The Persuaders! 1.20 – Read and Destroy

We had a funny moment watching tonight’s episode of The Persuaders!. I’ve lamented that my family simply are not very good recognizing actors. It’s mainly the kid, but his mom doesn’t have an eye for them either, you know, like most people who are more sensible than I am. However, they will occasionally recognize locations. And why not? We’ve watched at least a few episodes from about ten different series made over the course of about a decade at either Elstree or Pinewood and used locations within about thirty miles of the studios. This region is affectionately known as Avengerland, and it really leaves me wanting to go back to Britain in 1970 with a car and a camera.

So tonight’s episode guest starred Kate O’Mara, Nigel Green, and Joss Ackland, all of whom I love seeing in old movies and shows. I watched Green just the other week in The Ipcress File. He played a bent intelligence officer in that, too. But did my family join me in actor-spotting? Nope, they jumped at the stadium where Danny meets an American spy, jointly concluding that it was the same stadium as was seen in the first episode of Man in a Suitcase. For the record, I was iffy. The climax of the first episode of Suitcase was filmed at White City Stadium, and this was filmed at Watford’s Football Ground. The only thing I know about Watford is that according to one of the mean gunslinging bastards in “A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques,” they can’t play football to save their lives. So, thanks to the great people at the Avengerland site for clearing that up!

Anyway, “Read and Destroy” is very amusing and unpredictable, and our son enjoyed it very much. Had I guessed he was going to enjoy this show as much as he did, we’d have done all 24 for the blog, which will be concluding next month. As it is, I think we’re going to watch the remaining 18 episodes next year sometime. It really was such a fun and downright delightful program, easily among my favorites of the many great, great programs filmed in Avengerland. It’s a shame that ABC used it for cheap filler instead of something to get behind and promote in a big way, but then again if The Persuaders! had continued, I guess Roger Moore wouldn’t have been available to play James Bond. On the other hand, maybe some imaginary second season episodes might have been made in Los Angeles, to let Tony Curtis’s character be at home and Lord Sinclair the fish out of water. If only!

The Persuaders! 1.14 – The Man in the Middle

Before we watched tonight’s delightful and extremely fun episode of The Persuaders!, Donald James’s “The Man in the Middle,” I told our son to look out for Terry-Thomas. I reminded him that we’ve seen him once before, in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and he’s hardly playing against type here. Thomas specialized in variations of the same part: a comically obnoxious, cowardly aristocrat who’s always happy to stick other people with the bill. One thing that our little sample run of this series has mostly missed is Lord Brett Sinclair’s curious family tree. Here, Thomas is a distant cousin, and Brett is so desperate to get away from him that he completely forgets that two rival intelligence agencies are tracking him and that he has to lay low for the next twelve hours, and walks straight into a trap.

Geraldine Moffat is also in this one, which had the kid guffawing loudly as Danny tries to rescue Brett from the enemy power’s embassy while Archie provides as little help as possible. It’s really very funny. I’ve praised the writer several times over the course of this blog for all the great scripts he penned for ITC, but this was really one of his best even before Thomas got involved and making it even better. I told the kid that we’ll be seeing the actor once more in about a month.

But surprisingly, I didn’t actually pick this episode for its guest stars like I normally do. Always glad to see good guests like Thomas and Moffat, but I chose this one because there’s a bit at the end where Danny tries to build a road block to keep the baddies from driving out of town and it doesn’t work like he’d hoped. I remember that I really liked that gag when Marie and I watched this series a couple of years ago, and I figured correctly that the kid would like it as well. He agreed that was the episode’s best moment, and despite all the other amusing hijinks, fights, and shootouts, I agree.

The Persuaders! 1.13 – The Long Goodbye

I choose to believe that a couple of years after they made “The Long Goodbye,” the episode’s writer, Michael Pertwee, was talking with his brother, actor Jon Pertwee. The actor, then working in Doctor Who, mentioned that he’d like to have some kind of space-rocket car. Michael said “Well, there’s a funny thing, because I did this episode of The Persuaders!…”

Perhaps fortunately, the resulting car, which is known as both the Alien and the Whomobile, isn’t quite as ridiculous as this one, but it made its debut in a 1974 episode of that series and both are just lovably, wonderfully seventies in every way.

This car is driven around London by the Space Queen as part of a soap promotion, and Brett hijacks it. I picked this episode not merely for its car, but by its driver, the beautiful Valerie Leon. Nicola Pagett, Madeline Smith and Anouska Hempel are also in this story, along with familiar faces Peter Sallis and Glynn Edwards. It’s full of fine actors, good-natured silliness, and wonderful location filming all around London. It may not be the meatiest episode of the series, but it’s breezy and very entertaining.

The Persuaders! 1.9 – The Old, the New and the Deadly

Naturally, I picked the Persuaders! episode with Patrick Troughton. He’s one of the villains, along with Derren Nesbitt. I hoped that the kid would recognize him, and he did, but the white wig threw him. “Is that William Hartnell? No, it’s the second Doctor!” In an earlier scene, Nesbitt is wearing the sort of frilly shirt that Jon Pertwee was wearing at the time. Well, it was 1970-71. I was waiting for somebody to show up in a really long scarf. Nobody did, but Juliet Harmer was rocking quite a black hat…

So yes, this is another Persuaders! full of fine guest actors, also including Anna Gael and Frederick Jaeger. The script is by Brian Clemens and it’s incredibly silly. You’d think that Gael’s character would avoid lots of trouble with her new husband if she’d just admit that she’s being harassed by somebody who is willing to clear her family name by selling her a macguffin that Troughton’s character badly wants. Then again, the new husband gets to misunderstand everything and deck Danny a time or three.

It’s a really farcical and ridiculous story. I love Juliet Harmer’s femme fatale, who comes on to her old pal “Sin” – short for Sinclair – and insists that while she’s not that kind of girl, she wishes that Sin would try to turn her into one. There’s another scene set in a totally fab Parisian nightclub full of hippies and guys wearing single-feathered headdresses. Nesbitt fits right in with his frilly shirt. Groovy, baby. How 1971 is this? Totally.

Speaking of 1971, a couple of years ago, I wrote about how ABC had purchased the final 26 episodes of The Avengers because they had an impossible death slot coming up that season between two of the biggest shows on television and needed the least expensive program to air as a sacrificial lamb. The Persuaders! didn’t actually start that way in the 1971-72 season, but it turned into one.

The American run began with our heroes in a dead slot: Saturday nights at 10, opposite season six of the aging Mission: Impossible on CBS and films on NBC. But after a few months, ABC moved it to the sacrificial lamb spot: Wednesday nights at – get this – 9:30 pm. ABC was in such a mess that they actually gave the 10:30 slot back to their affiliate stations for whatever they could find for thirty minutes. And ABC knew they had some bad programming holes that season: they’d also purchased the sitcom Shirley’s World and the wild sketch comedy Marty Feldman Comedy Machine from ITC. Anyway, The Persuaders! was up against the top 20 Medical Center and the Columbo / McCloud / McMillan & Wife Mystery Movies for thirty minutes, and then against the huge hit Mannix and Night Gallery for the next thirty. It wasn’t quite as bad as what The Avengers had to deal with in 1968-69, but it was a pretty poor way to treat such a fun series.

The Persuaders! 1.2 – The Gold Napoleon

At dinner tonight, we enjoyed talking about stuntmen, and how sensible producers and directors will insist on using them for any work where a performer risks injury. Recently, we looked at “Babylon”, an episode of Stargate SG-1 where the production team overruled Ben Browder’s desire to keep doing the physical stuff and got a stuntman in. That’s because they were smart and didn’t want a repeat of something we saw a while back: a stunt gone wrong in 1974’s “The Sontaran Experiment” in Doctor Who, which left Tom Baker with a broken collarbone on location on some Devonshire moor with half the story left to tape.

I mentioned this, of course, because Tony Curtis spent decades depriving stuntmen of work. While I don’t think that “The Gold Napoleon” is a particularly strong episode of The Persuaders!, I picked it because of this great sequence where Danny Wilde goes crawling along the rooftop of a warehouse, and then ducks in through the ventilation shaft, dancing along the rigging with perfect balance. There are days I can’t even walk on a perfectly level sidewalk without falling down, and here’s blasted Tony Curtis, wearing far less sensible shoes than me, hopping from rail to rail with grace and style. The kid enjoyed it, especially a fight at the end, but it is certainly played more straight than the brilliant pilot was, with fewer opportunities for silliness.

Anyway, “The Gold Napoleon” was the only Persuaders! installment written by Val Guest, who was much better known as a film director, though he had penned some screenplays thirty or forty years before. This was written in between two cult classics that Guest directed in 1970 and 1972: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Au Pair Girls. Unlike the movies, everybody’s fully dressed in this one.

The Persuaders! 1.1 – Overture

For this blog’s last sample look at a show from ITC, I selected, of course, The Persuaders!, which is often agreeably silly and dopey, but is nevertheless one of the most downright fun television series ever made. I gave our son atypically high expectations about this one, and it met them. He laughed all the way through this. The leads’ hilarious rivalry and undercutting kept him giggling, and the fights left him roaring. One brawl sees Danny and Brett destroying a hotel restaurant. The following evening, having settled their differences, they are ordered off their case by four hoods. The restaurant is destroyed again. The kid was in heaven, even if the set dressers in 1970 weren’t.

The Persuaders! teamed Tony Curtis, who our kid fondly remembers from the hilarious Great Race, with Roger Moore, who our kid mostly enjoyed in The Saint, as nitro and glycerine. Forced to work together by a judge, unofficially of course, these hard-drinking, womanizing, good-natured playboys finally use their intuition, cunning, resourcefulness, and fisticuffs to solve all kinds of crimes around the south of France and Italy and the UK.

And it is fun. Super fun. This may be either a close second or tied with Randall and Hopkirk as my favorite of all the ITC series, because while it’s full of good guest actors and it has the requisite scripts by all the best names in British TV from the day, including a pilot by Brian Clemens, Curtis and Moore are simply hilarious together. At one point, Danny Wilde pulls the “heads I win, tails you lose” bit against Lord Sinclair, walks away a winner, and the beat before our son got it was almost as funny as when he exploded laughing. Then Roger Moore does a double-take, because it took Brett a beat longer than the kid. Priceless.

Anyway, “Overture” sets the stage and introduces Laurence Naismith as Judge Fulton, who pulls strings in about half of the episodes to make sure Danny and Brett keep working together. Alex Scott and Imogen Hassall also appear. It’s a terrific hour. Most TV shows don’t have a pilot anywhere near as rewatchable as this series. I picked six for us to sample, but I’m pretty sure that the kid will ask us to rotate the other eighteen in to family TV nights in the new year.

A note on copies: In Region 1, The Persuaders! is available for purchase on Amazon Prime, but I don’t think it’s presently streaming anywhere. I got the R1 DVD set from VEI about five years ago. It’s still available very cheaply, but insanely it’s presently actually available for even less if you get VEI’s set that bundles it with The Protectors. However, I had a little less cash on hand five years ago, and the smart purchase is Network’s Blu-ray set, fully restored and with lots of extras. It’s said to be Region B-locked, but I can’t confirm that. Might upgrade sooner rather than later.

The Protectors 2.15 – Lena

For the last of four sampler episodes of The Protectors, I’m afraid that I landed on a turkey. The kid didn’t follow it, and neither did I to be honest, but he still left the room humming the theme tune.

Anyway, I picked Trevor Preston’s Lena because it stars John Thaw, along with Judy Parfitt, plus Roger Lloyd-Pack in a small role. A few years later, Preston would write for Thaw several times in The Sweeney. Here, Thaw is playing a mob boss or a criminal or a politician or perhaps all three. It was filmed in Venice, and it reminded me of how in “Bagman” they found an incredibly interesting abandoned building in Copenhagen to shoot, because the first act fight scene is in a great, decrepit location in this city.

Also, this being a Gerry Anderson show, a getaway car turns out to be a very, very unlikely vehicle.

Maybe four episodes wasn’t enough of a sample, but I think that wasn’t bad. The four I picked had some fine guest actors, and by chance were filmed in four different countries. One was very good and one was a flop, but the other two were not bad at all. It certainly would have worked better as an hour show, with more character development and backstory and humor.

Going back to my comparison, twenty-odd years later, once they cancelled Jack of All Trades, Renaissance took the opportunity to expand Cleopatra 2525 into an hour series. ITC didn’t do that for the second year of The Protectors after they’d axed The Adventurer, and I think that’s a shame. A pretty good show could have been retooled into something much better.

That’s all for The Protectors, but we’ve got one more ITC classic to show our boy, starting at the end of the month. Stay tuned!

The Protectors 2.2 – Bagman

“Bagman” was written by Terry Nation, and I picked it because Lalla Ward is in it, along with Patricia Haines and Oliver Ford Davies in a story about a kidnapping in Copenhagen. There’s a lot of running around from location to location with a ransom in a case, not entirely unlike Nation’s “Take Me to Your Leader” for The Avengers, but really more like the ransom scene in Dirty Harry. Pretty simple and humorless stuff, but they found some neat places to shoot and the kid enjoyed it.

The Protectors 1.20 – Vocal

I love our little coincidences. I picked this episode because Shane Rimmer is in it, and also because Brian Clemens wrote it. I had no idea that Clemens co-wrote The Watcher in the Woods, which we watched last night, but they ended up on the schedule back to back anyway. I like how that villain with Rimmer is wearing a transparent plastic mask. I bet Clemens remembered the visual and decided to reuse it for his New Avengers episode “The Last of the Cybernauts…??” a few years later because it looks so good.

Anyway, I’ve probably watched five or six Protectors before now. I’ve thought of it as popcorn, just middle of the road adventure stuff, competent and occasionally good. “Vocal” is by a mile the best one I’ve seen. Tony Anholt’s character is temporarily blinded. Only he can identify a criminal, but the criminals need him alive because only he can identify who they believe is another witness. There’s a great twist in this one as well as a really good fight scene. Robert Vaughn’s barely in it. They must have been filming him for another episode while Shane Rimmer, playing a criminal who can mimic anybody’s voice, impersonates Harry.

One reason I’ve enjoyed doing this blog is that it’s given me many opportunities to give our son a good history lesson in how television used to be made. I mentioned Jack of All Trades last time, and the reason that show reminded me of The Protectors was the curious nature of its production. Jack was born because there were stations around the US that ran Hercules: The Legendary Journeys on Saturday evenings at seven, and Xena: Warrior Princess on Sundays at seven, and were looking for half-hour shows to lead into them. Other stations were looking for a one-hour block of programming. So they could buy Jack of All Trades for one night and Cleopatra 2525 for the next, or the stations that needed an hour could get both shows as the “Back2Back Action Hour.”

The Protectors was born because of similar circumstances a generation earlier. ITC’s salesmen had been hearing station managers tell them they needed a half-hour for Saturday nights, because they had an hour of local news, then half an hour of their network’s national news, a thirty minute gap, then the network’s prime time lineup. Other stations had a shorter half-hour local newscast and needed a full hour. In time, these gaps would be filled by game shows, chat shows, scandal shows, or whatever, but in the early seventies there was still a small window for dramas to get on the air. There are some lost media enthusiasts who remember a secret agent show called Monty Nash that appeared in this sort of slot briefly in 1971, but didn’t sell to enough stations to warrant making more than 14 episodes and is apparently missing apart from fragments.

ITC had the idea to produce a pair of half-hour adventure dramas, with American stars, to fill this need. Stations could buy The Protectors along with The Adventurer, with Gene Barry, and run them in an hour block, or any other way they chose. It worked incredibly well, and while The Protectors doesn’t have anywhere near the strong reputation as some of ITC’s other drama series that went straight into American syndication, it was remarkably popular among audiences and station managers. The Adventurer didn’t get a second season even though many stations must have wanted one – tales of the unhappiness among everybody involved, especially its star, are legend and hilarious – but the sponsors and stations were so happy with The Protectors that it continued production even without its stablemate. I wonder why ITC didn’t come up with a different half-hour show to accompany it, though.

The Protectors 1.2 – Brother Hood

For our next dip into the world of ITC, we’re sampling four episodes of The Protectors, which is nobody’s favorite series. It was produced by Gerry Anderson and Reg Hill, and everybody is surprised to learn that no matter how much we all love Anderson’s puppet series, The Protectors was the first time that Anderson was given the okay to produce a full second season of anything. In the US, it was successful enough in first-run syndication in the 1972-73 season that ITC needed a second batch of 26 half-hours for the next year.

So the show is kind of like Department S, only with far simpler plots and an anything-goes approach to why our heroes get involved in the case of the week. These heroes are played by Robert Vaughn, Nyree Dawn Porter, and, frequently, Tony Anholt. There are a whole pile of familiar names in the credits, from Anderson’s Supermarionation crew behind the scenes, to reliable vets like Brian Clemens and Ralph Smart contributing scripts, Don Chaffey and Charles Crichton directing, and of course it’s full of great guest actors.

The problem is that when you’re watching other ITC adventures, the plot will occasionally not matter quite so much so that we can focus on the leads being charming and witty and fun. With only twenty-five minutes available, this show is all plot and no character and very serious business. It’s kind of the opposite of the later Jack of All Trades, where the plot barely mattered much and everybody had fun and was ridiculous. I’ll explain why this comparison struck me when we get to the next episode.

So this time out, Patrick Troughton plays an evil billionaire who wants his brother, played by Vladek Sheybal, broken out of prison before he spills the beans on his criminal cartel. Everything is done with leaden weight and our heroes are unbelievably, conveniently, stupid not to realize that Troughton is not telling them all they need to know. But there are three fights, a small explosion, a helicopter, and some gunfire, which was enough to make our kid say “I think I’m gonna like this show!”

The Protectors followed the approach taken by The Persuaders! the previous year and actually filmed all over Spain, France, and Italy, so there’s a bit more to look at than the usual Avengerland locations. This one, set near Barcelona, even has a prisoner exchange in a bullring. But you just can’t help but wish this show was made with the same carefree and fun spirit of The Persuaders! and that after half an hour with these people you can remember any of their names.

Man in a Suitcase 1.22 – Burden of Proof

For our last little look at Man in a Suitcase, I naturally picked the one with Roger Delgado. And I’m thrilled to say that this is one of those pleasant and happy occasions where our son recognized an actor. “The Master?!” he shouted. Sadly, like some other actors I really enjoy from the period, including Gerald Sim and Charles Lloyd Pack, Delgado is only in this one for a very short time. The bulk of it is carried by John Gregson, with Nicola Pagett as his wife, and Wolfe Morris as a genuinely frightening villain.

Well, sadly, other than spotting the Master and a great sequence where McGill bugs a room with a variety of cameras and tape recorders, some of which he expects to be discovered, our son didn’t really enjoy this one either. The problem this time: torture. Gregson’s character spends a surprisingly long time, for a show of this day, getting bruised and bloodied, and Morris’s character has the upper hand for about the final third of the story. So yeah, this one’s a pretty nasty story, and so we end our look at Man in a Suitcase with our son largely unsatisfied with it. But we’ll try another ITC series for a short sample in a couple of weeks and see how it goes.