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.

Vendetta for the Saint (1969)

Wrapping up our look at this great old series, perhaps unsurprisingly we watched the famous two-part adventure. There’s actually another two-parter, but it’s not as famous as “Vendetta for the Saint,” which, in 1964, became the first “Leslie Charteris” Saint novel to be published in many, many years. Charteris didn’t actually write it, it turned out. It was ghosted by the great Harry Harrison, but it somehow seemed to be the one that every bookstore used to have in multiple editions.

Our son was really happy with the second half, but thought the first was long and he wasn’t too involved. Since part two is a giant cat-and-mouse game with Simon Templar being hunted all over Sicily by gunmen, there’s a lot for a kid to chew on, and he said that it was really exciting. Good; I think you can see a little bit of both For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy in the last twenty minutes of this. It’s a template of what was to come, and since I plan to introduce him to James Bond next year, I think he’ll like what he’ll be seeing.

For a long time, “Vendetta for the Saint” was the only color installment of the series that I saw. When I first started watching the series in high school, WATL-36 only had the black and white episodes available. Fortunately, I was long in the habit of reading the weekly TV listings very carefully to spot any monster movies or schedule changes, because some time after WATL moved on from the series, WTBS – you may have got it on cable, but it was channel 17 in Atlanta – showed this movie one Saturday afternoon.

You sometimes see essays about The Saint that call “Vendetta” and the other film, “The Fiction Makers,” examples of the way syndicators used to repackage two-part episodes as movies for foreign markets and American syndication. That isn’t true. They were both made as features and then edited into two parts for broadcast in the UK as part of the sixth season. It was partially filmed in Malta – perhaps they had such a good experience that ITC decided to come back and film Mister Jerico here the next year? – and features Templar at war with the Mafia, represented by Ian Hendry as a villain who’s trading on a false identity and gets very angry when people deduce who he really is. The Lovely Aimi MacDonald is a damsel in distress, George Pastell gets to play a hero for a change, and Fulton Mackay and Alex Scott both appear, briefly.

The kid really enjoyed this because Simon is actually fighting for his life for whacking great chunks of the story, but what I like best is that this is a fight the Saint does not need to pick, and he does it anyway. Even when he realizes that this villain, Dino Cartelli, is a little more connected and a lot more dangerous than the average Saint bad guy, Templar finds the guy’s sore spot and jabs it, repeatedly. But Cartelli gets under our hero’s skin, too. Templar drops the façade in the second half and threatens to kill his opponent. That’s how high the stakes get. It’s a great story, and such fun to revisit.

That’s all for our look at The Saint, but we’ll sample another classic ITC series next weekend. Stay tuned!

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?

The Saint 5.19 – To Kill a Saint

Foiled again! I selected “To Kill a Saint,” which was first shown in February 1967, because I thought it just possible that our son might recognize two actors from their very familiar voice work on the Gerry Anderson shows that our son has enjoyed so much: Peter Dynely, who was Jeff Tracy in Thunderbirds, and Francis Matthews, who was Captain Scarlet. But the joke was on me: the episode is set in Paris, and they’re speaking with French accents, so even with a great big hint, of course the kid didn’t recognize them.

It did mean we got one last glimpse of the bumbling Parisian police contacts Quercy and Luduc, played by John Serret and Robert Cawdron. This was the sixth and last appearance of these characters. We actually saw Serret briefly in another role in the last episode we watched, “The Queen’s Ransom”. Our kid really enjoyed this one. It’s full of twists and mistaken identities and somebody trying to kill Templar and frame a crime boss, and somebody else trying to kill the crime boss and frame Templar. At one point, someone breaks into Simon’s hotel room to trash it and make him think the crime boss ordered it. As Simon, knowing he was going to catch somebody up to something and having left Luduc behind*, stomped down the corridor, eyebrow raised, our son just howled with laughter.

But I can’t help but be amused by our son just not paying any attention to actresses. I told him up front that he wouldn’t recognize Pamela Ann Davy, as he really only knows her as a cartoon version in “The Power of the Daleks”, and he certainly wouldn’t recognize Valerie Leon, who has just a tiny cameo, but this is the third of seven Saint episodes we’ve watched with Annette Andre, and she’s just another pretty girl to him. I think I’ll make a “you’ve seen her before” sign and point it at the screen. I’ll get to do that twice Sunday night…

*Simon really does owe Luduc a nice lunch once all the paperwork on this one gets finished. He did give the poor sergeant his word of honor…

The Saint 5.1 – The Queen’s Ransom

In the spring of 1966, ITC started production of The Saint and, briefly, Danger Man, in color. The result here looks a little threadbare, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s overdue for a really nice restoration, because The Prisoner began filming a few months after this and has always looked so colorful and gorgeous. I’m not sure in which order these were actually made, but they started with a block of 30 episodes and the first 27 of them became “season five,” led by “The Queen’s Ransom” in most of the ITV regions. I remember reading that it was also chosen to launch the first season on NBC in the summer of 1967, but I can’t confirm that presently.

I’m still not sure that moving to color was the right move for this series, in part because it always looked so right in black and white, but our son certainly enjoyed this one a lot. Simon pulls a great switcheroo on the bad guys that had him laughing out loud, and the whole thing is one fisticuff-fueled cat-and-mouse game with criminals while Simon brings some snobbish Nosuchlandia royalty back down to Earth. Bits of it are very reminiscent of one of the most entertaining black and white episodes, “The Golden Journey.” Dawn Addams, who our son predictably did not recognize despite seeing her twice in the last month, plays the snobby queen, with support by George Pastell and John Woodvine.

But I didn’t pick “The Queen’s Ransom” for its guest stars, actually. I picked it for the ITC white Jaguar going off a cliff again, and the darn kid didn’t realize what was happening until it was on its way to launching. “I didn’t realize it was a Jaguar,” he protested. They picked a brilliant, amazingly twisty road to shoot on, and Avengerland tells me that it’s a road on the Llyn Stwlan Reservoir in Wales. The road was also used in a Persuaders! four years later, as well as, weirdly, another Saint that we’re going to watch soon, in which the other stock ITC crash, with the Red Renault, is used. I honestly didn’t plan this. I swear I picked it for its guest stars, not its car crash.

The Saint 4.2 – The Abductors

Everybody knows that Ivor Dean played the Saint’s regular foil at Scotland Yard, Inspector Teal. It’s less well-remembered that he had another recurring irritant among the French police, Sergeant Luduc, played by Robert Cawdron. Luduc appears in six episodes, although unfortunately they couldn’t settle on a regular actor for Luduc’s superior, Inspector Quercy, and he was played by four or five different people. This time out, Templar calls Quercy a “second-hand Maigret,” which was a bit mean.

“The Abductors” is another one packed with memorable guests, including Annette Andre again, and a trio of villains played by Dudley Foster, David Garfield, and Nicholas Courtney, whose character is strangely more violent and base than we usually see from this series. Andre and Courtney crossed paths again a few years later for the Randall and Hopkirk that everybody remembers for its own amazing guest cast, “The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo”, and weirdly, in 1969-70, Foster, Garfield, and Courtney each appeared one at a time in consecutive Doctor Who serials: “The Space Pirates,” “The War Games,” and “Spearhead From Space.” No, I don’t know why I know that, either.

The kid liked this one much more than the previous two. It is a very straightforward tale of criminals with a goal that’s easy for a ten year-old to follow. No weird adult stuff like mistresses or market manipulation, just plenty of driving around, making the police look like idiots, with some funny quips, great brawls, and a credibility-straining dungeon where the bad guys stuff their captives. I’ve always liked it a lot. It was one of the episodes I taped off-air in 1986-87 and rewatched several times later, but I had forgotten just how ugly and bloodthirsty Courtney’s character is. We’re so predisposed to love Who‘s Brigadier that it feels downright wrong to know this dude strangled a prostitute to death. Maybe WATL cut some of that part out from their copy to make room for an extra commercial or something.