but in fact it’s a thoroughly engaging and very entertaining program. What it lacks in action it makes up for in superb writing and great acting.

Much of the success of this series can be attributed to the performance of Alfred Burke as Frank Marker. Burke was enthusiastic about the series right from the start, and was particularly keen to play a very unheroic and unglamorous private eye. Burke brings this shabby but oddly engaging character vividly to life. Frank Marker’s profession can be sordid at times but we never lose sympathy for the character. Unheroic he might be, but he combines this with a quiet strength of character. Marker has his moral standards. There are lines he will not cross, and he sticks to his principles with a great deal of stubbornness. To an outsider his job might seem grubby but because he does stick to those principles he has surprising reserves of self-confidence. He is down-at-heel but he is not a loser. When things get tough he doesn’t give up. He might bend, but he doesn’t break.

Unfortunately the first three seasons are mostly lost but the remaining four seasons starting with the 1969 season survive in full. 

Network DVD have released the five episodes still in existence from the first three seasons in a two-disc set called Public Eye: The ABC Years.

With only five of the 41 ABC episodes surviving it’s frustratingly difficult to judge whether the tone of the series differed in any substantial way from the later Thames seasons. This is particularly frustrating since in its later years the series did undergo several subtle changes in direction. 

Certainly Frank Marker seems just as shabby and his cases seem just as commonplace as in the later seasons. 

The two surviving first season episodes, Nobody Kills Santa Claus and The Morning Wasn't So Hot, suggest that at this early stage Marker may have been slightly more of a tough guy character. In The Morning Wasn't So Hot he takes on a case involving prostitution and organised crime and takes a few risks that the later Marker might have been less inclined to take, although when things start to get rough he certainly backs off rather hurriedly. This episode deals with runaways from the provinces who are “befriended” at the railway station by smooth-talking ponce Mason. Frank Marker is hired to find one of these runaways but Mason has sold her to big-time operators. By the standards of 1965 this episode is extraordinarily frank in confronting some rather sleazy subject matter.

The second season sees Frank relocating to Birmingham. Frustratingly, since the final episode of season one and the first episode of season two do not survive, we have no way of knowing what prompted the move.

The two survivors from season two both deal with divorce cases. In those days divorce work was the bread-and-butter of a private detective. It was boring and routine but it paid the bills. These two episodes illustrate this show’s remarkable ability to make the most mundane details of Marker’s work into totally engrossing television. In Don't Forget You're Mine a woman hires Frank to find her husband. He finds that there are some very important things she has neglected to tell him.

In Works with Chess, Not with Life, Marker exposes a phony compensation claim by a woman complaining of being poisoned with bad mushrooms at an hotel, then gets mixed up in a case of an adulterous doctor. Marker ends up working for three different clients, including both the husband and the wife.

The sole surviving third season episode is The Bromsgrove Venus. This finds Marker once again caught in the middle of a domestic drama, with both the wife and the husband seeking to employ his services. A photographic competition is the catalyst for the drama. The photographs are on display in the Bromsgrove Public Library, with the winning photograph being a nude study of the Chief Librarian’s wife. The situation is much more complicated that it seems to be. Marker as so often finds himself having to function more as a marriage counsellor and psychologist than as a private detective.

Public Eye remains one of the best private eye series ever made. The ABC Years set provides some fascinating glimpses of its early years. Extras include a brief contemporary interview with star Alfred Burke. Highly recommended.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, season one (1979)

The 1979 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series was kicked off in 1979 with a TV-movie that ended up getting a theatrical release. Producer Glen A. Larson had been responsible for the 1970s Battlestar Galactica series which had also been kicked off by a theatrical release of the pilot episode.

The Buck Rogers character had originally surfaced in the 1920s in Philip Francis Nolan’s novel Armageddon 2419 AD. The novel spawned both a comic strip and a 1939 movie serial as well as an early 50s TV series.

The series has little in common with any of the earlier incarnations of Buck Rogers apart from the basic idea of a 20th century American who gets accidently deep-frozen and wakes up 500 years later. In this case Buck (played by Gil Gerard) is a 1980s US astronaut. How he became deep-frozen is never properly explained but when he does awake he finds himself on board a gigantic starship. This is puzzling but he starts to get really worried when he discovers that this starship does not come from Earth. He gets really really worried when he realises he isn’t dreaming and this is actually happening.

When he gets to Earth he finds that the 25th century is very different from the world he remembers. A nuclear war in the 1990s almost destroyed the planet and the survivors now take their orders from a council of all-wise and benevolent computers. The Earth is protected by a mysterious shield that is never explained, and by fighter spaceships under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) who will naturally become the love interest for the hero.

The first episode of the series proper, The Planet of the Slave Girls, was (for some obscure reason) also feature-length. As usual with episodes of a TV series extended over two episodes it has some pacing problems. It’s still, in its own way, kind of fun. The Earth in the 25th century is dependent on agricultural planets like Vistula 3. Vistula 3’s governor, played by Roddy McDowell, has allowed slavery to flourish on his planet. Now slave-dealer Kaleen (Jack Palance), who has gained a Messiah-like following, is about to lead the people of Vistula 3 in an invasion of Earth. Why a wealthy slave-dealer would want to risk everything on such a venture is never explained.

Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering must foil Kaleen’s plans and save the Earth.

This episode has most of the flaws typical of 1960 and 1970s TV sci-fi. Whole planets seem to have populations of no more than a few hundred people and the planet Vistula 3 is reminiscent of a very bad Star Trek episode, with people running around in costumes that look like they were left over from an epic movie on the Roman Empire.

Glen A. Larson seems to have been a very film believer in the virtue of two-part episodes. While they can be effective they can also tend to drag a little. Episodes 6 and 7 give us yet another two-parter, The Plot To Kill a City, involving a brotherhood of political assassins most of whom seem to have some kind of super power.

The TV series mercifully drops most of the post-nuclear war nonsense that made the original TV-movie rather more tedious than it needed to be.

Whenever it tries to take itself seriously it falls flat on its face, but luckily most of the time it is content to be silly fun entertainment and as such it works fairly well. The bits that are most reminiscent of the 1939 Buck Rogers movie serial are the bits that are most successful. A nice touch is the inclusion of 71-year-old Buster Crabbe in the supporting cast. Buster Crabbe was one of the all-time great screen action heroes and had played the part of Buck Rogers in the 1939 serial (and he’d also played Flash Gordon).

The special effects are very 1970s but for a TV series they’re generally pretty good, although there are a few very obvious and very bad matte paintings.

On the whole it’s reasonably enjoyable in a silly 70s way.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century has been released on DVD and is readily available.