The Machine Stops - Out of the Unknown season 2 episode 1

The Machine Stops was first broadcast in Britain in 1966 as the first episode in the second season of the BBC’s science fiction anthology TV series Out of the Unknown. It’s one of the best episodes in this uneven but extraordinarily interesting series.

The Machine Stops was based on E. M. Forster’s 1909 dystopian science fiction short story of the same name. The most intriguing aspect of the story is that it provides an uncanny anticipation of the 21st century world of the internet and social networking.

The Machine Stops tells the story of Vashti (Yvonne Mitchell), a woman of the distant future, and her son Kuno (Michael Gothard). Humanity now lives entirely underground. Civilisation has progressed to the point where all want and all pain and suffering has been eliminated. In fact all unpleasantness has been eliminated. The Machine provides everything that anyone could want. Instantaneous communication is possible with any place on the planet. There is no need for anyone ever to leave their room. Travel is unnecessary. In fact leaving one’s room is almost unheard of. Like most citizens in this wondrous civilisation Vashti has thousands of friends. Of course she has never met a single one of these friends in person, in the flesh so to speak. The very idea of such face-to-face meetings is terrifying and disgusting. She can talk to her friends whenever she wishes, through her view-screen.

Direct experience of anything is considered to be unnecessary, and possibly harmful. If one wants to experience something one does so through lectures, which can be accessed through the press of a button and which do not require leaving one’s room. Vashti herself delivers lectures on the music of the Australian Period (this idea can be regarded as a kind of anticipation of blogging and podcasts).

Her son Kuno is something of a misfit. He has shown disturbing signs of physical strength. He can stand up on his own for minutes at a time and can even walk for short distances. On his own feet! This sort of thing is recognised by The Machine as being not merely unnecessary but harmful. It might unsettle people. It might lead them to seek direct experience, or even (horror of horrors) it might lead them to want to go outside, onto the surface of the Earth. Kuno has displayed just such a disturbing tendency. In fact he has actually done so. Vashti finds her son more and more distressing.

Most horribly, Kuno has even ventured the opinion that The Machine might one day stop. 

Kenneth Cavander and Clive Donner adapted Forster’s story for television in 1959. The go-ahead was given for production to start but somehow it became lost in the bureaucratic labyrinths of the BBC and nothing came of it. Then in 1965 Irene Shubik, the producer of Out of the Unknown, rescued it from oblivion. Philip Saville, who had a reputation as an innovative director, was assigned to the project. 

Production designer Norman James was confident that he could, even on a penny-pinching BBC budget, do justice to the story. He and Saville were in agreement that the show should have both a futuristic and a slightly Edwardian look - this is the future, but the future as imagined in the past. There’s no question that James succeeded brilliantly - the sets are superb and they also have such a slight suggestion of a womb-like quality which admirably captures the atmosphere of Forster’s story.

Saville’s direction is (considering that was the era of shooting on videotape in the studio) bold and imaginative. In fact the studio-bound feel is an advantage - this is after all a stifling enclosed world. 

Yvonne Mitchell is magnificent as Vashti. The makeup effects make her look strange and alien and unhealthy but even though the character is emotionally distant to an extreme degree Mitchell still manages to engage our sympathy. Vashti is a tragic figure, and unaware of her own tragedy. Michael Gothard’s eccentric, theatrical performance also works well. 

Forster was apparently very impressed by the adaptation and expressed the view that it improved on his original story.

The Machine Stops is an intelligent, though-provoking example of the science fiction of ideas. Fascinating, disturbing and oddly moving. Highly recommended.

All Gas and Gaiters (1966-71)

Ecclesiastical sitcoms enjoyed quite a vogue on British television in the late 60s and early 70s. All of them starred Derek Nimmo, an actor with a particular gift for portraying bumbling, well-meaning and very funny clerics. The first, and the best, of these series was All Gas and Gaiters which ran for five seasons on the BBC between between 1966 and 1971.

Sadly only eleven of the thirty-three episodes have survived the BBC’s relentless zeal to destroy as many of its own programs as possible. Those surviving episodes provide an example of the best of British television comedy.

All Gas and Gaiters focuses on four hapless clerics in the fictional St Ogg’s Cathedral. Bishop Cuthbert Hever is a very worldly bishop, a man who enjoys the good things in life and whose main desire is to avoid any unpleasantness. The elderly but jovial Archceacon Henry Blunt, is rather too fond of a tipple. The bishop’s Chaplain, The Rev. Mervyn Noote, is somewhat bungling although he’s actually quite bright. He wants nothing more than a quiet life but that’s the last thing he’s likely to get at St Ogg’s. These three would have a very pleasant life but there is one serpent in the ecclesiastical garden - the Very Reverend Lionel Pugh-Critchley, the Dean of St Ogg’s. The Dean is enthusiastic and zealous. His enthusiasm for efficiency and reform is just the sort of thing to make the quiet life impossible.

The husband-and-wife team of Edwin Apps and Pauline Devaney wrote all thirty-three episodes. While there’s an element of gentle satire their scripts display a considerable degree of affection for their characters. Even the Dean, for all his officiousness, is fundamentally a good man. He just happens to be one of these people who can’t leave well enough alone. The bishop is certainly worldly, he enjoys his comforts and he has a horror of rocking the boat, and he is always on the lookout for ways of making money. His money-making schemes are however always for good causes, never for his own personal benefit. He has in fact a very real devotion to the Church - he simply manages to combine this with his love for the good life. The Archdeacon is elderly and not very efficient but he’s kindly and gentle. Noote does the very best he can and in his own way he’s a devoted son of the Church. We can’t help liking these characters and although the series is very funny indeed the humour is consistently good-natured.

One of the great strengths of the series is the superlative casting. William Mervyn, a very fine character actor with a considerable gift for comedy, gives the Bishop just enough pomposity to be amusing without ever being irritating. Mervyn also starred in the delightful offbeat crime series Mr Rose. Robertson Hare, who had a very long and successful career mostly in farce, is a delight as the sherry-loving Archdeacon. Derek Nimmo, who built his career on playing loveable silly asses, is perfect as Noote. The Dean was potentially the trickiest character but John Barron’s performance is superbly judged - the Dean is a man who genuinely cannot see that his zeal for efficiency is going to antagonise people.

Not only are the four regular cast members uniformly superb, they play off one another with tremendous zest. It’s a joy watching four great comic actors all at the peak of their form.

All Gas and Gaiters was apparently enormously popular with Anglican clergymen. It was also enormously popular with the public. In fact it was loved by everyone, except apparently for the BBC who destroyed most of the episodes.

When we think of 1960s British comedy we generally tend to think of the Carry On movies and the rather risque style of television comedy that relies to a very large extent on sexual innuendo. There is very little of that in this series. All Gas and Gaiters represents a very different British comedy tradition, an engaging mix of wit and farce with a lovely balance of visual and verbal humour, comedy  that could be described as ideal family viewing whilst still being laugh-out-loud funny.

We can at least be extremely grateful that eleven episodes have survived and that all are included in a two-disc DVD set. This set, which happily is still in print, is an absolute must-buy for lovers of British television comedy. Very highly recommended.

The Avengers - the Tara King era, part 1

Having just bought Optimum’s wonderful series 6 boxed set of The Avengers I am naturally going to be talking quite a bit about the Tara King era of The Avengers. I’m intending to spread this out over several posts. Firstly because the Tara King era is criminally underrated but secondly because this final season saw several marked changes in direction and it falls naturally into two parts.

One of the reasons The Avengers had such a long run was that the series was radically reinvented at regular intervals, these reinventions being almost invariably associated with a change in producers. The first season (with Ian Hendry as the star) was a gritty realist spy drama. The next two seasons saw Steed playing opposite three different sidekicks before Honor Blackman established herself as his main partner. The series started moving in a more fantastic direction but a fair amount of the original gritty realism remained. A major change occurred in 1965 with the introduction of Diana Rigg. The series took on its most familiar form - surreal, tongue-in-cheek and utterly fantastic (in both senses of the word). The series also switched from videotape to film, the budgets were increased and production values were very much higher.

It was therefore no real surprise that the departure of Diana Rigg in 1967 would signal another change in direction. Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens were dumped and John Bryce, who had been responsible for most of the Cathy Gale episodes, was brought back as producer. Bryce wanted to return to the more realistic style of the Cathy Gale era.

The immediate problem was to find a replacement for Diana Rigg. The selection of Linda Thorson remans somewhat controversial among fans to this day. She was very young (just twenty) and frighteningly inexperienced. 

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Bryce was a fine producer but he had no experience in doing a filmed series, which of course requires a very different approach compared with videotape. Shooting started to fall behind schedule. Linda Thorson was clearly nervous and uncertain. Worst of all, no-one liked the first few episodes made under the new regime. The American ABC network was particularly unhappy (and The Avengers was much too expensive a show to make without a guaranteed sale to a US network). It was obviously time to hit the panic button. Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens were hurriedly recalled to take over as producers and save the ship which seemed to be in imminent danger of foundering. Seven Tara King episodes had already been made and the US network, now reassured, gave the go-ahead for a further full season of twenty-six episodes.

If the Tara King era as a whole is underrated those seven original episodes are even more maligned. They do present a bewildering mixture of styles and approaches, the character of Tara King is all over the place and they are certainly uneven. Having said that, they do have their moments and they are worth seeing. 

One other very big change was that Tara King would be a very different sort of partner for Steed. Steed’s other partners had all been amateurs and had all been apparently recruited by Steed on his own initiative and on a semi-official basis. Tara on the other hand was a professional spy. This changes the dynamics between the two leads in interesting ways. The Steed-Mrs Gale and Steed-Mrs Peel pairings had been relationships between equals on a personal level, but on a professional level Mrs Gale and Mrs Peel were Steed’s assistants (albeit very competent ones). On the personal level there’s more of a teacher-pupil thing between Steed and Tara (he was the agent who trained her after all). She clearly sees him as just a bit of a father figure. Professionally though they both have a job to do, they both get paid for it and they get on with it. The dynamic between them would change again in the later episodes with the advent of Mother.

It’s not easy to make a judgment on the John Bryce-produced episodes. Invitation to a Killing was partly reshot, cut from its original 90 minutes to 50 and renamed Have Guns - Will Haggle. The Great Great Britain Crime was never aired and no longer exists although bits of it turned up later in Homicide and Old Lace. In fact the only one of his episodes that survived intact was Invasion of the Earthmen.

Invasion of the Earthmen is one of the most reviled of all episodes of The Avengers. Terry Nation’s script was certainly somewhat unorthodox for this series and there are times when it looks disturbingly like an episode of Star Trek. Or even Doctor Who. Not surprising really, given that Terry Nation had written several classic Doctor Who stories (and he invented the Daleks). The basic premise is pure science fiction. There are of course hints of science fiction in various episodes of The Avengers but this one takes that tendency much much farther.

Being one of the very very early Tara King episodes, Tara has not yet been fully established as a character and more importantly the Steed-Tara relationship was still rather sketchy. Linda Thorson’s inexperience shows at times. On the whole though her performance is reasonably satisfying. Thorson and Patrick Macnee would quickly develop the right chemistry between the two lead characters and already the signs are promising.

Have Guns - Will Haggle had a particularly turbulent history. John Bryce had intended to introduce Tara in a special 90-minute story, Invitation To a Killing. After his departure Fennel and Clemens gave Ray Austin the job of turning it into a normal 50-minute running time through drastic editing and some reshoots. As a result there are some glaring continuity errors. What really counts against this one in the eyes of many fans though is that it doesn’t really feel like an Avengers story - it seems more like a straightforward action adventure spy story. It does however provide an interesting change of pace and it has a lot of action scenes and they’re very well done. It’s perhaps not a great episode but it’s intriguing and it has some very good moments. Along with Invasion of the Earthmen it offers a tantalising hint that John Bryce might well have taken The Avengers in an interesting direction had he been given the chance.

Two days after shooting commenced on The Curious Case of the Countless Clues John Bryce received his marching orders so this is very much a transitional episode. The plot is clever and well-constructed but it has the underlying realistic basis that Bryce hoped to restore to the series. It’s the kind of story that could quite easily have come from the Cathy Gale era. On the other hand there are some whimsical touches that indicated the direction in which Fennell and Clemens intended to take the series. Philip Levene’s script is a playful spoof of the detective stories of the golden age, with a detective named Sir Arthur Doyle (complete with deerstalker and magnifying glass) and three villains named Earle, Stanley and Gardiner (Erle Stanley Gardner was of course the author of the Perry Mason mysteries). This one has Tara in a wheelchair after a skiing accident but she still gets to play a very active role in the case. It boasts a clever plot - a series of murders with way too many clues, in fact so many clues that no-one could possibly miss them. Despite being incapacitated Tara proves herself to be more than capable of looking after herself and she gets an exceptionally good fight scene. Since John Bryce was still the producer when the cameras started rolling this was obviously one of the episodes he commissioned and it’s yet another indication that perhaps he really did know what he was doing.

Get-a-Way! has a wildly implausible premise that is a bit too obvious but it has some major pluses - the monastery prison is very cool, Andrew Keir is excellent and most of all it has Peter Bowles giving one of his best Avengers guest starring performances. Split! had been written as an Emma Peel episode. It’s credited to Brian Clemens although apparently the original version had been by Dennis Spooner. The re-writing might account for the slightly disjointed feel (and it’s rumoured that some scenes had actually been shot a year earlier). 

Look - (stop me if you've heard this one before) But There Were These Two Fellers... is perhaps the most controversial episode in the entire history of The Avengers. Many fans hate it; many adore it. I adore it. It has more inspired silliness than any other episode but the point that is often missed is that Dennis Spooner’s script has a dark edge to it. This is a story about clowns but they’re clowns who are ruthless killers. There’s always something slightly sinister and tragic about clowns and it brings this out extremely well. It’s a story that could have become maudlin (a rest home for washed-up vaudeville artists could have been desperately sad) but Spooner avoids this pitfall. This episode is often laugh-out-loud funny and in general the tone is light and breezy but there’s always just that slight hint of darkness. It’s also the episode in which Linda Thorson shows that she really does have what it takes to be an Avengers Girl - her comic timing is impeccable. It’s also an important episode in that the Steed-Tara dynamic starts to work, and work well. It’s close to being my favourite episode from any period of The Avengers.

These first seven episodes (including The Forget-Me-Knot which I’ve written about elsewhere) form an odd kind of mini-series. They are not so much uneven in quality as uneven in tone. That can be disconcerting but on the whole they provided a by no means disastrous beginning to the Tara King era. In fact it’s clear that the series was a long way from running out of steam and it was equally clear that Linda Thorson had a great deal of potential. All seven are worth watching and a couple are bona fide classics.

McMillan and Wife, season one (1971)

McMillan and Wife was one of three series (along with Columbo and McCloud) that originally comprised The NBC Mystery Movie, the first of NBC’s “wheel series” with three different series screening on a three-week rotation in the same timeslot. Those three original series all proved to be very successful with McMillan and Wife lasting for no less than six seasons (from 1971 to 1977).

Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James were cast as the two leads, San Francisco Police Commissioner McMillan and his wife Sally. John Schuck as Sergeant Enright and Nancy Walker as the McMillans’ maid Mildred are the other regulars.

Rock Hudson had of course been a very major movie star in the 50s and 60s. By the beginning of the 70s his career was perhaps just starting to falter a little so the offer of the lead in a television series must have been quite welcome. The fact that the series included in the NBC Mystery Movie programming comprised feature-length episodes, boasted high production values and had shooting schedules that were quite generous by television standards (since each series only went to air every third week) must have made the transition from movies to television somewhat less painful than usual. And since McMillan and Wife turned out to be a major hit it proved to be a very good career move on Hudson’s part.

The excellent chemistry between Hudson and Susan Saint James was certainly a major contributor to the success of the series.

Like most of the various series that ran under the NBC Mystery Movie and NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie banners McMillan and Wife adhered quite deliberately to an old-fashioned formula. The stories were classic mysteries in the style of the golden age of detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. This is emphatically not the world of serial killers, gangs and drug murders. The social disintegration of the 70s is nowhere in evidence. This is televisual comfort food for a world that was desperately in need of just that commodity, a commodity even more sorely needed today. It’s escapist entertainment, and if (like me) you happen to be extremely fond of escapist entertainment then this series provides it, and does so with style and wit.

The pilot episode, Once Upon a Dead Man, establishes the tone for the series. The plots will be complex and outlandish and somehow Mrs McMillan will keep finding herself right in the middle of a murder. In this instance the plot involves an Egyptian mummy, horology, avant-garde theatre and a bidding duel over an 18th century Italian clock. Jonathan Harris (Dr Smith from Lost in Space) makes an appearance as an auctioneer. The bicycle chase through the streets of San Francisco is a nice touch.

In the first episode of the actual series, Murder by the Barrel, the McMillans are moving house and Mrs McMillan finds a body in a shipping barrel. Unfortunately the body then disappears. In keeping with what appears to be a fixation with offbeat action sequences we have an almost comic-book scene with barrels on a conveyor belt to nowhere, with one of the barrels containing something very precious indeed to Commissioner McMillan.

The Easy Sunday Murder Case probably won’t present viewers with too many difficulties in solving the mystery but it has an engaging light-hearted feel and some amusing moments.  It has plenty of affectionate banter between Hudson and Saint James. It even has a car chase, a very rare occurrence in any of the NBC Mystery Movie series. In fact it has a dog chase as well, with Mrs McMillan in hot pursuit of a Pekingese on the run! It’s lightweight entertainment but it’s fun.

At times the series edges very close to out-and-out farce (and in episodes like The Easy Sunday Murder Case it crosses that line completely). It’s all part of the charm of the show. 

Husbands, Wives, and Killers pushes this tendency even further, with Commissioner McMillan dressed as a giant bunny for a costume ball.

Knowing nothing about American football I found Death Is a Seven Point Favorite a bit bewildering. It’s still a fairly entertaining mystery, even for people like myself who have no idea what a quarterback is.

The Face of Murder pushes plotting to the limits of plausibility and well beyond but it does so with such cheerful insouciance that one can’t help forgiving it. It even includes an aerial dogfight!

Till Death Do Us Part boasts a truly inspired climax, with a wonderfully inventive murder method and a tense battle of wills as the Commissioner faces what promises to be a very nasty fate indeed. A very fine episode.

An Elementary Case of Murder is more straightforward, with much less humour but there is a certain boldness about the solution.

There are some wildly implausible elements to this series. I seriously doubt that any real Police Commissioner would spend so much time (or in fact any time at all) out on the streets chasing suspects, and of course in most episodes either the Commissioner or his wife always seem to be personally involved in the most unlikely cases. This does however seem to be quite deliberate and conscious - this is a show that makes no concessions whatsoever to realism. This is a fantasy world in which Police Commissioners look like glamorous movie stars who are also action heroes and they have gorgeous wives. It’s a feature not a bug and it’s another deliberate echo of the golden age of the  detective story.

There are numerous running gags - every episode has McMillan caught in a traffic jam, in every episode most of the city seems to be on strike and poor Sergeant Enright seems destined never to get a good night’s sleep or a proper meal.

Rock Hudson’s 70s fashion victim wardrobe will provide additional amusement. In The Easy Sunday Murder Case he wears a jacket that even Jason King would have had second thoughts about.

McMillan and Wife is best considered as a television variant of the literary form that was becoming known as the cozy mystery. In fact it has all the ingredients of the cozy - it’s light-hearted, deliberately and consciously old-fashioned, it’s played as much for laughs as thrills and it features a very engaging husband-and-wife detective team. It’s lightweight but it’s consistently enjoyable if sometimes slightly silly fun. 

McMillan and Wife is readily available on DVD in all regions. Recommended. 

Sherlock Holmes - The Resident Patient (1985) and The Empty House (1986)

It’s slightly outside our usual timeframe but Granada’s wonderful Sherlock Holmes TV series that ran from 1984 to 1994 is so good it’s worth discussing anyway. And since I’ve been rewatching a few episodes recently that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Much of the well-deserved praise this series has received is due to the truly inspired casting of Jeremy Brett as Holmes. There have been other fine interpretations of the rôle. I’m still very fond of Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Ronald Howard in the 1954 TV series was also a superb, if rather unconventional, Holmes. The fact remains that Jeremy Brett is the definitive screen Holmes and his performances are unlikely ever to be surpassed.

This is a brilliant and mercurial Holmes but he is also unstable and neurotic.  Playing Holmes in this manner could easily have been disastrous but Brett is in complete control and he does not make the mistake of overly emphasising the great detective’s darker side. His Holmes might be somewhat unpredictable but he can also be generous, compassionate and at times almost warm and affable. The dark side is however certainly there. Interestingly enough, a few years before the Granada series Brett had played Dr Watson in a stage production.

Equally revolutionary, and equally successful, is the approach taken to Dr Watson. The Watson of this series is essentially the Watson of Conan Doyle’s stories. He might not be capable of following his friend’s brilliant deductive reasoning but he is a calm thoughtful man of intelligence and sound common sense. He is exactly the sort of man that Holmes would choose as a friend and colleague - their personalities are diametrically opposed but complementary. 

David Burke played Watson in the first thirteen episodes. After his departure to join the Royal Shakespeare Company he suggested Edward Hardwicke as his replacement. While the two actors have slightly different approaches both are equally good and both are perfectly convincing as the Dr Watson created by Conan Doyle. This is a Dr Watson who is frequently bemused and even exasperated by his friend’s idiosyncracies while at the same time being fiercely loyal.

The Resident Patient is one of the earlier episodes (from 1985) with David Burke as Watson. It has the kind of baroque plot that makes Sherlock Holmes stories so much fun, with mysterious Russian aristocrats, rare and exotic diseases, bogus burglaries and events from the past catching up with people. It also has a fine guest performance by the very underrated Patrick Newell (probably best remembered as Mother in The Avengers).

It also has Sherlock Holmes at his most eccentric, stubbornly refusing assistance to a client because he is convinced the client is not being honest with him even though he knows the client is most certainly in need of help.

The Empty House introduces Edward Hardwicke as Watson. To be honest it’s not a great story but it is extremely important since it reintroduces Holmes after his dramatic and fateful struggle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. It’s also important in its implications for the Holmes-Watson friendship. Hardwicke settles into the rôle of Watson very confidently which can’t have been easy given that David Burke had been such an excellent Watson. The Empty House also offers Jeremy Brett plenty of opportunities to deliver a trademark bravura performance.

Between 1984 and 1994 Granada ended up adapting 42 of the 60 canonical Sherlock Holmes stories. This superb series is one I keep returning to, just as I keep returning to Conan Doyle’s original stories. 

Batman, season one (1966)

I was never a great fan of the Batman TV series. On the other hand I can see why people liked it so much. I can appreciate its virtues. And revisiting it now I have to say has turned out to be fairly enjoyable.

Batman pushed the edge of the high camp envelope about as far as it could be pushed. In fact it pushed it even further than that. It was also the first TV series based on a comic book that really went all out to capture the comic book flavour. It makes not the slightest concession whatsoever to realism.

I do like the mock-serious mock-heroic way Adam West and Burt Ward play the Dynamic Duo. I was also amused to note the number of jokes that would certainly have flown over the heads of younger viewers. I remembered this series as being basically pure parody but I’d forgotten the way the audience (or at least the older and more sophisticated members of the audience) were invited to share in the jokes.

There are some truly inspired visual moments - the use of umbrellas in the first Penguin story is very clever and very witty.

The first outing for The Penguin, the double episode Fine Feathered Finks/The Penguin's a Jinx, has an exceptionally clever (and ambitious) premise - The Penguin will feed false clues to Batman and those false clues will lead Batman unwittingly to plan The Penguin’s next big heist for him. It’s not just a clever idea - writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. develops it rather well. In fact several early episodes see the villains using Batman’s own reputation against him, with The Riddler suing him for false arrest in Hi Diddle Riddle/Smack in the Middle and The Joker discrediting Batman in The Joker Is Wild/Batman Is Riled, and rubbing it in by inventing his own utility belt - at this very early stage the series was already starting to parody itself.

Of course the show’s biggest strength is the incredibly high calibre of the actors appearing as Special Guest Villains. Frank Gorshin as The Riddler, Cesar Romero as The Joker, George Sanders as Mr Freeze and of course Burgess Meredith as The Penguin. That’s an era in which no modern adaptation can match this series - you just don’t get character actors of that quality today. No-one will ever equal Burgess Meredith’s performance as The Penguin.

Adam West and Burt Ward obviously “got” the series right from the start and their performances strike just the right note. What’s more surprising (and pleasing) is that the other cast regulars like Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon) pitched their performances in exactly the same mock-serious way. Adam West strongly believed that it was essential not to go too far over-the-top. It’s not surprising that guest stars of the calibre of Burgess Meredith and George Sanders also understood the kinds of performances that were needed.

The costumes capture the comic book feel perfectly. They’re fun but they still manage to be at least vaguely menacing and most importantly they suit the characters. The combination of The Penguin’s costume and his quacking noises might seem too over-the-top but it works. The Riddler and The Joker are both quite creepy.

The copious use of Dutch angles might have become irritating but actually it helps with the comic-book feel.

The gadgets are naturally a lot of fun. The Batmobile manages to look outlandish but without looking merely silly. The gadgets have clearly all been given a great deal of thought. The Batcave is still a pretty impressive secret headquarters, especially the giant atomic motor.

Of course the problem with the gadgets was that they made production of the series very expensive. That was fine during the first season. The show was an instant hit and the network was happy. Unfortunately that ratings success was not sustained. The series was perhaps just a little too quirky for the late 60s. Being aimed mainly at a young audience probably didn’t help - such an audience loses interest quickly and wants to move on to the next big thing. Other series from this era that were in their own ways just as quirky (such as The Avengers and The Wild Wild West) had the advantage of appealing to a slightly older, and possibly more loyal, audience. After two and a half seasons the ABC network pulled the plug on Batman.

It’s amusing to see the biting way the series makes fun of progressive prison reformers. That’s about as close as this show gets to social comment but it’s surprising to see any social comment at all.

Batman looks very good on DVD - the colours are pleasingly vivid which is of course a must for a series such as this.

I have to confess that my knowledge of the Batman comics is almost entirely non-existent. I have however seen the 1949 movie serial Batman and Robin which has a very different feel from the TV series and is worth a look.

The Batman TV series has turned out to be a good deal more fun (and a good deal wittier) than I’d remembered. Recommended.

Danger Man AKA Secret Agent, first season (1964)

The original Danger Man series comprised thirty-nine half-hour episodes broadcast in 1960 and 1961. The series was a success but for various reasons it ceased production until it was revived in 1964. The new series (which retained the Danger Man title in Britain but was known as Secret Agent in the US) would differ from the earlier version in a number of important ways. The switch was made to hour-long episodes, which allowed more complex stories but more importantly allowed more emphasis on the characters. The nature of the hero changed slightly as well. The original John Drake was a NATO secret agent of indeterminate nationality - possibly British, possibly American, possibly neither. The new John Drake was a British secret agent working for a British intelligence outfit. 

One thing that did not change was the willingness to take a fairly realistic and sometimes unglamorous look at the world of espionage and international intrigue. It’s a world with a certain amount of moral ambiguity. Sometimes the good guys have to do unpleasant things and sometimes the results of trying to do the right thing can be messy and unsatisfactory.

That’s not to suggest that Danger Man (in either of its incarnations) ever succumbed to the nihilism and cynicism that marred so many later British spy series. There is no suggestion that both sides are just as bad as each other and that both are morally bankrupt. John Drake is one of the good guys, and in this series the good guys mostly win. What makes the series so interesting is that the victories are not always clear-cut and not always wholly satisfactory. Sometimes Drake has to accept that a partial victory is better than nothing, and sometimes victory comes at a price. And sometimes the price is paid by someone who doesn’t really deserve theor fate.

The episode Yesterday’s Enemies is a good example. An ageing disgraced British spy (Howard Marion Crawford) wants to get back in the game, but whose side is he actually on? A very dark story, with definite hints of the moral ambiguity of later British spy series such as Callan.

In The Professionals Drake is sent to Prague where a British spy has gone missing. Has he gone over to the other side? Possibly yes, possibly no.

Colony Three is a particularly interesting episode. Drake finds himself in a typical English village full of typical English people, except that this village is behind the Iron Curtain. It is a training school for Soviet spies. Colony Three has hints of the surrealism that would blossom in McGoohan’s next series, The Prisoner. The village is staffed by British communists who have defected to the Soviet Union, but they quickly discover that life in the Workers’ Paradise is a lot less fun than they expected. In fact it’s no fun at all. They also discover that rather than being welcomed as heroes for defecting they are treated as mere cogs in the machine deserving of no particular respect. They are after all traitors, and nobody trusts a traitor. It’s an ambitious story with a slightly downbeat ending. It’s all rather bold for television in 1964.

Episodes like Fish on the Hook are more conventional but still quite complex - Drake has to extract a British spy whose cover is about to be blown from an eastern country but nobody (not even the agent’s British employers) know the agent’s identity. This episode in fact has quite a lot of fun with the question of identity. The Battle of the Cameras seems to have been an attempt at James Bond-style glamour and sophistication, interesting given that McGoohan had turned down the role of Bond. This episode demonstrates convincingly that he could have handled the role pretty well.

That's Two of Us Sorry is an interesting echo of one of the best episodes of the earlier half-hour series, with a different but equally effective twist at the end. A Man to Be Trusted throws in an amazing number of plot twists that’s keeps us (and John Drake) guessing until the end. Don't Nail Him Yet is an absorbing (and for Drake incredibly frustrating) cat-and-mouse game with a Russian spy.

One of the most intriguing things about the three spy series Patrick McGoohan made in the 60s is the identity of the hero. In the half-hour Danger Man series John Drake works for an unnamed international agency. He is a secret agent of indeterminate nationality. This was easy enough since McGoohan was born in the United States, raised in Ireland and lived in England and therefore had a conveniently indeterminate accent. In the revived hour-long Danger Man series he again plays a secret agent named John Drake but now he is clearly British and works for a British intelligence agency. So is he in fact the same man? And there has always been speculation that the unnamed character he played in The Prisoner was actually John Drake. So did he play three different spies, or two, or only one?

The longer format gives Patrick McGoohan more opportunities to stretch his acting abilities and it allows for a much greater focus on psychology. John Drake becomes a more interesting and rounded character.

McGoohan directed two of the hour-long Danger Man episodes (he had already directed one of the half-hour episodes). 

As was usual in this period the exotic settings rely on the judicious use of stock footage. 

The revamped 1964 series is even better than the extremely good 1960 half-hour Danger Man series benefitting from more complex plots, deeper characterisations and more perplexing moral dilemmas.

This is a top-notch spy series. Highly recommended.