When the first ITV franchises were handed out in the mid 1950s, while Terry Nation was still struggling to establish himself as a writer of radio comedy, one of the big winners was ATV, which won the right to broadcast to London at weekends and the Midlands during the week. Fronted by Lew Grade, the theatre impresario and – as he never failed to remind people – the former Charleston Champion of the World, ATV became over the next decade the most powerful and profitable of the independent companies, pioneering practices that would become standard in the British industry. It was also to provide gainful employment for Nation through much of the 1960s and into the 1970s.
At this stage a requirement was placed on the new channel that fourteen per cent of its broadcasting should be home-grown programmes, and Grade responded by commissioning – via his company ITC (Incorporated Television Company) – material from independent production companies to fill the quota. He struck gold immediately with The Adventures of Robin Hood, made by Sapphire Films and first broadcast in 1955, which proved so successful that it was rapidly followed by a slew of other swashbuckling series set in a fictionalised family-friendly history, including The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1956), The Count of Monte Cristo (1956) and Ivanhoe (1958). Even more influential than its subject matter, however, were the commercial opportunities that Robin Hood opened up. Grade sold the show to the CBS network in America, thereby providing a blueprint that ATV was to spend much of the next two decades striving to emulate with other productions. So fixated on American sales were these shows that Sir Lancelot was even made in colour, a full ten years before the first experiments in colour broadcasting were made in Britain.
Much of this enterprise was dominated by the charismatic figure of Grade himself. Born in the southern Ukraine in 1906 as Lev Winogradsky, he was just five years old when his family fled the anti-Jewish pogroms and arrived in Stepney in London’s East End. He and his younger brothers, Boris and Laszlo (later known as Bernard Delfont and Leslie Grade respectively), found an escape from the poverty of their childhood in the world of show business. ‘If you didn’t want to starve, you earned money,’ remembered Bernard. ‘It all bred a desire to achieve something better. That feeling came as naturally as breathing.’ All three brothers were to become hugely powerful players in British entertainment, but it was Lew who really captured the popular imagination. A natural showman who never displayed less than absolute faith in whatever he did, he revelled in the public role that came with his reincarnation as a television mogul, even though he faced considerable hostility from the outset. ‘Is this the man you want to choose the programmes for your children?’ asked the Daily Express, with just a whiff of anti-semitism, over a picture of Grade looking the very embodiment of the Jewish plutocrat, complete with his trademark eight-inch cigar.
Grade displayed a personal, paternal concern for his shows, though he had little interest in the mechanics of making programmes; Roger Moore remembered him paying just one visit to the set of The Saint throughout its seven-year run. His preference was rather for the wheeling and dealing involved in selling the work to other companies in the ITV network and, preferably, abroad, priding himself on his buccaneering salesmanship. He boasted in 1966, for example, that all three American networks were interested in a new series, to be titled The Champions, which had not even been cast, let alone filmed: ‘We have two scripts so far,’ he explained to the press, revelling in his ability to make bricks without straw. His other great boast was that he never broke his word, so that – in a reversal of Samuel Goldwyn’s famous formulation – a verbal contract was worth more than the paper it was written on. He was in many ways the perfect television executive: impulsive in his commissions, intensely loyal and supportive, and with no great appetite for interference. Consequently he received the same loyalty and support from those in his employ. ‘Lew was a wonderful human being,’ said Moore simply.
After five years of heroic histories, ITC moved into new territory in 1959 with an adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s thriller characters, The Four Just Men, followed by Danger Man, a secret agent series starring Patrick McGoohan, and by the television debut of The Saint. The latter was something of a coup, for the character of Simon Templar, the gentleman vigilante known internationally as the Saint, was already one of the most successful British cultural exports, having appeared in more than thirty books, in several movies, in cartoon strips and in radio series in both Britain and America (where he was most famously played by Vincent Price). Indeed his creator, Leslie Charteris, had moved to America in the 1930s, as the Saint’s fame began to spread across the Atlantic, and subsequently became a US citizen. Templar had never, however, appeared on television, though it was not for want of trying. Most recently, Roger Moore, the star of Ivanhoe, had been advised by his father when that series ended that, in the interests of controlling his future career, he should buy the television rights to one of the old action heroes, either John Creasey’s Toff, or the Saint, and he ‘made a half-hearted attempt at acquiring the rights’ but without success. Charteris, it appeared, had one overriding concern: ‘Money – I have had negotiations with many people at various times but I held out for more money.’
The men who came up with the right offer turned out to be the British production team of Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, whose previous cinematic work included Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) and The Hellfire Club (1961). ‘After many years of noble and lofty-minded resistance,’ explained Charteris, ‘I finally broke down and sold the Saint to the Philistines of television.’ Having failed to sell the idea of a series to Associated Rediffusion, Baker and Berman approached Lew Grade at ATV. The character of the fantasy hero had an instant appeal for Grade, who defined his approach to television in distinctly un-Reithian terms. (‘I am not here to educate the public,’ he insisted, ‘I am here to entertain them.’) With his blessing, Simon Templar made his television debut in October 1962, in the same week that Dr No, the first James Bond movie, was released. Despite the prior claims of Danger Man and The Avengers, the latter already into its second season, this was the true start of the action hero genre that would dominate 1960s popular culture, much of it harking back to the style of the 1920s and 1930s.
The Saint, indeed, was of precisely that vintage, having first appeared in Meet the Tiger in 1929. Simon Templar was a wealthy daredevil about town, cosmopolitan enough to explain to a French-Canadian waiter – in his own language – how to mix a perfect Rumhattan cocktail, while roguish enough to steal the man’s wallet on the way out of the bar. Conceived as a latter-day Robin Hood, he was a freelance campaigner for justice in a society riddled with corruption and career criminals, a man who didn’t baulk at breaking the law if it was in a worthy cause. He was ‘a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress’, and his enemies tended to be upper-class domestic tyrants, confidence tricksters, crooked businessmen and anyone else who might be tempted to place a damsel in a position of distress. He sided with the oppressed, but remained aristocratically arrogant and anti-democratic, with a particular distaste for nouveau riche types who don’t know their place in society. At times he would admit to a contempt not only for modern society but for most of humanity, and despite his leaden attempt at humour, the message was clear: ‘The human race is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfection can shine.’
He was thus a step further on from his near-contemporary, Sapper’s creation Bulldog Drummond, whose exploits filled books from 1920 to 1954. Like Templar a wealthy crime-fighter, independent of the police or other agency of the state, Drummond was above all a simple man of action with little discernible intellect, who leapt from one implausible scenario to another, including – to take random examples from just the first book in the series – an acid bath, a deadly tarantula, even a gorilla loose in an English country garden (the latter Drummond slays with his bare hands). Templar, on the other hand, while retaining much of this spirit of exotic adventure, had ostentatious trappings of sophistication and style, an ability to concoct complicated plans of action on the spur of the moment, and – after the carefree nonchalance of his earlier years – an air of slightly pained world-weariness that could only be stirred into action by the sight of injustice or of a woman in need of assistance. He was part of society, even of high society, but somehow remained aloof from it, an outsider rather than an outlaw. He was, in short, the prototype of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Much of this survived into the screen incarnation of the Saint presented by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman. Three decades on from his creation, he was still an international playboy who revelled in conspicuous consumption, still a deadly foe of wrong-doers, even though he himself enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with the law. Charteris wanted David Niven as the star of the series (Niven was also Ian Fleming’s preferred choice to play James Bond), while Grade was keen to use Patrick McGoohan, but Baker and Berman chose instead to give the role to Roger Moore, a younger, more casual, less overtly English presence. Among his other credentials, Moore had, following Ivanhoe, just starred in The Alaskans and Maverick on American television, gaining valuable exposure in the target export market; he was also a client of the management agency run by Lew Grade with his brother Leslie.
It was an inspired piece of casting. Moore looked superb in the role, boasting a highly lacquered, swept-back hairdo and an enviable ability to wear beautifully cut clothes, while his deceptively easy acting style allowed him to inhabit the character of Templar and yet maintain a slightly amused distance from him. The result was the definitive portrayal of the character, providing all the thrills and excitement a viewer could ask for, without demanding that any of it be taken too seriously; he was always a raised eyebrow away from commitment. ‘We wanted to do the show slightly tongue in cheek,’ noted Baker, and Simon Templar started every programme with a direct address to camera, welcoming us into his world while establishing a light ironic tone which ran as an undercurrent through the ensuing episode. The show’s American script editor, Harry W. Junkin, once claimed that there were three reasons why The Saint was such a successful series: Roger Moore, Roger Moore and Roger Moore.
Changes were made, of course, a slight smoothing of the darker side of the original. In the old days, for example, Templar used to carry a knife strapped to his forearm; as the novelist Colin Watson noted, this was uncharacteristic in an action hero of the pre-war years, when the convention was clear: ‘only foreigners and very low-grade criminals used knives for fighting purposes.’ The practice was dropped for the television series. ‘I made a decision that knives were definitely out,’ remembered Baker; ‘he had to fight by the Marquis of Queensberry rules.’ Such weapons were to be again restricted to those with no sense of honour and fair play, though the change didn’t go unremarked even within the show itself. In one of Terry Nation’s scripts, a French villain (we can tell that he’s a villain because he puts his cigarette out in Templar’s drink) pulls a knife from his jacket sleeve with a dramatic flourish. ‘I used to carry one like that,’ shrugs Templar. ‘Found it frayed my cuffs.’
Also played down was the implicit xenophobia that permeated much of the adventure literature of the 1930s. Charteris, born Leslie Yin, the son of a Chinese father and English mother, was much less inclined than many of his contemporaries to break out into explicit racism, but there was still an occasional tendency to refer ‘to the birds with the fat cigars and names ending in -heim and -stein who juggle the finances of this cock-eyed world’, or to ‘foreign-looking birds with ugly mugs’. The latent anti-semitism, which attracted little or no attention at the time, looked horribly inappropriate in a world coloured by the Holocaust, whilst a fine line had to be trodden, in a series aimed at overseas sales, between a celebration of traditional British culture and anything that smacked of superiority It was possible, however, to detect an implied nostalgia for imperial dominance, a sense of using the past as a stick with which to beat the present. Templar ends a 1967 episode, Michael Pertwee’s ‘When Spring Is Sprung’, by telling his Russian enemies: ‘For some years now the rest of the world has been systematically underestimating the British. To them – you – we are a second-rate power. Which means that everything about us is second rate.’
This belief in Britain’s post-war decline, in the enfeeblement of the national character, and in the need for heroes who might keep the flame of freedom alive, was a common theme in the popular fiction of the time, but it was not a theme to which Terry Nation found himself attracted; in his scripts for the series, the Saint simply didn’t express such opinions. More broadly, although his heroes were almost exclusively British, either overtly or – as with Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 – by depiction, and although he drew heavily on the pre-war tradition, there was never a trace of jingoism in his work. There is even a suggestion that nostalgia for the bold days of exploits and exploration is misplaced. ‘We’re the last of the adventurers,’ a character named Miles Hallin boasts to Templar, trying to ingratiate himself. ‘Living for excitement is a lost art.’ The Saint is decidedly unimpressed, reviving the argument that Richard Hannay had made forty years earlier in The Island of Sheep. ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he replies dismissively, but Hallin won’t let it go: ‘Why, sure it is. Today, kids get their kicks by taking pills. They don’t hunt big game or climb mountains. How can they know what life is about unless they’ve looked at death?’ We’re not much surprised when Hallin turns out to be a bad sort.
For Nation, whose love of adventure tales had been honed on the noble heroism of Biggles in childhood, a figure like the Saint was something of a gift. He had been an impressionable ten-year-old when Terence de Marney began appearing as Simon Templar on Friday evenings on the Forces Programme, around the same time that George Sanders was creating the first great screen incarnation of the character in a series of movies for RKO. He knew this material, and the genre whence it came, intimately, and he displayed considerably more enthusiasm for the idea of writing The Saint than he had shown for Doctor Who. Here, he knew, he would be in his element; even though he was working with characters – and sometimes plots – that were not his own, there was a sense of him coming home with his ITC work. ‘I think he felt more comfortable in this niche,’ commented Beryl Vertue. ‘It was something really new, more his own.’
Nation’s entry into the world of The Saint came via Harry W. Junkin. ‘I was given a terrible story by Leslie Charteris,’ he recalled. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and very little you could do with it, but I was supposed to adapt it. All those original Saint episodes were supposed to be adapted from Charteris’s stories.’ Evidently his adaptation was successful enough, for he was then commissioned to write more, and turned out nine scripts for the show in 1964–5. The stories ranged across the globe, from South America to London, from Haiti to the grouse moors of Scotland, and covered a similarly diverse range of subjects: there were revolutionary groups, voodoo priests, blackmailers, murderers and jewel thieves. And, despite his complaints about the source material, most of his adaptations stayed close to the originals.
The 1964 episode ‘Jeannine’, for example, relocated the action from New Orleans to Paris and added a minor sub-plot about ‘a couple of rather unsavoury French hoods’, but the essential story – of Templar and others trying to steal a pearl necklace – remained intact. He did, however, make a change to the denouement.
Early on in Charteris’ story, Templar tells a police officer the tale of Cleopatra giving Caesar a goblet of wine into which she drops a pearl; it promptly dissolves and is lost for ever, thus demonstrating the extent of her wealth and power. Having subsequently acquired the necklace, he then confounds the police by reminding them of the tale and directing them towards the oxtail casserole he has spent all day preparing. In the casserole, heavy with red wine, the police find just a two-foot-long loop of thread, and they troop out despondently, having lost any desire to pursue what they know will be a fruitless search. The Saint, of course, is bluffing; he has the pearls in his pocket and he’s merely slipped an empty string into the stew. In a final twist, it’s revealed that ‘the story of pearls being dissolved in wine was strictly a fable, without a grain of scientific truth’. Nation’s version garbles the sequence of events, missing the point of the casserole bluff, but it also omits that last detail about it all being ‘strictly a fable’, conveniently leaving the idea in the public domain, available for future use. And he did reuse it in ‘Legacy of Death’, a 1968 episode of The Avengers, in which a pearl is successfully dissolved in a glass of wine, again with reference to Cleopatra. ‘I thought everyone knew,’ says Steed. ‘Pearls dissolve in wine.’ (On a purely factual note, a pearl will actually dissolve in wine, but only if it has first been ground into a fine powder – this was not how it happened in The Avengers)
Nation also added a political edge, updating the story from the aftermath of Indian independence to the present, so that the owner of the necklace is now Madame Chen (Jacqui Chan), the representative of a dictatorial oriental nation, and one of those chasing the pearls is Lo Yung (Eric Young), a hotel waiter from Chen’s own country, intent on striking a blow for freedom: ‘My people starve. They are taxed beyond endurance. Any voice that is raised in complaint is instantly silenced by force of arms.’ He plans to steal the necklace so that he might sell it to raise funds for the revolutionary cause. ‘In the history of all oppressed people, a leader emerges from the crowd and takes his people into freedom,’ he explains, after a failed attempt to lift the pearls. ‘Until that man appears, the suffering goes on. The pearls would have brought some relief – food, medical supplies.’ It is he who ultimately benefits, when Templar gives him the stolen necklace, having concluded that Lo’s need is greater than anyone else’s.
Elsewhere in Nation’s scripts, lest he be misunderstood, the Saint makes clear that his is not a dewy-eyed celebration of revolution for its own sake. ‘Whenever people get killed, I’m bothered,’ he explains. ‘That’s what revolution means: death and misery on a large scale.’ But he’s always keen to take sides in a political dispute, particularly in the context of decolonisation. In ‘The Sign of the Claw’ (1965), his opening address to camera abandons the usual tone of dry detachment, striking instead a much more serious note: ‘The jungles of South-East Asia are amongst the hottest spots in the world right now. There is a full-scale war going on, except nobody calls it a war. Officially, it’s an anti-terrorist campaign. But no matter what the politicians call it, it’s a battleground. Probably the most savage on the face of the earth.’ The references are seemingly rooted in the long-running Malayan Emergency, which had seen British and Common-wealth troops battling communist guerrillas throughout the 1950s, though the resonance with the recently escalated conflict in Vietnam could hardly be avoided.
The story itself is set in an unnamed post-colonial country and features Max Valmon (Godfrey Quigley), who’s lived here all his life and is now in cahoots with a mercenary, Dr Julias (Leo Leyden), to destabilise the new government, for reasons that he explains to Templar: ‘Six months ago when this country became independent, the government was taken over by a bunch of wogs. They started ordering us about, telling us what we could do and what we couldn’t do.’ Templar replies laconically: ‘Seems reasonable. It’s their country.’ Valmon is outraged: ‘Their country! Without us, they’d still be in their straw huts.’ But the Saint has no time for such arguments, and no inclination to stand in solidarity with white colonialists: ‘I’d say whatever you’ve put into this country, you’ve taken out again, with considerable interest.’ He succeeds in scuppering their plans and, by repositioning the lights on a jungle landing-strip, he causes a plane, full of supplies for the counter-revolutionaries, to crash. When he’s congratulated on the success of his brilliant plan, he shrugs off the compliment: ‘I’m afraid the brilliance is not mine really. I read about it in an adventure story years ago.’
That last little joke was characteristic of Nation’s scripts for The Saint, which frequently included such knowing comments. ‘If you’re smart, you’ll pull the trigger on me right now,’ a crook tells Templar in one episode. ‘Because if I stay alive, I swear they’re going to be picking up little pieces of you all over this crummy town.’ The Saint is amused by his turn of phrase: ‘Haven’t changed much, have you, Jack? You still talk like a hoodlum in a second-rate gangster movie.’ This trick of letting the audience know that they were in on the joke of fiction, making them aware that they were suspending their disbelief, derived from Charteris himself. In a 1931 collection of short stories, as the Saint falls into the hands of yet another villain determined to put an end to his career, Templar points out that he is immune to all danger: ‘I’ve got such a lot to do before the end of the volume, and it would wreck the whole show if I went and got bumped off in the first story.’ As he puts it in a Nation-scripted episode from 1968: ‘I know the rules. I’ve been to the movies.’
Indeed there were, if not rules exactly, then certainly conventions to which a writer was expected to adhere in the action adventure series of the 1960s, many of them derived – as with that stricture on the carrying of knives – from the literary heritage, and many passed on to future generations. It was axiomatic, for example, that a hero can take any number of blows to his face and still get up to fight back, but will be rendered instantly unconscious by a single strike to the back of the head, and that, even after a night or two of informal imprisonment, he will still look crisp and clean-shaven in a suit and tie. Similarly a man who is shot will suffer either a minor flesh wound or death; there is no other possibility between these extremes, though death will sometimes be sufficiently delayed for one last message to be gasped out, or for the victim to fire one final shot from his own gun. Heroines, on the other hand, tend to be kidnapped rather than shot, though curiously – given that much of the show promotes their sexual attractiveness – they are never raped or sexually molested. (There is an exception in the Doctor Who story ‘The Keys of Marinus’, in which Barbara is clearly being threatened with sexual assault, but mostly Nation’s scripts for that series obey much the same conventions.)
Even the physical accoutrements were reasonably predictable. This is a tradition awash with miniature cameras and radio transmitters, with Swiss bank accounts and wall-safes, with knockout gas and secret weapons. It’s a world in which hotel bedrooms can invariably be accessed from the room next door via a narrow, high ledge, and in which any room entered at night will probably contain uninvited guests, to be revealed when the light is switched on. Equally dangerous are big houses in the country, the rooms of which can usually be locked from the outside. Brainwashing is a constant danger, and plastic surgery can give a man an entirely new face (the same is presumably true of women, but no one has ever tried). Perhaps, given the restrictions, it is not entirely surprising that there was some repetition of plot.
To these conventions, ITC added a few of its own, most significantly the insistence that language should be made appropriate for export sales to America: cars ran on gas, pedestrians were to be found on sidewalks and references to money tended to be in dollars. This was not a practice shared by The Avengers, produced by the rival television company ABC. ‘We always called a lift a lift, and not an elevator,’ noted associate producer Brian Clemens. ‘What we did was give them a picture of England that they all imagine it’s like. England is all people in bowler hats, or it’s all covered in fog. We never bent down to make it easier for them to understand.’ He did, though, point out a number of other limitations in the series: ‘There are a number of things we can’t do. We don’t kill women, though we may brutalise them. We do kill men, but we don’t have any blood effects, so that it must be quite apparent that when the scene is over the actor just gets up and walks away.’
Despite making such concessions, however, the early series of Danger Man and The Saint initially proved less successful with the American market than had the 1950s swashbucklers. In the pre-Beatles era, Britain was still expected to provide historical rather than contemporary television. Danger Man ran for a season on CBS to little effect and Lew Grade failed to sell The Saint to a US network, instead having to rely on syndicating the show, piecing together a patchwork of deals with local stations. That was to change, but first there was a split in the creative team behind the series.
In 1965, remembered Roger Moore, Lew Grade approached him about the possibility of a fifth season of The Saint, this time to be made in colour so that it would be more acceptable to American television. Moore replied, ‘I’d happily work with Bob, but not Monty.’ Grade went along with the idea, suggesting that The Saint be left in the hands of the emollient Robert S. Baker while the more abrasive Monty Berman was given his own show. The Baron, featuring an adaptation of John Creasey’s character, was also to be filmed in colour. Of the two partners, Berman was generally perceived to be the hard man of the partnership. ‘I remember Monty Berman being the one that everybody feared a little bit,’ remembered Sue Lloyd, who starred in The Baron, while some of the production crew were known to refer to him as Martin Bormann, in reference to the missing Nazi leader whose remains had not then been discovered. It was, however, Berman who provided Nation with a step up the career ladder, from freelance writer to salaried script editor on The Baron.
Nation in turn brought in Dennis Spooner to assist him. His new partner was just a couple of years his junior, and the two men had pursued similar careers: like Nation stage-struck since childhood, Spooner had spent some years struggling to make it as a stand-up comedian before drifting into writing (though he was also briefly a professional footballer with Leyton Orient), and the two had credits on several shows in common, including Hancock and No Hiding Place as well as, more recently, Doctor Who. It was the first time since the break with John Junkin that Nation had worked so closely with a co-writer and, after several years of working from home, he was now writing again in an office (in the Elstree studios where The Baron was filmed). In these changed circumstances, the need to form a new partnership – albeit more loosely than before – evidently reflected the transition from writer to script editor.
The role of script editor had emerged on ITV and been taken to the BBC by Sydney Newman. It was intended to form a bridge between producer and writer, though not all directors approved of the arrangement. ‘I wasn’t allowed near the authors,’ complained Richard Martin of his experiences on Doctor Who. ‘There was always a script editor in the way. You were never encouraged to talk to an author. By and large, that was a bad barrier between two creative people.’ From the point of view of the script editor himself, however, it was still a creative process and one that gave him considerable influence over the direction and nature of a series. ‘I’d have the writer in and sometimes I’d have the germ of an idea, or they would come in with an idea,’ explained Brian Clemens. ‘I’d sit at the typewriter, and we’d kick it backwards and forwards and we’d block it A to Z, like little telegrams to ourselves. And sometimes if a line of dialogue suggested itself, I would type that in too. And then at the end of that session, which might take all day, I’d give the writer four or five typewritten pages with every step of the story there and send him on his way. And the idea was that if he stepped outside the studios and got run over by a bus, I could write it.’
Having established the concept of the piece, the script editor’s function was to make such changes, or recommendations for changes, as were deemed necessary to ensure continuity within the series and to allow the translation to film. ‘It’s an odd sort of balance,’ reflected Terrance Dicks, the most influential of the Doctor Who script editors in the 1970s. ‘You want a writer with clear ideas, who defends them, but you don’t want a writer who says this is holy writ and you mustn’t change a word. There’s a middle ground in between, in which the writer accepts that in the end it’s going to be done the way the script editor and the producer want it.’ From his perspective, he concluded, ‘Terry was, perhaps, if anything, a little too easy-going.’ Beyond this link with the writer, there were further responsibilities. ‘As story editor,’ noted Spooner, ‘you’ve got to liaise with make-up, costume and all the other departments. You’ve got to look after your producer. You’ve got to take the director in hand.’
The role of the script editor at ITC was less central than at Doctor Who but it was still a new experience for Nation. As a writer, he had been almost entirely removed from the production process and was seldom seen on set. He did go to one rehearsal of ‘The Daleks’, but as far as the director, Christopher Barry, was concerned, that was all: ‘I only met Nation once. He seemed to have as little time for me – or the programme – as I came to have for him.’ John Gorrie, who directed ‘The Keys of Marinus’, had even less contact: ‘He was never around. I never saw him.’ Actors had the same tale of absence to tell; whether it were Tony Tanner, star of Uncle Selwyn, Peter Purves, who appeared in two of his Daleks stories, or David Gooderson, who portrayed Davros, they never met Nation. He admitted himself that this was his reputation: ‘They say: Nation never appeared. Nobody ever saw him, and he didn’t do anything.’ In this context, the value to him of Spooner, who had just spent a year as the script editor of Doctor Who and who had considerably more experience of television production, was obvious.
Even so, when filming began in July 1965, it became clear that this was a different world to that of the Doctor. To start with, an increased scale of resources was available at ITC: an episode of The Saint had a budget of £30,000, ten times larger than an episode of Doctor Who (though, of course, they were twice as long, running at around fifty minutes). But there was also a different philosophy of programme-making, rooted in the social differences between the two channels – the Oxbridge BBC and the working-class ITV – and manifest in a division between the stage and the movies. The BBC, despite the changes made by Sydney Newman, still essentially saw television drama as an offshoot of the theatre, and recruited accordingly, so that many of the key figures in the early Daleks stories came from a theatrical background: director Richard Martin, designer Raymond P. Cusick, costume designer Daphne Dare among others. So too did most of the actors, and there was some nervousness about whether appearing on television was a wise career move. ‘As a theatre actor,’ reflected William Russell, ‘you thought: I wonder if I should?’
Over on ITV, on the other hand, the perception was that television drama was most closely related not to theatre but to cinema. Baker and Berman had both come from the movies, as had many of the other senior production crew. Charles Crichton had directed Ealing classics like The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) before moving on to episodes of Danger Man and The Avengers; Jeremy Summers directed Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man and then The Saint; while Roy Ward Baker – who worked on The Avengers and The Baron – had learnt his trade as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant in the 1930s. Gil Taylor was the cinematographer on Ice Cold in Alex (1958), and received a BAFTA nomination for his work on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) during the course of filming The Baron. And Brian Clemens’s colleague Albert Fennell, who produced The Avengers, had earlier been associate producer on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). As Clemens said: ‘All the credits are great filmmakers.’
This divergence of approach was reflected in the end products. Although Doctor Who was not broadcast live, it was recorded almost as though it were, on a multiple-camera setup, with as few breaks in filming as possible and with retakes strictly discouraged. Just as in live theatre, things sometimes went a little wrong, actors occasionally bumped into the scenery or fluffed their lines – most frequently William Hartnell, who on one memorable occasion referred to ‘anti-radiation drugs’ ‘as anti-radiation gloves’ before correcting himself. The BBC considered such mistakes to be perfectly acceptable in a performance that was only expected to be viewed once; these were not works intended to be preserved for posterity, and indeed many of them haven’t survived at all, wiped from the record in order that the expensive videotape might be reused and not incur the cost of storage.
Lew Grade, on the other hand, with his eyes fixed firmly on selling his shows around the world, insisted that they be shot on 35mm film and approached as though they were movies, using a single-camera mode of production. ‘Our shows were, in fact, seen and treated as mini-films,’ pointed out Roger Moore. And although a great deal of stock footage was used – establishing shots of Paris or London or Monte Carlo – as well as a single street set at Elstree that was re-dressed and reused in episode after episode, these elements were blended in well with the indoor scenes to give the impression of a much larger production. Other elements were borrowed from movies being made elsewhere in the studios. ‘You’d walk onto a Hammer set, for instance,’ remembered Nation, ‘and they’d been doing some big mountain-climbing thing, and I’d say, “Can we save this set for another two weeks?” And I’d write an episode to fit it.’ Consequently, the ITC shows, even without a great deal of location shooting, look almost epic in comparison with their contemporary equivalents on Doctor Who. Viewed in the light of later television, the limitations are a little obvious, but that wasn’t the impression of either viewers or critics at the ‘time: if Associated Television doesn’t take The Saint on location,’ wrote Variety, ‘it sure seems that way.’
The key, as ever with Grade, was America, and in 1965 he proudly announced that he had sold a new extended version of Danger Man (US title: Secret Agent), together with The Saint and The Baron, to the American networks CBS, NBC and ABC respectively. The first two of these turned out to be the company’s big hits of the decade, notching up 86 and 118 episodes respectively and winning big US audiences. They also sold everywhere else – The Saint, boasted Grade in 1965, was ‘number one in Finland’ – with Moore and McGoohan purveying an international image of the English gentleman (even though Moore was the son of a South London policeman and McGoohan was an Irishman born in New York). Moore’s Templar, in particular, was one of the symbols of the age in the same way that James Bond was proving to be. Driving an exotic car – albeit a Volvo P1800, as opposed to the fictional Furillac or Hirondel of the Charteris tales – and flitting between his London mews house and his New York apartment, he was the ultimate swinging bachelor, hanging out in clubs, bars and restaurants with a succession of young women, upholding standards of justice and decency while having a thoroughly good time. He epitomised a decade that seemed enthralled by the emergence of an international jet set. If consumerism was the new faith of the post-war western world, then Simon Templar was one of its high priests. (Though this metaphor probably wasn’t what Lew Grade had in mind when he responded to a criticism that ATV didn’t produce enough religious programming: ‘We put out The Saint. What more do they want?’)
The Baron was much less successful than those two series, losing its American network slot during its thirty-episode run and failing to get a recommission, but it sold well around the world, from Poland to Nigeria, and it still made a contribution to ITC’s $10 million of foreign earnings in 1965, a figure that grew to $15 million the following year. In 1967 and again in 1969, ITC’s parent company ATV won the Queen’s Award to Industry for exports, while Grade himself was knighted at the end of the decade. (‘I have sold everything we produce, except the weather forecast and the Epilogue,’ he boasted in 1967.) As Dennis Spooner was to point out: ‘ITC was basically an exporting company. We were earning foreign currency.’ He added, in answer to the charge from Howard Thomas at the rival ABC franchise, that Grade seemed to be straying from his Midlands audience, focusing more on Birmingham, Alabama than Birmingham, England: ‘It’s no good trying to sell a locomotive in America if you insist on building it for the gauge of track that’s relevant in Britain. I don’t see why people get upset when you do the same thing in television.’ But perhaps it was by making too many concessions to transatlantic taste that The Baron fell down; perhaps it simply wasn’t English enough, failing to play to the American perception of Britain, however distorted that might be.
As originally conceived by John Creasey, the character of John Mannering was firmly in the mould of E.W. Hornung’s late-Victorian hero, Raffles, who had spent his days as a gentleman cricketer and his nights as a jewel thief. A ‘Mayfair bachelor and man-about-town’, Mannering’s easy passage through elevated social circles conceals a less respectable alter ego, for he is also a celebrated burglar and jewel thief, known to the police and to a mostly admiring public only as the Baron. Mannering was never as fully rounded a figure as Raffles, nor so subversive – the Wildean subtext of Hornung’s stories, for example, is absent – but he was exciting enough, displaying a physical prowess of which even that amateur boxer Sherlock Holmes would have approved: cornered by a pair of savage Alsatian guard dogs, he’s capable of rendering them unconscious with his fists. So although he was neither Creasey’s best-known hero (that was the Toff), nor his most critically acclaimed (Gideon of Scotland Yard), he was certainly popular, appearing in nearly fifty books, and he had loyal fans, among them the French poet Jean Cocteau, who was heard to murmur that the Baron was his favourite character in all crime fiction.
Mannering’s first appearance came in Meet the Baron (1935, US title: The Man in the Blue Mask), a 75,000-word novel written in just six days to meet the deadline for a competition being run by the publisher George G. Harrap. It took the £1,000 first prize, a huge sum at a time when publishers paid an average of just £50 for a thriller novel, and, published under the pseudonym Andrew Morton, it set the struggling Creasey off on a most extraordinary literary career. Over the next four decades, he produced more than six hundred books, using a couple of dozen different pen names, and at the time of his death in 1973, some four hundred titles were estimated still to be in print. The exploits of the Baron ran right through that career (indeed the last two books in the series were published posthumously), though the character calmed down a little as the years went by. He got married and strayed from the path of crime, setting himself up as an antique dealer with a shop in Mayfair, from where he assisted the police and even his own customers, when they found themselves caught up in jewel robberies and the like. Still charismatic, he was now seen in more conventional terms as ‘Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison and Greg Peck rolled into one’. In truth, it was not such a big step for Mannering, for he had never really been criminally minded. Even when robbing country houses, he had been primarily motivated by concern for the downtrodden, particularly if they were attractive young women or distressed members of the gentry; like the Saint, he saw himself as something of a Robin Hood for the modern age and ‘he used the profit more for other people than himself’.
By the time ITC turned to the Baron as a vehicle for a new show, Creasey’s work had already been raided for the series Gideon’s Way (1964, US title: Gideon CID), produced by Baker and Berman. It came with one huge attraction for a producer: where Leslie Charteris had insisted on retaining storyline approval for The Saint, no such restrictions were imposed by Creasey. The results were immediately apparent when the first episode of The Baron was broadcast in September 1966. To begin with, the entire history of the character, his disreputable early career as a jewel thief, had been dropped, while the name of his antique dealership (now an international chain of shops) had changed from Quinns to the more literal John Mannering. More startlingly, he was now American, a former cattle-rancher from Texas – hence, apparently, his nickname – who had served in the war, tracking down artworks stolen by the Nazis. (Old comrades tend to refer to him as Captain Mannering, which sounded less incongruous in the days before Dad’s Army.)
As portrayed by the American actor Steve Forrest, this Baron was courteous, good-natured and likeable; tall, broad, handsome and well-dressed. Unfortunately he was also utterly lacking in sex appeal, and despite being furnished with a decorative sidekick in the form of Cordelia Winfield (Sue Lloyd), whom he first meets while she’s taking a bath in his hotel room, he managed to avoid any hint of flirtation whatsoever. Even the 1930s original was more explicit in its acceptance that Mannering might have a sex life; after all, he had first taken up crime when his marriage proposal was spurned, and much of his early law breaking was an attempt to protect the woman he loved from the blackmailing demands of her estranged husband. Also lacking in the 1960s incarnation was the division that had once existed between the character’s two guises. When engaged in an escapade as the Baron, we were told, he used to undergo ‘a psychological change’, effectively ceasing to be John Mannering as he put on his trademark blue mask, almost as though he were one of the emerging host of superheroes. Not only the alter ego, but also the mask, were absent from the television version, who remained resolutely Mannering throughout, with only the occasional passing mention of his nickname to remind us of the show’s title.
These changes aside, and even allowing for the fact that the stories were all new, the television Baron was still in the mould of the 1930s heroes. He is absurdly well-connected, ‘one of only three men in this country who have immediate and unquestioned access to the security vaults of the Bank of England’, and he acts on occasion as an informal agent for a government organisation known as Diplomatic Intelligence, answering to a crusty English gentleman, Templeton-Green (Colin Gordon). He also retains an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, however much he protests that his only interest is financial reward. In ‘Red Horse, Red Rider’ he finds himself trying to wrestle a statuette of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the clutches of a military dictatorship in the Balkans, in order to sell it to provide funds for the resistance. As he rides the railroads, pursued by the secret police, his companion, a beautiful young rebel named Savannah (Jane Merrow), wonders why Mannering is here at all: ‘I don’t understand you. What are you doing riding in this box-car across this godforsaken country of mine? You own three of the most exclusive antique shops in the world, you are a charter member of the jet set, you have beautiful women. Why are you doing this?’ ‘Money,’ he replies unconvincingly. ‘I’ll make a hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the Horsemen. If I have to dodge a few bullets along the way, it’s all part of the game.’ ‘Is there no other reason?’ she insists, and his reply comes as much from the twinkling of his eyes as it does from his shrugged ‘Maybe.’
Solidarity with the oppressed is a running theme. Several of the episodes written or co-written by Nation for The Baron are relatively straightforward jewel heists, ranging from standard tales of released prisoners going back to dig up their treasure hoards, all the way up to an attempt on the Crown Jewels in the double episode ‘Masquerade’/‘The Killing’. But there is elsewhere a strong vein of broad-brush politics. In ‘A Memory of Evil’ the Baron battles an Austrian neo-Nazi group called the New Front, while in ‘Night of the Hunter’ he is back in the Balkans confronting another military dictatorship, this one presided over by a general so evil that he wears sunglasses after dark and a uniform that includes matching brown leather boots and gloves. His manners are little better than those of the French thieves in ‘Jeannine’, for he puts his cigar out in the milk jug, and when Mannering suggests that it’s not a good thing to destroy a democratic regime in a military coup, he behaves as a thriller villain should, laughing at such foolishness: ‘Democracy! Hah! It’s merely an archaic word, not a political creed.’ Again Mannering is bringing in money for the anti-government rebels.
‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ featured another familiar figure from the thriller library, with the mad scientist Ingar Sorenson (Kay Walsh). In a nod towards Nation’s later series, Survivors, she has developed an extremely contagious virus that kills anyone exposed to it, which she is offering to anyone in search of a biological weapon and who can meet the asking price. Voicing one of Nation’s recurrent themes, she explains her abandonment of the high principles of science. ‘A long time ago, I decided to market my work, and leave morality to the buyer,’ she says, arguing that this is the way of the modern world. ‘The defence budget of any world power could finance enough research to rid us of all our ills. But ask any government to believe that drugs are more important than rockets …’ Inevitably she kills herself accidentally with the last of her deadly bacteria, and the final portentous word is left for Mannering: ‘It’s all over. Until somebody comes up with the same thing again. Or something worse.’
In the best plotline of the series, the double episode ‘Storm Warning’/‘The Island’ sees the Chinese government funding a plan to bring down America’s latest space rocket. By hacking into the rocket’s communication system, it is intended to change its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere so that it splashes down 1,500 miles off course, where a ship is waiting to fish it out of the ocean, hauling in the most advanced technology in the world. It’s a fiendish plan worthy of feature-film treatment (though perhaps a little too reminiscent of the James Bond movie Dr No) and the production mostly does it justice. Much of the action is set on board the waiting ship, on to which Mannering has smuggled himself in yet another attempt to rescue Cordelia. For she was not one of the more resourceful heroines of the ITC stable; captured by villains on an almost weekly basis and never allowed to do any fighting, she did display a cool, slightly ironic tone in counterpoint to Mannering’s rugged openness, but Sue Lloyd struggled to make a great deal of the role. ‘I had to make her more Lucille Ball,’ she commented later, ‘because of being ridiculously weak at the last moment.’ Mannering suffered from no such shortcomings; as adept with a sub-machine gun as with his fists, he was the action hero as all-American jock.
Unlike The Saint, the atmosphere of The Baron was a little to one side of the carefree, wisecracking, bachelor romp through Swinging Britain. The jaunty theme tune was there, as was the jet-set lifestyle, but this was a hero who didn’t go in for womanising and who lacked the jovial repartee that had been de rigueur in British thrillers ever since Bulldog Drummond. In the absence of the self-mocking humour that Moore brought to The Saint, The Baron was a much more serious proposition. The shows had no straight-to-camera introduction and tended to end abruptly at the denouement, without an epilogue or additional explanation; there was no easing in and out of the tale, just an action-packed adventure.
And on occasion those adventures could be very dark. The last episode of the series, ‘Countdown’, featured a fine array of evocative settings – a scrap yard, railway sidings, a film set, a crypt and a windmill – as the backdrops to five unpleasant deaths, including a man kicked out of a railway compartment in front of an oncoming train, another impaled on an antique sword, and a third being tortured with a lit cigarette before being crushed under a concrete block. If this had been The Avengers, the killings would have been depicted as witty self-parodies of the action genre; here they are treated seriously, looking forward to the violent British gangster films (Performance, Get Carter, Villain) that were to come. The same episode also included a guest appearance by Edward Woodward as a rival antique dealer, Arkin Morley, who walks on the shady side of the street and has a nice line in arrogance; asked how good his Latin is, he replies, ‘I speak it and read it with a fluency which can only come from a very superior English education.’ (Leslie Charteris, who went to Rossall School, was also fond of sideways attacks on the public school system.)
Much of this undercurrent of unease was attributable to the influence of Nation, who was creatively – though not personally – inclined to pessimism. It is notable that one of the few times that The Baron broke the ITC convention on using American currency is in the episode ‘The Man Outside’, in which an Italian-American gangster named Bruno Orsini (David Bauer) attempts to bring six million pounds in forged notes into the country. Orsini explains to Mannering that he’s motivated not merely by greed but by a desire for revenge, having previously been deported from Britain. ‘You know what this much fake money could do to a country’s economy, Mannering? Smash it! It could make the pound worthless,’ he rants. ‘I’m going to see this whole stinking country go bankrupt. I’m going to push in millions more notes, give them away if I have to. By the time I’m finished, the pound’ll be just so much coloured paper.’ The episode was, in a quiet way, Nation’s comment on the vulnerability of the British economy to international speculation, and was broadcast in April 1967, in the midst of a continuing currency crisis that would, later in the year, force the Labour government to devalue sterling.
Nation’s influence can also be seen in the resourcefulness of the Baron, his ability to improvise his way out of tricky situations. It was a trait common to many of Nation’s heroes, and he evidently stockpiled any ideas he came across for later use in his scripts. Ted Ray, with whom he worked so closely at the end of the 1950s, used to tell an anecdote about an alcoholic music hall comedian of his acquaintance who sometimes ran out of people from whom to scrounge a drink. ‘If nothing else, he was resourceful. Once he went into the Gents, removed the light bulb from its socket, inserted a halfpenny, and replaced the bulb. The first person to switch on the light produced a short circuit and plunged the whole house into darkness. It was the easiest thing for Cyril to grope a bit and gobble up someone else’s pint.’ When, in ‘Storm Warning’, Steve Mannering finds himself locked in the cold room used for storing meat on the ship, he employs precisely the same trick, enabling him to slip quietly out when a crewman comes to investigate the power cut.
With the pressure of writing so many original stories himself while at the same time fulfilling his duties as script editor, Nation also dipped into his previous work for inspiration. Ingar Sorenson in ‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ is not exactly the first fictional scientist to discover the ultimate secret weapon, but it was perhaps careless of Nation to give her a name quite so redolent of Professor Soren in ‘The Inescapable Word’ (one of his scripts for The Saint), who has developed an equally deadly weapon: ‘It destroys all life, but leaves no trace of radiation. The classic death ray.’ Soren too is killed by his own invention. Similarly, both ‘The Crime of the Century’ in The Saint and ‘Epitaph for a Hero’ in The Baron feature robberies that require the pumping of poison gas through a ventilation system to put armed guards out of action.
But such minor borrowings were as nothing compared to the pure self-plagiarism of ‘Portrait of Louisa’ in The Baron, which not only lifted wholesale the plot of ‘Lida’ in The Saint, but also recycled large chunks of dialogue. Nation wrote both scripts, adapting ‘Lida’ from a Charteris story, and, although he added several layers of complication to the tale (and took the trouble to relocate it from the Miami of Charteris’s original to the Bahamas and then, in ‘Portrait of Louisa’, to England), he was perhaps fortunate that he didn’t run into trouble with the Saint’s creator. As so often in Nation’s career, there were precedents for this practice to be found among the writers of his youth. Edwy Searles Brooks, for example, one of the most prolific of those writers – he produced an estimated 36 million words in his career – was, like Nation, not averse to turning his hand to self-plagiarism: many of his 1940s novels about the character Norman Conquest were literal rewrites of his own earlier work, when the central figure had been Waldo the Wonder Man.
On this occasion, however, Nation’s sleight of hand did not go unnoticed. In an ill-timed piece of scheduling, both ‘Lida’ and ‘Portrait of Louisa’ were shown on the same weekend in America, and the comparisons were hard to avoid. ‘It was an embarrassment for Terry,’ shrugged Johnny Goodman, the production supervisor on both shows, ‘but I suppose there are a limited number of stories in the world.’