The Saint 5.20 – The Counterfeit Countess

Well, I absolutely had to pick this one, didn’t I? It’s got the red Renault going over the cliff, it’s got another appearance by Ivor Dean as Inspector Teal, and it’s got both Alexandra Bastedo and Kate O’Mara. By a weird coincidence, my copy of the Doctor Who season 24 Blu-ray set arrived earlier today. I watched the Behind the Sofa for “Time and the Rani” and all of the participants had such nice things to say about Kate. The two actresses would appear onscreen together about a year later in an episode of “The Champions”.

This was a pretty good one that we all enjoyed a bit, despite a few hiccups. I was amazed they got Roger Moore actually out on location in the middle of a field this time instead of doubling him like they often did in the color stories, but I did wonder exactly why he got so unusually righteous about a counterfeiting operation and determined to bust heads across Europe to shut it down. But credit where it’s due: it’s a good story by Philip Broadley, about whom I’ve expressed some lack of enthusiasm in these pages previously. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d do a Department S about two years later with some men in turtlenecks doing some counterfeiting in a similar wine cellar though. Probably the same big engraving machine prop, I bet.

Speaking of the same, Philip Madoc’s villain has a silver-haired (usually called white) Persian, and I joked to myself that the cat was saying how his agent had promised him the role of henchcat to Donald Pleasance and he ended up at Elstree instead. Then I started thinking about it…

You know, that could be the same cat. The one that Donald Pleasance adored in You Only Live Twice was apparently played by a cat called Chico. Twice seems to have been filmed at Pinewood in February and March 1967; this Saint episode may have been made in the fall of 1966. I’m sure some Bond aficionado knows for certain, but I can’t confirm it. What do you think?

Jason King 1.5 – Variations on a Theme

This blog’s meant to be about sharing experiences with my kid more than it is me, so let’s be very, very clear on this one: the kid barely tolerated Philip Broadley’s “Variations on a Theme.” This is a murky, shadowy spy story with nobody telling anybody much of anything, and the only actress who does want to tell somebody something is – in that way of damsels in distress in the fiction of days gone by – “too scared” to talk. He was restless and bored and the only time he brightened up was when a VW Beetle or hippie van showed up on screen, which was constantly, because the streets of Vienna were full of them in 1971.

From a production standpoint, though, I thought this was fascinating. I wonder whether the script was actually finished before they shipped Peter Wyngarde off to Vienna with what appears to be a single cameraman, and a few reels of what looks like 8mm film, with the ambient sound of crowd noises and music dubbed on later. So you’ve got Wyngarde outside the Vienna airport with all the resolution of somebody’s home movie, and actors in London watching him in 16mm.

The other interesting thing about the production is, of course, all the great guest actors. Ralph Bates is here as the spy who can’t quite come in from the cold yet, and Alexandra Bastedo is a Russian agent posing as a Swedish journalist, and Julian Glover, who our kid saw earlier this week when he watched The Empire Strikes Back again, is a British spy who really should have been used in other episodes beyond this. No, the kid still couldn’t recognize a face, but when I said “You saw him as the AT-AT commander the other day,” he replied “Well, you told me then that he was in everything, guess you’re right!”

Department S 1.11 – The Man Who Got a New Face

I was giggling about all the Volkswagens in a previous episode. Well, this time, the brick-walled back of the studio substitutes for three separate locations on three separate days, and they neglected to move the parked cars around, so the same red and white Beetles show up all three times. They also use the footage of the red Renault going over the cliff, which we saw in a Champions last year. And speaking of The Champions, the episode, written by Philip Broadley, is another good one, and it features Alexandra Bastedo, shown above…

…not to mention Adrienne Corri…

…plus Wyngarde rocking a green shirt like nobody else ever could.

The Champions 1.30 – Autokill

We recently watched “Gnaws,” where Dennis Spooner came on board with a script for Brian Clemens’ The New Avengers that everybody who saw it as a kid remembers more than any other episode. This was perhaps karmic retribution for “Autokill” eight years earlier, when Clemens came on board Spooner’s show with a script that pulled the rug out from every other installment. It’s the one where Richard and Craig have a brawl and the eyes of every child watching popped out of their heads.

We watched this episode earlier in the evening, since our son had a friend coming by after dinner. Marie was taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake her until we’d finished. So the kid gave her a breathless recap as she blinked the sleep away. “Richard got hypnotized into fighting Craig! It was AMAZING! They were knocking each other all over the place!” It’s quite a fight, that’s true. They get all kinds of battered and bruised like you just didn’t see on television in the late sixties. Our son described it this way: “Sharron held Richard down and then Craig gave him a sandwich. A KNUCKLE SANDWICH!” I vividly remember the shots of Richard’s mouth full of blood from when I first saw this one in 1987 because it’s so shocking.

So “Autokill” really is a memorable experience and overall a fine episode with which to end a show. Paul Eddington plays one of the villains, and he wouldn’t have been out of place in an Avengers. He’s fussy, fastidious, and obsessed with cleanliness. There’s almost a preview of the bloodshed to come when Craig smacks the villain and draws blood and the poor wretch almost passes out from fear that he’ll bleed on his uniform.

Sadly, that was it for The Champions. Like most ITC series, the program was made in the hopes of sales to international television markets, especially an American network sale. NBC picked up the series and gave ten of the installments a run in the summer of 1968. Remember last year when I talked about the roaring success of Laugh-In? Rather than risk overexposure for their surprise new hit, NBC rested it for the summer and ran The Champions in its place.

Unfortunately, The Champions sank without trace fifty-one summers ago, and NBC never bothered to run the other twenty episodes. I once read that this ended up hurting the show’s ability to find independent stations to pick it up. Local channels had purchased a few programs from ITC’s catalog, most notably The Saint, which was shown in enough markets to eventually make NBC interested in buying the two color seasons. But The Champions was tainted by its network failure and not often seen in American syndication. I’m really glad that I picked up Network’s DVD release. It’s got a great documentary about the show that reunites the three stars that I’m going to watch again soon.

One last stupid little anecdote about this episode. The first agent who gets brainwashed and drugged into becoming a killer leaves behind a wife who freaks out and cries while Sharron tries to ask her about the morning he vanished. I recognized her as someone I’d seen freaking out and crying in something else really recently, but couldn’t remember what. I didn’t recognize the name, Rachel Herbert. IMDB set me straight. The other morning, when I popped in the first episode of Lord Peter Wimsey to get a picture of the late Glyn Houston, I rewatched the scene where Herbert, playing Lady Mary, finds her brother standing over her dead fiance and freaks out, crying “Oh God, Gerald, you’ve killed him!” See, I knew I’d seen that freaked out, crying face recently.

The Champions 1.29 – The Gun-Runners

This was a very satisfying little hour written by Dennis Spooner that sees our heroes globetrotting from Burma to Belgium to a Central African Nosuchlandia on the trail of several crates of rifles that are being sold to finance a civil war. Along for the ride, a mob of regular ITC guest stars that you see in all these shows: Anthony Chinn, William Franklyn, David Lodge, Paul Stassino. There are even giraffes in the jungle, thanks to the magic of rear-screen projection. It’s a really satisfying action hour where all our heroes get a spotlight superpower moment and a few little smiles of comedy.

The Champions 1.28 – The Final Countdown

“The Final Countdown” is a good story with a terrific trio of villains – Alan McNaughtan’s in charge, with Norman Jones and Derek Newark as his thugs – but the main event is the ITC White Jaguar going over a cliff for the second of at least four times that we’ll see at this blog.

“I am NOT going to buy a white Jaguar when I grow up,” our son sagely observed, “because it’ll just go over a cliff and crash!”

The Champions 1.27 – Nutcracker

This is Sharron’s “I’m about tired of being sidelined” face. She uses it once or twice in this one.

The Champions 1.26 – Full Circle

I was thinking that tonight’s episode of The Champions, written by Donald James, might have been too complicated for our son, but he breezed right along with it and quietly said “This is really exciting!” as Craig executes a prison break. At its core, the story is a mystery: who is paying a man who broke into an embassy in London to photograph plans, and what did he do with the film. The ambassador believes the British government is behind the theft and has imprisoned their own agent, so while Craig and Richard are planning to break him out, the ambassador engages an underworld fixer and his gun-toting moll, played by Gabrielle Drake, to bring the convict to him.

The most surprising moment of the story comes when Richard loses a fight. Even superhumans have an occasional off day, but in Richard’s defense, there were three of them, they were huge, they caught him by surprise, and he did kayo two of the thugs before losing consciousness.

The Champions 1.25 – Desert Journey

Any hour of television that guest stars both Roger Delgado and Jeremy Brett can’t be all bad, but honestly, seeing these two fine actors is the best thing about “Desert Journey.” The story is set in a Nosuchlandia in North Africa and appears to reuse the set from “Happening,” with the “Joe’s Place” building redressed as an Australian oil company depot. Recognizing good actors and props is just about all the interest I could muster in this one.

The Champions 1.24 – Project Zero

Tonight, we rejoined The Champions for a run of seven last episodes of this incredibly entertaining show. “Project Zero” was written by Tony Williamson and it features a good, meaty part for Peter Copley as one of several scientists who’s been conned into thinking the top-secret research establishment in Scotland where they’re working is a government project, when it’s actually, of course, run by this week’s diabolical masterminds. And I use that term deliberately: this is a very Avengers scenario, right down to the nearby village, which is not quite abandoned, but overseen by one “everything is normal” fellow who’s there to pull the “gasp! you haven’t escaped at all!” routine. That fellow’s played by Nicholas Smith, and Jill Curzon also has a small role.

This is an incredibly good Sharron episode which more than makes up for a couple of the recent disappointments where the character was sidelined badly. It’s so satisfying on that front that I really should have used a picture of Alexandra Bastedo this time, except that there’s this scene with Craig and Richard which is completely amazing. Richard’s cover is blown and the bad guy has clamped a bomb around his neck. The scene where they free him is one of the most tense things I think our son’s ever seen. His eyes were wide and he didn’t dare breathe until it was over. They held the tension for so long that he about turned blue. If our son comes back to this blog to relive old memories once he’s grown up, he’ll certainly remember this scene.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) 1.10 – Whoever Heard of a Ghost Dying?

I’m afraid I was working on another project and had to rush, so I watched tonight’s episode out of the corner of my eye. What I saw was completely wonderful. This is a splendid and very funny adventure where Marty gets targeted by a clairvoyant criminal played by Charles Lloyd Pack. He needs to make sure that no ghosts get in his way, so he and his associate, Alexandra Bastedo under a very unfortunate hairdo, pick up Marty’s widow as a client in order to exorcise Marty! There are some good fights and great surprises, and it features Ivor Dean as a police inspector who is really sick of Jeff.

In our son’s favorite scene, Jeff consults a doctor in Harley Street to discuss all of his ailing friend’s symptoms. The quack deduces that Jeff’s friend must be pregnant, and our kid howled with laughter. This is definitely one to come back to another day!