I remember watching this programme with my mother in 1963. It was shown on BBC Television on a Thursday evening at 8:25, after the TV soap opera, "Compact" and the popular comedy show, "Steptoe and Son".
It is one of the few television shows that I do remember watching as a child. It starred Lloyd Bridges as Lieutenant Wallace Brown, who was incarcerated as a Prisoner of War in Communist China, during the conflict with North Korea in the early 1950s.
In places, the show was narrated, and was broadcasted on the BBC for a period of 50 minutes.
The show opened with Lieutenant Wallace Brown being shot down over enemy territory and being caught by franticly public-spirited peasant workers in a Korean farming area. I remember the scene shifting to Lieutenant Wallace Brown's prison cell, where he was taken out and interrogated at various intervals.
The interrogation scenes were not particularly harrowing. If the show been produced now, some of the scenes would probably have been more horrific and realistic. The programme was broadcasted quite early in the evening - before the watershed. There were no torture scenes to speak of - it was more mental torture, rather than physical.
Wallace Browns lonely scenes inside his prison cell seemed to reflect a gentle technique in how to mentally survive such an ordeal - he was given no pencils or paper to amuse himself with. To stop his mind from focussing on the worse things that could possibly happen to him, he was able to affix his imagination to putting together a blue print of a house that he was planning to build, before he was sent to Korea.
Special effects technicians were, cleverly for the time, able to show the image of what he was thinking - and the way he was building his house - as if it was appearing of the cell wall. There were also flash back scenes to where he was at home in America, awe inspiring his wife and telling her where the house was going to go.
I cannot quite remember how the show ended. It was obvious that he was eventually released. If this was not the case, he would not have been able to write a book about his ordeal, nor assist in its adaption for television.
The show would have been a shortened adaption from Captain Wallace Browns book: "The Endless Hours: My two and a half years as a prisoner of the Chinese Communists - published in 1961.
This is one of the very earliest unique tv shows that I can remember watching as a child and I do hope it is of some help to anyone interested.
