Callan - The Monochrome Years (1967-69)

Network DVD’s Callan - The Monochrome Years boxed set includes all twelve surviving black-and-white episodes from the first two seasons originally broadcast in 1967 and 1969. 

A Magnum for Schneider was later remade in colour as the Callan movie, but I’d never seen the original version which served as the pilot episode of the Callan TV series. 

There are some interesting differences between this pilot and the series proper. The relationship between Callan and his disreputable and evil-smelling burglar pal Lonely hasn’t yet been fleshed out. The strange affection that Callan has for Lonely is not yet in evidence, and we have no hints of the backstory that explains the unlikely friendship between a government assassin and a burglar. 

The other big difference us that Toby Meres is played by Peter Bowles, of all people! Now I’m a big fan of Peter Bowles, but this is unexpected casting indeed. And it doesn’t really work. Partly this is because you can’t help comparing this to Anthony Valentine’s superb and chilling performance in the series proper. The Bowles version of Meres is neither sinister nor frightening, nor does he have the surface charm that hides the viper underneath.

Edward Woodward though has already nailed the character of Callan pretty effectively. And the cynicism and pessimism, and the total lack of glamour, the seediness, all these ingredients are present. The story itself works quite well, although the later movie version is probably superior overall.

The picture and sound quality are pretty dodgy, but it’s a miracle this very first appearance of Callan has survived at all.

Watching the very early episodes of Callan it’s interesting to note the differences compared to the more familiar third and fourth seasons. I’ve seen all the third and fourth season episodes several times, but I’d never seen the black-and-white episodes at all. 

Both the pilot episode and the first episode of the series proper make extensive use of voiceover narration by Edward Woodward. Dropping that practice in later seasons was definitely a good idea - it’s overused and not really necessary. By season two the series has settled down into the format that would become more familiar in seasons three and four.

The relationship between Hunter and Callan in season one is interesting - more personal and much more bitter. I can’t imagine Callan speaking to the William Squires version of Hunter the way he speaks to the original version. 

Even this early on the Callan-Toby Meres relationship is fun. In a single episode so much has already been established. Not just their intense dislike for one another, but the reasons for it. I love the fact that as much as they hate each other’s guts, they still have great respect for each other’s professionalism. They both know that in their line of work you can’t allow personal feelings to influence the way you do your job. You might hate the guy you have to work with, but you might also have to rely on him to save your life.

It’s also interesting finding out more about Callan’s early history with the Section. Most of it could be inferred in later seasons, but it does make some of his bitterness more comprehensible.

The Good Ones Are All Dead was the first true episode after the original Armchair Theatre drama, and it’s very typically Callan - loads of moral ambiguity and cynicism. It has a rather sympathetic Nazi war criminal, and a rather unsympathetic and quite fanatical Israeli agent hunting him. At the same time the horrors of the Nazi’s crimes are not minimised. Callan’s ambivalence about the morality of his job, even when the target is someone who is clearly guilty of terrible crimes, is already becoming nicely complex and tortured.

Quite a few of these early episodes do not have pure Cold War themes. Death of a Friend deals with French OAS terrorists. The Worst Soldier I Ever Saw deals with a British brigadier who has unwisely becomes embroiled in Middle Eastern politics. This episode fills in quite a bit of Callan’s personal backstory, the brigadier in question having been Callan’s CO in Malaya.

There were several different Hunters (as the head of the shadowy Section is named) in the first two seasons and they seem to get themselves mixed up in the action to a degree that the Hunter of seasons three and four would have disapproved of. One of these Hunters, in the extremely good episode Heir Apparent, is a British spy in East Germany. Before he can take over as Hunter Callan and Meres will have to get him out of East Germany alive, an undertaking that turns out to be considerably more difficult than they’d anticipated.

Without taking anything away from the performance of Patrick Mower (a very fine actor) as Cross in season three and the early part of season four there’s no question that Toby Meres as portrayed by Anthony Valentine was the ideal foil for Edward Woodward’s Callan. The menace wrapped in public school charm of Meres is one of the high points of television espionage.

Had Callan been made a few years later it would undoubtedly have been shot on film with a lot more location footage. We can therefore be thankful it was made when it was, with all the brooding claustrophobia that was so much easier to capture in a studio. 

Callan remains the greatest of all television spy series and viewing these black-and-white episodes, unseen for decades, further enhances the reputation of the series. Very highly recommended.

Tales of Frankenstein (1958 TV pilot)

Tales of Frankenstein was the 1958 pilot episode for a proposed television series which was to be a collaboration between Columbia and Hammer Films. The immense success of Alfred Hitchcock Presents had resulted in a great deal of interest on the part of TV networks in the possibility of other anthology series, an interest that would bear fruit in such series as Thriller and The Twilight Zone. Tales of Frankenstein would have been slightly different - a true gothic horror anthology series.

Given that Hammer were riding high after scoring a major with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, and that this success had established that there was a definite audience for gothic horror, the television series seemed like a very good idea. In fact it was a very good idea, but unfortunately everything went wrong.

The plan was for 26 episodes, 13 to be made by Columbia in the US and 13 by Hammer in England. The pilot episode was to be made in the US, and that’s where the trouble started. Columbia had bought the TV rights to the old Universal horror films and had had considerable success with them. They naturally wanted the TV series to be done in the Universal style. This was both puzzling and exasperating for Hammer, who just as naturally had assumed that the series would be in the Hammer horror style. After all, why involve Hammer at all if you weren’t going to make use of their expertise in making their own distinctive and much more modern style of gothic horror? 

Even worse, Hammer’s Michael Carreras discovered that Columbia weren’t interested in the script ideas Hammer had developed for the series. The only real input that Hammer had to the pilot episode was the choice of star. Hammer wanted Anton Diffring to play Baron Frankenstein, a logical choice since they were about to launch him as a gothic horror star in their upcoming (and extremely good) movie The Man Who Cheated Death. Diffring got the starring role in the TV pilot.

Columbia had a script written by Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore. They had gained plenty of in the genre writing for the pulp magazines in the 30s. Their script was based on a story by Curt Siodmak. Siodmak was a fine writer so there should have been no problem. Unfortunately Siodmak was also hired to direct the pilot. Curt Siodmak was proof that being a good writer does not automatically make someone a good director.

Michael Carreras had by this time given up in despair and returned to England, sending out Anthony Hinds to keep an eye on things in the US. Hinds had no more success than Carreras had had in getting Hammer’s viewpoint across and soon he too gave up and returned home. 

Nobody at Hammer Films was the slightest bit happy with the pilot once they saw it. It was most definitely not at all what they had had in mind.

So was the pilot as bad as Hammer thought? The answer to that is a qualified no. Given that Columbia wanted something that looked like the old Universal horror movies the results were by no means terrible. And the ABC network was quite impressed by the pilot and were very interested in buying the series. Sadly it was not to be. Relations between Columbia and Hammer having more or less broken down completely the project was shelved.

The pilot episode was pretty much a stock-standard Frankenstein story but as an introduction to the series that was not necessarily a bad thing. Once the series had established itself there would have been plenty of opportunities to do slightly more original stories.

The attempt to copy the Universal style worked fairly well. The gothic atmosphere is captured quite effectively. The horror is rather low-key but that at least meant there would be no censorship hassles with the network.

It also needs to be said that capturing the distinctive Hammer horror style in black-and-white would have presented quite a challenge.

Diffring is a reasonably good Baron Frankenstein although his characteristic rather distant acting style meant that the character lacked the subtlety of Peter Cushing’s interpretation, and it has to be said that Diffring’s Frankensein probably had less potential for development than Cushing’s.

The whole affair was not a complete loss for Hammer. Many of the ideas they had come up with for the series were later utilised in their Frankenstein movies. In fact the experience of trying to come up with variations on the story may well have convinced them  that making movie sequels to The Curse of Frankenstein was a more promising idea than a TV series.

Image Entertainment have released the pilot episode on DVD. The problem they faced was that even at a budget price purchasers might be disappointed that all they were getting was a single half-hour episode of a TV series. Their solution was to load the DVDs with extras. There’s a very good commentary track, there are brief interviews with Michael Carreras and Peter Cushing, there’s an extended radio interview with Boris Karloff and another with Glenn Strange (who played the monster in the later Universal movies). There are also lots of trailers for various Frankenstein movies. Given the very reasonable asking price the DVD is not bad value. Tales of Frankenstein itself is in reasonable condition for a 1950s TV episode.

Tales of Frankenstein was a lost opportunity but the pilot episode is not without interest, and not without entertainment value. It’s definitely worth a look.

Hazell, season one (1978)

Hazell was a British private eye TV series made by Thames TV. It ran for two seasons in 1978 and 1979. It’s a slightly unusual series with a flavour all its own.

Hazell was based on a series of novels by Gordon Williams and Terry Venables (better known as a footballer and football team manager).

James Hazell is a young cockney cop turned private eye. Some years earlier it had all turned sour for Hazell and for a few years he had crawled inside a bottle and stayed there. Now he’s cleaned himself up and has a career as a private detective. Not quite a thriving career. He has a flashy car (a Triumph Stag) and a flashy wardrobe but whether he can keep up the payments on the car is another matter.

The setup makes it sound like it’s going to belong squarely to the gritty realism school school of crime series with a hefty dose of cynicism. In fact it’s nothing like that at all. Hazell is a likeable guy and although he looks at life with a certain amount if scepticism he’s by no means cynical. He’s actually a bit of a soft touch. He’s no shrinking violet but he’s definitely not a stereotypical tough guy. He doesn’t like shooters and he’d rather talk his way out of trouble than use his fists. This is in fact a remarkably non-violent crime series, especially for Britain in the 70s (that being the era of The Sweeney).

The most popular and long-running private eye series on British television in that era was Public Eye, which ran from 1965 to 1975. Hazell shares the unconventional non-heroic tone of that series but without its shabbiness and seediness. James Hazell doesn’t have much in common with the chronically down-at-heel Frank Marker, but he does have the same ability to deal with life’s disappointments without surrendering to despair or cheap cynicism.

There are plenty of amusing moments and there’s some very witty dialogue but the series is never played as comedy. It has its dark moments but it isn’t interested in wallowing in misery. It walks a fine line between such extremes. It can perhaps best be described as quirky. James Hazell regards the world with tolerant amusement. That’s the chief charm of the series - it adopts Hazell’s attitude towards life. Hazell just wants to earn a living, keep out of trouble and get as much enjoyment as he can out of life with the minimum of aggravation. Of course life, and his chosen field of employment, conspire to keep getting him into trouble.

The bane of his life is Detective-Inspector Minty, known inevitably as Choc Minty. Minty is a dour Scotsman and he disapproves rather strongly of Hazell. Again the series avoids obvious clichés - Minty might be humourless and disapproving but he’s an honest cop and he’s fair-minded enough to admit it when Hazell turns out to be right about something. And Hazell knows that while Minty would happily run him in if he crossed the wrong line he is not the kind of cop who would ever frame somebody.

The casting of Nicholas Ball was inspired. He is perhaps just a couple of years too young but aside from that he is perfect. He plays the role with a very sure touch, never over-doing things.

The series has a good deal of fun playing with the conventions of film noir and of the 1940s American private eye movie. Each episode features film noir voice-over narration by the lead actor. Hazell is to some extent modeled on famous film private eyes like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and to a considerable extent he has modeled himself on such characters. On the other hand the characters and setting are vehemently British. This gives the series much of its distinctive flavour. If you can imagine a cockney Philip Marlowe in the slightly flashy slightly seedy atmosphere of London pubs and dog tracks and betting shops then you’ve imagined James Hazell.

Hazell had a reasonably generous budget, enough to allow for quite a bit of location shooting and to give the series a feeling of quality and class.

Hazell and the Weekend Man is a typical episode. It involves a case that seems unlikely to go anywhere but slowly Hazell realises that something odd is definitely going on. He thinks he knows what it is, but it’s something his client is going to be quite unhappy about it. And Hazell isn’t sure he should tell the client. Maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie? But sometimes that just isn’t possible.

Hazell Works for Nothing sees Hazell taking on a case that promises no money and potentially a very great deal of aggravation, and it will almost certainly get him into Inspector Minty’s bad books. Hazell really doesn’t want anything to do with this case but his mum insisted that he take it, which doesn’t leave him much choice.

There are quite a few episodes in which Hazell slowly comes to realise that the client is manipulating him. That’s an obvious link with the private eye movies of the 40s. It’s the sort of thing that as always happening to Philip Marlowe. It’s a plot device that lends itself to tragic consequences and downbeat endings but this series tends to use it for the purpose of wry amusement and gentle irony.

Network DVD have released both seasons in a single boxed set.

Hazell is stylish, slightly offbeat and always entertaining. Very highly recommended.

Espionage (1963)

Espionage is a British 1963 television espionage series from ITC. Unusually for a TV spy series it is an anthology series with each of the 24 48-minute episodes being an entirely self-contained drama.

Given this format there was no regular cast but the series employed a galaxy of interesting actors from both Britain and the US, including Dennis Hopper, Steven Hill (who went on to star in Mission: Impossible), Martin Balsam, Patrick Troughton, James Fox, T. P. McKenna (who later played the Soviet master-spy Richmond in Callan), Bernard Lee and Donald Pleasence.

The problem with this kind of format is that such a series can end up having no actual identity, being merely a series of disconnected stories with very little in common. Most successful anthology series solved this problem by having some unity of tone and some kind of commonality in approach. You expect a Twilight Zone episode to be spooky and quirky. You expect an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode to be dark and twisted with a dash of black comedy. Unfortunately Espionage, based on the episodes I’ve watched so far, has no such unifying elements. The only common element is that all of the stories have at least a vague connection with espionage. Even that link is tenuous - episodes like He Rises on Sunday and We on Monday and The Dragon Slayer are concerned with revolutionaries than rather than spies.

Which raises another problem - while it is difficult to deal with a theme like espionage without dealing with politics at least peripherally this series often seems to be much more concerned with politics with only a passing interest in espionage. And nothing dates quite so irrevocably and embarrassingly as political television.

An anthology series is also likely to be more varied in quality than a conventional series, and that’s spectacularly true of this series which ranges from truly excellent to horrendously bad. Sad to say, the horrendously bad seems to outnumber the excellent by a considerable margin.

As with most series from this era the episodes were not necessarily screened in the order in which they were produced so there’s some confusion as to the episode sequence. When I refer to the “first” episode I mean the first episode in Network’s boxed set, which may not have been the first episode to go to air.

The first episode in the set is The Incurable One by Albert Ruben and Halsted Welles, and it’s a definite high point. It concerns Celeste (Ingrid Thulin), a Scandinavian countess who had worked as a spy for the Allies in the Second World War. She had been recruited and trained by American agent Andrew Evans (Steven Hill) and they had undertaken several dangerous missions together. Now the war is long over, but for Celeste it will never end. When you have been trained as a killer how can you adapt to peacetime life? This episode is superb intelligent television that focuses on the psychological cost of espionage rather than the glamour.

Next up is The Weakling, written by Arnold Perl, which has an extremely interesting an promising idea as its centre-piece. Alas it is derailed by some monumentally cringe-inducing acting excesses by Dennis Hopper and by a very basic mistake which gives away far too much of the plot far too early. Even worse it suffers from some spectacularly anachronistic dialogue. A World War 2 spy was unlikely to speak like an early 1960s beatnik, but that’s what happens here. This was something that was occasionally employed in the 1960s as a deliberate technique in an ill-judged attempt to make a story seem more “relevant” and up-to-date. That may have been the case here, or the director may simply have made the mistake of allowing Dennis Hopper to improvise his own dialogue. Either way it’s jarring and irritating. 

It’s a pity because the basic story really is very clever (and it is exactly the sort of idea that real-life spies like Ian Fleming actually came up with during the Second World War). To reveal any plot details would be to risk spoilers so I’ll content myself with saying that Hopper plays an American spy who ends up being caught by the Gestapo.

Covenant with Death, written by Peter Stone, is considerably better. Two young Norwegians have been helping Jews to escape across the border from German-occupied Norway to neutral Sweden. They have proved themselves to be brave and dedicated but in May 1942 they are two frightened young men who do a terrible thing because they see no other way out. In 1947 they face trial as a result. The episode cuts between the courtroom scenes and flashbacks to those fateful moments in 1942.

The series hits real problems with the next episode. Ernest Kinoy’s The Gentle Spies is truly awful. It concerns ban-the-Bomb protesters in contemporary Britain. The protesters are the usual mixture of starry-eyed idealists, cranks and foreign agents. This episode for irony but simply comes across as an embarrassing mish-mash of muddle-headed naïvete and adolescent emotional posturing. It’s clumsy and heavy-handed and it telegraphs its punches in a depressingly obvious manner. It’s overly earnest, a fatal weakness if you’re attempting satire.

He Rises on Sunday and We on Monday deals with the bungled Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. Once again the series abandons espionage for clumsy political polemics, and once again the viewer is bludgeoned with a partisan political message. Even a fine performance by Patrick Troughton can’t save this episode from being crude propaganda.

The Dragon Slayer deals with the revolutionary activities of Dr Sun Yat-Sen in China. What has this to do with espionage? Precious little, but the long-suffering viewer is again assailed with earnest political propaganda.

By this time the patience of even the most tolerant viewer has been tried beyond endurance and I find it difficult to believe that many viewers would choose further misery. By this point I felt I had suffered enough. Perhaps at some future stage I will be in a particularly masochistic mood and will struggle through a few more episodes. Just remember, gentle reader, that I have already suffered a good deal so that you won’t have to.

British television series of this era tend to have a characteristic studio-bound feel. This could be used to advantage to create a stifling atmosphere of entrapment, and that is very much the case with Espionage. It has to be said that the sets are imaginative and effective. I thought Celeste’s flat in The Incurable One was a marvelous example of a set that looked good and worked well, and it reflected her personality. It’s obvious that quite a bit of money was spent on this series.

Network DVD have done an exceptional job with this boxed set. Image quality is absolutely superb, remarkably so for an early 60s British series.

Espionage was an expensive series with a great deal of potential, most of which was sadly wasted. A couple of fine episodes, but there’s an enormous amount of dross to be sorted through for a few tiny nuggets of gold. I cannot in all conscience recommend this set. 

Rod Serling’s The Time Element

The Time Element is a 1958 television play written by Rod Serling and presented as part of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse series, hosted by Desi Arnaz. The Time Element was intended to serve as a pilot for the series Serling was planning, the series which would become The Twilight Zone. When CBS saw the script they were underwhelmed and lost interest in the projected series. The producer of Desilu Playhouse, Bert Granet, was on the other hand highly impressed and anxious to make do the story as part of that series. The audience response was so positive that CBS’s interest was rekindled and Serling was given the opportunity to do another pilot. The rest, as they say, is history.

As the title suggests this is a time-travel story. Peter Jenson (William Bendix) goes to see a psychiatrist (played by Martin Balsam) because he’s troubled by a recurring dream. Only he insists that it isn’t a dream. He insists that it’s real and that he really does travel through time. So far he has always awakened at the same point so he doesn’t know how the dream is supposed to end.

One of Serling’s chief weaknesses as a writer was a tendency to deliver the moral of his stories in a very obvious and laboured manner. In this story however he keeps that propensity in check. He is also prepared, in this story, to be quite open-ended. This tale can be interpreted in a number of ways and Serling is content to allow the viewer to make up his own mind.

His other major weakness as a writer was that he had a political axe to grind and he was prepared to do so in a remarkably heavy-handed way. Serling was one of those people who firmly believe that it’s not enough to have strong opinions - you have to inflict those opinions on others. If other people resent having your opinions foisted on them you just have to try even harder to bludgeon them into submission. Mercifully this story does not suffer from that flaw.

I have to be up-front and say that I am not at all a fan of Serling’s writing. Considering his vast reputation he can be astonishingly clumsy. The Time Element is one of his better efforts.

Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were very major players in American television in the 50s and had founded their own TV studio, Desilu, following the immense success of I Love Lucy. The Desilu Playhouse was something of a prestige production with a correspondingly generous (by television standards) budget. This works very much in The Time Element’s favour and the high production values found in this TV play were of course something that Serling was keen to see incorporated in his new series, The Twilight Zone.

Another major asset of The Time Element is director of photography Nick Musuraca, not only one of the great cinematographers but one with a superb track record in film noir (movies like Out of the Past) and horror (Cat People). 

At the end of the show host Desi Arnaz offers his own interpretation of the story, and it has to be said that it’s a perfectly valid if conventional interpretation (although other quite different interpretations are equally valid).

William Bendix and Martin Balsam were very fine and very experienced character actors and they help a good deal in creating the necessary suspension of disbelief by making their characters seem like real people. Darryl Hickman is equally good as the young naval officer whose fate becomes so important to Pete Jenson.

The Time Element is included as a bonus feature on the Blu-Ray release of season 1 of The Twilight Zone. It’s in remarkably good condition and on Blu-Ray it looks exceptionally good. This bonus feature comes with its own bonus features including an audio commentary by Mark Scott Zicree. 

The Time Element includes a lot of the best elements that would later feature in The Twilight Zone. It doesn’t quite have that Twilight Zone atmosphere in a fully developed fashion but it certainly points the way forward. The Time Element is important historically and it’s entertaining as well. Recommended.

It's interesting to compare this one with Nightmare at Ground Zero, a very Twilight Zone-ish episode he wrote in 1953 for the Suspense anthology series.

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.