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 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.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts five, six, and seven)

My previous two posts feel a little harsher than I intended them. I wouldn’t say that “The Evil of the Daleks” is at all bad, but it is really slow and while certain discoveries or recreations from the Troughton years have more than exceeded expectations – such as “The Faceless Ones” and “The Enemy of the World” – this one is good, but it’s not the masterpiece that legend claims. Although, happily, this is among those very rare Who serials that gets better as it goes along. The first four parts are pretty good. The last three are very entertaining.

Our son mostly agrees with my thoughts on its pace, although he liked this far more than any of the other animations they have released recently. Part five ends with three newly-born Daleks, having received a “whatever, Dr. Science” injection of “the human factor,” curious and excited and rolling around like happy toddlers, and the kid just fell apart laughing. These carefree and fun Daleks continue to amuse throughout the story’s concluding parts, leading to my favorite bit in the whole shebang. One of the mean Daleks gets sick of this bunch having infected dozens of others into questioning authority and talking back. The mean Dalek exterminates one of a noisy pair. His friend slowly extends its sink plunger to sadly touch the dead shell, quietly disbelieving that his talkative buddy is gone.

I sometimes wonder about the pipe dream American Dalek TV series that Terry Nation had hoped would start production soon after this and get his merchandising money flowing again. Nation had hoped that some studio could land a deal with a network, and then sell a bigger-budgeted film series back to the UK, with a dashing hero or two trying to save the world of the future from a pending Dalek invasion, with treachery and danger at each new planet on the way back to Earth. Boomers have always had a lot of affection from even the shortest-lived American adventure series of the 1960s – Honey West or Land of the Giants or The Green Hornet – in part because even though most of these shows didn’t last long by the standards of the day, they were merchandised like crazy and made it to the full 26 episodes, whereas later generations would see their flash-in-the-pan flops over and done within a month or two, before word of mouth could get around.

I kind of see The Daleks! (or whatever it would have been called) as something like that, something that Irwin Allen fans or nostalgists who remember The Invaders fondly would have kept alive through tape trading until Nick at Nite or TV Land or meTV resurrected them. It’s good that “Evil” was not indeed “the final end” as it was intended, and everybody’s glad the Daleks returned five years later, but I’d still like to see what could’ve been.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts three and four)

You know, the Daleks were just more interesting in the sixties, before power creep set in and they had to be all sneaky and crafty because they were not indestructible army-killing super-tanks yet. At this stage, they’re so easily disposed of that Jamie and a friend literally destroy one by slamming it into a fireplace really hard. And their body count is so low that a supporting character completely freaks out when one of them murders a criminal who’d wandered in to rob the place. That’s two men they’ve killed! Two!

As much as I’m enjoying the Daleks in this, and as much as I’d love to have episode three recovered so we could see Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines have a really surprising shouting match, this story really is the most disappointing experience. They’re all a little slow and measured by contemporary standards, and use that pace to establish mood and atmosphere, but “Fury From the Deep” moved like lightning compared to this. They could have compacted these four half-hour episodes into two and it would still be walking slowly in place waiting for the story to get to Skaro.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts one and two)

Say, wasn’t this in live action the last time we saw it?

As is the way of these things, there’s still a baffling gap between the British release of old Who and the domestic. New Who we get a couple of hours later. Archive stuff, we have to wait two or three months. It’s like it’s still 1985 or something. The newest animated reconstruction is for the mostly-missing “Evil of the Daleks,” and it came out last month in the UK and is due next month in America. We looked at the surviving episode in July, our son still giggles about the Dalek telling Victoria not to feed the flying pests, and honestly, this one moves like molasses. The animation on these rebuilds is continuing to improve and impress, but it feels like the writer, David Whitaker, was really struggling to fill this one out to its running time.

Its great reputation came from somewhere, however, so I’m sure this one’s going to get better. I like Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ interaction, as always, and I like the little Easter eggs that suggest pretty much every band worth seeing in 1966 had played London recently enough for their posters and flybills to still be on the tops of the stacks glued to the walls. About the only thing I felt this really needed was a little bit when the Doctor and Jamie – who has not yet met the Daleks – are wondering who their unseen enemy is.

“You don’t think it’s the Chameleons again?” Jamie asks. What the Doctor should have replied was “Pfft! Those losers? Hardly.”

The Saint 2.18 – The Romantic Matron

For a really long time now, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint has been one of those properties held onto by nostalgists. That’s fair; time marches on and nothing lasts forever, but it’s interesting to think about how once upon a time, Simon Templar was such a huge character, known by just about everybody. By the eighties, he wasn’t. I’d catch a glimpse or a reference here and there in Doctor Who Magazine in 1985-86 to there being a show, presumably British, called The Saint where a writer or actor whose names I recognized contributed, but I had no idea what it was. Eventually, I noticed it in the TV listings; it started appearing weeknights at 10 on WATL-36 – this was the show I mentioned last week – and once I finally stayed up late enough to try it out, I had the time of my life. This show was terrific!

Of course I expect everybody reading this nostalgic blog today knows that, but that was certainly not the case with my high school classmates. No matter, The Saint immediately moved up to number three on my list of favorite TV shows, right behind Who and The Avengers, despite nobody at any bookstore being able to find me a program guide with an episode list. The main thing keeping me from completely digging in to the six other ITC series available on WVEU that I mentioned in that link above was that most nights I trying to stay up late and watch this, and I had to do my homework sometime. WATL’s package was a strange one. It seemed to have been 95 hours – the 71 black-and-white Saint episodes and the 24 Return of the Saint installments.

So this evening, we gave a capsule introduction to the show and character to our kid. What did he need to know? Our hero is a gentleman adventurer and former master criminal, still notorious and still unable to stay out of trouble, played by Roger Moore, featured in ITC’s longest-running adventure program. It’s second only to The Avengers for number of episodes for an action-adventure hour of its day, it ran in syndication in just about every American market in the sixties before NBC picked up the color years and played them for three seasons on the network, and I’ve picked ten installments for our sample series. Did I pick them based on the guest stars rather than the plots? Probably!

And once again, our kid proved he can do it, given the right actor. “I think that’s Patrick Troughton,” he said, and my heart grew three sizes that day. Troughton joins some other recognizable British faces, including John Carson and Joby Blanshard, as playing Argentinians in this story. A modern program would probably not do that, but I was particularly impressed with Carson, who has to smooth-talk a truly gullible young American widow into helping him move some stolen gold out of the country. It’s a role that could have veered into stereotype very easily, and he didn’t let it.

Happily, the kid really enjoyed it. I worried that I may have picked a turkey, because I had forgotten that Templar hardly appears at all until about the midpoint, while the con gets moving. But there’s enough of an undercurrent of ugliness that it works. It’s only jaded and skeptical viewers who will spot Carson’s character as a baddie; the show presents him as an unlikely good guy being followed by some thugs. Then watching Templar put things together, while engaging in some great brawls, kept his attention very well. He was really pleased with the scheme to ship the gold out of the country in the romantic matron’s car: they’ve given her a solid gold bumper! We reminded him that he saw something a little similar in Freewheelers way back when, but that really was a while back, and he didn’t remember it that well. Maybe he’ll feel like revisiting it sometime. I’ll hint at it.

Danger Man 1.8 – The Lonely Chair

I know that you, dear reader, won’t find this as amusing as I do, but I have always enjoyed watching some of these TV series where I’ve just selected some episodes based on a guest star – MacGyver, The Twilight Zone – and then letting enough time pass for me to have no idea why I picked it, and we get to the climax and I find myself asking “So who’s gonna be playing the boss of these kidnappers?” Then Patrick Troughton shows up.

And my kid! My boy recognized him! He may not have known the famous faces in the last two Ray Bradbury Theaters that we had watched with a reminder practically on top of the show, but he said “The second Doctor?!” within seconds and I was so pleased. Then again, the Doctor probably stands right behind Garfield the cat as just about his favorite fictional character, so I shouldn’t be too ridiculous with praise.

Overall, he liked this a lot more than the previous episode that we saw. It’s Drake versus kidnappers instead of Drake convincing somebody to get some backbone and do the right thing. For a ten year-old viewer, this episode had some more meat on its bones.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (part two)

Earlier today, the BBC announced the forthcoming release of their next animated reconstruction of a lost serial. “The Evil of the Daleks” was first shown in 1967, and, unusually for British television in those days, it was actually shown again a year later as a summer repeat, but the corporation soon did what they often did and junked the films and wiped the tapes for reuse. A film print of episode two was returned in 1987.

To celebrate the news, I suggested to our son that we give the surviving episode a spin and he couldn’t have agreed faster. He did briefly muse that it was a shame that it wasn’t the first installment of the serial that was available, but I reminded him that the first episodes of Dalek serials typically don’t actually have Daleks in them until the cliffhanger, and he said “Oh, yeah…”

Anyway, he enjoyed it a lot, and concluded that he was glad it was part two that was available because of a short scene where a Dalek, menacing the companion-to-be Victoria, played by Deborah Watling, warns her: “Do not feed the flying pests!” He mused “One of the reasons I like the Daleks is the mix of pushiness and slight ignorance. They don’t know what birds are… and they don’t care!” Bigots are like that.

“The Evil of the Daleks” will be released in the UK in September.

Jason King 1.26 – That Isn’t Me It’s Somebody Else

I told our son that this episode of Jason King would feature a plot that they’d used a couple of times before, although not smuggling Jason somewhere in a box. “Committing crimes based on the plots of his books?” he asked. He hasn’t got the finest memory in the world, but sometimes he pays attention.

No, this is another example of somebody posing as Jason, but this time out, it’s our hero Patrick Troughton! He and Simon Oates play some organized crime types who are trying to get to a deposed Mafioso bigwig who’s hiding out in a fortress, and who, conveniently, is a huge Jason King fan. Even more conveniently, Jason happens to arrive in this allegedly quiet area of Italy to get away from reporters for a while. So yes, this is remarkably silly, but it’s done with such panache. At one point, a police inspector notes the kingpin’s fandom as though Jason’s novels are the real problem. Jason replies that he isn’t responsible for “the dichotomy of my readership.”

Overall, I think I enjoyed the Jason King series more than I enjoyed Department S, even though some of the S episodes, particularly “The Pied Piper of Hambeldown” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing”, are better than anything in the solo run, and there was never an S episode as lousy as “Zenia”. The kid agrees, but only because he didn’t immediately remember the name Department S, and thought it was a superhero show for a minute. What was I saying about his memory?

Honestly, neither show is as good as I would hope, thanks in large part to so many downright ordinary hours penned by Philip Broadley across both series. But the more Wyngarde the better, I’d say. At their best, both shows gave us excellent examples of these fun romps, and for the most part, when they weren’t thrilling, they were usually at least competently-made and intelligent, with very good guest actors, and I enjoyed them overall. Good stuff.

I had such fun introducing our son to the entertaining world of ITC that we’re going to have some sampling mini-seasons of five other shows from the company for the blog a little later this year. We’ll start with a few episodes of Danger Man in August. Stay tuned!

Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep (parts five and six)

As much as I’d like to claim that I’ve spent the last three evenings completely lost in the fun of escapism and remade lost sixties TV, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future, because this release of “Fury” is attached to the real world in a specific way. I haven’t spoken much in the pages of this blog about the pandemic. We’re very, very fortunate to have good jobs and can work from home and are earning enough to pay off bills and set a little bit aside just in case the economy were to start taking a crash dive. Ordering DVDs from another country is a luxury.

I’m worried about what might start happening in the near future. Amazon UK’s international shipping prices went from “incredibly cheap” to “unbelievably exorbitant” overnight, and so I ended up ordering “Fury From the Deep” from Base.com. Within two weeks of my package arriving, Base sent a follow-up email to North American customers announcing that they are no longer shipping outside of Europe. It feels like a harbinger of bad times coming.

Sorry to have a downer of an entry. We did enjoy the story very much, and I’m so pleased with the great work by the animation team. I hope that they’re able to release another classic serial in 2021, and maybe they’ll release it to a happier world. Fingers crossed!

Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep (parts three and four)

They did a really good job in this serial foreshadowing Victoria’s decision to leave at the end of it. Perhaps Peter Bryant, who had taken over as producer, looked back at what a raw deal Michael Craze and Anneke Wills were given when his predecessors wrote out Ben and Polly at the end of “The Faceless Ones” and decided that they needed to do better. So Victoria gets plenty of opportunities to express that she is very tired of this life and sick of being terrified by monsters everywhere they go. The Doctor and Jamie are not entirely empathetic to her position on this. They’re having too much fun.

We switched to the black and white presentations of parts three and four in the new set, and our son quasi-complained that it just made it even more frightening. It really is something else; he went behind the sofa for the eerie cliffhanger to part three, and spent most of the following half hour behind it. It’s a shame that any television is lost – it should all be available for people who wish to enjoy it – but I wonder whether the loss of part four isn’t one of the greatest losses in all of Doctor Who. The audio and the animation is darker and creepier than our son was ready for, and incredibly effective. The recovery of most of “The Web of Fear” proved that Who was on fire that season telling scary, effective stories about monsters in dark tunnels with incredibly good visuals. I wish very badly that this episode still existed to see how it compares. If I could pick which of the 97 that are still lost could come back next, I think it would have to be this one.

There are some small flaws with the original production, like Robson being obnoxiously obstinate and unreasonable even before the seaweed gets him, but overall I’m incredibly pleased with this. I know how it ends – even if I have forgotten everything about Victor Pemberton’s novelization of the story for Target Books, I remember how they save the day – but I’m really looking forward to seeing it tomorrow night.