The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

The Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC as part of the Theatre 625 anthology series. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best remembered as the creator of the Quatermass serials which aired on the BBC in the 1950s and which were adapted by Hammer as three very successful feature films.

The subject of The Year of the Sex Olympics is television itself. It is set in the fairly distant future in which a totalitarian regime maintains order by effectively drugging the populace with mindless television entertainment. Most of the programming revolves around sex but its purpose is to eliminate any desire for actual sex. In fact, to eliminate any desire for anything other than consuming television. 

The populace are to be indoctrinated to watch rather than to do.

In 1968 hysteria about overpopulation was starting to peak so the idea that the government would want to discourage procreation seemed extremely plausible.

The watchword is Apathy Control. The aim is to encourage absolute passivity and an avoidance of any passions. People must never experience tension.

This was 1968, when people were becoming obsessed by the fear of overpopulation. The government does not want people to have sex, at all. Just to watch.

The population is divided into two castes, Low Drive and High Drive. The High Drives run things. The Low Drives watch television.

Nat Mender (Tony Vogel) is the producer of one of the most popular TV programs, SportSex. Its ratings are high and it keeps the audience cosy and comfy. 

Nat’s current girlfriend is the ditzy blonde presenter of SportSex, Misch (Vickery Turner).

Nine years earlier Nat and Deanie (Suzanne Neve) had a daughter. They have little to do with her (there is no marriage and no family in this future society).

Deanie’s current boyfriend Kin Hodder works as a designer in TV but he has been spending his spare time painting pictures. Misch is horrified and bewildered by the paintings. They’re pictures but they don’t move. Kin wants the public to see the pictures but that’s not going to be allowed - it must cause people to experience tension.

An accident on set provides the inspiration for a revolutionary new show. It will be Nat and Deanie and their daughter on an island, with no modern technology. They will have to survive without help. The Co-ordinator (Leonard Rossiter) knows it will be a risk because it will show people dealing with fear, anxiety, cold, hunger and isolation. All the things that are supposed to be avoided because they might make viewers feel something. His hope is that experiencing these things vicariously will keep them in their cosy comfy vegetative state.

This is very obviously predicting reality TV. And it’s dealing with the widespread fears at the time that TV was turning people into moronic zombies. Mind control and brainwashing were major pop cultural obsessions from the late 1950s until the 70s. The Year of the Sex Olympics is perhaps the bleakest most cynical view of the entertainment industry of all time. When I first saw it I thought it was overly pessimistic, that such extremes of manipulation of the public were just a little implausible. Today, watching it again, I have the depressing feeling that its view of human nature is pretty much spot on.

The main target is obviously the elite who manipulate the populace whom they regard with fear and contempt. This teleplay is successful in that respect but there is an ironic twist in that one does get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that Kneale may (perhaps even unconsciously) have shared some of that contempt for the TV audience. And this is a BBC production and the BBC at that time certainly regarded ordinary people with undisguised loathing (and of course they still do). The audience members shown have the intelligence of cabbages. Maybe we’re meant to think that this is the fault of the elite but it still speaks to a breathtakingly pessimistic view of ordinary people.

The acting is very exaggerated and very stagey but given that every member of the cast plays things this way I assume that this was entirely deliberate and that the intention was to emphasise the artificiality of this future society, and of course to remind us that we are in fact watching a television show. We are watching a television show about watching a television show.

The aesthetic of this teleplay is the 1960s Flower Children aesthetic on steroids, which might put some people off but once you accept it it works well enough.

The Year of the Sex Olympics is in some ways very much of its time (for example the overpopulation fears) but well ahead of its time in others (it doesn’t just predict Reality TV, it predicts it with uncanny accuracy). It’s an extraordinarily jaundiced view of the television industry coming from an insider (by 1968 Nigel Kneale had already spent 17 years forking for BBC-TV). And of course the points it makes apply equally well to all electronic media including the internet.

It’s not cheerful viewing but it is powerful and unrelenting and it is highly recommended.

It was released on Blu-Ray but it could be hard to find.

I’ve also reviewed Nigel Kneale's fascinating 1976 TV series Beasts. He really was doing some amazingly inventive TV work in the 60s and 70s.

The Saint: The Set-Up, The Abductors, The Death Penalty

I’ve just finished reading (and reviewing) The Saint and Mr Teal, a 1933 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Interestingly all three novellas were adapted as episodes of the 1960s ITC Saint TV series towards the end of the series’ black-and-white era. Having reviewed the novellas I thought it would be fun to do parallel reviews of the TV episodes in question.

It should be pointed out that The Saint and Mr Teal belongs to the first phase of the Saint’s adventures and features the first version of the character. At this stage Simon Templar still has a lot of the overgrown hyper-active schoolboy about him, with a schoolboy sense of humour and an extraordinary recklessness. The character evolved over the years, in a believable and logical manner. The Saint grew up. He became older and wiser, with a slight sense of wistfulness and while he never lost his taste for adventure it was tempered with good judgment. The Saint, as he grew older, also became more of a genuinely sophisticated man of the world, and a restless world-traveller. The character in the TV series is based on this final version of Simon Templar.

This necessitated a few changes when these stories were adapted for TV.

The Death Penalty

The Death Penalty was the ninth episode in the third season of The Saint. It was scripted by Ian Stuart Black and went to air in December 1964.

The big problem facing anyone trying to adapt the Saint stories for television in the 60s was that the stories had to be sanitised. Most crucially Simon Templar as a character had to be sanitised. He had to be sanitised a lot. In Charteris’s stories the Saint is an unrepentant criminal. He has ethics. He only steals from bad people. But he is a thief and feels no shame about it. The Saint is also extremely ruthless. If he thinks that a man really needs killing then he’ll kill him without feeling the slightest remorse. The Saint is one of the good guys, he’s on the side of justice, he is a sworn enemy to those he refers to as the ungodly but he also feels very strongly that sometimes the most effective solution to dealing with the ungodly is simply to kill them.

For television all of these elements had to be not merely toned down, they had to be eliminated. Unfortunately these elements were what gave Charteris’ stories their unique flavour. Simon Templar had to become a Boy Scout, which meant that he ceased to be Simon Templar. That the TV series worked so well was due largely to the charm and charisma of Roger Moore. I love the TV series, but it lacks the bite of the books.

The Death Penalty was a story that presented a very big problem. In this novella the Saint displays a breathtaking disregard for the law and sets out to commit coldblooded murder.

The basic plot outline is retained. There’s a power struggle between two crime lords, Stride and Osman. Stride’s daughter Laura becomes an element in that struggle. There’s an Englishman working as secretary to Osman and he’s a mere shell of a man. Simon is determined to save Laura. There’s a climax on Osman’s yacht which ends in murder.

It’s an OK story but all the elements that added spice to Charteris’s story have been removed. In the novella Stride sells his stepdaughter to Osman to save his own skin. He is as rotten and corrupt and evil as Osman. In the TV episode Stride would never do such a wicked thing. He’s a criminal but a devoted father. In the novella Simon’s intention is to carry out coldblooded murder. In the TV episode Simon would never do anything so ruthless. He hopes to leave justice to the police. The secretary Clements is just a drunkard in the TV adaptation rather than a man who has been systematically stripped of his self-respect.

The TV episode is enjoyable enough but it lacks some of the edge of the original story. The novella is like a double Scotch with a dash of soda. TV episode is like a Scotch and soda with extra soda and no Scotch.

The Set-Up

The Set-Up, scripted by Paddy Manning O’Brine, went to air in January 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Man from St Louis.

Again the basic plotline is fairly similar. An American gangster with ruthless American methods has been behind a string of daring robberies. He has a gang of would-be tough guy English crooks. Simon has decided that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen in England and as in the novella he’s prepared to assist Chief Inspector Teal.

Simon utilises the same ploy he utilises in the novella when Ted comes gunning for him. As in the novella Tex suspects that someone in his organisation has squealed.

The thieves are more up-market than in the novella and a female movie star is introduced into the story to add some glamour but these minor changes are very much in keeping with the feel of the TV series.

The climactic heist sequence is original to the TV script and it’s well executed. The ending is satisfactory although it lacks the twisted cleverness of the ending of the novella.

The Abductors

The Abductors, scripted by Brian Degas, went to air in July 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Gold Standard.

Once again the bare bones of the original story are retained. A man is murdered in Paris and the murder is connected to a plan to kidnap his brother, a top metallurgist. Again there’s a sinister Mr Jones involved. And as in Charteris’s story Simon Templar was on the spot when the murder occurred.

Patricia Holm does not appear in the TV series at any stage (this is the later incarnation of the Saint as a loner) so as in several other episodes a female guest star is introduced to fulfil the same plot function - to lead Simon to the bad guys’ lair. In this case the guest star is the charming Annette Andre who would be a regular in a later ITC series, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). The Saint will have to rescue both the girl and the professor. It was presumably felt that one of the key plot points in the novella would have been too outlandish so it’s dropped and the reason for the villain’s interest in the professor is left rather vague.

And again the essential bite of the original story is missing.

All three episodes are quite good and reasonably enjoyable but none of them are up to the standards of Charteris’s stories. One can’t really blame the screenwriters. They had to make the stories more wholesome so as not to corrupt the fragile morals of British TV viewers and that’s what they did. Unfortunately in all three cases it meant that Charteris’s deliciously clever devious endings had to be sacrificed and replaced by utterly boring utterly conventional endings. It’s no wonder that this TV series reduced Leslie Charteris to despair.

I’ve reviewed the original novella collection The Saint and Mr Teal at Vintage Pop Fictions.

The Prisoner TV tie-in novel

In 1969 and 1970 three original novels based upon the television series The Prisoner were published by Ace Books. Since there is some ambiguity about their place in the timeline of the series it’s probably a very sound idea to watch the series before reading the novels. In the case of the first novel you really must be at least vaguely familiar with the TV series. That doesn’t mean you need to rewatch the entire series before reading it, but you need to know what the series is about.

The first of the novels is The Prisoner (later reissued as I Am Not a Number!) which was written by Thomas M. Disch. Disch was a prominent figure in American New Wave science fiction in the 60s. Given that The Prisoner has a very slight science fictional flavour and that New Wave SF tended to be paranoid and edgy Disch was perhaps a fairly appropriate writer for the assignment.

A man and a woman are having dinner in a restaurant. The relationship between them is not entirely clear but there’s some heavy flirting going on. The man has just quit his job. The woman is surprised that he was allowed to do so. He has bought himself a little cottage, a converted gatehouse, in Pembroke in Wales. He has only seen photographs of the cottage but he is sure it will suit him. He has spent the day looking at the furniture he would love to buy for his new home but it’s all hopelessly out of his price range. He will have to be content with cheaper more utilitarian furnishings.

He boards the train for Pembroke. A taxi takes him to a village which is disturbing in its excessive attempts at cuteness and cosiness. He had never been here before but it seems oddly but subtly familiar. He spots his cottage. It looks just as it did in the photos. He attaches no significance to the number 6 on the door. He is puzzled to find that all his furniture is there - the furniture he had fantasised about buying. The furniture that nobody had known that he desired.

He quickly discovers that he is a prisoner. Everybody in the Village is either a prisoner or a jailer but there is no telling which are which. Everybody is referred to by a number. He is Number 6. The person in charge is Number 2.

So it begins exactly as does the TV series, except that it’s not quite the same. There’s that  slight feeling that he’s been here before. If you’re familiar with the TV series you will know what’s going on, except for Number 6’s feeling of déjà vu. There’s something else going on here. And Number 6 has some strange gaps in his memory.

Of course if you know the TV series you know that Number 6 is a British secret agent who has quit the Secret Service. Disch obviously assumes that you do know the TV series and that you do know this but oddly (and I assume deliberately) the words spy or secret agent are never mentioned. Perhaps it’s those gaps in Number 6’s memory. He is obviously aware that he had worked for the government in some capacity connected with security or intelligence but perhaps he no longer remembers exactly what his job had been. Perhaps he no longer possesses the information that Number 2 wants.

When writing a TV tie-in novel it is essential to do nothing to undermine the premise of the TV series. Disch obeys this rule. There is nothing in the novel that is in any way in conflict with the TV series. It’s clearly the same Village. Number 6 is clearly the same Number 6. The themes of the novel are all present in the TV series. This is not a reboot or a re-imagining, but nor is it merely a retelling of the same story.

Disch has added nothing but has put slightly slightly more emphasis on aspects present or implicit in the series. Memory and identity become extremely important. Number 6 is desperately trying to cling to his sense of identity but if one loses parts of one’s memory one’s identity is in a sense threatened. That’s the case not just with Number 6 but with Number 41. She is the woman with whom he was having dinner at the beginning of the novel. Or she might be. Her name is really Liora. Or it might be. It might also be Lorna. How does she come to be in the Village? Is she a prisoner or a jailer? Can Number 6 trust her? Are any of the things she has told him true? And can she trust Number 6?

The paranoia goes deeper. There are things that are genuinely puzzling to Number 2. There are things about Number 6 that are not in line with Number 2’s expectations. And Number 2 also does not know whom he can trust. Even worse, he’s not sure if Number 1 trusts him.

So Disch amps up the paranoia and the sense of an intricate web of lies and deceptions, and the threat to identity. All of which are of course part and parcel of being a spy. And Disch handles these aspects with great skill.

And then Number 6 is persuaded to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, after which things get seriously weird.

I’m not sure this novel could really be considered as strictly belonging to The Prisoner canon but it’s an interesting riff on the same theme and a wild crazy science fiction spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed The Prisoner (1967-68) TV series.

Naked City season 2 (1960)

Having watched and written about selected episodes in the second season of Naked City (which originally went to air on ABC from late 1960 to mid-1961) I’m now filling in the blanks. The more I see of this series the more I love it. Everything about it is unconventional, offbeat and original. Even the outrageous episode titles.

It’s not unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional. These are complex literate scripts that are concerned with exploring the psychological underpinnings of crimes. Why do some people go off the rails so spectacularly? The scripts are also concerned with another question - if we understand why people do bizarre and anti-social things does this actually help the police in dealing with these issues? Does it help society in dealing with damaged and dangerous people? The series rarely offers easy or comforting answers. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell good from evil.

Naked City takes a very different approach compared to a series like Dragnet. Dragnet aimed for everyday realism - ordinary cops investigating ordinary crimes, the sorts of crimes that are committed every day in a big city. And they’re solved by following established procedures. Joe Friday relies on legwork, not sudden flashes of insight, to solve crimes.

In Naked City the cops are very much ordinary cops but the crimes they investigate are cases that are a little bit out of the ordinary. The aim of the series is to get inside the minds of the criminals and sometimes that’s easier if the crimes are spectacular or unusual. The crimes don’t have to be realistic. In reality the police do encounter bizarre crimes but in Naked City most of the cases have a touch of the bizarre. The bizarre nature of the cases is used to illuminate some dark recesses of the human psyche.

Of course a series that takes a deliberately offbeat approach is going to have its share of failures, of episodes that just don’t quite work. The amazing this is that this series has so few misfires. And even the misfires are interesting.

There have been other fine cop shows since Naked City but none has ever been able to equal this great series. It remains a uniquely brilliant achievement.

With some fine location shooting it also provides a wonderful glimpse of early 1960s New York City.

Episode Guide

The Pedigree Sheet begins with two dead bodies in a crashed car. And a live 17-year-old girl who was also in the car. One of the dead men is the foreman of the jury in a major criminal case. The other dead guy is a hit-man. And nobody knows who the girl is but the police are pretty sure she’s the key to solving the case. That’s what the story seems to be about, but it isn’t really. It’s actually about the girl, a good girl gone bad, and her father, once a famous lawyer and now a drunken bum, and how they got to be that way.

So it’s a pretty good mystery story and a psychological study. Trying to combine the two is the sort of ambitious thing that Naked City would do throughout its run and what’s truly remarkable is how often they did it successfully. And this story is definitely one of those successes.

A Succession of Heartbeats is a whodunit. Millionaire playboy Ben Harlow is shot to death along with his latest girlfriend, a married woman. Harlow has lots of girlfriends. The list of people who would have liked to kill him is practically endless. There are at least three people who could have done so. Some of the clues point to one of the suspects, some at others. But this is Naked City so it’s not just a solid mystery story but a character study as well. Can you put a life back together again once it’s been broken? And guilt can destroy the innocent as well as the guilty. A very fine episode penned by Stirling Siliphant.

In Down the Long Night Norman Garry tells the detectives at the 65th Precinct that a man named Max Evar is going to kill him. A year earlier Garry's printing factory burnt to the ground. Max Evar’s house, which was next door, was destroyed as well with Evar's life and child being killed in the blaze. Evar is convinced that Garry was responsible for the fire. Since Evar hasn’t committed an actual crime there’s nothing the cops can do but Adam Flint has a bad feeling about it and decides to look into it anyway. Evar runs a carnival funhouse and his family has for generations specialised in illusion, magic and the manufacture of terror for entertainment. He’s the kind of guy who would certainly know how to use fear as a weapon and that’s what he seems to be doing.

This is another intriguing psychological study, in this case a study of two men. And the funhouse climax is extremely good. A very fine episode.

To Walk in Silence is a reluctant witness story. A very respectable man, a Mr Weston, witnesses a murder in an illegal betting establishment. In fact he himself suffers a minor gunshot wound in the course of the murder. He’s not willing to talk to the police since it might threaten his professional and social position. What he fails to understand is that he might not have a choice. It features a good performance by Clause Rains as Weston. As a character study its interesting although the plot is rather predictable. An OK episode.

In Killer with a Kiss a psycho killer is stalking cops. He’s killed one and almost killed another. In the latest attempt he pretended to be a blind man. And he kisses his victims on the hand. The breakthrough in the case comes when Adam discovers the headless toy soldier. This episode is another attempt to grapple with psychological disturbance. It works quite well.

The Human Trap is the story of a murder among the rich and fashionable. Playboy Tobias Bennington Tennant III is dead with an icepick in him. Dress designer Walda Price claims she killed him in self-defence after he tried to maul her teenaged daughter Jessica. Adam Flint thinks the story doesn’t quite add up, and his boss Lieutenant Mike Parker doesn’t think so either, but neither woman will change her story. Jack Lord gives a great guest starring performance as Jessica’s devoted mobster father. A very good episode.

In Bullets Cost Too Much Adam Flint is in a bar when an armed robbery takes place and a man is killed. Adam thought about drawing his gun but decided that it would have put too many people at risk. Now the press is after his blood. And a young doctor has to make a choice between his brother and one of the hold-up men who was shot in the robbery. It’s a typical Naked City story, with the emphasis on the effects of crime on people’s lives rather than on the solving of the crime. And it’s an extremely good story.

Landscape with Dead Figures is another wonderfully offbeat episode. Famous dead artist Albert Blakely escapes from a mental hospital. He doesn’t know he’s famous and he doesn’t know he’s dead. But he’s worth a lot of money. In fact he was worth more dead than when he was alive. Everybody assumes he’s just a mental patient. Everyone but Adam. Adam thanks there’s something screwy about the story of the escaped mental patient who suddenly starts defying paintings. His obsession nearly gets him kicked off the force. The vital clues are in pictures done by Blakely - a doll without a face, two men in front of a pile of rocks. Wildly offbeat yes, but a fascinating story. Great stuff.

The Well-Dressed Termite starts with the accidental death of a telephone linesman. Only the guy was no telephone linesman. So what was he doing in a phoney telephone company truck and who was his partner doing with the telephone lines? And there’s a woman, who is currently divorcing her husband. He’s a rich businessman but a social nobody. Now she’s found a new man who is rich and a social somebody. But how does this relate to the dead guy tampering with telephone lines? A typically ingenious episode with a jigsaw puzzle that has to be pieced together but the cops have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like. Great stuff.

The Day It Rained Mink involves the theft of a million dollars’ worth of fur coats. It’s a clever plan but the focus of the story its on the motivations behind the crime rather the crime itself. Thwarted ambitions, greed and lust are pretty good motivations. And a million dollars is a big payoff, but easy money isn’t always the solution. Lust in particular is a dangerous motivation.  In Naked City the biggest danger to criminals is not necessarily getting caught.

The Deadly Guinea Pig is another of the countless stories about Nazis that were such an obsessive feature of American TV at this time. Unfortunately they tend to be rather predictable and this one is no exception.

The Fault in Our Stars is the story of an actor named Donny Benton Donny’s career is going nowhere and he’s broke so he turns to murder. He’s so self-absorbed that he just assumes that his career is more important than the lives of a few dumb schmucks of cab drivers. Tracking him down proves to be surprisingly difficult and finding evidence that would stand up in court is even more of a problem. Typically for this series the story takes some very dark turns, much much darker than you’d expect from network TV in 1961.

The story also offers some fascinating insights into the strange unreal world of the theatre and the even stronger psychology of actors. A bravura performance by Roddy McDowall as Donny makes this another exceptional episode.

Tombstone for a Derelict is another Nazi episode. Or is it? A homeless person is brutally murdered by four young men. Three other murders follow in quick succession. The only clues are Nazi stickers posted on the wall near two of the victims. And an odd letter to the editor of a daily newspaper, and an even odder complain to the police by a concerned citizen. It seems they are dealing with rampaging Nazis. But it’s not that simple. Nowhere near that simple. This story seems like it’s going to one of the rare misfires but it ends up making sense, in a nonsensical way. So it’s an interesting episode.

A Memory of Crying is another attempt to deal with psychological abnormality. Willard Manson is a man with no human feelings, until he marries his fifth wife Jessica. He still doesn’t know he has emotions until she dies in childbirth. He then refuses to accept her death and cracks up, but he cracks up in a dangerous way. He convinces himself he needs money to pay for the hospital and he will go to any lengths to get that money. This one is perhaps not entirely convincing but at least it’s an interesting attempt. When an episode of this series doesn’t quite work it’s usually because it’s been too ambitious and the ambition at least has to be respected. And Luther Adler’s performance almost makes it work.

A Very Cautious Boy is a hitman (played by Peter Falk of all people) who kills with his bare hands. He is a karate expert. His latest target is a lawyer who is causing problems for an elderly restaurateur and ex-racketeer. Along the way he kills an ill-tempered bouncer and that’s what initially attracts the attention of the police. Adam Flint only appears briefly in this episode so it’s left to Frank and Lieutenant Parker to solve this one. And it’s a story will some cool twists.

Economy of Death is not as obvious as you think it’s going to be. Lazslo Lubasz escaped from Hungary in 1956 and has been paying Miklos Konya to find his missing granddaughter. Then Lazslo finds that Miklos has been lying to him, Lazslo’s wife dies of grief and Lazslo blames Miklos. But then there are a number of plot twists to make things more interesting. This is one of those episodes in which we discover that evil deeds are not always committed by evil men. Sometimes they’re committed by good men. And justice is a complicated thing. A very good episode despite a hammy performance by Sam Jaffe as Lazslo.

Final Thoughts

Naked City is one of the all-time great TV cop shows, very character-driven rather than plot-driven. Must-see TV.

The Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster

The Time Tunnel is a TV tie-in novel written by Murray Leinster. Quite a few well-known very good authors ended up writing such books as their usual markets started to dry up.

TV tie-in novels sometimes had a feel that was subtly different from the series. It was not unusual for the first tie-in novel associated with a series to be written before the series actually went to air, with the author having seen only the scripts and perhaps one or two episodes before they aired. That may be the case here. The novel is copyrighted 1966 and the series was first screened in September 1966. It does however capture the feel of the series fairly closely.

The Time Tunnel was a hugely entertaining TV series produced by Irwin Allen that was a bit cleverer than it seemed to be. The big problems with time travel stories are that there is no way to deal satisfactorily with time paradoxes and there’s the danger of extreme silliness. Various science fiction authors have tried to solve the time paradox problem but it’s a problem that can’t ever really be solved in a totally satisfying way.

The Time Tunnel TV series took an approach that was as good as any and better than most. You can try to change the past but no matter how hard you try you will fail and events end up playing out exactly as they did historically. The novel develops this approach in a slightly more complex way which is rather interesting.

The subject is an ultra top secret US Government project to develop a time travel device. The level of secrecy has backfired. The chairman of a senate committee that should have been informed about the project but wasn’t has found out about it and he’s hopping mad. He thinks it’s not just a waste of money but dangerous insanity and he intends to shut it down. I have to say that the senator’s objections make a lot of sense - the idea behind the project really is reckless to the point of madness.

To forestall the cancellation of the project one of the scientists, Dr Tony Newman, decides to use himself as a guinea pig. Everyone on the project is confident they can send a man into another time period. They’re not so confident they can bring him back.

Tony and another scientist, Dr Doug Phillips, end up marooned in time. In fact they’re marooned in various times. There is no way to predict where and when they will end up, and seemingly no way for them to get back to the present day.

Tony’s urgent problem is that he’s in 1889 and he’s about to be a witness to a horrific dam collapse (the famous Johnstown Flood disaster) which historically killed thousands of people. His scientific instincts tell him he must not interfere. His human instincts tell him that he must at least try to avert the disaster. This leads to a very unexpected consequence.

The dangers are not over for Tony and Doug. Having escaped one time period they find themselves potentially in the middle of a massacre in another.

One could object that an ethical scientist with a proper sense of responsibility would not behave the way Tony behaves, but who ever heard of an ethical scientist with a proper sense of responsibility? History is littered with examples of scientists giving no thought at all to the consequences of their scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.

And Tony is human. Give what seems to be a chance to be a hero and a benefactor he succumbs to temptation, and probably any man (or woman) would succumb to such a temptation.

The challenge for the writer is that we know what is going to happen. We know that the disastrous Johnstown Flood is going to happen. Somehow the writer still has to create an atmosphere of suspense. Leinster does this pretty well. Leinster was in fact a very fine science fiction writer.

This is an enjoyable read that has most of the strengths of the TV series. The characterisation is not exactly deep but it does at least hint at a few ethical issues. Highly recommended.

Murray Leinster wrote a number of these TV tie-in novels including The Invaders, based on the excellent series of the same name. He wrote some superb short stories - I highly recommend the collection The Best of Murray Leinster.

I’ve reviewed The Time Tunnel TV series, in a two-part review. The first part is here, the second here.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. - The Blazing Affair

The Blazing Affair was the second original novel based on the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV series. The first two novels were both written by Michael Avallone.

These TV tie-in novels were sometimes written before the series in question had even begun its run and were based on the original concept of the series and perhaps the first couple of scripts. As a result they sometimes have a tone that differs slightly from that of the TV series. I suspect that might be the case here. This book and Avallone’s earlier The Birds of a Feather Affair have a more serious and much less outrageous tone than the series.

The Blazing Affair makes use of one of the most overused tropes of 1960s spy fiction and spy television - someone is trying to revive the Third Reich.

It begins with an attempted assassination in the Balkans but the action then moves to South Africa. Diamonds seem to be involved. Presumably these will be used to finance this latest attempt at world domination. A lot of western agents have disappeared in this country in recent times, suggesting not only that South Africa may be the epicentre of this latest threat to world peace but also that the people involved in this conspiracy are exceptionally ruthless and well-organised.

The finger of suspicion points towards a diamond dealer, Simon Ashley.

Crack U.N.C.L.E. agents April Dancer and Mark Slate are sent to South Africa to investigate. Unfortunately their covers are blown and things get unpleasant. Being chased by guys with machetes, that sort of thing.

As you’d expect April and Mark both get captured by the bad guys and end up in some situations that are both dangerous and creepy.

There’s some reasonable suspense. There’s quite a bit of action and a few explosions along the way.

There’s lots of gadgetry. April is a walking arsenal. Even when she’s stripped down to bra and panties you can’t be sure she’s unarmed.

All the right ingredients are here and the plot is serviceable enough but it just doesn’t quite catch fire the way it should. Perhaps the problem is that the villains needed to be a bit more colourful, and perhaps it needed a more fully thought-out plan for world domination in order to give the story a greater sense of threat and urgency.

One of the things I love about the TV series is the chemistry between Stefanie Powers as April and Noel Harrison as Mark, with lots of cheeky affectionate banter. There is some of that in the novel, but not to the same degree.

More could have been made of the South African setting, and the diamond angle.

It’s all fairly chaste, even when April is half-naked. That is of course true of the TV series as well but spicing things up just a little in the novel wouldn’t have hurt.

On the whole it’s a competent enough spy thriller and reasonably enjoyable. Worth checking out if you’re a fan of the TV series.

I’ve also reviewed several other Girl from U.N.C.L.E. original novels - Michael Avallone’s The Birds of a Feather Affair (which is quite good) and Simon Latter’s The Global Globules Affair and The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair (both of which are fun and more lighthearted and with a bit more craziness).

And I’ve reviewed the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV series.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. - The Cornish Pixie Affair

Peter Leslie’s The Cornish Pixie Affair, published in 1967, was the fifth of the original novels based on the TV spy series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (although only the first two were published in the United States).

I’m rather fond of TV tie-in novels, especially the ones that are original stories rather than novelisations of TV episodes. They often have a subtly different tone compared to the TV series. They’re often darker and more violent, and sometimes sexier. The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. novels are definitely slightly more serious than the TV series. In fact the first of the novels, Michael Avallone’s The Birds of a Feather Affair, is very dark indeed.

Another fascinating feature of TV tie-in novels is that they often make explicit things that are only implied in the series. In some cases these are things that would not have been acceptable to the TV networks. In the case of The Cornish Pixie Affair we’re explicitly told that U.N.C.L.E. is politically strictly neutral, favouring neither the western powers nor the eastern bloc. That’s implied at times in the TV show but never explicitly stated.

Peter Leslie (1922-2007) was a reasonably prolific author who wrote quite a few TV tie-in novels based on various TV series including several The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Danger Man, The Invaders and The Avengers.

The Cornish Pixie Affair starts with a murder in a circus, always a good way to start a mystery or thriller story. The murder takes place in rural Cornwall. Sheila Duncan ran a concession stand in a travelling circus. She sold souvenirs. The murder might have been the result of a complicated romantic entanglement but what worries Mark Slate is that Sheila may have been murdered because she was a secret agent. She was in fact an U.N.C.L.E. agent and she was working on a case.

Ace U.N.C.L.E. agent April Dancer is sent to Cornwall to take charge. She talks her way into a job in the circus, taking over Sheila Duncan’s concession stall. There are clues but they seem to make things less clear. Why do so many people want to buy cheap black porphyry statuettes of Cornish pixies? Such statuettes don’t appear to exist, but people keep asking for them. And why are the little souvenir lighthouses made in such an odd way?

And what could possibly be the motive for the second murder?

April decides that engaging in some flirtation with one of the suspects might pay dividends, but she finds out that harmless flirtation can get a girl into a lot of trouble. A girl can end up chained in a dank cellar.

This is a perfectly competent spy thriller. The plot is not exactly dazzling but it’s serviceable.

April and Mark behave in ways that are generally consistent with what we know about them from the TV series (which is essential if you’re going to write a TV tie-in novel) although the novel would have benefited from a bit more witty banter between them.

April gets to make use of plenty of gadgets. It’s amazing what can be done with the things women carry around in their handbags. Or at least the the things April carries around in her handbag.

It’s all fairly straightforward with very little in the way of outlandishness. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. The books lacks the silliness that marred so many of the TV episodes but it lacks the subtle touches of the outrageous that made the good episodes so enjoyable. The circus setting is used quite well.

There’s a reasonable amount of action and suspense. It picks up steam in a major way towards the end with quite a bit of mayhem and some tense race-against-time stuff.

Overall it’s a book that fans of the series should enjoy. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed three of the other Girl from U.N.C.L.E. novels - Michael Avallone’s The Birds of a Feather Affair, Simon Latter’s The Global Globules Affair (which is great fun) and The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair (also by Simon Latter).

Thriller - Late Date (1961 episode)

Late Date is episode 27 of the first season of the 1960-62 Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller TV anthology series. It first went to air in April 1961. I love all the American anthology series of that era. Thriller is uneven, but that’s part of the appeal an an anthology series - you never know whether you’re going to get a clunker or an absolute gem of an episode.

Thriller started out very much in the mould of the very popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, focusing on twisted crime stories with nasty stings in the tail. Initially audiences were a little underwhelmed by Thriller but as the series began to focus on supernatural horror audience enthusiasm started to build. There’s a noticeable and dramatic difference between the crime episodes and the supernatural horror episodes. Most fans prefer the horror stories and it’s arguable that the crime episodes are a little underrated.

Late Date is very much a crime story. It’s a suspense thriller story with a bit of a Hitchcock vibe and some definite film noir flavouring. It’s based on a Cornell Woolrich story so you expect some darkness.

It opens with a woman’s dead body on a bed, and a distraught man on the stairs. The man is Jim Weeks (Edward Platt) and the woman was his wife. His much younger brother Larry (Larry Pennell) assures him that the woman had it coming to her, and that everything will be OK. Larry has a plan to get his brother off the hook.

It’s a very elaborate plan. Maybe too elaborate for a plan that will have to be improvised. Right from the start everything that could go wrong does go wrong. In fact so many things go wrong that the story veers in the direction of black comedy, and black comedy in the Hitchcock manner. But it never quite becomes a black comedy. The emphasis remains on the suspense.

And there’s plenty of nail-biting suspense. Larry is quick-thinking and resourceful but he’s always just a millimetre ahead of disaster.

Of course there’s going to be a sting in the tail.

There’s some fascinating moral ambiguity here. We know Jim is a murderer but we see everything from Larry’s point of view and we like Larry and we admire his resourcefulness. We also admire his loyalty to his brother. We really want Larry’s scheme to work. We feel he deserves to get away with it - he’s tried so hard and he’s been through so much.

I haven’t read the original Cornell Woolrich story but Donald S. Sanford’s script feels very Woolrichian (within the limitations of what you could get away with on network television in 1961).

Herschel Daugherty directs with plenty of style and energy. Daugherty and cinematography Ray Rennahan achieve a very film noir atmosphere and a surprisingly cinematic look. Lots of shadows. This is a story that really benefits from being shot in black-and-white. There are some beautifully composed shots. This episode was made by people who cared about what they were doing.

Jody Fair is very good as Jim’s stepdaughter Helen. Edward Platt is fine. However this episode belongs to Larry Pennell and he’s excellent and very sympathetic and very human.

I love the inexorability of fate in this tale. You can see the things that are going to go wrong before they happen and that adds to the tension. As soon as you see Larry take the spare tyre out of the boot of his car (so there’ll be room for the body) you just know he’s going to get a flat tyre. The audience knows it, but Larry doesn’t know it. And there’s nothing he could do about it anyway.

Late Date is definitely worth seeing. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of other episodes of Thriller - here, here, here and here.

The Outer Limits - three season 2 episodes

I love horror/thriller/science fiction anthology TV series and The Outer Limits which aired on the American ABC network from 1963 to 1965 is one of my favourites. It certainly plays fast and loose with science but it was consistently inventive and original. It was created by Leslie Stevens.

I’m just starting to delve in the second (and final) season so I thought I’d review a couple of episodes.

Producer Joseph Stefano (who also wrote many of the scripts) had been the main guiding force but left the series after the first season. There was a slight change of emphasis in the second season, with fewer monsters.

Some of the stories were crazy but they were almost always at least interesting.

We do have to confront the special effects issue. This series has gained a reputation for the extreme cheesiness of many of the special effects. And yes, they are cheesy. Often very much so. The problem wasn’t really the technology of the time. The problem was that The Outer Limits was trying to do ambitious science fiction stories on a 1963 TV budget. It couldn’t be done. They went ahead and did it anyway. Younger viewers today may have real problems getting past the cheesy effects. You just have to accept them and concentrate on the stories.

The Invisible Enemy

The Invisible Enemy was written by Jerry Sohl and directed by Byron Haskin. It aired in October 1964. It concerns the first manned mission to Mars. It ends disastrously, with Mission Control hearing the screams of the astronauts before contact is lost.

The second mission is supposed to be better prepared. They have a super-computer at Mission Control. And the four astronauts are under strict instructions never to get out of sight of one another. They also have a bazooka that fires nuclear-tipped projectiles.

Predictably the first thing that happens is that one of them does get out of sight of the others and he is never seen again.

The audience knows from the start what’s going on. The sandy plain where they landed isn’t a plain, it’s a sand sea. And there are sand shark monsters lurking in that sea. The astronauts take a long while to figure this out. In the meantime another member of the crew vanishes.

Mission Control is really annoyed. They’re inclined to blame the spacecraft commander, Major Merritt (Adam West, yes Batman). They want the mission completed. They want the bad guys destroyed. They want to open up Mars for colonisation.

It becomes a test of survival, with a race-against-time factor.

This episode reflects ideas about Mars that would soon become untenable when unmanned space probes reached the Red Planet. The assumption here is that Mars has a breathable atmosphere. This was presumably so the actors wouldn’t have to wear helmets the whole time. The low gravity on Mars is ignored.

It has to be admitted that the sand sharks are incredibly cheesy.

The main interest of the story is the tough decisions that may have to be made by Mission Control and by Major Merritt, and the price that may have to be paid for the conquest of space. It’s not a bad story.

Wolf 359

Wolf 359 was written by Richard Landau and Seeleg Lester and directed by Laslo Benedek. It first went to air in November 1964. This one is really wild.

Jonathan Meridith heads a research project out in the desert. He and his team have created a miniature replica of a planet eight light-years away. It’s like a computer model except it’s real. The replica planet has a diameter of a few feet. Time is speeded up several millionfold on the miniature planet. Dr Meridith wants to watch the process of evolution on a distant planet take place before his very eyes in his laboratory. He has a special viewer gizmo that magnifies things a millionfold.

The problem is that something really is going on on that tiny world. Meridith has seen something very weird through that viewer. What he sees loses a bit of its impact because the special effect comes across as a bit too goofy.

The science is of course totally nonsensical and there’s lots of loopy technobabble but it has to be said that it’s a clever and original idea.

I, Robot

I, Robot was written Robert C. Dennis, based on Eando Binder’s robot stories published in the Amazing Stories pulp in the late 30s and early 40s. It was directed by Leon Benson. It first went to air in November 1964.

An eccentric scientist has built an almost-human robot. He has named it Adam. Adam appears to have the ability to think for himself. He also appears to have some capacity for emotion.

The scientist is now dead and the robot is blamed. Cynical but smart newspaper reporter Judson Ellis (Leonard Nimoy) smells a story. Trial lawyer Thurman Cutler (Howard da Silva) is coaxed out of retirement to handle the case. The robot is tried for murder. The events that led up to the scientist’s death unfold in a series of flashbacks.

There is some attempt to grapple with the problems posed by artificial intelligences. Adam appears to be capable of thinking but is he really? He appears to have emotions but are these merely simulated emotions - is he simply copying human behaviour without understanding it?

There’s a bit of speechifying at the end but mercifully it doesn’t get political.

The robot does have that classic Tin Man look but he doesn’t look any sillier than robots from big-budget movies of the time. It’s a reasonably successful episode.

Final Thoughts

These three episodes are typical of the series in combining incredibly cheesy special effects with reasonably good writing. They’re all worth a look. Wolf 359 is the best, with the coolness of its ideas.

The Twilight Zone - The After Hours

Of the many and varied horror, science fiction and mystery anthology series that were such a feature of American television in the late 50s and early 60s The Twilight Zone is probably the one with the most glowing reputation. I have always had slightly mixed feelings about this series. There are many episodes that I love unreservedly and at its best it had a unique atmosphere that was profoundly unsettling rather than overtly scary.

On the other hand it could at times be a bit sentimental, and rather preachy. It’s the episodes written by Rod Serling with which I mostly have issues. Serling was definitely prone to sentimentalism and he could be very preachy. At his worst the preachiness could be clumsy. He did write some great episodes, but he wrote quite a few that I find difficult to enjoy.

Having said all that, my all-time favourite episode was in fact written by Rod Serling - The After Hours.

This is episode 34 of the first season of The Twilight Zone. It originally went to air on June 10, 1960. It was directed by Douglas Heyes (arguably The Twilight Zone’s ace director).

It’s a tricky episode to discuss, because I really don’t want to spoil any of the twists.

It starts innocently enough. Marsha White (Anne Francis) has gone to a department store to buy a gift for her mother. She’s looking for a gold thimble. She is advised to go to the ninth floor. Which she does. That’s something that will later be disturbing and perplexing for both Marsha and the store staff.

She finds the thimble but later finds, to her intense disappointment, that it is damaged. Naturally she complains and for some reason which she cannot fathom this causes great consternation to the staff. Then she has a shock. She is advised to lie down and rest. She has a sleep and when she wakes up things start to get really strange.

Marsha finds herself in a very frightening situation and it’s the kind of situation which would lend itself to a horror plot. But there’s no actual horror here. No gore. No bloodshed. No violence. No monsters. Nothing except a gradually increasing atmosphere of strangeness and disorientation. To the extent that it is horror, it is very subtle existential horror.

This is more akin to the literary genre of weird fiction than to horror. The temptation would have been there to give the story a horror story ending but Serling cleverly resists this temptation. This is The Twilight Zone and Serling here achieves exactly the feel that he had in mind when he created the series.

One of the great strengths of this episode is that this time Serling has no real axe to grind. He’s simply trying to make us feel uneasy. And he succeeds admirably.

Douglas Heyes as usual does a fine job as director. The visuals are impressive and a bit creepy. There aren’t any special effects as such. Everything is achieved through fine directing and good production design. 

And some very special props.

Anne Francis is excellent, playing Marsha as a woman who is bewildered and disoriented rather than hysterical. The supporting cast is very good, but this episode belongs to Anne Francis. There are some lovely nuances to her performance. You don’t fully appreciate just how good her acting is until you get to the end of the story, and then you realise what her performance has been leading up to. And according to director Douglas Heyes most of the really clever touches were her own ideas. Anne Francis was a very fine actress but I don’t think she was ever better than this.

The After Hours is a great example of what is now a lost art - short-form television drama. The half-hour television episode or standalone television drama was a very distinctive form and while it has its weaknesses it had very considerable strengths as well. It required discipline, focus and economy. Information that the viewer required (information about what sort of people the characters are, what kind of place it is that forms the setting of the story) had to be conveyed with extreme economy. 

Which meant that the sets, the set dressing, the lighting, the costumes and the makeup had to be carefully thought out because most of that vital information was going to be conveyed through an immediate visual impression. There just wasn’t time for detailed explanations. 

And the actors and actresses had to give the viewer an instantaneous impression of the characters they played, with no time for them to tell their life stories.

In The After Hours Serling and Douglas Heyes give us a master-class in this lost art. There’s not a single wasted shot, or a single unnecessary line of dialogue.

The After Hours is beautifully shot, and by 1960 television standards it’s visually very very impressive.

I’ve seen The After Hours at least three times now and I think I like it even more with each viewing. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed some other Twilight Zone episodes here and also here.

The Avengers - Stay Tuned

Stay Tuned is another Tara King episode of The Avengers, and this one is a corker. It was written by Tony Williamson and directed by Don Chaffey and first aired in February 1969.

Steed is getting ready to leave for three weeks holiday. As he’s about to walk out the door Tara arrives and she’s decidedly puzzled. Steed has already had his three-week holiday. Steed assumes that she’s playing a joke on him, until she advises him to check his suitcase. It’s full of dirty laundry and souvenirs he bought on his vacation. She also shows him today’s newspaper, whereupon Steed realises he has lost three weeks of his life.

He must have been somewhere during those three weeks but he has no idea where. He doesn’t remember a thing.

He also tries to crash Tara’s car, but he doesn’t know why.

The forensics people check his car. It has been in France and Italy, and it has recently been sideswiped by another vehicle.

 

And then Steed finds himself once again getting ready to set off on that very same holiday. Losing his memory is bad enough but he seems to be condemned to keep living the same events over and over again.

To solve the problem he will have to figure out why Tara lied to him. She would never lie to him. It doesn’t make sense.

Even when we start to realise at least some of what is going there’s still plenty of suspense and weirdness. Steed of course fears that he is going mad, and it has to be admitted that the evidence tends to point that way. Tara on the other hand refuses to believe that Steed has gone mad. One way or another she’s going to find the solution to the puzzle, or at least help Steed to do so.

A nice touch is Tara’s very genuine concern for Steed, which is clearly more than just professional concern.

Mother doesn’t appear in the early part of this episode. He’s on leave, so Father has taken over. Father is of course a woman, and both Father and Father’s flat add further surreal touches. And Mother will put in an appearance later - he has an important part to play in the plot.

Both Patrick Macnee and Linda Thorson are in fine acting form. Roger Delgado provides a menacing and sinister presence. 

And it’s always a treat to see Howard Marion-Crawford. He plays Collins, an agent assigned by Father to keep an eye on Steed.

And we get a good fight scene between Linda Thorson and Kate O’Mara. Honestly, what more could you want?

The bizarre psychiatrist’s office set, the mysterious room in the house in Fitzherbert Street and the man following Steed and Steed’s totally unaccountable failure to spot this man even when he’s only a few feet away from him add further bizarre disturbing touches.

The set design is top-notch. There’s a wonderful atmosphere - there’s something very wrong and unsettling about everything but Steed just can’t put the pieces together.

Stay Tuned is yet another Tara King episode that compares more than favourably the best Emma Peel episodes. Highly recommended.

The Saint in colour, part 2

A few selected episodes from the colour era of The Saint. I slightly prefer the black-and-white episodes but there was plenty of fun to be had in the colour seasons as well.

Locate and Destroy

Locate and Destroy (scripted by John Stanton and directed by Leslie Norman) went to air in December 1966.

Locate and Destroy begins with what seems to be an attempted hold-up in an art dealer’s shop in Lima, Peru. Simon Templar naturally just happens to be on hand and foils the robbery. Except that it wasn’t a robbery. This much is obvious to the Saint. He decides that he’d like to find out what was really going on. The fact that it’s none of his business is merely an added attraction. In fact what is really going on is a bit too obvious from the start, and the story relies on too many clumsy clichéd narrow escapes.

This one is a bit disappointing. It’s not terrible, it’s just very average.

The Better Mouse Trap

The Better Mouse Trap (scripted by Leigh Vance and directed by Gordon Flemyng) screened in November 1966.

The Saint is in Cannes and of course crime has followed him there, in the shape of a series of daring jewel robberies. Naturally the police assume Simon is the thief. They always do. 

And naturally this adventure involves a woman, a Canadian. The thieves are trying to cover their tracks by framing Simon.

As often happens in Simon’s adventures the woman is somewhat ambiguous. The viewer certainly has plenty of reason to suspect that she’s mixed up in the robberies.

This is very much a stock-standard Saint episode, enlivened by a comic turn by Ronnie Barker as a bumbling French policeman. There’s the usual stock footage to convince us we’re in the south of France.

Nothing special, but it’s executed competently.

Little Girl Lost

Little Girl Lost (scripted by Leigh Vance and directed by Roy Ward Baker) went to air in December 1966.

Simon is in Ireland where he rescues a young woman from a couple of thugs. The woman claims to be Hitler’s daughter! Simon is sure she’s either mad or lying but he likes a good story and she is pretty and it all sounds like it could be an amusing adventure.

There’s a millionaire mixed up in it and a couple of crooked private detectives, Simon and the girl get chased through the countryside and there’s young love thwarted and a matter of a hundred thousand pounds. And quite a bit of fisticuffs. 

Oh, and there’s a castle and a dungeon as well.

All in all this is a delightful light-hearted romp.

Paper Chase

Paper Chase (directed by Leslie Norman and written by Harry W. Junkin and Michael Cramoy) went to air in December 1966.

A chap named Redmond from the Foreign Office has defected to East Germany taking with him a vital file. Simon gets inveigled into working temporarily for British intelligence since he can identify the defector. But it’s not as simple as that. The East German spy who was Redmond’s contact wasn’t what he seemed to be. And Redmond finds he’s been conned.

There’s also a pretty girl (naturally). She’d like to go to London with Redmond. Or with Simon. Or with anybody who’ll take her.

This story gives Roger Moore a chance to do the James Bond thing which of course he does pretty well. There’s a lot more action than usual and some decent suspense.

All in all this is a pretty good spy thriller episode.

Flight Plan

Flight Plan (directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Alfred Shaughnessy) went to air in December 1966.

Diana Gregory (Fiona Lewis) arrives in London to meet her brother Mike but a phoney nun tries to kidnap her. Luckily when a damsel is in distress you can be sure that Simon Templar will be at hand to rescue her. But then there’s another mystery - her brother, an R.A.F. pilot, is nowhere to be found.

Mike had been one of the pilots testing the new top-secret British fighter the Osprey (which appears to be the supersonic version of the Harrier that was planned at one stage) and it doesn’t take Simon long to figure out that there’s some kind of plot afoot involving that aircraft. Mike turns out to be a bit of a loose cannon, being a drunkard who passes bad cheques. Just the sort of person who get mixed up in an espionage plot.

This is a decent spy thriller episode with the added bonus of aerial adventure (although the aerial stuff is of course almost entirely stock footage). William Gaunt (from The Champions) plays Mike.

Final Thoughts

Five episodes, two of them a bit on the routine side but three of them very good.