Although The Daleks was never to materialise, the amount of time and energy that Terry Nation put into the project can be gauged by the fact that between April 1967 and October 1968 – the best part of eighteen months – not a single new script for any series on British television bore his name. It was his longest absence from the broadcast media since It’s a Fair Cop had aired back in 1961, though he did appear in person at the beginning of 1968 on the documentary programme Whicker’s World, in which he was interviewed by Alan Whicker at Lynsted Park; surrounded by Dalek props from the Amicus movies, he looked as though he were reaffirming his status as a major television writer, even if there was presently no new material on screen.
Those eighteen months, as he put aside the dashed hopes of an American show and returned to the world of British television, saw a major shift in the cultural mood. The rise of liberal and radical politics had been one of the defining features of the decade thus far, reaching a peak in the spring of 1968 as the movement against the Vietnam War hit critical levels in America amid a spate of riots, as a general strike paralysed France and as the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia seemed to offer state socialism a way forward from totalitarianism. Immediately thereafter, however, came a powerful reaction. Richard M. Nixon was elected US President, the party of Charles de Gaulle won a landslide election victory in France, and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush dissent, while the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made race relations the most controversial issue in British politics with his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. As if to emphasise the victory of conservatism, two great liberal heroes, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated.
The same year also saw the suicide of Tony Hancock. The comedian had never recovered his position after that ATV series and, alone in Australia, with his second marriage having ended as catastrophically as his first, he took an overdose of pills, washed down with vodka.
The days of Swinging London were receding fast and Nation, who had benefited from that era but whose work had never sat entirely comfortably in it, was ultimately to find fertile ground for his darker visions. For now, however, the only opportunities that presented themselves were essentially more of the same, returning him to the position he had been in before the Daleks project: successful, wealthy and writing scripts for ITC.
A new season of The Saint was in preparation – the second to be filmed in colour and the last of the Roger Moore incarnation – and Nation contributed four episodes. This time they were original stories, since the back catalogue of Leslie Charteris’s tales had by now been heavily depleted. ‘Television is a monster, like a great big garbage disposal,’ noted Charteris, ‘and it can eat up a lifetime’s output in a matter of seasons.’ It was a lesson that the music hall comedians had learned a long time back, but the stockpile was not entirely used up, and there is a suspicion that the switch to newly commissioned stories was also made in the hope of ending Charteris’s complaints about the liberties he saw being taken with his work. He was supposed to have a degree of script approval, but it didn’t always work out in the way he wished, and he tended to make his displeasure known. ‘I always saw the scripts and made my comments and criticisms, but they were not always necessarily followed,’ he recalled later. ‘I had no veto and I can’t say I was always pleased with what I saw on the screen.’
Unfortunately he was to be no happier with the new material. And perhaps he was right not to be, for there was little discernible change between the adaptations and the new stories; after more than seventy episodes, the production line was running with such efficiency that the format and the style continued smoothly through the transition. Nation’s scripts were not among his best work, though there were some good moments. In the episode ‘The Desperate Diplomat’ a British representative, Jason Douglas (John Robinson), is stationed in a newly independent country and keen to expose the abuse of international aid to Africa: ‘When independence came, I went to work for the new regime. The new leader started with good intentions. Then corruption set in. Aid from America, from Britain was used to furnish palaces, buy cars, jewels. Government officials lived in luxury while the people starved.’
Even before this, Nation had already written a couple of episodes for a new ITC series, The Champions, filmed in 1967 and bought by NBC in America soon thereafter, though it was not screened in Britain until the autumn of 1968. Developed by Dennis Spooner and produced by Monty Berman, The Champions focused on three agents working for an international organisation called Nemesis, based in Geneva; in the first episode, their plane crashes in Tibet, they are rescued by mysterious monk-like figures and, as part of their recovery, are imbued with superhuman powers of telepathy, enhanced senses and phenomenal strength. This shameless borrowing from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933) was, somewhat perversely, intended to bring a sense of believability back to the ITC genre. ‘Action dramas have reached the stage when the principal characters are achieving the impossible in their exploits, fights, cunning and unbelievable physical stamina,’ argued Spooner. ‘No one can believe that any mortal could achieve what the present day heroes manage to do and survive. But The Champions makes it all logical because the three characters have these out-of-the-ordinary powers.’ It was a neat, counter-intuitive defence of the show’s premise, but it didn’t make any more comfortable the marriage of the two traditions of secret agent and superhero. More importantly, the casting was far from impressive; the three stars were less than charismatic, and none of them made much impression on the audience.
For Nation, the heroes’ super-powers didn’t particularly suit his preferred theme: the ability of ordinary people to rise above difficult situations by exercising ingenuity and creative improvisation. But his scripts worked well enough. In ‘The Body Snatchers’ the villain has seized control of a research laboratory in North Wales that has developed cryogenic freezing; having stolen the body of a recently deceased American general, he’s hoping to bring the man back to life and thus acquire crucial defence secrets. (The Welsh setting allows for a rare sighting on 1960s television of a character speaking Welsh, as well as a brief, uncredited appearance by Talfryn Thomas, formerly of Uncle Selwyn and later to return to Nation’s work.)
Stronger than that was ‘The Fanatics’, in which several prominent politicians have been assassinated in a spate of suicide terrorist attacks. One of our heroes, Richard Barrett (William Gaunt), infiltrates the organisation responsible for the attacks, posing as a disaffected British soldier who has been selling secrets to an enemy state on the grounds that: ‘No country has a moral right to exclusive knowledge on weapons of mass destruction.’ The episode is lifted by a guest appearance from Gerald Harper as Croft, the evil mastermind behind the plan: ‘The meek will inherit the earth? Oh no, it’s the strong who’ll survive, the men of courage and ideas. The mass elects a leader, yes, but the mass is a mindless organism. It destroys true progress.’ ‘Well, that’s been the platform of every dictator,’ shrugs Barrett, under-cutting one of the most hallowed traditions of the action hero, that his enemy must always deliver a bragging speech about power. The interruption doesn’t stop Croft, of course: ‘When you’ve been with me a little longer, you’ll know the feeling of power, real power, life and death. It’s like a drug, you taste it and you want more, and you’ll kill for it. You’ll even die for it.’ It’s all good crazed stuff, though it doesn’t get us any closer to an explanation of the suicide element of the operation; it’s clear what Croft wants, but not what his self-sacrificing minions get out of the deal. Possibly there was a brainwashing story that got lost in the final cut, but it does leave on a slightly confused note.
The Champions is fondly remembered in some quarters, but at the time it failed to win over the critics. ‘The enormous advantage that Sir Lew Grade has over his rivals among the network,’ wrote Peter Black in the Daily Mail, ‘is not that he knows better than they do what the public wants. It is that he doesn’t mind.’ He added, in reference to one of Spooner’s scripts: ‘I felt that a dog could have written it if he had wanted dollars more than dog biscuits. There wasn’t a moment to stimulate even the simplest of minds. And this is peak-time television in one of the greatest cities in the world.’ The audience, at least in America, appeared to agree and, like The Baron, the series was dropped from its network slot during the screening of the one season that was made. Its success or otherwise in Britain was more difficult to judge, since it was shown at different times in different regions. This was often the case with the ITC series, but was particularly exaggerated with The Champions; Peter Black’s review was written in November 1969, when the show finally arrived in London, more than a year after it had first been screened elsewhere on the ITV network, an indication that Grade was not throwing his whole weight behind it.
Presumably, however, it was not a complete commercial failure, for Spooner and Berman immediately bounced back with two new series that were produced in tandem in order to save money: Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Nation wrote two of the first three episodes to be filmed of the former and was scheduled to write more before other opportunities presented themselves.
If The Champions suffered from a lack of magnetism among its stars, Department S perhaps veered too far in the other direction. Two of the characters, Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nicols), were solid, unexceptional figures who could have come from any thriller series of the era, but they were entirely overshadowed by the third member of the trio, Jason King, as played by Peter Wyngarde. The original idea was that the team would be completed by a retired Oxford don named Robert Cullingford, who was also a writer of detective stories and would thus view the cases from unexpected angles. Kenneth More’s name was touted for the role, but instead Berman choose Wyngarde, and the nature of the series changed entirely.
One of the great television actors of the period, Wyngarde had already appeared in various series to which Nation had contributed – including The Baron, The Saint and The Champions – though never in one of his scripts. Wyngarde rejected the proposed character of Cullingford, keeping only the concept of being a writer, though now it was of paperback thrillers centring on an agent named Mark Caine. The character himself was renamed Jason King, and Wyngarde created an enduring image of the 1960s playboy bachelor taken to a superbly self-parodying extreme. His camp excesses, complete with elegantly drooping moustache, coiffured hair and exquisite velvet suits and kaftans, were balanced by a Lothario image that made him an irresistible, unattainable fantasy figure for millions of female viewers. He couldn’t pass a mirror without admiring his own vulpine good looks, his catchphrase was a drawled ‘Fancy!’ and his voice sounded like it had been aged in a cask of Amontillado. So self-assured was Wyngarde’s performance that, most unusually for an action hero, he seldom won a fight – and it didn’t matter.
In the scripts that Nation wrote for Department S, he approached the character by explicitly evoking the shade of Oscar Wilde. ‘Do you have anything to declare, Mr King?’ asks Stewart, and Jason replies, ‘Nothing, except my genius.’ On another occasion, Annabelle says, ‘We still have to find the actual room,’ and Jason murmurs, ‘We will, Oscar, we will.’ Nation’s own witticisms kept up the same faux-decadent atmosphere. As Jason comes round from being knocked unconscious yet again by a villain, and complains of a headache, Annabelle suggests he take a couple of aspirin. He shudders: ‘I couldn’t bear the noise I’d make swallowing them.’ And, inspired by King’s habit of drawing the cuffs of his frilly shirts back over his jacket sleeves, Nation couldn’t resist revisiting a gag from The Saint; Jason explains that the hero of his thrillers carries a knife up his sleeve, but that’s just for fiction: ‘I never carry a weapon, let alone a knife. It would fray my cuffs.’ Other details are equally irresistible; of all the attempts to parody the girls in the James Bond films, none have bettered the heroine of the Mark Caine novel Epilogue to Hong Kong, the perfectly named Hussy Abundant. The only jarring note comes in a scene in ‘A Cellar Full of Silence’, which sees King, dressed entirely in black leather, dismounting from a motorbike and saying, ‘I haven’t been on a bike since I was a teenage rocker.’ The idea that Jason King might have been a rocker rather than a mod is hard to take, though his subsequent reference to ‘leather queens’ may shed further light on the question.
The plots of the two episodes that Nation wrote are less relevant than details such as these, but then that was true of the entire programme; the whole of Department S was a magnificent triumph of style over content. The concept for the show was inspired by the mystery that had been solved by Nation in ‘The Chase’, on which Spooner had been script editor. ‘If the Marie Celeste were to happen today, no one knows who would investigate it,’ Spooner reasoned. ‘Department S always started like that. The “hook” was always the Marie Celeste sort of situation – a totally, absolutely inexplicable mystery.’ Unfortunately, thanks to the structure, the ensuing fifty minutes tended to be something of a let-down, a rational solution to an intriguing conundrum, and viewers, quite understandably, found themselves less interested in the narrative than in the figure of Jason King. He was so obviously in a different league to his colleagues that a second season of the show never materialised; it was replaced by a new programme, Jason King, in which Wyngarde took centre stage. And what had been a superb role in the context of a team proved to be a bit too baroque and flowery to carry an entire show. By that stage, however, Nation had already flown the ITC nest, having been recruited to the staff of the biggest of all the secret agent series.
The Avengers, initiated by Sydney Newman back when he was responsible for drama at ABC, had grown out of an earlier Newman commission, Police Surgeon (1960) starring Ian Hendry. When that failed to get the ratings figures for which he’d hoped, Newman suggested a new series for Hendry to be titled The Avengers, ‘an action adventure-thriller with a sense of humour’, though, according to Brian Clemens, beyond the title he had few ideas of what the show might be: ‘He came in and said, “I want to do a series called The Avengers. I don’t know what it means, but it’s a hell of a good title.” ’ The star was teamed with Patrick Macnee, playing a character named John Steed, but it was not until Hendry himself departed, to be replaced by a young female companion for the cheerful but crusty-looking Steed, that the series began to acquire its distinctive identity. First with Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman, 1962–4) and then with Emma Peel (Diana Rigg, 1965–8), The Avengers became not merely a national but an international institution, purveying an increasingly kitsch concept of England in which all the conventions of the spy thriller were gleefully ridiculed, and in which elements from science fiction and comic book traditions were equally welcome. Roger Moore could undercut a plotline in The Saint with a single sardonically raised eyebrow, but The Avengers at its peak – which for most critics meant the Diana Rigg seasons – was so fixated on fun that the whole show seemed determined to subvert genre expectations. There was plenty of action but it was the stuff of pure fantasy.
The prime shapers of the show by this stage were Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens, but when Rigg decided to leave the series in 1967, the company decided to make a clean break in the hope of returning to a style that at least approached reality. Fennell and Clemens were fired, and replaced by John Bryce, who had been script editor and then producer in the earlier years. He recruited a Canadian actress, Linda Thorson, to be Steed’s new partner, Tara King, and began to film the next season. After just three episodes, however, the results were deemed to be unacceptable and a call went out to Fennell and Clemens, the latter of whom was on holiday, touring England and Wales: ‘Every time I got to another hotel there was a message saying: Could you phone? And eventually, after about two-and-a-halfweeks, I did phone, and they said: Could you come back?’ The two men returned to find that of the three shows already filmed, only one met with their approval, ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’. And since that was written by Terry Nation, he was given the job as script editor. He was expecting at the time to be writing further episodes of Department S, but the chance of joining the production team on a show that had been a regular fixture in the television top ten for seven years was clearly too good a chance to miss.
‘It got wilder,’ was Nation’s memory of that final season of The Avengers. ‘It probably got too wild by the time we finished. There was no other market for that sort of thing. The acid test for our show was: what is the story? Now turn it on its head! Instead of seeing somebody shot, we would see the chalked outline of the body. Then somebody would walk in, get shot and fall into the chalked outline. Always turn it on its head, always make it more and more ridiculous – but then justify it.’
Despite his background in writing comedy, this kind of spoof was not the kind of thing for which Nation was primarily known, though there had been moments to suggest it could easily become part of his repertoire. ‘The episode Epitaph for a Hero’ in The Baron, for example, had opened in a cemetery after a funeral, as a woman arrives, spits in the open grave and leaves. She is followed by two men, one of whom – another of Nation’s loquacious Welshmen, played here by Artro Morris – delivers an effusive eulogy: ‘In this black hour of fond remembrance, when the great sorrow, dark as a raven’s wing, swoops into the memory and clouds the eyes with tears as cold as the angel of death himself, we call back in gentle memories the man who was so dear. Kind, decent, honest and true friend that he was, a man of infinite goodness, his forgiveness for those he loved was endless.’ During the latter part of this speech, the barely suppressed giggles of the two men have built into uncontrollable laughter, and they depart in a state of near-hysteria, as the title sequence brings a moment of pause. The story that follows is a routine bank heist, but there remains an element of strangeness. Much of the action takes place in a fairground House of Horrors that’s closed for renovation, and one scene is set in a steam bath, where Mannering encounters a man complaining that it’s not hot enough: ‘We must have more heat, so we can get used to the flames of eternal damnation. It should be hotter, much hotter.’ None of which would have been out of place in an episode of The Avengers.
In his scripts for the show, Nation clearly enjoyed the freedom to laugh. ‘Legacy of Death’ bounced ideas off John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, with Stratford Johns giving a magnificent performance in the Sydney Greenstreet role (his character is named Sidney Street, in case we didn’t spot the reference) as a man on the trail of ‘a pearl of great price, a monstrous pearl, black as night and spawned up by some gigantic mollusc before time began, the largest, the most priceless pearl on earth’. (This is the pearl that ends up being dissolved in wine, in contravention of the words of Leslie Charteris.) The over-writing is entirely characteristic of a script in which Nation displays a glorious lack of restraint. ‘We’re near it now,’ Sidney pants as his delirious, fevered dreams appear to be reaching fruition. ‘I feel it, I smell it, all around like the perfume from some rare and exotic blossom comes the sweet smell of success. Victory is near, we have but to reach out and grasp, to take that delicate blossom in our hands and crush its petals to inhale the perfume of triumph.’ Not even Steed is immune; when Tara, who is driving the two of them, asks where they’re going, he replies: ‘Where indeed? Philosophers have asked that question for a thousand years. Quo vadis? Whither goest thou? Man’s eternal search for his destiny. You may well ask where are we going.’ So she asks again: ‘Where are we going?’ And he answers: ‘Turn left, next lights.’
In ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ – a shaggy dog tale in which Steed and Tara follow a talking attaché case around London – they encounter a precocious schoolgirl (played by Elisabeth Robillard) who possesses the secret key that they’re pursuing, and who happily declares herself open to bribery. ‘Twenty-five pounds invested in blue chip equities will show a high yield by the time I’m twenty-one,’ she explains. Steed is unimpressed and reminds her that money isn’t everything, to which she replies in wide-eyed innocence: ‘Oh Mr Steed, don’t shatter a little girl’s illusions.’ The episode ‘Thingumajig’ was less successful, concerning a mad scientist who has developed metal boxes that feed off electricity, move around of their own free will and emit a high-voltage charge that kills. The concept was fine – and Iain Cuthbertson as the scientist gave it his best shot – but the story foundered on the fact that small featureless boxes are neither frightening nor entertaining as a visual image. There was, however, room for a restatement of an argument from The Caves of Steel as Steed explains how vulnerable modern life is in the face of a threat to the electricity supply: ‘Take a city. London, for instance. Its appetite for electricity is insatiable. It gulps up millions of kilowatts and converts them into heat and power and light.’ It was a theme to which Nation was to return.
Other favourite concerns turn up in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, where Steed and Tara investigate an institution called the Alpha Academy, run on strict military lines – one might almost say as a hive – by Brigadier Brett (William Lucas), who is busily recruiting a private army of youthful soldiers. When their training is complete, he freezes them in cryogenic suspension, so that when Earth begins to explore and settle on other planets, he will have his troops ready to conquer the space colonies. It’s a ludicrous proposition, of course, but Nation doesn’t simply stay with the caricature of science fiction, instead expanding into a parody of his own action tales. The Academy is surrounded by a protective zone full of snares and booby-traps, snakes and scorpions, and when Tara successfully lasts for an hour outside, the Brigadier is impressed. ‘I congratulate you on your powers of survival,’ he tells her, and she shrugs: ‘They’re instinctive.’ There is also a tunnel beneath the Academy, whose function is explained by one of the cadets: ‘The Brigadier says everybody’s got a secret fear. In that tunnel you come face-to-face with that fear.’ Inevitably Tara and Steed end up in this fully equipped Room 101, where they find rats, spiders and a concrete tube designed to engender claustrophobia, as well as snares, acid pools and other hazards.
How much influence Nation had over the last season of The Avengers, beyond the six scripts with which he is credited, is uncertain. The show had become very much Clemens’s baby and, although he was now officially the producer, he appears to have retained many of the script editor’s responsibilities. He commissioned Nation to write ‘Noon Doomsday’, a spoof of the movie High Noon, but was disappointed by the result: ‘He turned in a script that was really inferior. I totally rewrote it. Although Terry’s got the sole credit, there’s not really a word of his in any of that episode. He hadn’t been rewritten like that in a long time, and it was a shock to his system. And I must say that thereafter he wrote several Avengers episodes and I never had to rewrite them. I forced him to get off his arse really, and do it.’ No one questioned Nation’s ability to write well when he tried, but even he seemed to have doubts about whether he was capable of stepping into a more supervisory role. ‘I am not a good script editor,’ he admitted, many years later. ‘If somebody sends me a script, it could be absolutely perfect, but it wouldn’t be my way of doing it, and I would tend to rewrite until it reflected my way of thinking, which is not a good thing to do.’ Clemens’s take was more direct: ‘He wasn’t suited to what I call executive decisions.’
In any event, this final season of the show was, and remains, much less celebrated than its immediate predecessors. The troubled start to the series had left Fennell and Clemens with Linda Thorson already cast as the replacement for Diana Rigg, a decision on which Clemens was lukewarm at best: ‘I wouldn’t have cast her. She developed into a good actress, but she was too young and she was Canadian. And Canadians notoriously don’t have a British sense of humour.’ In an attempt to find another companion figure (because ‘Steed’s got to strike sparks off someone’), he revealed for the first time their superior. Known only as Mother and played by Patrick Newell, he was a wheelchair-bound man who swung around his room by means of straps hanging from the ceiling, an image Clemens borrowed from Michael Powell’s 1961 film The Queen’s Guard. The British critics were divided both by Tara King and by Mother, though mostly the goodwill towards the show carried it through. ‘The programme – arguably the best series produced by British television – is as good as ever,’ was the verdict of the once and future Conservative MP, Julian Critchley, in a review in The Times. Dennis Spooner remembered that the imminent end of the show liberated the writers: ‘We went really weird, because we knew there wasn’t going to be any more.’ And Clemens himself thought that the scripts for the final season were ‘the best of all. Much more variety, ingenuity, originality.’ It was a view shared in retrospect by Patrick Macnee, though he hadn’t been enthusiastic at the time: ‘They rate as some of the very best episodes that were ever made.’
In America, however, where the show had been a big hit, and had even been nominated for an Emmy in the last two seasons, the ratings fell off sharply – partly, it is argued, because it was scheduled up against Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, then at the peak of its popularity. When The Avengers was cancelled by the American ABC network in 1969, it was clear that the show wasn’t going to be recommissioned, and the last episode, ‘Bizarre’, ended with Steed and Tara being blasted into space, as Mother turned to the camera to reassure us: ‘They’ll be back, you can depend on it.’
Lew Grade’s ITC was also having difficulties in America, and had been struggling to find a winning formula for some time. A string of series, including Man in a Suitcase (1967) and Strange Report (1968), as well as The Champions and Department S, had failed to make it to a second season and – despite strong overseas sales elsewhere – had met with only moderate success in the crucial American market. Meanwhile, the company’s two guaranteed winners had by now finished production: Danger Man when Patrick McGoohan quit in order to develop the more experimental series The Prisoner (1967), and The Saint when Roger Moore finally decided in 1968 that the show had run its course. What was needed, evidently, was one unmistakably big, sure-fire hit, and in 1970 Robert S. Baker began discussions with Grade about a new series to be titled The Friendly Persuaders and built around the partnership of an English aristocrat and a self-made American businessman. Both would be wealthy playboys, sufficiently bored with their lives of leisure that they would be prepared to team up for the usual crime-busting adventures.
Roger Moore was always intended to play the English half of the pairing and, despite his reluctance, Grade soon had him on board, airily dismissing the actor’s move into films (with the 1970 classic The Man Who Haunted Himself), and insisting that the earning of dollars was a patriotic duty. ‘The country needs the money,’ argued the newly knighted Sir Lew. ‘Think of your Queen.’ A more important and difficult consideration was the casting of the American actor who would join him. ITC had used American leads in series before, but they had hardly been A-list stars: Steve Forrest in The Baron, Stuart Damon in The Champions, Richard Bradford in Man in a Suitcase. This time, there was to be no such skimping. Grade had authorised a budget of £100,000 per episode, making the series the most expensive drama in British television history, and he needed a major figure to sell it around the world. After some consideration of Rock Hudson and Glenn Ford, it was finally agreed that the ideal candidate was Tony Curtis, still a big name internationally, even if his screen work had, with the notable exception of The Boston Strangler (1968), been undistinguished in recent years. Robert S. Baker, Roger Moore and Terry Nation – the latter already recruited to be script editor and associate producer of the series – were sent to Hollywood to persuade him to do the show.
Moore’s main memory of that encounter was the British trio’s awareness that Curtis was ‘the head of the anti-smoking lobby in America’ at a time when they all smoked. Eventually, some way into the meeting at Curtis’s house, Moore plucked up the courage to ask if it was all right to light up. An ostentatious search for an ashtray ensued, while their host used the time to pass round anti-smoking propaganda – pictures of diseased lungs and the like – to his guests. The meeting was a success, but the moral high ground so carefully established by the American star looked a little less secure when Curtis subsequently flew into Heathrow to start filming and was promptly arrested for possession of cannabis. Had he not passed a handful of pills to production executive Johnny Goodman just before going through Customs, he might have faced even more negative publicity and a harsher penalty than the small fine he actually received.
The pairing was an unqualified triumph, and the opening titles of what had now become known as The Persuaders! set the scene perfectly. Over the moody drama of one of John Barry’s best theme tunes, a split screen shows us snapshots illustrating the contrasting life stories of the two characters. Danny Wilde (Curtis) emerges from a Bronx tenement to become a major player on Wall Street, while Lord Brett Sinclair (Moore) is seen as the product of Harrow, Oxford and the Grenadier Guards, with a particular emphasis on his sporting prowess: rowing, rugby, motor racing, even a winning ride at Ascot, however implausible that might be for a man of Moore’s stature. The contrast between the products of these varying back-grounds was spelt out in the opening to Chain of Events’, one of the stories scripted by Nation. Danny wakes up by a campfire in a field; wearing western gear, complete with fringed buckskin jacket and wide-brimmed hat, he’s on a back-to-nature holiday. He starts fixing his breakfast until, two minutes into this pastoral idyll, the camera pans back to show Brett waking up. He’s at the other end of the same field, in a tent equipped with every luxury from television to electric blankets, from a hot shower to a deep freeze; there’s even a chandelier. ‘I must admit I rather like roughing it,’ he says languidly, ‘but I miss the morning papers.’
Curtis brought to his character a couple of tics – ‘I always try to get in close to people when I talk to them and I always keep my gloves on no matter what I’m doing’ – which added to his sense of fussy restlessness, bouncing in an unpredictable orbit around the calm understatement of Moore. From the outset, there was a sense of male bonding that veered towards sexual chemistry, as the two characters bickered and bantered with each other like a divorced couple in a 1940s screwball comedy. They walk arm-in-arm down the street, they worry about breaking a nail and ruining their manicures, and they are intensely loyal and devoted to each other. They weren’t as camp as Jason King, but at times it was a near-run thing. When Danny is praised for renovating a run-down cottage all on his own, he makes no comment on the plastering and structural work he’s done, focusing instead on the soft furnishings: ‘I picked out every little fabric you see in the place.’ They were not, however, supposed to be seen as homosexual, for they are in perpetual friendly rivalry over women, most famously over Joan Collins, playing a character named Sidonie, in the episode ‘Five Miles to Midnight’. Their competition however tends to result in stalemate; that particular story ends with Sidonie driving off, leaving the two men stranded in the Swiss countryside, thirty miles from the nearest town.
In the same episode, Nation gave the pair the opportunity to outline their motivations for allowing themselves to be recruited by a retired judge (Laurence Naismith) as freelance righters of wrongs, bringing justice to bear where the legal system has failed. ‘I need the money,’ says Danny, in echo of the self-deprecating claims of Steve Mannering in The Baron. ‘I thought you did things for strong, noble reasons like justice and integrity and all that sort of thing,’ pouts Sidonie, and Brett gives the game away: ‘That is what the Judge likes to think, but I’ll let you into a little secret: quite frankly, I’m having the time of my life.’
So strong are the central performances, and so focused is our attention on them, that the stories mostly fade into insignificance. Which was perhaps just as well, for they were not overburdened with originality. Most of the plots could happily have found a home in other ITC shows, though they did benefit here from the higher budget – which allowed for location shooting, some of it abroad – and from some strong guest stars. Of Nation’s scripts, ‘A Home of One’s Own’ (guests: Hannah Gordon, Talfryn Thomas) was effectively a modern western, with a man defending his homestead from villains who, as in ‘The Man Outside’ in The Baron, are engaged in smuggling forged banknotes. The aforementioned ‘Chain of Events’ (Peter Vaughan, George Baker) was a simple chase through the woods, with Danny being pursued by several different interest groups. And ‘Someone Waiting’ (Donald Pickering, Sam Kydd) saw the pre-announcement of Brett’s death, much as had happened to the Saint in Nation’s story ‘The Time to Die’. This latter plot went back still further to Edgar Wallace’s 1905 novel The Four Just Men, as did the show’s central premise of wealthy men acting as a supra-legal force for justice. The most unlikely borrowing, though, which was surely initiated by Nation, was Walter Black’s script for ‘The Morning After’, in which Brett wakes up with a thundering hangover to find that he’s now married but has no memory of how it happened, a revival in somewhat different circumstances of the Hancock episode ‘The Night Out’.
Influences were also discernible from The Avengers – the sped-up fight sequence in ‘Someone Waiting’ with silent movie accompaniment – and from The Saint: when Danny is captured in ‘A Home of One’s Own’ and has his hands tied behind his back, he tries to burn the rope on the flame of an oil lamp, but only succeeds in burning himself. ‘Ow! Always works in the movies,’ he complains. And, as in The Baron, there is the occasional moment that is darker than one expects. ‘Someone Like Me’ appears to be a rerun of ‘Masquerade’ in The Baron, with someone creating a double of Brett Sinclair, until it turns out that there’s no double at all, just a deeply brainwashed Brett. Unaware of what he’s doing, he gets into a genuinely nasty fight with Danny on a building site, attacking his partner with a shovel and displaying not a hint of the insouciant charm that Moore brings to the rest of his performance.
The stand-out episode is ‘A Death in the Family’, in which a murderer in a clown mask is killing off members of Brett’s family, heirs to the title of the Duke of Caith, in an attempt to get their hands on the dukedom. Moore plays three other members of the family in an explicit tribute to Alec Guinness in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), whose plot this borrows. Unlike that movie, the attention here is on the family rather than the killer, leading one academic study of the action genre to point out that ‘what was originally a subversive narrative about usurping the existing social structure becomes a conservative narrative about preserving that social structure’. It is, however, just about possible to watch the programme without such subtexts entirely overwhelming one’s pleasure at the sight of Moore in drag, particularly when he’s joined by Curtis as his Aunt Sophie – the first time he’d dragged up on screen since the film Some Like It Hot (1959). As in the very best episodes of The Avengers, each of the murders is tailored to the eccentricities of the character. A crusty old general is killed by an exploding toy tank, a retired admiral is found floating in the lake, rock musician Onslow (Christopher Sandford) is electrocuted by his guitar, Roland (Denholm Elliott), a collector of rare weapons, dies from a poison dart, and the alcoholic Lance (Willie Rushton) drowns in a vat of his own wine. (‘I said that wine needed a little more body,’ reflects Danny.) There’s also a characteristic Nation touch when Danny finds himself locked in the Sinclair family crypt and pours gunpowder from a shotgun cartridge into the lock to blow it, saying he saw someone do the same trick in the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
It all looked like tremendous fun on the screen, tongue-in-cheek adventures with a central relationship that evoked some of the mood of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the Road to … films. Robert S. Baker, said Moore, ‘had always wanted to make a buddy movie, and this was his chance’. Nation’s contribution to this atmosphere was valued by others on the production team. ‘It was a great comfort to know that Terry wasn’t a temperamental type,’ remembered Johnny Goodman. He wouldn’t throw a paddy, he wouldn’t suddenly go into a fit about something. Terry would simply get on with the job, and that’s what made him such an attractive personality.’
But in private at least, Nation was feeling the pressure. He had a more active role in the production than on any previous series, and this time he didn’t have an old friend to share the burden in the way that Dennis Spooner had on The Baron or Brian Clemens on The Avengers. ‘It would drive me bananas,’ he recalled. ‘Like an actor in a long run. Actors find a way to handle it, but I didn’t find a way to handle this – week after week trying to find new things for the same characters to do. It was tough. After a few months, I’d come home on a Friday night and say: “I’m not going back in, I’m going to quit, I can’t take it anymore, it’s driving me crazy.” And of course on Monday morning, I’d go back in, because that’s what you do.’ Risking the wrath of Tony Curtis, he continued to smoke heavily. ‘Making any long running TV series has its pressures, as the turnaround of episodes is always very tight,’ observed Moore. ‘Terry smoked to relieve the pressure, and I rarely saw him without a cigarette.’
‘The situation wasn’t made any easier by Curtis’s habit of making changes to his script as he went along, and turning what was a twelve-month schedule into a fifteen-month one’, in Roger Moore’s words. The American star came from a very different culture of filming and seemed to make little attempt to adjust to the reduced circumstances of British television. ‘He was,’ remembered Nation, choosing his words carefully, ‘demanding. He was an American movie star, and we had not had that experience before. What he could ask for, and did ask for, was stuff like: “I need a sauna.” So a sauna cabin had to be built in the room next to his dressing room. All the kind of Hollywood trimmings you’d expect.’ Others in the production team felt much the same. ‘Tony on the screen could be charming, elegant, whatever was required of him,’ said Johnny Goodman. ‘But in real life, he was a difficult man to handle, and I can’t say I found the relationship particularly rewarding.’ Malcolm Christopher, the production manager, was more diplomatic in his appraisal of the two stars: ‘Roger was a really generous, warm, kind-hearted guy. And Tony was Tony.’
None of those tensions appeared on screen, but even so the series was slammed by the critics. ‘Curtis reached new heights of mediocrity’, commented Morton Moss in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. ‘Mostly it is lousy,’ wrote Stanley Reynolds in The Times. ‘Awful’, agreed John Weightman in the Observer, while his colleague on that paper, the play-wright John Mortimer, was very haughty indeed: ‘Although there is not a nude in sight, they made me understand at last what Mr Muggeridge means by the “decline of standards in television”. The Persuaders! must make Edgar Wallace turn in his grave.’ It was left to the more perceptive Nancy Banks-Smith to admit the attraction of the show: ‘Tooth rot perhaps but sweet temptation.’ She was presumably closer to the audience’s feelings, for the show was a big hit; all twenty-four of the episodes reached the top twenty in Britain, and it peaked at number one. It also sold extensively around the world, proving particularly – and enduringly – popular in Europe. At the end of 1971 Lew Grade announced that ATV’s overseas sales would exceed £17 million, the highest they had ever been, and The Persuaders! was listed as the key series, alongside one-offshows such as a Burt Bacharach special and Robinson Crusoe on Ice.
And yet, with all the success it enjoyed, The Persuaders! again failed to make an impact in America. Screened by ABC, it didn’t even finish its run before being pulled from the schedules. Several reasons were proffered for its failure, including the fact that it was up against the established Mission: Impossible. Curtis argued in his autobiography that ‘It was more tongue-in-cheek and less violent than American audiences were used to.’ In the immediate aftermath, he had complained too that there weren’t enough American writers on the show and that consequently he ended up with lines that didn’t ring true: ‘I had to say: “Give me the gat, I am a gangster.” No American gangster says that.’ Perhaps not, but for British writers of Nation’s vintage there was a clear precedent; Lefty, the American gangster played by Jack Train in Tommy Handley’s ITMA, used precisely that language, his first ever line being: ‘Get out your gat and shoot up the joint.’
But there was another factor at work here as well. America was becoming less receptive to imported culture, whether from Britain or elsewhere. This was to become particularly acute in the mid 1970s following the triple whammy of recession, defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal; the loss of faith in core American institutions – big business, the military, the presidency – provoked a marked cultural turn inwards. The early signs of that process, however, were already visible early in the decade, evident, for example, in the way that the glam rock of David Bowie, T. Rex and Roxy Music became the first British rock and roll phenomenon since the Beatles not to make inroads in the States. On television there was a more formal expression of the same isolationist tendency; the American Federal Communications Commission ruled that from October 1971 the slot from 7.30 to 8 p.m. had to be occupied by home-made programmes. ‘Multiplied by three networks over the year,’ calculated the Guardian, ‘this means that British television is to be deprived of potentially some 546 hours of American screen time in a slot frequently inhabited by British programmes.’
One solution was that pioneered by Beryl Vertue at Associated London Scripts: selling to America not the original productions but simply the show formats. Thus in 1971 Alf Garnett’s Wapping in Till Death Us Do Part became the Queens district of New York City in All in the Family on CBS, and the following year the Shepherd’s Bush of Steptoe and Son became Watts, Los Angeles in Sanford and Son on NBC. Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson all benefited as the creators of those programmes, but more generally it seemed that the American people’s infatuation with British popular culture, which had in the 1960s been so crucial to Britain’s economy and to its sense of identity, was definitely on the wane. As the political climate became harsher, the demand for imported fantasy diminished.
On a personal level, Terry Nation’s timing was beginning to look a little unlucky. He had been script editor for The Baron, one of the less successful ITC series, he had helped oversee the last ever season of The Avengers, and now the show on which he had his biggest production role ended after just one series. For in the absence of American sales, The Persuaders! was effectively doomed even before Roger Moore went off to take the role of James Bond in the movies. Lew Grade did think about commissioning a second season, with Noel Harrison replacing Moore, but Robert S. Baker talked him out of it: ‘I said, “Why don’t we quit while we’re ahead? We’ve made a very good show, that’s it, let’s stop it now.” And Lew said, “I guess you’re right.” And that’s why we never made any more Persuaders.’
It was the end of the programme and the end of the era of the big ITC action adventure series. If a show as good as The Persuaders!, with all the money that had been thrown at it, and with two major stars in the lead roles, couldn’t cut the mustard, then there was little hope for anyone else. There were to be no more Persuaders, but also no more Saints, Barons, Champions, Jason Kings or Men in Suitcases.