Goodbye to Craig Sterling

 On the one hand, there has been some very good news today, with the announcement of a second season of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman.

On the other hand, Stuart Damon has died.  He was, of course, one of The Champions. 

Here they are in the title sequence, supposedly in Geneva where Nemesis headquarters was (it was actually an office block in a place called Whetstone, in the UK).  He did some of his best acting in the episode The Interrogation, where Craig is questioned because his special powers have made him too successful as a secret agent.

The Avengers - The Hour that Never Was

 I remembered this episode as soon as they got to the abandoned airfield - it's the one with the milk float and Roy Kinnear as a tramp.  There's also a bonus Gerald Harper as Steed's old friend at the airbase.

The Man-Eater of Surrey Green and Silent Dust

 In honour of Dame Diana Rigg's death, I brought out my complete box set of The Avengers again.  I've been watching it a bit at a time, in order, and by chance I had reached Series 4, Disc 4, and a couple of delightful Emma Peel episodes.

In The Man-Eater of Surrey Green, Steed and Mrs Peel are up against an alien plant that can control minds, which gives a lovely excuse for Emma to fight Steed.  A plot twist is that the plant cannot control deaf people, so there are three deaf people in the episode.  The first is a horticulturalist, and boyfriend of one of the mind-controlled scientists.  The second is a fertiliser merchant who Emma meets in the local pub, and the third is an elderly lady scientist who is brought in to analyse the alien plant specimen.  To protect themselves from the mind control, Emma and Steed wear hearing aids to get close to the control room where the growth of the plant is being regulated.

Fertiliser is also involved in the next episode, Silent Dust, but this time the formula went wrong and produced a pesticide that wipes out everything it touches.  The bad guy in this episode is William Franklyn, most famous for the "Shh - You Know Who" Schwepps adverts - here he's a keen country sportsman, and very involved in the local hunt when he's not trying to hold the government to ransom by poisoning the whole of Dorset.  I found it interesting that hunt protestors carrying placards were shown in 1965.  Also, Steed gets shot with no blood or marks on his jacket whatsoever - but it does lead to a very funny hallucination scene.

Tonight I'll be finishing off the disc with The Hour that Never Was, which I have no memory of whatsoever, and Castle De'ath, which is one of my favourites.

Dame Diana Rigg has Died

 

This is how I best remember her, as Emma Peel in the Avengers.  I wanted to be like her, when I was six.

But she was a brilliant actress in so many roles - the only Bond girl to marry Bond (just a pity it was George Lazenby - and that she died just after the wedding), a nun in In This House of Brede, and Mrs Bradley in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, for instance.

More recently, she played the villain in the Doctor Who episode The Crimson Horror, which had been specially written for her and her daughter Rachel Stirling by Mark Gatiss, and of course she was the Queen of Thorns, Oleanna Tyrell, in Game of Thrones.

She did Shakespeare, and the Morecambe and Wise Show, and she will shortly be seen in the new series of All Creatures Great and Small (returning to her native Yorkshire) and as another nun, Mother Dorothea, in Black Narcissus.

I was lucky enough to hear her rehearsing, once.  I was on a coach tour in Scotland with my gran, and we were looking round the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Diana Rigg was in the pulpit, rehearsing a speech - there was no mistaking the voice.  I was thrilled, and wanted to stay to listen, but my gran wasn't terribly sure who Diana Rigg was, and wanted to go and have a cup of tea before we had to get back to the coach.  I see from her Wikipedia page that she had an honorary degree from the University of Stirling, where she was also Chancellor for a time.

She also collected a book of theatrical reviews called No Turn Unstoned.

I know what I'll be watching later this evening....

More of Adam Adamant

Damn you, Guy Adams!

I was left so traumatised by the end of the first volume of Big Finish episodes of Adam Adamant Lives! that I had to find out what happens next!

Will Georgina escape The Face?

Will Adam ever find happiness?

So I've just pre-ordered Volume 2 from Big Finish, which promises a bank robbery by highwaymen and a show down between Adam Adamant and The Face, among other things.

Guy Adams has also written these three episodes, and also plays Simms, Adam's manservant.

I fully expect to be traumatised by the excellent writing and acting again, but this time I'll have a stiff drink ready....

Who Opened Blackpool Tower?

In the Adam Adamant episode where they visit Blackpool, Georgina enthusiastically points out Blackpool Tower as they travel along the Golden Mile in an open top tram. "Oh, yes," Adam says casually. "I opened it." And then adds: "It rained all day."

I rather think John Bickerstaffe would have something to say about that, though of course Adam Adamant may have been present at the opening ceremony. John Bickerstaffe was the Chairman of the Tower Company, so on 14th May 1894 he was the obvious choice to cut the ribbon and allow all the holidaymakers who had paid their 6d into the Tower Building. It was 6d extra to get in the lift to the top of the Tower, and an extra payment for the Tower Circus, which also opened for the season that evening.

In his early days, according to his obituary in the Lancashire Post, he was a member of the local lifeboat crew "and participated in several exciting sea rescues", which makes him sound like the sort of person Adam Adamant would have got on well with.
He made his fortune as the licensee of the Wellington Hotel, got onto the local council and became an Alderman and later, the Mayor of Blackpool. As Mayor, he was responsible for the building of Victoria Hospital, and after that he was Chairman of the Fylde Water Board for 28 years. He was also involved in the local Territorial Army, and recruited men locally for the First World War.
He was knighted for his services to the development of the town of Blackpool and the Conservative Party in 1926, but he seems to have been the sort of old school Tory who believed in public service, who wanted to improve the lives of all the people of Blackpool. He wanted every child to have a decent education and a chance in life, and was also involved in the building of several local schools.
When he died in 1930, at the age of 82, the flags at all the public offices in Blackpool, and the Tower and Winter Gardens, were flown at half-mast.

Adam Adamant Lives!

Recently on Twitter, @archivetvmus71 (Archive TV musings) posted a couple of clips from the 1960s series Adam Adamant Lives! which were amusing enough to give me a desire to watch an entire episode.
The DVDs of all the episodes that still survive are eye-wateringly expensive, but I still have a video machine, and I was able to pick up a video of two episodes for under a fiver.
As it turns out, I got the first two episodes of the series, A Vintage Year For Scoundrels and Death Has a Thousand Faces.
The first episode gives Adam Adamant's backstory - how he was captured by an arch-villain in 1902, frozen in a block of ice, and revived in 1966, where he is found by Georgina Jones, who can explain the strange new world of the 1960s to him. He, in turn, can help her against the villainous woman running a protection racket threatening the disco where Georgina works.
There's an amusing scene where Adam has been allowed to stay the night in Georgina's flat, and she admits to other men having stayed overnight, so he assumes that she is a prostitute, and he wishes to save her from her fallen state. But really, Tony Williamson's script could have been better (but he was also the script editor, so had overall responsibility for the quality of the scripts) - the woman Adam loves in 1902, Louise, really should have had more lines, especially when he was declaring his undying love for her, for instance.
Also involved were Sydney Newman and producer Verity Lambert, who had also been involved in the creation of Doctor Who. The concept of an Edwardian gentleman taking a satirical look at the Swinging Sixties was a good one but - well, there's a reason the Avengers was more popular and lasted better, and I think it's in the writing, despite the occasional witty scene. Of course, it might have improved as the series went on.

The second episode takes Adam and Georgina to Blackpool, at the height of the popularity of the Golden Mile, before holidaymakers started going on cheap package holidays to Spain. To give them credit, they really did go to Blackpool to film, with scenes along the Golden Mile and on the beach, as well as travelling on an open top tram. I was also delighted to see them walk past a stall selling Pablo's ice cream - we bought ice cream from that very stall, and it was delicious! In 1966, I would have been a small child playing on the beach at Blackpool, and I'm certain I saw the Illuminations that year, which play a large part in the plot - which actually doesn't make a lot of sense. The idea of hiding plans in a stick of Blackpool rock was a good one - but why did they need to when all the conspirators knew each other? And why had the man who stole the plans gone to London, apart from being a plot device to alert Georgina and Adam to the villainous scheme?
Once again, the main villain is a woman - I don't know if this continued as a theme - and once again Adam throws villains off high buildings to their deaths.
The episode also introduces William Sims, a Punch and Judy man who becomes Adam's servant. I can only assume that Adam's bank account had been quietly gathering interest over the 64 years he was frozen, because he seems to be independently wealthy with no visible means of support. By the second episode he has managed to buy a penthouse on top of a multi-storey car park (his original home having been knocked down ten years before) and he's learned to drive a Mini, with the number plate AA 1000. He also manages to pull the wool over the eyes of the man at the planning department of Blackpool Town Council while looking for information, so he's not helpless in the modern world, though he does suffer from flashbacks to the night he was betrayed and frozen every time he gets drugged or hit over the head, poor chap.
On the whole, I think the first two episodes have sated my desire to see the whole series, but I understand Big Finish had done some audio adventures which might be fun.

Goodbye to The Virginian

I grew up in the era where one of the main genres of TV show was the Western. I loved Bonanza, the Big Valley, High Chaperral - and The Virginian, starring James Drury.
James Drury has just died, aged 85. I've been looking at his screen credits, and he was in a lot of Westerns, but I hadn't realised that he also appeared in Forbidden Planet as one of the crewmen of the C-57D.
The article in Variety says that, in recent years, he toured Western events, talking about the Old West and cowboy values.

Cathy Gale has Died

I just looked at Twitter, and Honor Blackman is trending. She's just died aged 94.
In The Avengers (the UK 1960s version, that is) Steed had other partners before, but the series really found its feet when he teamed up with Cathy Gale. She was a great character, independent, no-nonsense, and able to throw a man across a room, often doing her own stunts.
Then she went on to be one of the best Bond girls as Pussy Galore.

And here she is, still being badass at the age of 87 in Cockneys vs Zombies!

According to imdb, apart from her acting, she was involved in the Fairtrade movement.

The Champions - The Bodysnatchers

I finally gave in to temptation and bought the boxed set of The Champions - I only had a few random episodes on video before. This is the 1960s series starring Stuart Damon, Alexandra Bastedo and William Gaunt, secret agents with enhanced physical and mental powers.
I wanted to watch an episode I didn't remember first, just to see if I would really enjoy it, or if my enjoyment was influenced by my happy memories of watching it before.
So I chose the episode The Bodysnatchers. I didn't remember it, and as a bonus it was set in Wales, and written by Terry Nation.
There is only one Welshman in the entire episode - Talfryn Thomas, who plays a garage mechanic. Craig and Sharon needed some excuse to travel on a picturesque Welsh steam train, so their car breaks down. The stock footage is lovely, and I think includes Lake Bala. At one point Sharon wakes up from a doze at a station and asks "Where are we?"
Craig starts to answer, and then just points at the station sign. "There," he says.
Later, Sharon pronounces all the Welsh names perfectly. However, it was a great disappointment to see her standing around in the big fight scene while Craig and Richard were enthusiastically punching everybody in sight. At least she got to beat up one of the guards and take his machine gun from him earlier in the episode.
The villain of the piece was a very menacing Bernard Lee - M from James Bond! There's a journalist snooping around the place, and when Bernard Lee catches him, he takes great pleasure in killing him horribly (and fortunately off screen). He had kidnapped/bodysnatched a US General, hoping to cryogenically freeze him and then revive him to tell his military secrets.
The episode just about passes the Bechdel Test, as Sharon talks to the young Englishwoman who runs the Prince of Wales pub/hotel, where they're staying. The cryogenic scientist is also a young woman, giving Richard someone to charm and be kind to while trying to find out what's going on at the remote clinic.
So I had great fun watching the episode, and I'm looking forward to re-visiting some of my favourites now.

The Captain of the Seaview Dies

David Hedison, who played Captain Lee Crane of the Seaview in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, has died, aged 92.
I loved Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but even when I was seven I was aware of how silly some of it was - like the crewmen who died were always the ones with a Polish name, rather like a redshirt on Star Trek. And it wasn't a decent episode unless a control panel blew up!

David Hedison played other roles as well, of course - in the original The Fly, for instance, and he was Felix Leiter in the Bond films Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill.

I was quite surprised to find he'd also played the lead in a 1958 film, The Son of Robin Hood. I thought I was aware of all the Robin Hood films out there, but I don't think I've ever seen this one.
He was also a guest star in The Saint. I've been watching my way through a partial collection of Saint episodes which I picked up in a charity shop a while back, and I haven't seen him yet.
His parents were Armenian, and he got married to Bridget in London in 1968. One of his daughters, Alexandra, a fine art photographer, is married to Jodie Foster.

Oh, Brother!

I am ridiculously happy!

At work, we often get CDs, DVDs and, occasionally, videos, along with the book collections we buy. Sadly, it's very hard to sell the videos, because so few people now have a video player, so often these get thrown away.
Today, though, the video heading for landfill was the incomparable Derek Nimmo, starring in all 8 surviving episodes of Oh, Brother!
He was a novice monk. Hilarity ensued.
The series ran from 1968 to 1970, and I remember it with great fondness - so I brought it home.

I hope it's as good as I remember!

Norman Florence's Acting Career

I was watching another episode of The Saint, The Set Up - it's 1965 and involves an unusually brutal mail van robbery. There are fist fights in The Saint every week, and Simon does get knocked out rather a lot, but one of the bad guys in this episode was shooting people all over the place.
And another member of the gang of robbers was a certain Norman Florence.
In Hay, Norman Florence (or Flo, as he was usually known), was best known for having the original idea that became Hay Festival, now an international concern run by his son Peter. I knew he had been an actor, but I hadn't noticed him appearing in anything until last night.
When I looked up his acting career, I saw that he had also appeared (well down the cast list) in one of my favourite episodes of The Champions, The Iron Man, in which Craig, Richard and Sharon are sent to protect a South American dictator in exile from being murdered.
He did quite a lot of TV work in the 1960s, including two other episodes of The Saint and one other episode of The Champions. Several of his characters seem to have been called Carlo, or some other vaguely Mediterranean name - he also seemed to play quite a few policemen, and he was Tony Marchesi in the series Compact, which was a soap opera set in the offices of a glossy women's magazine. He was also in Redcap, with a young John Thaw. The last acting credit in his IMDb entry is for Doomwatch in 1971.
In the 1970s he went into theatre management, working with Sam Wanamaker on the Globe project, and coming to Wales with Theatr Ym Ymylon, a bilingual theatre group - and he happened to settle just outside Hay....

The Saint in Puerto Rico - with Parker!

The latest episode of the Saint that I've seen takes him to Puerto Rico, where he finds a poor peasant farmer about to lose his farm because he borrowed money to grow tomatoes in a hydroponic system which failed.
And I remembered reading the original story, many years ago, in which it was made clear (which it was not in the episode) that the poor peasant farmer had been set up to fail because the hydroponic system didn't work, and the man who lent the money knew this.
I also noted that the actor playing the poor peasant farmer had the very un-Puerto Rican name of David Graham.... and that name seemed strangely familiar.

David Graham was quite busy in the 1960s. He's best known for his performance as Parker, Lady Penelope's chauffeur in Thunderbirds - though I wasn't aware until I read his Wikipedia entry that he had also provided the voices for Gordon Tracy, Brains and Kyrano! When Thunderbirds was remade in the last few years, he was the only original cast member to return. He also provided Dalek voices for some of the early Doctor Who episodes.

The Saint Goes Fishing

The Sporting Chance is, without doubt, the most sexist episode of the Saint I've seen so far. Usually, he seems respectful of women, and seems comfortable around women professionals. In this episode, though, he starts off with his usual piece to camera about how women are entering every workplace and sitting on bar stools alongside the men - but there's one place that women do not follow men, and that's the fishing trip.
The setting is a hunting lodge in Ontario, and the plot involves a scientist who has defected to the West but is now being blackmailed to return to the East.
The bad guys are doing this under the cover of a logging company, where the Saint chats to the innocent secretary - who wears glasses.
He says the cliché line - "you look prettier without your glasses", and makes it worse by adding later that she doesn't really need her glasses anyway.
All of this is a pity, because one of the bad guys, Derren Nesbitt who played the Russian sea plane pilot, is great fun, and seems to be channelling Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Derren Nesbitt later appeared in The Blue Max and Where Eagles Dare, as Major Von Happen.

In the next episode I saw, the Miracle Tea Party, the Saint was back to being respectful of women's abilities, recruiting Aunt Hattie, an older lady who was a keen bird photographer, to take photos of customers at a chemist's shop at the heart of the spying ring he was investigating. Aunt Hattie was played by Fabia Drake, who was best known as a Shakespearean actress.

The Saint Tackles Council Corruption and an Arabian Coup

I enjoyed The Saint Plays With Fire, so I've been watching a few more episodes from late 1963 and early 1964.

The Well-Meaning Mayor starts with a local election, and deals with council corruption in an English seaside town - a new civic centre is being built, and somebody is making a lot of profit from it. Some of the episode was shot on location on a real building site, and it amused me that the entrance to the site had a big sign up saying "New Civic Centre" in case the viewer was in any doubt.
The idea of a council overspending on a building project struck me as being quite topical.

And then there's The Wonderful War, set in a fictional Arab country next-door to Kuwait with every Middle Eastern cliché going. There's a wicked prime minister who organises a coup once oil is found in the country, a young prince who escapes and gets the help of the Saint - and it seems that the Saint can speak fluent Arabic now. He gives a rabble rousing speech in support of the prince, dressed in Arab robes. Oh, and the Arab soldiers are about as good shots as Star Wars Imperial stormtroopers. There's even a hilariously bad sword fight, which is about at the same standard as Richard Greene's Robin Hood. Modern fight choreography is in a totally different league.
The Saint is assisted in his plot to regain the prince's throne by the wonderful Noel Purcell, as an Irish oil man, a pretty girl (daughter of another oil man who has been murdered) and a middle-aged Scottish lady who lives in Kuwait.
There's a feast with a belly dancer, where the Saint is offered a sheep's eyeball to eat. And all the Arab characters are, of course, played by white English actors. The nearest they get to an Arab is Ishaq Bux, who played "Arab (uncredited)" and was actually Indian.
The belly dancer, however, was a real princess - Princess Soraya Esfandiary, the second wife of the Shah of Persia!

The Saint Plays With Fire

I fancied something vintage to watch last night, and so picked up the next DVD in my pile of The Saint episodes.
The beginning was a bit of a shock, to be honest - The Saint was observing a Fascist rally in Trafalgar Square, with some stock footage of protesters struggling against a cordon of police. I don't know who they really were, but in the story they were anti-fascists trying to get to the podium where the leader of the British Nazi Party was speaking.
A punch up ensued.
The Saint observes to camera how much he hates Nazis, and that it's only 20 years after the end of the Second World War and here they are again.
He's then drawn into an adventure involving files stolen from the British Nazi HQ, detailing the rich donors to the party. This information is passed to a journalist who is going to write a magazine article about it. The whole premise of the story is that, if the magazine article is published, this will be the end of the British Nazi Party, and will totally discredit all the donors. They will, therefore, stop at nothing to prevent the journalist from writing his story, while trying to get the information back from wherever it's hidden.
And the Saint finds out how difficult it is to burn through his bonds with a cigarette lighter held by the beautiful girl he's been imprisoned in a cellar with.

If only today's Fascists could be defeated with a well-placed magazine article....

Goodbye, Scott Tracy

I've just heard that Shane Rimmer, the voice of Scott Tracy, has died.
Shane Rimmer was a Canadian actor, who also appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me, with smaller parts in other James Bond films - he's believed to have appeared in more Bond films than any other actor apart from those in recurring roles.
He appeared in many films, including Star Wars, as a Rebel Fighter Technician!
In his long association with Supermarionation, not only did he provide the voice of Scott Tracy, but he also wrote scripts for Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and Secret Service, as well as providing some of the uncredited voices. He also appeared in UFO and Space:1999.
He also appeared in Doctor Who's brush with the Wild West, The Gunfighters, and appeared in The Persuaders.
He was 89.

One of the Champions

I learned today that Richard Barrett was the former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6. He was giving his opinion on the case of Shamima Begum.
So that's what he did when he left Nemesis!

Too Many Targets - Avengers from Big Finish

This is the British, 1960s, Avengers, of course, not the more famous Marvel Avengers. Big Finish don't only do audio adventures for Doctor Who - they've branched out into other cult TV shows as well.
It's a great temptation, because of the Doctor Who link to Big Finish, to think of this story as Steed with all of his Companions. The story is set at the time when Steed is paired with Tara King, played by Emily Woodward, but gradually brings in all the other people he's worked with up to that time.
It took me a while to get used to Julian Wadham as Steed - after all, Patrick Macnee had such a distinctive voice, but as they said in the actor interviews which are also on the CD, the characterisation is all there in the script. They'd got the way Steed talked exactly right. It's also quite nice that Christopher Benjamin, who plays Mother, also appeared in several episodes of the original series.
Cathy Gale gets involved because of a rogue killer gorilla in Surrey, and Beth Chalmers does have a voice very like Honor Blackman's. All the actresses involved said it was great fun doing the period RP accents!
Mrs Peel (Olivia Poulet) is now running Knight Industries, which also seems to be involved in the case, and Dr David Keel (Anthony Howell) gets involved when a colleague of his gets kidnapped.
There's a glorious scene with the constantly frustrated KGB agent who is Steed's Russian counterpart(voiced by Dan Starkey, sounding very much like Warren Mitchell, who originally played the part).
The script is based on a novel that came out in 1990, written as a homage to the series by John Peel and Dave Rogers, and it really captures the witty banter and bizarre situations of the original series.
I loved it!