The Chattering Cyclops… August 10, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews , trackback‘How naive of me to think a mere atom bomb could fell the chattering cyclops!’
Sideshow Bob - The Simpsons; Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming
There’s a danger inherent in watching anything, I suppose, that you aren’t too familiar with, something you admired only in a dim and dusty past. There is the awful possibility that you now see it for what it is and always was, a total clunker. A blessed memory, forever to be thereafter indentified as ‘fools’ gold’. Dear God in heaven, what kind of numbskull could ever have seen anything in that? Please sir, it was me; I was that numbskull…
Nowhere is this better expressed than in the arena of archive television, the endless hours of safe, homogenised, conveyor belt entertainment, acted out on rickety cardboard sets, appalling formulaic scripts mouthed by those of little talent, directed by those with little interest. All we have to protect ourselves is a butter-hued glow of nostalgia, strip that away and it’s another piece of your past exposed to the withering gaze of cruel reality, trodden underfoot by the grim march of time, expunged from the file marked ‘happy memories’.
I was glued to the box when Starsky and Hutch were roaring round the mean streets of, well, wherever the hell it was shot, in that big red phallus of theirs (my car at the time, a red Escort 1100, was trimmed accordingly - eat rubber suckers…); have you even tried to sit through the first five minutes of this buddy cop flim-flam recently? Don’t get me started on The Six Million Dollar Man, and did I really think that thirtysomething was essential viewing? The Thought Police will surely come and cart me away right after I admit, at chez Hodson, there were guffaws as the nuclear family sat around and gawped at Love Thy Neighbour. Gulp.
Television cooks up huge amounts of material, chews it up and vomits it out. Sometimes it’s simply crafted (and I use the term loosely) for the ‘now’, instant culture, digested and plopped into the toilet bowl of history (dare I mention repeats, or is that enough, already, of the bodily functions analogies). Odd times it’s good enough still to call down the years, but with all this, this…stuff, you have to be careful when you’re mining the archives. What’s that? They’ve released Big Breadwinner Hog on DVD; I think I liked that. ‘Think’. Not good enough with limited shelf space, limited time (limited funds). Watching the ‘chattering cyclops’ today, most shows seem to have outstayed their welcome almost by the time the opening credits fade. It’s hard to believe now isn’t it, for example, that both The World at War, and Brownlow and Gill’s Unknown Chaplin were broadcast by the U.K.’s premier commercial channel during ‘prime time’; those were days when documentaries were possibly the only examples of ‘reality TV’.
I’ve not been big, then, on revisiting old TV shows, my DVD collection betraying relatively few examples, and mostly those that I’m truly certain that I will enjoy again and again - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I Claudius, The Prisoner, The Norman Conquests, Pennies From Heaven, ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (both Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing), Fawlty Towers, what exists of ’Quatermass’, a handful of ‘Who’ - for old times sake, I was there when they broadcast the first episode - Shooting The Past, ‘Blackstuff’, well, you get the idea. A mixture, I would hope, of genuine classics and barefaced nostalgia. But what is becoming apparent is, I’m turning to more and more of it.
Now that may be as a result of the desperate need to fill up the many dozens of channels now broadcasting via cable and satellite, so, I’ve been able to catch a few gems - and a few scruffy examples of cheap and nasty fake jewellery - that haven’t seen the light of day on terrestrial telly for years. And it’s the tip of the iceberg. Both ITV and the Beeb are planning on opening up their archives to enable downloads of decades of programming - from Hughie Green to Camberwick Green, The Newcomers, Callan, Brucie at The Palladium, The Squirrels, Bootsie and Snudge, Tony Hancock, Space City, The Forsyte Saga et al. TV heaven or hell? I can’t quite make my mind up; my head says loftily ’Civilisation‘, my heart snatches the remote and yells: ’sod off! I wannna watch Howard’s Way…’
Adam Adamant Lives!
Unlike film, when it comes to actually slapping down the cash for archive televsion material, I rarely plunge into the unknown, one recent exception however being Adam Adamant Lives! Having clear recall only of who our hero was, the title sequence and theme, a couple of scenes, and the fact I once owned a genuine plastic ‘Adam Adamant’ swordstick (complete with rubber safety tip - play nice now kids), a few months ago I bought the series on DVD when it dropped into my budget. It was a bit of a whim, and these gambles rarely pay off, but on this occasion the set turned out to be not only a beautiful time capsule, but a genuinely delightful surprise.
Gerald Harper is our eponymous doer of derring, a wealthy Victorian/Edwardian adventurer who, when called on to do his duty for Queen (or King, it being 1902 at the start of the adventures), does it with great relish; Adamant, secure in the knowledge of his own invincibility, loves nothing better than a good punch-up in the service of his country. While battling his arch-foe ‘The Face’ (for every hero there has surely to be a nemesis), Adamant’s eye for the ladies proves to be his Achilles heel, he is captured, drugged, and frozen in a state of suspended animation. The damnable fiends! It isn’t until the Swinging Sixties that the ice-pop that is Adamant is discovered, thawed and revived, using methodology that scientists today, finding permafrost pickled mammoths, would give their eye-teeth for. Once again Adamant is ready take up the cudgels against the forces of evil, the new barons of crime - after first, of course, visiting his boot-maker and finding they handily still have his measurements on record. A true gentleman must have his hand made boots, a fresh cape and starched wing collars.
Conceived in 1966 by Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman and producer Verity Lambert, Adam Adamant Lives! is a hybrid of 007, Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond; indeed but for a rights hiccup, the series would have been Sexton Blake Lives! Of course, the core idea of the series - the return of a legendary, long thought dead, crime fighter into unfamiliar modern day surroundings - has since been yoinked out of the Beeb’s pocket for the ‘Austin Powers’ series, and gifted Stuart Goddard his stage name. Though the show was originally scheduled by the BBC as post watershed adult viewing, that sub-Bondian mixture of sex and sadism, watered down for mass consumption on the telly, appealed quite naturally to children of all ages.
Adamant’s characteristics, his old world charm, dress, and manners, the kittenish sidekick, and his array of villains set on world domination (or simply the domination of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach), put the series head to head in the battle for viewer’s affections with The Avengers over on ITV, which was, after all, the Beeb’s aim. However, ever careful with the licence payer’s cash, ‘Auntie’ was a little stingy with the budget; ‘Adamant’ was shot quickly, lacking the glossier production values of the opposition, the shaky sets redolent of ‘Who’ and it’s more forgiving target audience. After two series, it was gone, back in the deep freeze…but not for good.
Last year BBC DVD and 2 Entertain produced a handsome U.K. R2 five-disc set, containing all 17 of the remaining Adam Adamant Lives! episodes and a real feast of extras; a thoroughly interesting 52 minute documentary ‘This Man Is The One’, commentary tracks, with a genuine warmth of feeling for this long dead - or should I say dormant - project, by the urbane Harper, Lambert and the lovely Juliet Harmer on the first and last episodes broadcast. Harmer plays ‘Georgina Jones’, Adamant’s decorative, but not quite so swinging companion; they make a decent enough pair, but oddly lack the sexual chemistry of the opposition on the commercial channel. There are also featurettes, outtakes, full scripts in PDF format plus audio extracts from the dozen missing episodes, a photo gallery and more.
The icing on the cake is author Andrew Pixley’s superbly informative 64-page booklet of viewing notes - a goldmine of stills, wonderfully well-researched episode guides, including the background to the untransmitted pilot, and an overview of the whole project, one that briefly shone so bright, but ultimately, like so many other adversaries, failed to knock Steed and Mrs Peel off their pedestal.
Watching the set today left this viewer’s mug wreathed in smiles. Harper is a sheer delight as Adamant; ever dapper, not a crease, not a hair (not an eyebrow) out of place, he despatches his foes using sword, fist or martial arts. Harper occasionally glances straight at the camera, staight at us, which could be disconcerting, but this slightly post-modern nod seems to render us inclusive, part of the action. He addresses his companion as ‘Miss Jones’ in a manner that’s possibly a little too reminiscent of Rising Damp, and the fact that the Beeb broadcast episode two as episode three thinking no-one would notice (had they suddenly cast Arthur Mullard as Adamant mid-story, mid-scene, it would have been slightly less apparent), simply adds to the charm. Adamant has hardly shaken off the freezer frost and he is instantly accepted back to the bosom of H.M. Government, who whistle him up quicker than you can say ‘Victorian values’; much more fun than a gunboat. By episode two (which is in fact episode three…), this man who has ridden nothing more powerful than a, well, one horsepower horse, is suddenly zooming around Britain in a hopped up Mini Cooper. Yeah, baby…
The quality of the transfers, like the quality of the episodes, are mostly excellent, some better than others, depending on the source. The first episode, ‘A Vintage Year For Scoundrels’ is beautiful, the last, ‘A Sinister Sort Of Service’, thought to have been lost, but found on 16mm film, is less so; but none are truly offensive. Ironically, in view of the Beeb’s aim to try and topple The Avengers, writers for the series included Avengers alumni Tony Williamson and Brian Clemens, and one Ridley Scott, whose major credit to date had been directing a handful of Z Cars episodes, was behind the camera for ‘The League Of Uncharitable Ladies’. It was not, then, for the want of trying; as Newman wrote to Harper in 1967 after Adam Adamant Lives! was cancelled: “The series, from where I sat, was a near miss - we were so close to having something really great…”
The title sequence is superb, and it’s that, more than any other aspect of this utterly charming show, that has been lodged in my mind for the past 40 years. Kathy Kirby belts out the theme song (also presented as a whole in this set), Adamant, cloak billowing, springs his cane-sword menacingly from it’s innocent looking sheath, smiles that deadly smile - ‘Bold as a knight in white armour/Cold as a shot from a gun…This man is the one…’ sings the gorgeous, the pouting, the tragic, Kathy.
Close my eyes and I’m 10-years-old. Funny what gifts a shiny little disc can bring you…
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