It’s Dark Outside, season one (1964)

Chief Inspector Rose was a central character in no less than three Granada Television series during the 1960s. He made his first appearance in the final two seasons of the police drama The Odd Man. He then featured in a new cop series, It’s Dark Outside, the first season of which included another character from The Odd Man, Detective Sergeant Swift. Then in 1967 he was the subject of yet another series, the superb Mr Rose.

Chief Inspector Rose was played throughout by William Mervyn, a fine character actor with a particular gift for comedy but who was quite capable of being serious or even sinister when required.

Rose does change somewhat between It’s Dark Outside and Mr Rose but the change is plausible enough. In Mr Rose he has mellowed quite a bit. He has also inherited a great deal of money, taken early retirement and now lives in gracious comfort in the country. I imagine I’d mellow as well if that happened to me.

The subject of this review is however It’s Dark Outside, which lasted two seasons from 1964 to 1965. In the first season Rose’s sergeant is Detective Sergeant Swift (Keith Barron). Barron left after the first season and was replaced by Anthony Ainley as Detective Sergeant Hunter.

Chief Inspector Rose is a rather pompous character but it would be a dangerous mistake to dismiss him lightly for that reason. Under the pomposity there’s a sharp mind and a streak of considerable ruthlessness. 

The first episode, The Grim World of the Brothers Tulk, introduces us to the series’ two other regular characters, Anthony Brand (John Carson) and his wife Alice (June Tobin). Anthony is a barrister and human rights campaigner and is even more pompous than Chief Inspector Rose while lacking the positive qualities that make Rose so fascinating. Alice is a typical crusading journalist. This episode is certainly very dark indeed, dealing with a child murder, a couple of faded music hall performers and an unfortunate sequel to an interrogation. DS Swift finds himself in trouble and feels he is being stabbed in the back by Rose.

There are two ongoing story arcs intertwined with the individual stories that make up the eight episodes of the first season. One arc concerns a tentative romance between Detective Sergeant Swift and Alice Brand; the other concerns a figure from Anthony Brand’s past. These story arcs will gradually assume more and more importance as the series progresses. They’re not really apparent in the first episode but it does lay down the groundwork by giving us some insights into the characters involved.

This is a series that must be watched in sequence and from the beginning otherwise you will find the last few episodes quite mystifying.

In the second episode, One Man’s Right, Brand is organising a human right convention but his illustrious guest speaker proves to be rather embarrassing - his view of human rights is not at all the view that Brand takes and more alarmingly he puts his principles into practice. Which brings Chief Inspector Rose into the picture.

Speak Ill of the Living opens with a hanging, but then a day later another woman confesses to the murder. Her confession is however just a little suspicious. Anthony Brand sees this as a wonderful opportunity to advance yet another of his human rights causes. Chief Inspector Rose and DS Swift are meanwhile making their own investigation.

This is typical of the approach taken by this series. The case is complex, even more complex than it seems to be at first. The truth is shadowy and elusive and the moral dilemmas prove to be fiendish traps. Anthony Brand is as usual convinced that his cause is just and seems unable to perceive that his self-righteousness is leading him into dangerous moral territory. His own conduct is ruthless and unscrupulous, ethically very questionable indeed and possibly illegal. While he likes to think of himself as being morally superior to his friend Charles Rose it is clear that Rose would never stoop to such dubious methods.

More Ways of Killing a Cat is a more straightforward crime story without the obvious political subtexts of the earlier episodes. DS Swift is being stalked by someone from his past, someone who had been in a mental hospital but is now completely cured and has therefore been released. At least the psychiatrists thought he was cured (psychiatrists do not come off very well in this tale).

Wake the Dead is a major improvement on earlier episodes. Mercifully Anthony Brand is relegated to a minor role. An old lady is found dead under very mysterious circumstances - with alcohol and barbiturates in her bloodstream although she was a non-drinker and several letters are found from her late husband. The trouble is the letters were posted three years after his death. Meanwhile Alice Brand is once again trying to rescue a poor downtrodden criminal - in her mind no criminal has ever been responsible for his actions and no amount of evidence or experience will change her views. It’s starting to become obvious by now that we’re expected to have much more sympathy for Chief Inspector Rose’s worldview (do your duty as efficiently as you can with decency and commonsense) than for the worldview of the Brands (everything is the fault of society and criminals are always victims). Wake the Dead is neatly plotted and benefits from fine guest performances by Patrick Newell as a phony spiritualist and Liam Redmond as a cheerful habitual thief.

A Room with No View has two completely unconnected plots. The main plot concerning a rent collector is heavy-handed and preachy and makes no sense. The subsidiary plot though, involving Anthony Brand’s war service that might in reality have been a good deal less than glorious, is subtle and very very clever. 

With A Case for Indentification the series starts to fall apart really badly. Excruciatingly poor acting, a ludicrous plot involving a disturbed young man and it’s all made worse by the increasingly embarrassing ongoing story arc detailing a squalid entanglement between Sergeant Swift and the awful Alice Brand. This may be the worst single episode of any 1960s British TV series.

The final episode, You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up, is surprisingly good. In fact it’s very good indeed. This one resolves both of the two ongoing story arcs and does so quite satisfactorily. This was one of the three episodes written by Marc Brandel (the other two being Speak Ill of the Living and Wake the Dead) which are by far the strongest of the first season. Anthony Brand’s past catches up to him in a very unpleasant way but what’s most impressive about this episode is that it makes sense given what we’ve already learnt about his character in the preceding seven episodes. It’s believable.

It’s worth pointing out that It’s Dark Outside and Mr Rose had entirely different production teams - different producers and a quite different roster of writers and directors. In fact the only connection between the two series is the character of Chief Inspector Rose and even he’s not quite the same.

It’s Dark Outside is very much an oddity. It’s wildly uneven and it suffers from a certain amount of genre confusion - it’s not sure if it wants to be a quirky cop series, a soap opera or a slice of heavy-handed moralising social realism. It doesn’t quite succeed on any of these levels although it’s an intriguing attempt and it does avoid being overly obvious. Social commentary was common enough in 60s British TV but It’s Dark Outside doesn’t always follow the ideological line you think it’s going to follow. At times it will strike modern audiences as being very politically correct while at other times it will seem to be almost shockingly politically incorrect.

Two years later when Philip Mackie revived the character of Chief Inspector Rose in Mr Rose he was careful not to fall into such a trap. Mr Rose focuses entirely on being a quirky crime drama and it’s one of the very best examples of the genre from its era. It’s Dark Outside on the other hand never quite manages to resolve its internal contradictions and ends up being less successful although it remains interesting. You’d probably want to rent it first before risking a purchase.

Network’s DVD release includes the whole of the first season plus the two surviving episodes of the second.

Out of the Unknown - The Last Lonely Man (1969)

The Last Lonely Man, originally transmitted in early 1969, is the only episode from the third season of Out of the Unknown to survive in its entirety. I’ve already blogged at length about the first two seasons of this interesting but wildly uneven BBC science fiction anthology series.

Out of the Unknown was intended to be a series of adaptations of notable stories by well-known science fiction authors. This formula was largely adhered to in the first three seasons but abandoned in season four.

The third season saw the series switch to colour and also saw changes to the production tram with Alan Bromly taking over from Irene Shubik as producer and Roger Parkes coming in as script editor. They had however limited control since Shubik had already commissioned scripts for all thirteen episodes.

The Last Lonely Man was adapted by Jeremy Paul from a story by John Brunner.

This episode deals with an intriguingly different future. Society has been changed dramatically by the advent of Contact although at this stage no-one has quite realised the true significance or scale of the change. Contact is a government program that offers  citizens a kind of technological immortality. Everyone is to have at least one and preferably several Contacts. Contact is achieved by visiting a free government clinic. A complete copy of a person’s brain patterns is recorded and implanted into the brain of their Contacts. If the person dies his personality instantly jumps into the brain of one of his Contacts.

No-one need ever fear death again. No-one need ever truly die. The only disadvantage is that when you die you have to share a brain with another person - and that other person will from that time on have to share a brain with you. This is however a very minor problem  - the government has done studies and it’s really no problem at all. 

In this new world of virtual immortality everyone is much happier, although they are a little more careless. Not having to worry about dying means not having to fuss so much about taking precautions. In fact when people go to the movies and see images of people being slaughtered they laugh uproariously. Death is something to be light-hearted about.

If you decide you no longer want someone to be your Contact you can always cancel the contract - this is known as expunging the person. It’s no big deal. It happens all the time. You can do this at any time - as long as the person is still alive. Once they’re dead and they’ve made that final jump into your brain the process is permanent. The government has done studies on this as well and it’s also no problem. In any case they provide Adjustment Clinics for the tiny handful of people who have really very minor problems as a result.

James Hale (George Cole) is sure that the government is right to tell people not to worry. He’s not worried. He’s quite happy when Patrick (Peter Halliday) begs him to be his Contact. Patrick has just been expunged by Mary (Lillias Walker). Patrick’s problem is that Mary was his only Contact. Now he is not covered. This means if he dies now he will be really dead. James is a nice guy though and he’s happy to be Patrick’s Contact, purely on a short-term temporary basis until Patrick can make other arrangements with one of his many friends.

Needless to say James will find out that Contact is not quite as foolproof and trouble-free as those reassuring government television commercials claim. He will also discover, indirectly, a paradox about immortality. Immortality can actually make some people more afraid of dying.

This is a clever and well-constructed story with several neat and genuinely unexpected twists. It’s the kind of science fiction story that does not require much in the way of special effects In fact it requires none, nor does it require elaborate futuristic sets. It’s about ideas, not gadgetry. This future world looks pretty much like 1969. The fact that it could be done at minimal expense must have been a considerable relief to the BBC which was notoriously tight-fisted when it came to television science fiction budgets. Amazingly enough though it still manages to look cheap even by BBC standards.

Of course if considered in any detail the whole premise is pretty much scientific nonsense but it’s the idea in the broadest sense that is the point of the story and it’s a provocative idea.

Apart from the excellent script the major plus here is the terrific performance by George Cole. 

The first season of Out of the Unknown had varied quite alarmingly in quality and this inconsistency continued in season two, with brilliant moments such as The Machine Stops and some fairly dire moments as well. The Last Lonely Man is one of the better moments and it’s excellent television. Highly recommended.

The Baron (1966-67)

The Baron was one of ITC’s less successful action adventure series, running for a single season (of 30 episodes) in 1966 and 1967. The series was based, fairly loosely, on the character created by John Creasey and starred American Steve Forrest (brother of Hollywood star Dana Andrews) in the title role.

The character in Creasey’s books belonged to the gentleman-thief tradition, a tradition that began in the 1890s with Raffles and Simon Carne and was still going strong in the 1920s. John Mannering, known as The Baron, was something of a latecomer making his literary debut in Meet the Baron in 1937. Mannering is a jewel thief who is gradually transformed into an amateur detective.

The TV series turns Mannering into a thief-turned-crimefighter in the style of The Saint and downplays the character’s criminal past to the point where that aspect is practically non-existent. The problem with this is that what makes such characters so fascinating is the hint of moral ambiguity, and in the case of Simon Templar it’s the fact that although he often helps the police (and they accept his help) they still believe he’s a thief and they still want to see him behind bars. The John Mannering of the TV series comes across as an eminently respectable antique dealer, which unfortunately makes him rather dull.

ITC were firm believers in the theory that the best way to crack the US market was by casting American actors. Sometimes this worked. Casting Richard Bradford in Man in a Suitcase was an inspired choice - being an American effectively exiled from the US makes him an even more convincing haunted loner, a man who really does live out of a suitcase. In the case of The Baron it was a mistake. The character would have worked better had he been portrayed as an Englishman, as he was in the novels. 

Making Mannering a former Texas cattleman was an even more dubious idea.

Casting an American to play the role might not have been a fatal error but they certainly chose the wrong actor. This is the kind of series that desperately needs a witty and charismatic star. Someone like Roger Moore. Steve Forrest, alas, is entirely lacking in charisma and is not suited to the sort of witty repartee that such a series needs. It’s not that he’s a terrible actor or that his performance is terrible. He’s just the wrong actor and he gives the wrong performance. Forrest could have been a perfectly convincing hard-boiled private eye but that’s not what this series needed.

Forrest had apparently been very impressed by Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man and was trying to model his performance on McGoohan’s. Sadly Forrest just doesn’t have McGoohan’s combination of subtlety and charisma.

Initially John Mannering was to have an assistant named David Marlowe, played by Paul Ferris. After filming eight episodes it was decided that a beautiful female assistant would be a better idea and the Marlowe character was replaced by Cordelia, played by Sue Lloyd. Given that Steve Forrest is not the world’s most exciting actor giving him a glamorous co-star who was a decent actress was on balance a smart move. Cordelia is quite an interesting character. She often manages to get herself captured by the bad guys but when this happens she invariably starts thinking of some ingenious and outlandish method of escape. Her plans don’t always succeed but they’re usually well thought-out and sometimes they do work.

The Baron was reasonably popular with audiences in Britain but attracted little interest in the US and any ITC series that failed to attract American interest had no chance of being renewed for a second season. The fact that the critical response to the series was almost uniformly negative did not help. If critics disliked the series they disliked Steve Forrest even more.

A bigger problem is that the TV series is just too obviously a clone of ITC’s mega-hit series The Saint. You have a debonair man-of-the-world hero, with just a hint of the rogue, who moves in a world of money, high culture, high fashion and style. A member of the jet-set. He solves crimes involving the rich, the fashionable and the powerful. He has adventures in exotic locales. The series are so similar that at least one episode of The Baron was simply a rehash of an earlier script for The Saint. The series was always going to be compared to The Saint, and the comparison was not going to be in The Baron’s favour.

Having said all that, The Baron is not a bad series. Some episodes are rather good. Most are at least watchable. You always end up feeling that even the good stories would have been even better as episodes of The Saint but if you try to put such thoughts aside there’s a certain amount of enjoyment to be had here. The better episodes are the ones that make the most use of the fact that Mannering is a deal in art and antiques, and to be fair the writers do try to make as much use of this as possible. These episodes do give the series at least some of the distinctive flavour it needed but unfortunately they’re outnumbered by rather generic episodes that could have been written for any adventure series.

You Can't Win Them All is an episode that very definitely takes advantage of John Mannering’s expertise as an expert in art and antiquities. The chief interest in this story is the poker game played for very high stakes between Mannering and the criminal. Whether it’s a suspense or mystery or spy novel or movie or TV series poker games always offer the opportunity for a tense battle of wits, nerve and will between hero and villain in this instance writer Dennis Spooner makes very skillful use of this opportunity. One of the best episodes of the series.

The Edge of Fear is another art-centred story and a potentially interesting one involving the theft of a very very valuable painting indeed. Unfortunately it’s let down a bit by an over-reliance on the diabolically clever master criminals suddenly making incredibly stupid mistakes so that the hero can save the day. It’s as bit disappointing to see lazy writing like this from Dennis Spooner.

In The Terry Nation-penned The Seven Eyes of Night it’s jewels rather than paintings being stolen and it’s a very fine story with some very good twists and is also highlighted by a neurotically manic performance by Jeremy Brett. In Time To Kill an exquisite cameo is the driving force of the action. There is a curse, which we are not surprised by, but we may be surprised by the connection with radioactivity. A fine episode (written by Dennis Spooner) in which Cordelia takes centre stage.

With A Memory of Evil we’re back to paintings although this is a much more outrageous tale. In fact the story, involving a neo-nazi plot to finance a plot to resurrect the Third Reich by selling looted art treasures hidden in a cave in the Alps, is ludicrously far-fetched but it’s great fun. Robert Hardy does some serious scenery-chewing as the neo-nazi leader. The alpine setting adds extra interest.

In a 60s adventure series there are always has to be at least one episode dealing with South American revolutionaries and Long Ago and Far Away is a good example of the breed. This time Cordelia gets to play a major role when Mannering sends her to meet an explorer who seems to have discovered more than rare plants or ancient artifacts.

Masquerade and The Killing are actually one two-part episode and it’s an odd one. Doubles were a popular feature in science fiction and spy series in this era but they’re more unusual in this kind of series. It’s the sort of story you’d expect from The Avengers but is a bit out of place here.

The Long, Long Day is more or less a western, with Mannering and a girl under siege in the sheriff’s office holding off attacks by outlaws, only it’s an Italian police station and it’s being attacked by mafiosi rather than outlaws. It’s a decent episode with plenty of action. 

So Dark the Night is fairly routine, with the bad guys trying to find something that they want very badly but that something is very well hidden. The rather gothic house is a plus and Sue Lloyd gets plenty to do in this one including some clever heroic stuff. Routine perhaps but still reasonably enjoyable.

Night of the Hunter is the sort of episode that gave this series a bad name. It’s an uninspired tale of revolution in an unnamed country. The Saint could get away with this kind of thing because Roger Moore had the charisma to carry off even a less than stellar script. As an episode of The Baron it’s just too obviously a second-rate copy of The Saint.

The Maze was written by Brian Clemens who provides a brief introduction to the episode on the DVD. As you might expect from Clemens this story has just a bit of the flavour of The Avengers. It’s a very good episode with nice use of the maze and a reasonably good dream sequence.

Had the producers tried harder to stick with stories that made better use of Mannering’s expertise in art and his position as a leading dealer and had they stuck a little more closely to John Creasey’s original creation The Baron could have been an excellent series. They had Sue Lloyd’s lively and entertaining performance to compensate for Steve Forrest’s adequate but unexciting portrayal of the hero. As it stands it’s still not a bad series and it has its moments. Recommended, but probably better to rent it rather than buy it.

Thriller - Night Is the Time for Killing (Murder on the Midnight Express, 1975)

ITC’s Thriller was one of the most successful of all British television anthology series, in fact one of the most successful such series made anywhere. It ran for six seasons beginning in 1973. Brian Clemens created the series and wrote the bulk of the episodes.

Thriller is generally regarded as a horror series but it avoids the supernatural (apart from occasional hints that usually turn out to have non-supernatural explanations). The title in fact describes the series pretty well - these are crime thriller stories with an admixture of the horrific and occasionally the uncanny.

Night Is the Time for Killing (retitled Murder on the Midnight Express for a later US release)  came midway through the fourth season in 1975. It was written by Brian Clemens and is slightly unusual for this series in being a spy story.

The opening scenes suggest this will be very much a standard espionage tale. A diplomat from an eastern bloc country wishes to defect to the British. Unfortunately the intelligence services of his own country are aware of his plans to defect and are taking active steps to prevent this from happening. Very active steps, including trying to gun him down in a London street. As a result the would-be defector has insisted on setting up a rendezvous with his British contact in an unexpected manner.

Appearances can be deceptive and this spy tale is not quite as standard as it originally appeared to be. After the brief opening sequences it suddenly switches gears dramatically, focusing on a young American woman, Helen Marlow (Judy Geeson), setting out from London’s Euston Station on a long train journey. The other focus of our attention is on one of her fellow passengers - the pompous, opinionated and supremely supercilious bon vivant and celebrity Hillary Vance (Charles Gray).

Some of the other passengers could be regarded as suspicious characters. One does not normally expect to find men wearing shoulder holsters or young women carrying automatic pistols fitted with silencers on the average British train journey.

Hillary Vance does not like trains. He does not like them one little bit. He makes his displeasure very obvious. We have to wonder what a man with such an evident distaste for rail travel is doing aboard a train.

Helen Marlow is deeply unhappy for other (and rather more valid) reasons. She is being packed off to the country after spending a considerable time in a mental hospital following the sudden death of her fiancé. 

Helen is even more unhappy when she discovers a dead man aboard the train. She is more unhappy still when, after she has reported the matter, the body disappears and everyone thinks she’s crazy. Having just left a mental hospital she’s a tiny bit sensitive on the subject of craziness. She will soon have cause to have her own doubts about her sanity.

It’s obvious that some of the passengers are British agents and some are Soviet agents but we’re unsure which is which and we’re even more unsure about what they’re up to. It has to have something to do with that defector but he is nowhere on the train.

Brian Clemens provides a nicely twist-laden plot. It’s hard to go wrong with a spy thriller that takes place on board a train and the setting is used skillfully by director John Cooper.

I have no idea why it was decided to make Helen Marlow American. There is absolutely no reason why she should be American. Judy Geeson is English and while her American accent is just about passable (she very wisely decides not to overdo it) it seems slightly odd and can probably only be explained by ITC’s ongoing obsession with the notion that US sales for their series could only be achieved by including American characters. Luckily Judy Geeson is an accomplished and underrated actress and does a fine job even with the accent.

Charles Gray always relished playing larger-than-life characters and he’s very much in his element. He overacts with superb style.

The supporting cast is quite adequate with Jim Smilie being likeable as an Australian engineer who takes a shine to Helen only to discover that he may have inadvertently managed to get himself  entangled with a crazy woman. Alister Williamson is also good as the rather shabby Barkly who is obviously a spy for one side or the other.

With a slightly offbeat spy story script from Clemens and great performances by Judy Geeson and Charles Gray Night Is the Time for Killing is a superior episode of a very good television series. Highly recommended.

Network have released the entire six seasons (43 feature-length episodes) of Thriller in a Region 2 DVD boxed set while the complete series has also been released on DVD in the US.

Tales of the Unexpected (1979-88)

Tales of the Unexpected was a British anthology series made by Anglia Television which had a long run - nine seasons from 1979 to 1988. The episodes in the first season were based on short stories by Roald Dahl who provided a brief introduction to each story. Most of season two was also based on Dahl’s writings with a few episodes adapted from the works other writers. From season three onwards Dahl’s involvement was minimal.

The oddest thing about this series is that it reverts to what was by 1979 a very old-fashioned format - the half-hour episode. This is the series’ biggest weakness since many of the stories, despite promising beginnings, don’t really go anywhere. A certain ambiguity and open-endedness may have been a feature of Dahl’s original stories (it’s so many years since I’ve read Dahl that I can’t be dogmatic about this) but while that might work for a short story it doesn’t quite work on television.

This was also a fairly low-budget production. By 1979 British television standards this makes it seem like a bit of a throwback to an earlier era.

While it has its weaknesses Tales of the Unexpected has its strengths also. It’s not a horror series or even a mystery series - these stories are often just odd and even darkly whimsical (if you can imagine whimsy being dark) and the avoidance of standard horror tropes can make for interesting viewing. 

The entire series (of 112 episodes) is available on DVD in Region 2 from Network but the set is alas slightly out of my price range at present. Happily there is a Region 4 DVD release which includes 20 assorted episodes and it’s available for rental.

The episodes I’ve watched to date from all been from the second season.

The Hitch-Hiker is an amusing little tale of an American writer named Paul Deveen (Rod Taylor) who picks up an Irish hitch-hiker (Cyril Cusack). The hitch-hiker won’t reveal what he does for a living but Deveen is about to find out. It’s a light-hearted story that is almost too slight to work but the fine performances by the two leads (especially Cusack) are enough to carry it through. 

Poison is a nicely twisted tale. Harry is an Englishman in India who has a very close encounter indeed with a krait - one of the world’s most feared and deadly snakes. The krait has crawled into his bed and decided that his stomach would be a suitably warm place to have a little nap. Harry knows that the slightest movement on his part will mean death. His friend Woods and an Indian doctor have to find a way to save him, a difficult problem indeed. It’s a tense situation that makes for a fine suspenseful story. And of course there’s a neat little twist at the end. A bonus is having the wonderful Judy Geeson in the cast. My only minor quibble is that the story is obviously supposed to take place in India during the Raj and while the sets and costumes make sense for the time period the 1970s car that Woods drives hits a rather jarring note. 

Taste is a clever story involving a momentous bet. If you’re betting on an absolutely sure thing that’s not really being irresponsible is it? OK you can’t be 100 percent certain of winning, but what if you’re 99 percent of winning? It would almost be more irresponsible not to take such a bet, regardless of the stake. And even the greatest wine expert in the country surely could not be guaranteed to be able to identify an incredibly obscure claret. This is one of the strongest episodes of the series.

These three episodes, all based on Roald Dahl stories, aren’t necessarily  horror tales as such. Some are almost whimsical, albeit in a black comedy sort of way.

My Lady Love, My Dove has a very promising setup but fizzles out disappointingly. Georgy Porgy is just rather distasteful. Depart In Peace is unmemorable.

The Umbrella Man, another episode based on a Dahl short story, is on the other hand an extremely clever idea handled exceptionally well.

Fat Chance is based on a Robert Bloch story but it has the same sort of black comedy feel, as a pharmacist tries to find a way to rid himself of a wife with a weight problem. Of the eight episodes I’ve watched this is the only one not based on one of Dahl’s stories.

The ideas behind the stories are often rather slight. This may well be a characteristic of Dahl’s approach to the short story format. Sometimes it works quite well, when the idea is quirky enough. And some of the ideas are intriguingly original. Unfortunately when the trick doesn’t come off the results are very flat. Dahl’s stories can also have, at times, a rather unpleasant edge to them - unpleasant in a mean-spirited and petty way.

Tales of the Unexpected is moderately entertaining. Having samples eight episodes I don’t really feel compelled to go any further with this series, for the moment at any rate.

The tone is rather similar to the classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents series of the 50s with definite and often very strong touches of black comedy. Unfortunately Tales of the Unexpected is nowhere near as successful, with too many of the twist endings being rather obvious. The half-hour format is not always used to its best advantage with too much time being spent setting things up for rushed and often unsatisfying endings.

This series is perhaps worthwhile as a rental (and the early seasons will most certainly be of interest to hardcore Roald Dahl fans) but I wouldn’t really consider it to be worth a purchase.

The Protectors (1964)

The Protectors is a British crime series produced by ABC in 1964 and is not to be confused with the later and much better-known ITC series. It ran for only one season - like so many British series of the 60s and 70s it was shipwrecked by industrial disputes.

The series deals with a firm of security specialists set up for former insurance investigator Ian Souter (Ian Faulds) and ex-policeman Robert Shoesmith (Michael Atkinson). Heather Keys (Ann Morrish) is the third member of the team. She’s the secretary but her knowledge of the art world makes her invaluable. The firm of Souter and Shoesmith refer to themselves as the SIS (Specialists in Security).

Ian Faulds is brisk and businesslike and makes a fine lead for this type of series. Michael Atkinson’s performance is slightly odd but it’s odd in a good way, or perhaps quirky would be more accurate. Ann Morrish is fine as well and the three leads combine quite well. Ian Souter is a more bustling energetic character while Robert Shoesmith is more cerebral and slightly ironic.

The SIS are not quite private detectives but they’re more than just security consultants. It’s quite a good setup for a series, offering possibilities for varied stories and a mix of detection and action.

Typically for an ABC production the tone is slightly more serious compared to contemporary ITC action adventure series. It’s played very straight. On the other hand it’s certainly not grim. The emphasis is on entertainment.

The Protectors is a far cry from the “gritty realism” school of British television drama that started to emerge in the late 60s but it has a pleasingly everyday quality to it. One of the strengths of this series is that it has a certain plausibility. It deals with the sorts of cases such a firm might actually take on - industrial espionage, insurance fraud and various assorted scams. These are not private eyes who find themselves getting mixed up in big time crime. Their cases don’t end in murder or shootouts or car chases. It’s actually a bit along the lines of the slightly later ABC series Public Eye, although with a bit more action. There’s probably more action than a real-life security company would encounter but even the action is plausible - if you go poking about in warehouses where illegal things are going on you could reasonably expect to get clobbered by disgruntled criminal types.

Like Public Eye this is a low-key deliberately unglamorous series. Souter and Shoesmith don’t drive about in fancy sports cars or wear trendy designer clothes or mix with the rich and famous. This is an ABC series, not an ITC series.

While it doesn’t exactly deliver high-octane excitement the stories are well thought out and the series has a feel that is refreshingly different from a routine private eye series.

The debut episode, Landscape with Bandits, is an extraordinarily convoluted tale of double-dealing in the art world. A Monet is being offered for auction but some doubts have been cast on the legal ownership of the painting. Add to the mix a ruthless gallery owner, an ambitious employee of the gallery who wants his own gallery, a newspaper mogul, a mysterious wealthy Russian emigre and an assortment of miscellaneous crooks and you have some fine entertainment.

In The Bottle Shop Souter and his team are employed by a pharmaceutical company where industrial espionage is suspected. Ian goes undercover as an efficiency expert and needless to say no-one likes having an efficiency expert about. Peter Bowles is delightful (as always) as a highly strung, rather unstable but brilliant research chemist.

Happy is the Loser sees the SIS team working for The Society of British Gaming Clubs. Under British law gambling debts were not enforceable in law and as a result gambling clubs had chronic problems with gamblers who lost heavily and refused to pay up. Many of the clubs solved this problem by using strong-arm merchants to collect their bad debts. The Society of British Gaming Clubs is trying to end this unfortunate practice by offering the clubs insurance. Ian and his team have the job of trying to persuade club owners to join the society. This brings them into conflict with a couple of the most unpleasant of the aforementioned strong-arm merchants, a rather nasty crook named Happy Dyer and his even nastier thuggish sidekick Cyprian.

Ian and Robert have to resort to some unconventional and perhaps dubiously ethical methods to break the stranglehold that Happy Dyer has over the club owners. They get some invaluable assistance from Heather who poses as a wealthy glamour girl who doesn’t like to pay her gambling debts, from suave aristocrat and inveterate gambler the Hon. Arthur Keir (Gerald Harper) and a delightfully bubbly and ditzy high-class call-girl named Delores (Christine Finn). The SIS team’s plans threaten to go wrong right from the start and they find they may have bitten off more than they can chew. It’s a good story but the highlights are provided by the wonderful performances by the supporting players, especially by Gerald Harper and Christine Finn.

No Forwarding Address deals with an insurance swindle at a wholesale warehouse but the trouble with swindlers is they can get double-crossed themselves. The Pirate is another episode with a similar theme - thieves and confidence tricksters all trying to do each other down with stolen diamonds providing the catalyst.

The Loop Men is another insurance fraud, with a gang of railway thieves stealing heavily insured electronic goods. This story is enlivened by a delightfully excessive performance from Jeremy Kemp  as a totally insane ex-army corporal who runs his racket like a military operation, the only problem being that he really thinks it is a military operation. This gives the episode a slightly outrageous quality unusual for this series. Also look out for Derren Nesbitt (of Special Branch fame) as a smooth but twitchy heavy.

An insurance company calls in Souter and Shoesmith when they start getting worried about a valuable stamp collection for which they’ve written a policy in the episode The Stamp Collection. Some kind of fraud seems to be in the offing but just what is the nature of the fraud? This is a decent episode with a dangerous ex-army officer mixed up in things and he’s a man who may be even more dangerous than he seems. 

It Could Happen Here is a change of pace. Souter and Shoesmith are called in by a trade union to investigate phony lotteries which the union feels are exploiting its members. In fact there’s a lot more than that going on, and there may be a connection with the murder of a union branch secretary. Shenanigans in a trade union might suggest something political but is that what is really behind these shady goings-on? This is quite a hard-edged episode (and a good one).

Freedom! represents yet another change of pace. It’s more of a spy story with Ian and Heather getting mixed up in a potential international incident when two Albanian musicians on a concert tour of the UK decide to defect to the West. Souter and Shoesmith are supposed to be providing security for the hotel at which the visiting Albanian orchestra is staying - their job is to prevent just this sort of unfortunate incident from occurring at a time when Her Majesty’s Government is negotiating a trade deal with Albania. Writer Bill Strutton seems to be under the impression that Albanians are pretty much the same as Russians so all the Albanians have Russian names. Despite this minor defect this is a very fine episode with Ian facing more than one moral dilemma, and with the partnership of Souter and Shoesmith threatened with dissolution. It has an intriguing plot twist at the end making it a rather subtle and nuanced spy story.

The Protectors is a rather ambitious series characterised by some very good writing and some complex moral problems. The tone is generally quite serious. At around about this time ABC were also responsible for both Public Eye and Callan which tends to suggest that they were aiming at a darker and more serious tone than their competitors in the British television market (and it’s worth pointing out that when their most famous series, The Avengers, was launched in 1961 it was also intended to be a dark and edgy series). Like Public Eye and Callan The Protectors benefits from the studio-bound feel of early 60s British TV which gives it an enclosed and slightly paranoid edge.

Remarkably enough all fourteen episodes survive and are available in a DVD set from Network. For an early 60s shot-on-videotape series the transfers are very acceptable.

It’s a great pity that The Protectors lasted only a single season. It was cancelled not because it was unsuccessful but because of industrial disputes. It deserved a better fate. It’s an intelligent action adventure series that manages to be extremely entertaining as well. Highly recommended.

Paul Temple (1969-71)

Paul Temple had originally been created by Francis Durbridge for a BBC radio series in 1938. The character later featured in novels, a comic strip and four late 1940s movies (including Calling Paul Temple and Send for Paul Temple which are both great fun). In 1969 it became a BBC TV series. The second and subsequent series were co-productions with a German company, Taurus Films.

The Paul Temple TV series was intended to offer a mix of action and adventure with some lighthearted fun and it proved to be extremely popular, all of which horrified the BBC. Despite its popularity they axed the series and promptly destroyed most of the episodes. Only sixteen of the fifty-two episodes survive, although it is believed that Taurus Films preserved other episodes in German-dubbed versions. 

It’s particularly unfortunate that five of the sixteen surviving episodes exist only in relatively poor quality black-and-white versions, since this is a series that really made the most of the possibilities of colour filming. 

Paul Temple is a bestselling crime novelist who solve real crimes in his spare time, a formula that has been used in various novels and TV series, most notably ITC’s Jason King a couple of years later. Jason King in fact is basically a much more extravagant version of Paul Temple. As portrayed in the TV series by Francis Matthews Paul Temple also has a taste for fashionable clothing, fine wines and food, and exotic places. Unlike Jason King he has a wife, Steve (Ros Drinkwater), so his tastes don’t include chasing women. Matthews gets to wear some truly outrageous clothing (which apparently he chose personally) - this was the great age of cravats for men. Ros Drinkwater’s wardrobe is pretty impressive also in a late Swinging 60s sort of way.

The entire first season is lost. The earliest surviver is the third episode of season two, Games People Play. On a Mediterranean holiday Paul and Steve encounter movie star Mark Hill (played with considerable flair by George Baker). British television in the 60s displays both a fascination and an anxiety for what was then called the Permissive Society  and the rising tide of violence and anti-social behaviour. Mark Hill represents all of this. He is a wealthy and dangerous degenerate. Mark though goes beyond casual sex, booze  and drugs. His dangerous passion is for playing games. Playing games with people. Mark’s games are the kind that require a victim. Picking Paul Temple’s wife as as victim proves to be a little unwise. Paul Temple can play games as well, and he plays to win. It could have been a fine episode. The problem is that it’s a bit rushed - 50 minutes wasn’t quite enough time to explore the idea fully - and the ending is contrived and unsatisfying.

Corrida is interesting, dealing with gangsters and bullfighting in the Camargue in the south of France.

The Specialists is quite a good story of business plotting and assassination. It’s highlighted by some wonderful interplay between Sammy Carson (George Sewell) and Lewis (Garfield Morgan), both gangsters who might be on the side of the angels, well partly at least. In fact George Sewell became a semi-regular cast member, appearing in a total of eleven episodes. We never really find out to what extent Sammy Carson was, or perhaps still is, a  crook. He certainly has far too many underworld connections to be a respectable citizen but he is a loyal and exceptionally useful friend to both Paul and Steve Temple, and Sewell was always an actor worth watching.

Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? was written by Dennis Spooner, always a promising sign. It’s a delightfully complicated espionage story about a feckless Irish artist named Kelly who seems to be caught in the middle of a international conspiracy and also finds himself accused of murder. He happens to be an old friend of Steve’s so Paul finds himself somewhat reluctantly trying to help out although he doesn’t realise just how complex a situation he’s stumbled into. A guest starring performance by the always delightful Richard Vernon is a highlight.

Motel is a terrific little episode. A strange variety of people turn up at a remoter Scottish hotel during a blizzard. And they keep turning up. Each guest seems to be slightly more eccentric than the previous one. And among these guests are Paul and Steve Temple. Also among the guests is a bank robber. In fact any or all of the guests may be accomplices of said bank robber. Or they may be police officers, or amateurs after the reward money, or even genuine guests there for the fishing. The situation becomes more and more farcical but underneath the farce there is a serious side - there is a great deal of money at stake, enough money to kill for. The whole situation is treated with a wonderfully light touch. Superb television.

Cue Murder! is even better. The entire episode takes place in a television studio where Paul is participating in a panel show that attempts to solve previously unsolved crimes. This setting works very well, the plot is nicely convoluted and fine supporting performances add to the fun. Philip Madoc is typically and delightfully over-the-top as the host of the TV series.

Death of Fasching was one of Francis Matthews’ favourite episodes and it’s easy to see why. This is a somewhat surreal and slightly experimental episode in which nothing is as it appears to be. The surreal touches invite comparison to The Avengers but in some ways this story is even more daring and ambiguous in narrative terms than anything attempted by The Avengers. Paul and Steve are in Munich for Fasching, a sort of Carnival month in which the normally staid inhabitants of the city let themselves go. Perhaps some of them go just a little bit overboard. There is something very strange going on but the more Paul and Steve find out the more puzzling the whole situation becomes.

Catch Your Death employs a favoured idea of 1960s thrillers - the theft of a virus from a research establishment. The puzzling thing though is that the would-be thieves seem to have been after a virus that does nothing more dangerous than cause the common cold.

Ricochet is a so-so story although it is amusing to see an action adventure story involving coffee smuggling and toboggan racing - both of which are apparently very very serious matters in Switzerland!

The Guilty Must Die is a delightfully twisted tale of double crosses and triple crosses and dangerous romantic entanglements. An old friend of Steve’s is engaged to be married to be married to smooth-talking but sleazy used car salesman Peter Blane (Patrick Mower in a gloriously over-the-top performance). Steve finds herself trying to warn her friend that Peter is not merely sleazy but also has a very shady past but it seems that love is blind. Or is it?

Paul Temple really is a treat for fans of classic British action adventure television. The location shooting (yes, actual location shooting) in exotic places is a major plus. This series looks stylish and classy. Francis Matthews is a perfect suave playboy crime-fighter hero (and he is certainly the definitive screen Paul Temple) and he and Ros Drinkwater make a great team. Judging by the episodes that have survived the quality of the scripts, although variable, was often very high indeed. It’s all great fun. Very highly recommended.

Network’s excellent DVD release includes all sixteen surviving episodes. It doesn't include a huge amount in the way of extras but the interview with Francis Matthews is certainly worthwhile.