Lord Peter Wimsey - Five Red Herrings (1975)

Five Red Herrings was the last of the superb BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries starring Ian Carmichael. Comprising four one-hour episodes, Five Red Herrings originally went to air in 1975.

I personally think the BBC adaptations were more enjoyable than Sayers’ novels. Nit-pickers might object that Ian Carmichael was by this time a little too old for the role but he’s so absolutely perfect that it doesn’t matter.

This is in some ways the most outrageous of the five BBC adaptations, with the victim and all the suspects being artists and all of them wildly eccentric.

Lord Peter is in Scotland, looking forward to two weeks of relaxation and fishing. He is of course accompanied by his gentleman’s gentleman Bunter (who also provides a good deal of useful assistance in Lord Peter’s crme-solving activities). Bunter, a keen Sunday painter,  is hoping for an equally relaxing time with his brushes and his easels. Of course it is not to be - wherever Wimsey goes murder is sure to follow.

The Scottish village that Wimsey has chosen for his holiday is something of an artists’ colony. Everybody there seems to be a painter. Even the secretary of the golf club is a painter. And what do you get when you put a group of artists together? You get an extraordinary amount of bitchiness, back-biting, jealousy and murderous rages. The catalyst for much of the trouble is the incredibly bad-tempered argumentative Campbell. Just about everyone has at some time threatened to kill him, and he’s threatened to kill them as well. 

When murder finally is committed it does not come as a great surprise.

And it is murder, although it has been cunningly contrived to appear to be an accident. Wimsey knows it is murder because the paint on the painting at the murder scene is still wet, which is impossible. Equally impossible is the absence of a certain tube of paint.

It is clear that the murderer has to be one of six local artists. Therefore five of these artists must be red herrings.

As you would expect in an adaptation of a golden age detective novel alibis play an absolutely crucial role. This means a great deal of emphasis on railway and bus time-tables, on the time it would take a man to travel a certain distance no foot, by bicycle or in a car, on the accuracy or otherwise of eyewitness sightings of suspects, and all the other similar stuff that golden age detection fans like myself dote on. In this case it all reaches a climax in the re-enactment of the crime - this very extended sequence (taking up most of the final episode) is an absolute tour-de-force as Lord Peter gradually reveals the intricate manner in which the murder was planned and carried out. Detective novels often end with the detective offering a lengthy description of such events but having it all re-enacted by the indefatigable Lord Peter (and the long-suffering Bunter who must endure of good deal of discomfort in the process) makes it much more fun. Ian Carmichael really throws himself into these sequences and seems to be having enormous fun. 

There is however more to this story than elaborate alibis. The lineup of suspects is a delightfully rich gallery of outrageous and extremely entertaining eccentrics. All the suspects have powerful motives and secrets to hide and the motives reveal just what a powder keg an artists’ colony can be!

Ian Carmichael is in magnificent form. It was a tricky role - Wimsey’s affectations could easily make him appear to be a bit of an ass but the viewer has to be convinced that he really is a shrewd and determined sleuth. He has to be amusing but also have a certain dignity. He has to be witty and charming but with some emotional depth. We have to both like him and respect him. The affectations can’t be downplayed - they’re an essential ingredient of the character but we have to believe that he is more than just a collection of aristocratic affectations. He has to be able to exclaim “What ho!” and “Jolly good” without seeming ridiculous. Carmichael carries it all off with effortless style.

Glyn Houston is as solid as ever as Bunter. The supporting cast is very strong. The highlight may well be Russell Hunter’s deliciously bizarre performance as Matthew Gowan, although the young Julie Peasgood’s splendidly over-the-top turn as the precocious Fenella Strachan is also memorable.

There’s some lovely location shooting in Scotland as an added bonus.

Acorn Media’s DVD release offers a satisfactory transfer. The only significant extra is an excerpt from an interview with Ian Carmichael.

All five of the 1970s BBC Lord Peter Wimsey series are delightful but this one might be the most enjoyable of them all. Very highly recommended.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956)

The Adventures of Robin Hood, launched in 1955, having proved to be a huge success for Lew Grade’s fledgeling ITC Entertainment it was hardly surprising that the company followed it up with several more medieval action/adventure series. One of these was The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, which was produced for them by Sapphire Films (a company that enjoyed some success until the heavy-handed politicking of the ill-fated The Four Just Men series sank them).

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot was screened by NBC in the US and was sufficiently popular to prompt the bold decision to make the final fourteen episodes in colour.

William Russell, best remembered as one of the early companions of Doctor Who, played the title role with a considerable amount of both dash and charm.

The first episode, The Knight with the Red Plume, deals with Sir Lancelot’s arrival at Camelot, an arrival that is not welcome by everyone. In fact Lancelot is accused of having slain the brother of one of the Knights of the Round Table. Could Lancelot actually be a villain? It’s a reasonably serious introduction to the series although there are certainly some light-hearted moments as well. 

We also meet Merlin for the first time and an interesting character he is. As a magician he’s a total fake. His magic is a mixture of illusionism, applied science and out-and-out trickery. In fact all of the magic in this series falls into these categories - there are no real supernatural elements at all. This is actually an advantage. The trouble with magic is that it’s all too easy to use it as a plot device to get a writer out of a tight corner rather than having the writer use some imagination, and it can also make things too easy for the hero (or for the villains). On the whole the decision to include no genuine magic was the right one.

On the other hand while Merlin’s magic might be faked he really is a wise old bird and a shrewd and intelligent adviser to King Arthur - the phony magic is necessary to make people believe in him and listen to his generally very sound advice.  

The following episode, The Ferocious Fathers, is much more light-hearted and at times almost farcical. Of course it has to be remembered that this was a kids’ show so one can hardly complain if it’s a bit lightweight. The episode does have some genuinely amusing moments and it gives William Russell the chance to show that he can handle light comedy rather well. This episode also introduces Brian (Robert Scroggins), a kitchen boy who wants to become a knight and who will become Lancelot’s sidekick. The series was of course aimed largely at kids so giving Lancelot a youthful sidekick made sound commercial sense, and luckily he’s not overly annoying.

The Queen’s Knight introduces Sir Mordred, the chief villain of the Arthurian legends, and he’s up to some dastardly villainy here. In The Outcast Lancelot encounters opposition when he announces that he intends to have his new young squire Brian trained as a knight. There are some slightly grating anachronistic class conflicts in this story and it’s a bit too predictable (this predictability is unfortunately a fault with quite a few of the episodes). Winged Victory on the other hand is a fine episode enlivened by Nigel Green’s performance as the treacherous King Mark who captures Lancelot and puts him to the torture to persuade him to reveal King Arthur’s battle plans for the capture of Mark’s castle.

The Lesser Breed was one of the colour episodes and it does look rather splendid. Witches Brew is another colour episode and it’s a good one, having the advantage of a reasonably strong and interesting plot. Plus it features a contest between Merlin and a beautiful but evil sorceress! And hypnotism!

The limited budget means that many episodes are very light on action and even lighter on spectacle and the half-hour format and the need to tailor the series towards kids mean that some of the scripts are pretty lightweight and under-developed. The episode The Bridge features an epic battle for control of a bridge - with half a dozen villagers defending the bridge and four knights as the assault force. Even a dozen more extras would have helped.

It’s always fun to see guest appearances by unknown actors who later went on to stardom, such as Patrick McGoohan as a dastardly knight in The Outcast.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot offers a pleasing and light-hearted mix of adventure and gentle humour with just an occasional hint of romance.

These medieval adventure series were essentially the British equivalents of American TV westerns, and in particular those TV westerns aimed at younger viewers (such as Annie Oakley). You know that good will triumph and that Sir Lancelot will always act bravely and nobly. There’s always some action but not too much obvious bloodshed. I don’t mind that - I don’t require that a show aimed at younger audiences should be dark and edgy and cynical. I don’t even demand that a show aimed at adult audiences should go overboard on darkness, edginess and cynicism.

Don’t expect too much historical accuracy. If there really was a King Arthur he lived in the 6th century AD while the arms and armour in this series clearly date from many centuries later. But then most of the stories of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are of course much later medieval legends. This series gives us the legendary version, which is what television audiences in the 50s would have expected since that’s what they’d seen in Hollywood movies like Knights of the Round Table.

On the other hand the producers went to a lot of trouble with the sets and costumes and they look splendid given the very limited television budgets. William Russell makes a lively and very personable hero and handles the action scenes with dash and enthusiasm.

Network have released the entire series on DVD. Happily all 30 episodes have survived. The DVD set includes colour transfers of 12 of the 14 episodes made in colour. The picture quality is slightly variable (as you’d expect in a series made 60 years ago) but on the whole the quality is fine and most of the colour episodes look superb.

As long as you remember that it was aimed at younger audiences this series is great fun and highly recommended.

Cult TV highlights of 2015

I watched a lot of cult television in 2015. In fact 383 episodes’ worth, dating from 1956 to 1976. So what were the particular highlights? It’s not easy to chose from so many episodes but here’s my attempt. They’re in chronological order - I couldn’t possibly attempt to put them in order of merit.

First up was the Killer in Town episode of M Squad from 1957, one of the great 50s crime series and Lee Marvin’s only television series. Despite incredible shooting schedules (they shot each episode in two days) the overall quality of this series was remarkably high. It also had some definite hints of film noir.

Next is A Chorus of Frogs from 1963, universally recognised as the best of the Venus Smith episodes of The Avengers and a very fine episode by any standard.

Colony Three was perhaps the most ambitious of the one-hour Danger Man episodes and was a kind of dry run for The Prisoner.

The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth was the episode that really put The Wild Wild West on its feet after a shaky start.

The Bishop Rides Again was the pilot for one of the most unjustly neglected British comedies of the 60s, All Gas and Gaiters.

The offbeat 1967 British detective series Mr Rose has been one of my most exciting discoveries of the year. Picking a standout episode is almost impossible but if pressed I’ll go for The Jolly Swagman or The Tin God.

All Done With Mirrors may well be the best of all the Tara King episodes of The Avengers but my particular favourite is Look - (stop me if you've heard this one) But There Were These Two Fellers...

This year I rediscovered The Persuaders, and great fun it is too. A Death in the Family, with Roger Moore playing multiple roles, is hard to beat.

Public Eye is an old favourite of mine and Who Wants to Be Told Bad News? sums up the quirkiness of this series extremely well.

I’ve always had a soft spot for The New Avengers. The later Canadian episodes have a poor reputation but Forward Base is actually superb, and it’s classic Avengers stuff - an outrageous plot, bizarre characters and more than a hint of the surreal. The slow-motion swan boat chase is a wonderful touch.

Another major discovery this year has been Paul Temple, a series I will definitely be posting about in the neat future. Cue Murder! is an especially fine episode.

Christmas with Steed and Mrs Peel - Too Many Christmas Trees

I suppose one should make an effort to get into the seasonal spirit, and sharing Christmas with Steed and Mrs Peel seemed like a pretty good way to do just that. In other words I have just revisited one of the most-loved of all episodes of The Avengers, Too Many Christmas Trees, which first went to air in Britain exactly 50 years ago.

This was one of Tony Williamson’s earliest scripts for the series and it’s a corker. Steed is having recurring nightmares, Christmas nightmares complete with a sinister Santa, a forest of Christmas trees and a corpse. The corpse of a fellow agent, suspected of treason, who has just died as a result of a complete mental collapse.

Mrs Peel has been invited to spend Christmas at the country house of Dickens fanatic Brandon Storey. Storey owns a priceless collection of Dickens memorabilia and his whole house is Dickens-themed - there’s even a Hall of Great Expectations complete with cobwebs. Mrs Peel decides to invite Steed to accompany her, hoping to keep his mind off the nightmares. But the nightmares just get worse.

I’m not going to reveal any plot details other than to say that this is an episode that veers strongly in the direction of the macabre, the uncanny and the paranormal.

One of the delights of this episode is that everything meshes and interconnects perfectly. Apart from his love of Christmas Charles Dickens also had a love for ghost stories and mysteries so a Christmas episode involving Dickens and the uncanny is wonderfully appropriate. Mervyn Johns who plays Brandon Storey had been one of the stars in the classic 1951 film adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which also featured a young Patrick Macnee. Mervyn Johns had also starred in the superb 1945 anthology film Dead of Night which had an eerie atmosphere of nightmare and reality becoming hopelessly confused -exactly the atmosphere this episode is aiming for.

There are Avengers-related in-jokes as well, with Steed getting a Christmas card from Cathy Gale - from Fort Knox! Williamson’s script provides witty dialogue in abundance and Macnee and Rigg are in sparkling form. Rigg was always great at handling the comic side of things but in this story she also gets a couple of opportunities to show her serious acting chops. The Steed-Mrs Peel relationship is also thrown into sharper focus as Mrs Peel shows her genuine affection for Steed when she thinks he’s in real trouble.

Roy Baker directed this episode and he succeeds beautifully in getting the tone just right. The sets and costumes are top-notch. The dream sequences are spooky and surreal and genuinely dream-like. 

All this would be enough to make Too Many Christmas Trees a great episode but we get even more - Diana Rigg looking as cute as a button dressed as Oliver Twist, an excellent and imaginative climactic fight scene, a nicely romantic tag scene and Steed and Mrs Peel singing together. If Christmas is a time for indulging oneself then this episode is a glorious indulgence indeed. It’s like a magnificent Christmas dinner with all the trimmings accompanied by the finest wines and followed by the finest port and cigars. 

A truly superb episode.

And by the way, Happy Christmas to all my readers!

Dead of Night (1972)

Dead of Night was a short-lived BBC horror anthology series which ran for seven episodes in 1972. Only three episodes survive and have been released on DVD by the BFI. Having now watched the series I feel that it’s perhaps a pity that any episodes survived.

The first episode, Don Taylor’s The Exorcism, opens with a dinner party in a country cottage. The owners of the cottage have spent a great deal of money on renovations to make the cottage a snug comfortable country home. They have invited another couple over for dinner. 

Strange things start to happen. The electricity supply fails; the telephone goes dead. The food and wine have a strange taste. What can the explanation be?

Sadly the explanation is an excuse for some of the crudest and most manipulative television you’re ever going to be unlucky enough to be subjected to. It’s delivered in a smarmy self-satisfied and extraordinarily insulting manner. Most of all this episode is an opportunity for some very ugly wallowing in misplaced adolescent guilt. The DVD liner notes describe it as a Marxist ghost story and if you think that sounds like a spectacularly bad idea you’d be right.

Episode two, Return Flight, is much better. It helps that it had a competent writer in the person of Robert Holmes. A middle-aged airline pilot, Captain Rolph (Peter Barkworth) has a near miss shortly after departure from Hamburg. The only problem is that no-one else, not even his co-pilot, saw the offending aircraft. It also didn’t show up on ground radar. The German authorities are sceptical of Rolph’s story. Eventually it is decided that a DC-8 on a training flight may have wandered off course. Both the German authorities and the British investigators are happy with this explanation.

Captain Rolph is relieved that his reputation has been vindicated but then some rather disturbing things start to happen. He hears voices that appear to be the crew of an unknown aircraft in distress. He catches fleeting glimpses of the same aircraft he saw before - a four-engined propeller-driven aircraft. Perhaps it’s just a reaction to the recent death of his wife. Then he strikes trouble on another flight from Hamburg. Is he haunted by the past - or more to the point is he haunted by someone else’s past? Or is he imagining things?

It’s quite a good story with just enough ambiguity to keep things interesting. It also has the advantage that it’s a straightforward story without any axes to grind. It benefits from an exceptionally fine and subtle performance by Peter Barkworth.

The third of the surviving episodes (and the seventh to be transmitted) is A Woman Sobbing by John Bowen. A middle-aged middle-class couple have moved to the country for the sake of the children. The wife, Jane, hears the sound of a crying woman but nobody else hears anything and she slowly cracks up. The plot could have been disposed of in ten minutes (and even then it would be an uninteresting story). It’s padded out to 50 minutes with talking. Lots and lots of talking. Followed by more talking. It’s not even interesting talking. It’s deadly dull talking. It’s an object lesson in how not to make a television program.

This being the 70s a lot of the talking is about sex. It manages to make this into a very tedious subject. 

The story seems to have conceived as an exercise in social commentary and it illustrates all the reasons why social commentary makes for boring television. Jane is unhappy. Considering that she and her husband are wealthy and live in a lovely home and that her husband, Frank, is a pretty nice guy it’s easy to see why she’s unhappy. Who wouldn’t be? Being wealthy and living in a large comfortable picturesque house in the country must be Hell. They talk about their problems. Endlessly. Nothing happens until the entirely predictable ending (which happens to be very clumsily foreshadowed early on thus ensuring that there is no suspense at all).

The BFI have released the three surviving episodes on a single DVD. Picture quality varies from mediocre to poor. There are a few extras - there stills galleries from the lost episodes and fairly informative liner notes.

Ghost Squad, season 2 (1962-63)

Ghost Squad was a very successful ITC series that ran on British television from 1961 to 1964 (with the title changed to G.S.5 for the third season). The Ghost Squad is part of Scotland Yard and specialises in undercover operations and was inspired by a real-life squad that operated as part of the Metropolitan Police.

I reviewed the first season in an earlier post.

There is some debate about when the second season actually started. The first season was a co-production with the Rank Organisation and was shot on 35mm film. It was to comprise thirteen episodes. Due to a strike production of the last three season one episodes (The Green Shoes, Princess and Death from a Distance) was delayed and they eventually went to air as part of season two.

Rank dropped out of the picture after the first season and seasons two and three were produced entirely by ITC, and were shot on videotape.

The first two seasons survive in their entirety while the whole of season three has been lost.

ITC always favoured the idea of using imported American actors in their action adventure series so it’s no surprise that the star is an American, Michael Quinn, who plays undercover agent Nick Craig. 

For some reason it was decided during season two to introduce a second lead character. Tony Miller, played by English actor Neil Hallett, is another Ghost Squad agent. The series then alternates between Nick Craig cases and Tony Miller cases. There’s nothing at all wrong with Neil Hallett’s acting but he does not quite have Michael Quinn’s easy-going charm and charisma.

The first season featured Donald Wolfit as the head of the Ghost Squad, Sir Andrew Wilson. He disappears in the second season to be replaced by Anthony Marlowe as Geoffrey Stock as the squad chief, although Gordon Jackson takes over as chief in one episode. The second season also introduces Claire Nielson as Stock’s Scottish secretary Jean Carter.

The Green Shoes, which was either the eleventh episode of season one or the first episode of season two depending on your point of view, is a competent spy thriller story. Scientists at a British nuclear research facility have discovered a new element. The discovery is not just of great scientific importance, it also has enormous military significance. It will make the development of a neutron bomb a real possibility. Security at the facility is so tight that there is no danger of the new element being stolen, but of course it is stolen and the Ghost Squad have to recover it. The matter is urgent, the element being extremely radioactive. The episode was photographed by the great Nic Roeg.

Doubles were something of an obsession with writers of television spy series during the 60s. Interrupted Requiem uses the double idea quite effectively. A scientist working on a British missile project has been persuaded to refuse to do any further work on the project when his daughter’s life is threatened by agents from the eastern European nation of Ordania. But his daughter is already dead - she died in an air crash two years earlier. So what is going on? It’s up to Nick Craig to find out and that means going to Ordania. His cover story is that he is a salesman for a toy manufacturer.

Interrupted Requiem plays like an episode of Danger Man but Nick’s toy salesman cover and a comic supporting performance by Derek Nimmo as a British Embassy official in Ordania adds just a hint of the flavour of The Avengers. It’s a fine episode with a good script by Bill Craig.

The Big Time is a very impressive episode. Nick Craig has to find a very small-time bag snatcher who got more than he expected when he stole a handbag containing £70,000 worth of uncut diamonds. He is now in the big time - but the big time can be very dangerous for a small time sneak thief. The script by Leon Griffiths offers a nice combination of suspense, humour and pathos with some surprisingly subtle characterisation. This episode was directed by the very talented Peter Sasdy who went on to have a good carer in films. Network’s DVD set includes an audio commentary by Sasdy for this episode. Sasdy always does good audio commentaries and this one is typical. He was a director whose approach to television was quite ambitious and he was clearly trying (with some success) with The Big Time to do something a bit more than just a run-of-the-mill crime story. The Big Time is an example of how good ITC’s action adventure series could be on those occasions when they were lucky enough to have a good director working from a good script. It’s also a demonstration of how effective the early 60s shot-on-videotape style of television could be when it was done right.

Sentences of Death is another excellent Peter Sasdy-directed episode, with Craig drugged and forced to reveal vital information.

East of Mandalay is very much in the Danger Man mould with Tony Miller investigating gun-running in a small South-East Asian country. A British mining company appears to be involved in supplying arms to anti-government rebels. The highlight is Denis Shaw’s scenery-chewing performance as rebel leader Ah Tok.

The Golden Silence is a crime rather than an espionage story, dealing with gold smuggling. It’s another Tony Miller story, with Tony posing as a courier for the smugglers. It’s a reasonably tale enlivened by good supporting performances by David Garth as a crooked Treasury official and David Lodge as the cheerful but vicious Max, who provides the muscle for the smugglers.

In The Man with the Delicate Hands a man is killed in a car accident. Although the body is burnt more or less beyond recognition there seems to be no doubt of his identity but his sister insists that the corpse is not her brother. Her brother had thin delicate hands while the corpse has coarse stubby hands. The Ghost Squad gets involved because the man has access to financial secrets worth millions and it is vital to know if he is really dead or not.

In Escape Route Nick Craig learns just how dangerous and unpleasant being an undercover cop can be. A derelict has been killed by a car in Australia. The odd thing is that he was an embezzler who had escaped from justice in the UK with a very large amount of money. So how did he become a penniless derelict? Nick’s boss suspects that someone helped the man escape from the British police but clearly something went wrong. Nick goes undercover posing as another embezzler keen to depart for foreign climes and he learns that escaping is not such an easy thing.

The Missing People is a particularly fine episode. Tony Miller goes undercover as a pilot to infiltrate a gang smuggling people out from behind the Iron Curtain. Not that the British government is overly concerned about the idea that people are escaping from the communist bloc, but the trouble is that once they escape they are never seen again.

Ghost Squad has a surprisingly dark tone with some stories being really quite hard-edged (although there are lighter moments). On the whole the series doesn’t suffer quite so badly as most early 60s British series from the characteristic studio-bound feel of that era. Obviously the exotic locales are faked with stock footage and with a minimal amount of location shooting but visually it’s not too bad and the strong writing (stronger than most of its ITC stablemates) is enough to keep the viewer interested enough to overlook the studio shooting.

This is a rather ambitious series with a more serious tone than other contemporary ITC series like The Saint. It was one of the first ITC series to adopt the hour-long episode format and it makes good use of the format to tell fairly complex stories. On the whole it’s an enjoyable well-written well-crafted series with a mix of crime and spy stories. Highly recommended.

Network's excellent Region 2 DVD boxed set includes the whole of the first two seasons.

Fantasy Island, season one (1977)

If you’re of a certain age the words “De plane! De Plane!” will bring a rush of nostalgia. Yes, we’re talking about Fantasy Island.

Fantasy Island premiered in 1977 and ran for seven seasons on the American ABC network. It was one of legendary producer Aaron Spelling’s many television hits.

It can be considered as a variant of the anthology series concept. Each week a number of guest stars arrive on the private island owned by Mr Roarke (Ricardo Montalban). Each has paid $50,000 to live out a cherished fantasy. Mr Roarke provides the setting and the people they need to live their fantasy. You have to exercise a certain amount of suspension of disbelief here - some of the fantasies require Mr Roarke to reproduce luxury homes or in one case an entire London pub as the setting and even in 1977 that would obviously cost a lot more than $50,000. On the other hand it is implied that Mr Roarke is very rich indeed and that money is no object for him. It is also implied that he has no real interest in making a profit and some guests do not pay anything at all or only a token price.  Mr Roarke just likes acting in a God-like capacity.

In fact it probably helps to regard Mr Roarke is a bit of a Mephistopheles-like figure, or perhaps a kind of wizard able to grant any wish, or even perhaps an angel or minor deity of some variety. The hints that he may have some supernatural powers are very subtle but they are there and there’s no question that he seems to know more about his guests than he possibly could know. The island also seems remarkably huge and has a seemingly impossible variety of terrain types - in the second TV-movie it appears to have a large chunk of the Wild West in it. This also strengthens the likelihood that Mr Roarke is more than he appears to be. Of course he could just be unbelievable rich and have a network of private detectives working for him to supply him with so much information on his guests.

He is a benevolent sort of wizard. Well, mostly benevolent.

Hervé Villechaize plays Mr Roarke’s pint-sized assistant Tattoo. The interplay between Mr Roarke and Tattoo was one of the highlights of this series.

The guests always get the fantasy they asked for although more often than not it turns out in a way they didn’t expect. They don’t always really understand exactly what it is they are looking for from their fantasy, but Mr Roarke always knows.

Fantasy Island began with two tele-movies and they are subtly different from the series proper - there is a slightly darker and definitely less sentimental tone. The original concept as expressed in these two tele-movies really was extremely clever and both are very well executed.

Most episodes comprise two separate stories but the two movies give us three stories. In the pilot we have an American ex-serviceman wanting to relive a wartime romance in London during the Blitz, a woman who wants to attend her own funeral so that she can discover what her family really thinks of her and a big game hunter who wants to find out how it feels to be the hunted rather than the hunter (obviously inspired by the countless film adaptations of Richard Connell’s classic short story The Most Dangerous Game). All three stories have a dark edge to them and have some neat and unexpected twists.

The second TV-movie, Return to Fantasy Island, again comprises three separate stories intercut. There’s a couple who hope to be reunited with the daughter they surrendered for adoption twelve year earlier and a man who wants to spend the weekend with his female boss only she doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the idea. The third story is the most interesting, a psychological thriller tale about a young woman who lost her memory during her honeymoon four years earlier.

The series proper unfortunately doesn’t have quite the same edge to it. On the other hand as it progresses it becomes more and more apparent that Mr Roarke must have some supernatural or science fictional powers - one small island could not possibly accommodate so many incredibly elaborate fantasies involving entire quite sizeable communities.

The idea of having two completely separate stories per episode is a good one. Some stories (such as The Funny Girl) do edge dangerously close to out-and-out schmalz but pairing a story like that with an adventure yarn like Butch and Sundance makes it tolerable. The Prince/The Sheriff is another episode that combines a slightly sentimental love story with a more action-oriented tale. Family Reunion is even more schmaltzy but it’s paired with an excellent and much darker story, Voodoo. Pairing very lightweight or romantic stories with adventure-type stories seemed to become a definite template. Sometimes it fails miserably, as with Superstar/Salem which combines a dull story about a man who dreams of being a baseball star with a heavy-handed and clumsy tale of the witch trials in Salem. At other times the template works reasonably well, as in Trouble, My Lovely/The Common Man with a mildly amusing tale of an insignificant dweeb wanting to be a hardboiled private eye and a story of a downtrodden husband and father who just wants a little respect.

I have seen criticism of this series as being too much like soap opera but that seems to me to be perhaps somewhat unfair. That might apply to some of the stories but others are quite dark and twisted. In fact some stories remind me just a little of the blending of black comedy and twisted psychology of the classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents series (this is true at least of the two tele-movies). Unfortunately in the series itself this element tends to disappear. The big problem is that too many scripts are under-developed and the desire to give every story a happy ending leads to excessive predictability. The basic idea behind the series was extremely good and the two TV-movies lived up to the promise but the series gradually becomes just a little too bland.

Ricardo Montalban as Mr Roarke and Hervé Villechaize as Tattoo really are the series’ biggest assets. They are so good they tend to overshadow the guest stars.

The first season is available on DVD everywhere.

Fantasy Island is interesting for its nostalgia value, its unusual format and for the Mr Roarke-Tattoo interplay. Probably worth a rental but not a purchase.