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here’s generally quite a crossover between Infinity and our companion magazine The Dark Side, so if you enjoy this mag then you’re pretty much guaranteed to have fun reading Britain’s best-selling Magazine of the Macabre and Fantastic also. For example, the current issue has a fabulous feature on The Medusa Touch, the 1978 Lew Grade movie starring Richard Burton in one of his most memorable latter-day roles as John Morlar, a telekinetic novelist who can cause disasters simply by thinking about them.

We also bring you an interview with Patrick Mower, an actor who has made frequent appearances in Infinity. He was a TV favourite back in the day in classic shows like Callan, The Sweeney and Target, and for the last 20 years has had a regular role in the top-rated TV soap, Emmerdale. In fact another Emmerdale regular, horror fan Dominic Brunt, helped arrange this exclusive interview in which Patrick discusses the making of Incense for the Damned, an obscure British chiller also starring Peter Cushing, Edward Woodward and Patrick Macnee!

Our striking cover feature - another superb bit of artwork from Rick Melton - looks at the making of Humanoids from the Deep, aka Monster in the UK. This controversial Roger Corman movie featuring sex-crazed fish creatures was actually directed by a woman, but of course Roger insisted on beefing it up with added sex and violence in post-production.

Also in this issue you will find an archive interview with zombie maestro George Romero, conducted for the release of his 2005 Land of the Dead, and a fascinating look at the life and career of Hammer boss Michael Carreras, who was in charge of the company in its latter years and directed such films as Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and The Lost Continent. There’s a lot more too, but we will leave you to discover this yourself when you pick up a copy of Dark Side 218. It should be on sale where you bought this issue of Infinity, but if it isn’t you can still order a copy from our website or, better still, subscribe and have it delivered to your door!

GOOD REASONS TO COME ON OVER TO THE DARK SIDE ROSALBA NERI HOT-BLOODED LADY Opposite: A glamorous publicity shot of Rosalba from 1965

“Rosalba was a statue, really. By that I mean that she was of course incredibly beautiful but also that she had an immortal quality to her presence. She was a beauty without time, in fact she has often been cast in period pieces and Gothic horrors.

Also, she had a very provocative physique but also innocent, nearly naïve, facial traits which made her even more erotic, the reason why I cast her as a very anomalous and desirable nun, and I believe other directors did subsequently.”

Giulio Petroni, who directed Neri in Crescete e moltiplicatevi (Grow and Multiply, 1973): “Rosalba was fantastic in that. She could really act and she worked perfectly because her beauty became a narrative device, and added a level of ambiguity to the character.”

Romolo Guerrieri, who directed Neri in Johnny Yuma (1966): “Rosalba was polite, sweet and would smile and nod a lot but she was also distant. She always had a suspicious look, and I think she was wary of people’s motivations. She didn’t seem to have fun or want to really make friends within the crew. I can’t speak a bad word about her, but she was distant.”

Alberto De Martino, who directed Neri in Upperseven- L’uomo da uccidere (The Spy with Ten Faces, 1966):

E

xpressionist shadows. The cinematography of Aristide Massaccesi evokes them in some of the most effective sequences of Il plenilunio delle vergini (The Devil’s Wedding Night, 1973). On the white walls of the castle of Balsorano, the lens and the lights of Massaccesi recreate and capture the flickering fascination of indistinct, dark and sinister projections; the effect is stylish and the Gothic becomes flamboyant in a spectacle as simple as it is eerily seductive. At the centre of these contrasted chromatic contaminations we find the statuesque Rosalba Neri.

Neri became the symbol of many of the films she took part in, even when in the smallest of roles. Not surprisingly in the above mentioned vampire Gothic horror, possibly the film she is most remembered for, but also in the bitter-sweet comedy Grow and Multiply in which she has something closer to a cameo role, she was put right at the centre of the film’s poster.

Born in Forlì, Emilia-Romagna (19 June, 1939), Neri was recognized for her beauty early on in life, winning her first beauty pageant at the age of fifteen. Pushed by her mother to pursue a career in acting, she preferred to attend the prestigious Romanbased film school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC) than the world famous Actors Studio.

There is an ongoing debate regarding Neri’s actual screen debut, seeing that often her films - especially in that bridging period between the fifties and sixties - end up being mixed up with those of older actress Rosalina Neri, to whom she has no relation.

What is sure is that after having collected a series of bit parts and small roles Neri managed to jump-start her career in 1960 when she appeared in two sword-and-sandal mythological spectacles: Il sepolcro dei re (Cleopatra’s Daughter, a.k.a.

The Tomb of the King) and Raoul Walsh’s Esther and the King, starring Joan Collins.

6 The DarkSide

Eugenio Ercolani interviews Lady Frankenstein herself, cult European horror star Rosalba Neri…

Roger Corman’s 1980 Humanoids from the Deep, the finest motion picture ever to feature sexcrazed salmon-coelacanth humanoid mutants, boasts its fair share of fascinating behind-thescenes stories, as James King recounts…

‘They’re not human, but they hunt human women. Not for killing… for mating!’

You come from the small Northern town of Forlì.

Yes. I lived there with my family, right next to the Bridge of Schiavonia. But then, after the war, we moved to Via Fulcieri.

But in reality it all began in Rimini which is where in the 1950s we went on vacation with Mum and Dad. My mother pushed me to enrol in beauty contests and there is where I became Miss Cinema. That was the springboard. I won a trip to Hollywood and I went there with my mum. A wonderful fortnight on the studio sets; William Holden, Frank Sinatra... Wonderful people. Then when I came back I took diction lessons, but it wasn’t enough for me. So, again thanks to my mother’s push, I went to Rome, to the Centro Sperimentale. I arrived first, I won the Ciak d’Oro. Do you know who I managed to beat? Claudia Cardinale!

But then we had two very different careers… unfortunately.

Despite abandoning cinema fairly early on, you have quite a dense filmography.

Yes, although I have to admit I don’t remember much of it.

That period of my life has become like someone else’s memory in many ways, that for some reason I seem to recall pieces of.

I will try my best. Where shall we begin then?

Edinburgh, July 2005. Two decades after his zombies last roamed the earth, horror king George A. Romero was back with Land of the Dead and hit the publicity circuit.

Tony Earnshaw met the knight of the living dead at the Edinburgh Film Festival for an interview resurrected here…

Let’s start with one of your most remembered films abroad, The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973) and see where that leads us. On this project you crossed paths with Joe D’Amato/ Aristide Massaccesi. Do you remember anything about him?

Most of all I remember his physical appearance, because he looked like an actor. Not in the sense that he was handsome, because frankly he wasn’t, but he could have been a character actor. He had this very dark, thick beard, this big drooping nose, intelligent vivacious eyes. He seemed as if he had just come out of some period piece. I also remember that he would always be laughing, cracking jokes.

he production of Humanoids from the Deep is a tale of unwieldy rubber monster suits, boozing actors and creative control ultimately being wrested from its talented director, Barbara Peeters. The film also represents everything that was fun and notable about New World Pictures, the fabled production and distribution studio that Roger Corman founded in 1970 and ran until its sale in 1983: it’s fastmoving, well-made and features a typically schizophrenic collision of exploitative elements and liberal themes. It’s notorious for its scenes of inter-species sexual assault and the gruesome coda where a baby humanoid bursts Alien-style from the belly of a female victim. It was also the launch pad for several notable careers in the entertainment industry.

The late 1970s were something of a golden age for New World Pictures: the company was attempting more ambitious, slightly more expensive productions, shot on location with ‘name’ stars - yet soon the demise of drive-ins and the rise of VHS would relegate Corman’s activities to straight-to-video pabulum. It’s fair to say that a film with Humanoids’ subject matter would never be mounted on this sort of (albeit modest) scale today.

For a long time many have theorized that he is the one to have actually directed the film.

To be honest, I don’t remember him being the director, not really at least. I would define him more a very hands-on cinematographer. His presence could definitely be felt on that set and he probably had a say in how to shoot the film in a way you wouldn’t expect from a DOP, although I wouldn’t say he was the director, more of a cinematographer-second unit director. There wasn’t a second unit of course, but you understand what I mean.

He is really the only thing I remember about that film. Actually I do remember a comment in one the reviews of the time. (the literal translation of the original title is “The Full Moon of the Virgins”). A journalist asked himself where could the production have possibly found all those virgins. It was all very silly, the film and the reactions to it. Not my highest moment.

What were your aspirations, starting out as an actress?

I wanted to do theatre, to be honest, and in Romagna there was Teresa Franchini, a famous scholar of Gabriele D’Annunzio.

I went to her to try and get rid of my accent and to learn how to act but soon after I got seduced by easy contracts: westerns, spy films. All stuff made in the wake of big international successes.

Imitations of 007, The Bible! All films on biblical figures.

I should have been more selective when it came to picking The DarkSide 7

14 The DarkSide

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26 The DarkSide

You started almost as a guerrilla filmmaker making movies for almost no money and having tremendous success. Land of the Dead is a studio movie. Was there a huge difference?

Not much difference at all because we weren’t rich. This movie was half the budget of the Dawn of the Dead remake [from 2004], less than half, and it was much more ambitious. It was big! Big sets, the truck and all that stuff. So it was not that different.

It was still guerrilla film-making. I feel that I have a bit of an advantage having done commercials and little ‘industrials’ – little films with no money. You know what you need to do and you try to figure out the shots and how to spend the money. That’s what it’s really all about. So it wasn’t that different.

The big difference was that, for the first time, I had to deliver an R-rated version for US MPAA so I used some tricks there. In the end we wound up walking zombies in front of a green screen so that we could overprint them and put them on top of the gore shots and take out frames. We could then take them off for the DVD. Some of the MPAA stuff is a bit ridiculous. They won’t say ‘cut that scene’ because then they’re afraid of being censored but they’ll tell you, ‘Cut nine or 10 frames out of that’. So we were able to do that with these walk-bys that we did.

Then consciously we did a few things that were meant to escape the MPAA’s wrath. We did a scene in smoke where they pull a hand apart and we did a scene in silhouette and shadow where a guy’s neck gets pulled off. We did some things like that in order to squeak by the censors. It’s funny, because people say that this film is gorier than the others but I don’t think it is. You can see exactly what’s going on but if you count it frame-by-frame I don’t think it is. Maybe it’s been a while so people think, ‘My God, this guy’s nuts!’

It wasn’t easy to get off the ground.

Was that a 9/11 thing and changes that you made to the script?

I have this conceit: Night of the Living Dead [1968] was the ‘60s, Dawn [1979] was the ‘70s, Day [1985] was the ‘80s and I wanted to do the ‘90s. I just missed it. My partner and I got hung up in Hollywood in development deals and we had a housekeeping deal with New Line for a while and never made a movie. Then we got involved in these development deals on films that never happened. Out of frustration I fled and made a little film financed by CanalPlus called Bruiser [2000] that nobody has ever seen. So I missed the ‘90s.

Immediately after finishing Bruiser I started to write a script for this. It was much more about homeland problems – homelessness, AIDS, the vanishing middle class – although a lot of the imagery [such as] the truck and the idea of a city protected by water was in that script. When I finished it and sent it around it was literally before 9/11 and nobody in Hollywood anyway wanted to touch it. They wanted to make soft, fuzzy, lollipop movies. So I stuck it on the shelf.

A couple of years later I took it down and put in some obvious references to this ‘new normal’ in America now but some of the things were there. They’re more poignant now: the idea of an armoured vehicle going though a little village and mowing everybody down and then wondering why they’re pissed off at us! That scene was in the original

script; it just meant more. The tower was made a taller, bigger building and one of the lines – ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists’ – is too on the nose. It always gets a laugh so maybe it works.

Night of the Living Dead had a subtlety to it whereas Land of the Dead is more overt in its shocks. Do audiences expect that now?

I think that maybe my fans expect it of me. I think Day of the Dead had really the most graphic effects – [the ones] that Tom Savini did. I think probably there are a couple of moments in Day of the Dead that are much more graphic and much more gory than anything in Land of the Dead. But I think they expect it of me.

I enjoy doing it, I grew up on EC comic books, I am not bothered by it. When I see gore scenes in someone else’s horror films I giggle, I don’t cringe.

Again, it’s another conceit. It’s sort of like a slap in the face. You see the original film version of M*A*S*H [1972] by Robert Altman and you’re laughing your ass off for 90 minutes. And occasionally there’s an operating room scene where there’s blood all over the place and it’s a slap in the face. It’s a wake-up call or something. I have sort of justified it that way and maybe it is a justification but I am also not bothered by it.

What was it about EC comics that influenced you as a young man?

In the days before the ‘comics code’, when I was buying comic books as a

Above left to right: Eugene Clark in Land of the Dead (2005) and Romero on set

kid, there were EC comic books, there was Mad magazine but there was also Tales from the Crypt – that whole series of EC horror comics with the vaultkeeper. I loved that stuff. They were horror tales but also sort of morality tales. The bottom line is that they were always moral. When we did Creepshow [1982] – which Steve King modelled after those books – he wrote a tag-line saying ‘A Laurel comic is a moral comic’. The bottom line is that the bad guys also got their comeuppance.

Peppered here and there throughout there was some social satire and social criticism. They were beautifully drawn – the great artists that drew for Mad, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis and all those guys, were beautiful. I grew up on that and then all of a sudden they said, ‘Wait a minute! Forbidden!’

Your career appears to have enjoyed a wholesale resurrection on the back of the Dawn remake and via Shaun of the Dead [2004] over here. Now here you are making a new film. How ironic is that for you? Is it something you have to embrace or do you laugh in the morning when you’re shaving in the mirror?

You have to embrace it. I have to. I don’t feel any anger. My ex-partner [Richard Rubinstein] had the right to do the Dawn remake; he told me he was doing it and I said, ‘Fine’. I didn’t have a problem with that. I don’t think I would have had a problem getting this film financed.

The DarkSide 27

DarkSide 15

Issue 218 on sale Now Full details and subscriptions can be found online at thedarksidemagazine.com and on our Facebook page Dark Side Magazine INFINITY 2

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08: WHEN ALF RULED THE WORLD He’s ugly, he’s short, he’s got a bad attitude and he’s from outer space. 1980s puppet ALF lands on Earth!

14: A DINOSAUR IN NEW YORK We look back at the making of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, a 1950s Ray Harryhausen classic!

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20: EDDIE’S MUNSTER MEMORIES We interview actor Butch Patrick, better known for his role as child werewolf Eddie Munster!

20

26: MODEL BEHAVIOUR Andy discusses the use of scale model buildings.

And here are a few he built earlier…

28: THE DREAM TRIP Mike Hankin recalls a very special holiday where he got to meet some very famous genre names indeed!

48

42: EUSTON MANIFESTO Investigating Special Branch, the hard-hitting police series that laid the foundations for The Sweeney.

48: PLAYING THE HORROR CARD Take a trip back to the playgrounds of the 1970s for the gruesome Horror Top Trumps card game.

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52: ‘HELLO HONKY TONKS!’ Ooh he was awful… awfully funny! Celebrating the life and laughter of the late, great Dick Emery.

54: FLANARCHY IN THE UK Legendary presenter Sally James recalls her days as the sexiest slapstick star of TV’s outrageous Tiswas!

PUBLISHING

GHOULISH

60: REMEMBERING TV’S LOST WORLD Meet Wesley Eure, star of Land of the Lost, a cult series with claymation-animated dinosaurs…

Editor: Allan Bryce Design & Production: Kevin Coward Advertisement and Subs Manager: Yannie Overton-Bryce yannieoverton@googlemail.com Online publisher: Ghoulish Publishing www.infinitymagazine.co.uk Advertising enquiries: yannieoverton@googlemail.com

Web Master: jonathan@jonathanbowen.co.uk Website: www.infinitymagazine.co.uk Published by: Ghoulish Publishing Ltd, 29 Cheyham Way, South Cheam, Surrey SM2 7HX. Printed in the EU by Acorn, W. Yorkshire.

Distribution: Intermedia, Unit 6 The Enterprise Centre, Kelvin Lane, Manor Royal, Crawley, West Sussex RH10 9PE © Copyright 2021 Ghoulish Publishing Ltd. ISSN 2514-3654

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INF36

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THANK GOODNESS SOME MOTHERS DO ‘AVE ‘EM… N ow that we are four-weekly on both Infinity and The Dark Side it means we have to effectively produce a new issue of each every two weeks - I just knew that maths GCSE would come in handy one day. But we are up to the challenge and you will see that there will be no drop in quality even as the bags under my eyes get bigger from long hours sweating over a hot keyboard. It is literally hot too, my mate nicked it from PC World!

Anyway, all joking aside for a few sentences, I’d like to rattle on a bit about my beloved mum, Patricia Hazel, who passed away earlier this year at the grand old age of 95.

She loved a laugh, did Mum, and was a big fan of Carry On comedies and On the Buses. In fact she used to enjoy most things, although she did say: “I can’t stand that Jonathan Ross,” to which my usual reply was, “Well he speaks well of you, Mum, albeit with a lisp.”

Yannie has told me, repeatedly, that it is disrespectful to make jokes about the dear departed in our lives, and I fully agree when such things happen unexpectedly to your nearest and dearest at a young age.

My sister Viv, my brother Sandy and I all agree however that it was Mum’s time to go some months earlier when she drifted into a comfortable form of senile dementia. She still hated having carers coming in five times a day to ferry her back and forth to the living room using a harness. “It’s like Piccadilly Circus around here,” she said. “I wish they would all bugger off!”

In her younger days Mum was the warden of an old people’s home and a lot of the people there didn’t know what day of the week it was. “If I ever get like that, come round and bonk me over the head with a hammer” was her wise advice. She didn’t seem to care how much porridge I would have had to do for her murder.

It is true, however, that people tend to get a worse deal than animals when they reach the ends of their lives. When a beloved pet is obviously in pain and distress we take them to the vets to be put to sleep rather than see them suffering.

Mind you, when my time comes I’d rather have an injection than a clump over the noggin with a sledge hammer.

Mum’s funeral was held on the Isle of Wight, her home for almost 40 years, on April 19th, and I wrote and read the eulogy, during which I recounted finding Mum’s long lost sister Beryl and reuniting the two on Cilla Black’s last

Surprise, Surprise show. I also talked about her days as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war, something she wasn’t allowed to tell us about but which came to light in 2017 when she was given a medal for it. That made us very proud indeed, no wonder she was so very good at crosswords!

Mum and Dad divorced when I was in my teens and she joined the ‘Get-Together Club’ in search of a new partner, and those of you who also read The Dark Side might have already chuckled over my stories of some of the no-hopers she encountered before settling down with her second husband Gordon. He was a postman who finally delivered the full-time friendship and devotion she needed - her upbringing in the care of relatives after her own mother passed on at an early age had been chaotic to say the least.

I may have already mentioned in past editorials that my mum was the one who really nurtured my love of reading books and watching sci-fi films. One Sunday when we lived at rural Westcott in Surrey in the early 1960s she took me on a two mile walk across the fields at the back of our house to the Dorking Embassy to see The Time Machine, and it was a life-changing experience. I often wish I could jump into my own personal time machine and travel back to that golden childhood time, though as one of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes wistfully reveals, it is a lot more than just Walking Distance.

Mum was also the one who let me stay up late to watch The Twilight Zone and encouraged my growing interest in film-making by buying me my first 8mm camera, along with a splicing kit and a bottle of film cement. I rewarded her by slicing my sister Gillian to death on the doorstep in Bloodbath, four minutes of grisly mayhem that involved my brother Sandy wielding a big knife and an economysized bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup sprayed everywhere.

I reckon it still wouldn’t get past the BBFC in 2021. Mum’s succinct review was: “Wait till your father gets home!”

Anyway, I’d like to dedicate this issue not just to my mum but to all of our mums, God bless them. They put up with a lot and don’t complain as much as they should do considering they have the hardest job in the world. Enjoy them while you’ve got them - I certainly did with mine.

Allan Bryce.

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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

The Infinity team bring you news on your favourite TV shows and movie franchises, including the sequel to the blockbuster Game of Thrones, and the lowdown on the long-awaited new Batman movie…

Robert Pattinson as The Batman

Dragons’ den: A script reading for House of the Dragon

IT’S BATMAN 2022!

The DC Cinematic Universe may not have been as financially successful as their Marvel rivals, but they will surely have a hit on their hands with The Batman, which offers an exciting new rendition of possibly the most widely renowned comic book icon.

The film itself wrapped up production in March after an array of COVID-19 related setbacks pushed its release to March of next year. Yet news of the delay is only heightening fans’ anticipation for what promises to be a refreshing new instalment in the Batman canon.

Helming this one is Matt Reeves, director of smash-hits Cloverfield (2008) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), who says he is seeking to plunge the familiar franchise into the unknown.

“We are expecting to see more blood, guts, and brutality from our fledgling detective as opposed to that of the cold, calculated, and composed protagonist of previous renditions such as that of Christopher Nolan’s revolutionary The Dark Knight trilogy.”

British star Robert Pattinson took up the cape and cowl after Ben Affleck stepped down from the role in May 2019. His portrayal of Bruce Wayne promises a unique perspective on the Dark Knight that is quite frankly set apart from the Batman we have come to know and love.

Reeves, claiming to have taken inspiration from a breadth of cinematic genres ranging from neo-noir mystery Chinatown (1974), to psychological thriller Taxi Driver (1976), presents us with an insight into the world of the caped crusader in only his second year as Gotham’s defender.

Colin Farrell will take on the role of Oswald Cobblepot, commonly known as The Penguin, and Paul Dano appears as The Riddler. Catwoman Selina Kyle, is returning as a complex compatriot of the caped crusader, this time played by Zoe Kravitz, while Andy Serkis inherits the role of Bruce Wayne’s butler and aide-de-camp from veterans Michael Caine and Jeremy Irons.

GEORGE AND THE DRAGON Game of Thrones’ prequel series House of the Dragon recently started filming in Cornwall, and production company HBO confirmed this with tweets of members of the cast reading scripts.

The new series is set 300 years before the events of Game Of Thrones and will tell the story of the Targaryen family. The latest series is based on author George RR Martin’s 2018 novel Fire & Blood and is scheduled for release in 2022 on the HBO Max streaming service in the US. Over here it will probably turn up on Sky. The network marked the start of production by sharing photos from the socially-distanced table read. They featured the cast, including Paddy Considine, going over the script while seated at separate tables to ensure coronavirus social distancing.

Steve Toussaint and Olivia Cooke were also at the table read. Matt Smith, previously known for his lead role in Doctor Who and his portrayal of the late Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown, is to play Prince Daemon Targaryen. Game of Thrones was a pop culture phenomenon during its eight-season run from 6 INFINITY

2011-19, which was filmed mainly in Northern Ireland. House of the Dragon is one of many Game of Thrones TV projects HBO has in the works, while a stage show for London’s West End is also in production.

SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE FISH Cult movie fans will be pleased to know that UK distributor Powerhouse/ Indicator are releasing a 4K restoration of 1973’s Day of the Dolphin, the third and final collaboration between director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry, following The Graduate and Catch-22.

A science-fiction thriller filmed in the Bahamas, and adapted from Robert Merle’s best-selling novel, the film concerns a scientist (George C Scott) who is teaching dolphins to speak but finds himself embroiled in a shadowy government plot to assassinate the US president.

Extras on this one include a selected scenes commentary with academic and film historian Sheldon Hall and a new interview with actor Jon Korkes.

We also get archival interviews from 2003 with screenwriter Buck Henry and actors Leslie Charleson and Edward Herrman, plus trailers and a booklet.

The release date is July 19th but it is up for pre-order now at www.powerhousefilms.co.uk.

Name of feature Henry Darrow as Manolito Montoya in The High Chaparral

Lee Fackerell

GOODBYE MANOLITO One of the great Western TV actors headed off for that great cowboy ranch in the sky in mid-March 2021 when Henry Darrow died at the age of 87.

Darrow was best known for his role as the colourful Manolito Montoya on the late 1960s Western The High Chaparral, an American Western action adventure set in the 1870s and also starring Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell. But aside from that trademark role, which he played for four years and 97 episodes, he also portrayed police detective Manny Quinlan in the first season of ABC’s Harry O series, starring David Janssen in the mid-1970s.

The Latino star, who was actually born in New York but moved to Puerto Rico as a teenager, also played masked swashbuckler Zorro several times: first in the series Zorro and Son and then providing the voice for the character in the animated series, The New Adventures of Zorro. He also replaced Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Zorro’s father from 1990 to 1994, in The New Zorro.

His long career included roles in films such as 1959’s Revenge of the Virgins, 1964’s The Glass Cage, 1973’s Badge 373 and 2003’s Runaway Jury, but he was most prolific on the small screen, guesting in a huge number of iconic TV shows including Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Mod Squad, Kojak, Baretta, Hawaii Five-O, The Waltons, Dallas, and Star Trek: Voyager. He also starred on the soap opera Santa Barbara in the 1980s, for which he won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1990.

In 2012, he released his memoir Henry Darrow: Lightning in the Bottle, and was presented at the ALMA Awards with the Ricardo Montalban Lifetime Achievement Award, after working with Montalban in 1970 to create the Nosotros Organization, aimed at boosting Latinos in Hollywood. The Screen Actors Guild praised his many accomplishments in a long and successful career saying: “We honour the career and achievements of Henry Darrow, the pride of Puerto Rico and a SAG Board member from 1970-73.”

He was extolling the virtues of the recent issue with On The Buses and The Time Machine on the cover - plus he was looking forward to the next issue with the Raquel Welch feature... for some reason. But my dear friend did not complete our hike. He suddenly felt unwell and an astonishing turn of events led to me giving him CPR by the roadside until the amazing paramedics and police arrived. Alas - they could not save my dear friend. He was only 51 years old - and leaves behind a lovely wife and two teenage daughters. So Infinity has lost a great fan.

I was wondering - would that be any chance of a mention of him in the next issue - maybe even a dedication in the editorial or something? I know that this could be setting a precedent but I thought I would ask. I know that his daughters would be thrilled.”

Well here’s that mention Steve, 51 is no age and we can’t imagine the shock and sadness Lee’s family and friends are feeling now. May he rest in peace.

A PERSONAL TRIBUTE Yannie and I would just like to pay a personal tribute to an Infinity reader who is sadly no longer with us. His name is Lee Fackerell and while he wasn’t famous and we never met him, he sounds like he was a fine fellah with a loving family and very good friends, one of whom is Steve Cobbold. Steve sent us this moving letter which I hope he doesn’t mind me printing here.

“I am writing in regard to the two subscriptions that I pay for - one for me and one for my dear friend, Leif Mackeral. Well - confession time - his real name was Lee Fackerell. Whenever I sent him something - the envelope would say things like Len Tilsoop, Tom R. Toosoop, Lou Sarce... and I always took great delight in knowing that his subscription issue had arrived.

Last Thursday, he and I went for a long hike and a catch up. Among other things we enthusiastically discussed Infinity magazine. Lee loved it!

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WHEN A T

hink of an alien stranded on planet earth in the eighties and chances are your mind will go to Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial. But think a little harder and you may remember another alien, who looked like a cross between a Kangaroo and an Aardvark and there you have an Alien Life Form, or ALF for short. ALF hit the US airways on September 22 1986 (a year later for us in the UK) and was an overnight success.

The series focused on a suburban family, social worker Willie Tanner (Max Wright), his wife Kate (Anne Schedeen), children Lynn (Andrea Elson) and Brian (Benji Gregory), and their cat, Lucky.

The pilot episode featured amateur radio enthusiast Willie, following a radio signal from space to Earth. The signal leads him to discover ALF, whose spaceship has crash landed in the Tanner’s garage after being knocked off course when his planet ‘Melmac’ exploded. Unsure what to do with the funny-looking creature they protect him from the authorities and marvel at his amazing appetite, destructive tendencies, and love of eating cats! Despite the problems and inconveniences his presence brings into their lives, they soon grow to love him.

Much of the humour was found in a culture clash scenario and in ALF’s desperation, loneliness and general boredom from being forced to stay indoors in a suburban house in LA, which frequently caused difficulty for the Tanners.

A FASCINATION WITH PUPPETS

He’s ugly, he’s short, he’s got a bad attitude and he’s from outer space.

What’s a family to do when he crash lands in their suburban garage?

Mark Witherspoon remembers ALF, a 1980s puppet favourite who is still popular today!

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ALF creator, Paul Fusco has always had a fascination with puppets. In an Under The Puppet podcast (episode 23. December 2018), he spoke about where it all started: “My father bought me some hand puppets when I was off school once to relieve the boredom, and I liked their companionship.” Fusco was fascinated by the New York puppet scene in the 70’s and was lucky to attend a high school that had a complete television production facility.

This gave him a good background in all things technical and a general interest in television. After school he formed a video company and met puppet builders Bob Fappiano and Lisa Buckley, both who had worked on The Muppet Show.

“Puppetry and television were the perfect medium,” he said. “Your TV screen was your puppet theatre”.

THE MUPPET FROM MELMAC

ALF RULED THE WORLD

In a bold gamble they raised money, built their puppets and shot a Halloween puppet special in a warehouse. They then took the special to the networks, and all declined… aside from a company called Metromedia who were looking for shows for Showtime HBO. Metromedia loved it and bought it and they wanted six more holiday puppet specials. A move to LA followed, and a mischievous Fusco would take an early ALF prototype with him to Hollywood parties, saying: “I always got a huge reaction by insulting people with him!”

Over time he backward engineered the character and realised this was ALF, who came from the planet Melmac and crashed into the Tanners’ garage in Los Angeles. It was at one of those parties that Fusco met an agent for CAA, who was amazed at the character and made it his mission to sell it to one of the studios. Fusco was not surprised: “There is something about him, I just knew he was going to work, that’s not me being cocky I just

saw how people reacted to the character.”

Disney were interested but wanted to change the character too much. ABC were interested but saw it as more of a Mork and Mindy type show - they wanted ALF more human. Another wanted ALF more alien, foaming around the mouth kind of stuff. Finally, they met Tom Patchett who had worked on The Bob Newhart Show and Buffalo Bill, two successful shows for CBS and NBC respectively. Tom had a back-door pilot commitment with NBC, so it was the perfect fit.

With executive producer Bernie Brillstein (Ghostbusters, The Muppet Show) they took their idea and ALF (in a bin bag!) to meet NBC

Top: Andrea Elson, Benji Gregory, Charles Nickerson, Anne Schedeen, and Max Wright (who is also seen in the image directly above) in ALF (1986)

head-honcho Brandon Tartikoff.

Fusco says: “When we pitched the idea their eyes were darting around the room, we were pretty much dead in the water, nobody got it until I pulled ALF from the bag. ALF sat next to Brandon at the top of the table and started picking his nose and wiping it on Brandon’s sleeve, which he thought was hilarious, ALF would tell Brandon that he needed a hit show on his network. I knew we were home free when Brandon was ignoring me and talking directly to ALF staring him right in the eyes. At the end of the pitch he said OK guys, you got yourself a pilot.”

NOT AN EASY RIDE Once production started, they realised this wasn’t going to be an easy ride. Each episode was blocked and rehearsed in three days and would take 2 long days

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Name of feature This image and left: ALF with Max Wright, a popular comedy actor who also appeared in the first and second seasons of the sitcom Friends as Terry, the manager of Central Perk

to shoot. The set was four feet off the ground and consisted of a series of trapdoors, so that ALF could appear almost anywhere in the house. These trapdoors would need to be reset for every set up.

Fusco and his assistant Lisa Buckley were the voice and hands of ALF and sometimes two foot nine inches tall actor Mihaly “Michu” Meszaros was used for the long shots of ALF walking around, but this was dropped after the first couple of seasons.

They would film three episodes over a three-week period and then had to take a week off as everyone was exhausted. Fusco told me, “It was very frustrating and gruelling for the actors with lots of stopping and starting, but everyone knew what it would be like going into it.”

As well as playing the lead character, Fusco would sometimes write and direct the show, sign off merchandise and voice the character in ALF’s Animated Series and ALF Tales, both Saturday morning TV shows. The show was regularly in the top ten ratings for the week, pulling in audiences of around 20 million, Jim Henson called Fusco at one point to say “Congratulations you beat me to the punch, you put a puppet on prime time”. The Muppets never achieved this and although their show was huge in the UK, in the US it was aired on a Prime Access syndication station.

ALF’s popularity went from strength to strength and the 3-foot alien featured on hundreds of items of merchandise - everything from plush toys to telephones to t-shirts. He even had a Marvel comic that lasted 50 issues (does this make ALF part of the Marvel Universe?). Fusco did, however, turn down a deal with Budweiser, and when asked to sell sugary snacks, he took a leaf from Henson’s book saying: “He shouldn’t sell stuff. ALF doesn’t hawk!”

ALF MEETS BILKO By season four and after almost a hundred episodes, the show was starting to fade a little. Ratings were still good, but the writers were running out of people for ALF to meet while confined to the Tanners’ house - it’s rumoured the cast were growing tiresome of ALF getting all the best lines too!

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A plan was made to end the current season on a cliffhanger, seeing ALF captured by the Alien Task Force. Season five would have placed ALF in a new situation; on a US air base, where he would become a ‘Sergeant Bilko like’ character. But NBC had other ideas: a change at the top (Brandon Tartikoff had moved on to become CEO at Paramount) and a new rule allowing networks for the first time to create their own shows, led to the creation of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which would take ALF’s 8pm Monday night slot. So the show was cancelled and a promise to wrap up loose ends in a special episode was quickly forgotten - a move that left

many fans of the show disappointed.

Six years later the character proved to be alive and well on that very same air base in the ABC movie of the week Project ALF. The film did well but alas, did not lead to a new series.

In a curious case of ‘the character being bigger than the show’, ALF has made many cameo appearances in other shows since the series ended. ALF fans can spot him in Blossom, Matlock, The Love Boat, Hollywood Squares and most recently Mr Robot and Young Sheldon. In 2004

he returned briefly with his own talk show.

Seven episodes of ALF’s Hit Talk Show, filmed before a live studio audience, were shown on the TV Land channel. And in 2015 the muchloved character starred in a huge campaign for DirecTV in South America. When I asked Fusco whether any more appearances are in the pipeline, he teased: “You never know where he will show up”.

Still a huge character in many parts of the world, ALF’s face can be seen on merchandise and wall murals across Europe and South America and the series has never stopped being shown in Germany. Can we expect to see him again? A planned ALF movie from Sony Pictures and a planned reboot of the show have yet to happen but when asked what he considers ALF’s legacy to be Fusco asserts: “That remains to be seen. It’s not over yet.

This page: ALF had his own popular comic book from Marvel.

Beginning in 1987 and running for four years, it went to 50 issues and half a dozen specials

With thanks to Paul Fusco and Grant Baciocco from the Under the Puppet Podcast.

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YOUR LETTERS AND EMAILS

We love Close Encounters with our readers so drop us a letter at 29 Cheyham Way, South Cheam, Surrey SM2 7HX or an e-mail at editor@thedarksidemagazine.com and you have a good chance of seeing your own name in print master William Tuttle also did an excellent job. As I remember it was always on at Crimbo time and a great treat to watch. All the best.

Derek Gray, Aberchirder.

Dear Allan, Your editorial on your memories of sweets of yesteryear certainly made me wonder why I haven’t got type 2 diabetes today.

My favourites included Spanish Gold sweet coconut tobacco, gooey choccy Aztec bars (sickly but lovely), Old Jamaica rum and raisin there was a mighty punch of rum in those bars!

As one of your readers remarked, the ice lollies were just as good: liquoriceflavoured Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret, mounted on plastic sticks that doubled for monster stencils, and the same year we got the choc and mint sensation known as Dalek Death Ray. My absolute favourite was Lord Toffingham, with caramel ice cream and gooey caramel in the middle. Along with Horror Bags (‘Bones, fangs and claws’) you used to get Tudor Crisps’ famous special free gifts of ‘Wear ’em, scare ‘em plastic tribal masks and shrunken heads. There was never a dull moment in the sweetie shop!

Well done on your On the Buses article. At least the ITV network still show the series and films from time to time, which is more than you can say for Love Thy Neighbour, Curry and Chips and The Dick Emery Show.

I would love to see an article on the great old actress Peggy Mount. I have fond memories of her in George and the Dragon and Lollipop Loves Mr. Mole (with Hugh Lloyd). She even did a Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who story, ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ which is hardly what Doctor Who can be called nowadays. As far as George Pal films are concerned, one movie seems much neglected.

That’s The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, with great stopmotion animation by Jim Danforth and Wah Chang (of Outer Limits fame). The Twilight Zone’s makeup 12 INFINITY

I’m sure we will get round to Dr Lao some time soon, Derek, it has long been a favourite of mine, very Ray Bradbury-ish, a lovely film. Peggy Mount sounds like a good one for Robert Ross to tackle.

I always remember her most from The Larkins, which ran from 1958 and 1964 and always seemed to be on the box in my childhood. The less said about Curry and Chips and Love Thy Neighbour the better if you don’t want the countless modern reincarnations of Mary Whitehouse on your back, but Dick Emery is well worth remembering, as you will see in this very issue. As for your sweet comments, the reason I don’t have diabetes is that I, like many others of a certain age, didn’t scoff so many sweets or ice creams back in the day. We weren’t spoiled in that fashion because our parents just didn’t have the spare, er, lolly. I remember that in my family the only time we really got to overindulge was at Christmas, when we always got a selection box or two in our stockings. Now I can afford as many sweets as I want, but you can’t find a Lord Toffingham for love nor money.

Dear Allan, Apologies for not writing for a while but this furlough has been taxing, with constant Zoom meetings, training sessions etc. Frankly, work was a lot easier when it took place at actual work places. Anyhow. Just wanted to say how much I have enjoyed recent issues; especially the Land of the Giants 2 part feature and issue 33’s On the Buses review. You got everything spot on. Bob Grant pulling the birds was insane, and Olive (Anna Karen) was in reality a top quality lady who was in one of my dad’s mags that he kept in the garage, Penthouse/Mayfair.

The letters page was insane, particularly the one about crisps and cards and sweets. I’d love a feature on these promos and remember many of them very well, especially those Tetley Tea cards.

I must also comment on Neil Martin’s letter on Asterix cards. My mum did similar and Weetabix sent a complete set of Dr Who cards round. They were very kind people, you wouldn’t get that sort of service these days.

Allan, you say you may have lost some readers due to diluting the magazine’s sci-fi content.

I have been here since the start and am going nowhere. You’ve hit the right balance. Top work.

Det. Insp. Jack Regan: “Look, Iris, the world does not revolve around your body. This bloke Galileo proved it goes round the sun.”

Ian Watson, by email.

Thanks for the kind words mate. I’ve been re-watching The Sweeney of late and the other day I revisited the episode with James Cosmo as Scottish hard man copper Davy Freeth. It’s absolutely priceless.

Freeth: “Where I come from they don’t batter down doors without a warrant.”

Regan: “Where you come from they batter

everything from fried fish to their bleeding grandmothers.”

Dear Allan, I was saddened to read (issue 33) of the death of John Richardson, who I remember chiefly (probably exclusively) for the part of Leo Vincey in Hammer’s 1965 adaptation of She. One of my earliest visits to the cinema, it made a huge (terrifying!) impression on me.

One of his lesser-known roles (in fact, pretty much only to me, in the shape of a theory) is that I believe he was the model for Emperor Trigo in The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire.

Back in the first decade of the 2000s, I was helping to proof-read the de-luxe reprint of The Trigan Empire, put together by Dutch publisher Rob van Bavel, so it was much on my mind when I happened to be re-watching She one Sunday afternoon and I was immediately struck by Leo Vincey’s resemblance to Trigo. Given that the film was released in the UK in April 1965 and the first instalment of Trigan Empire (in the premiere issue of Ranger) appeared in September 1965, it seemed quite likely to me that Don Lawrence may well have based the character on Vincey, especially given the scenes in the movie of Leo in Romanesque garb, wielding a gladiatorial short sword and the prominent display of an ancient medallion featuring his ancestor’s Imperial countenance.

I tried to interest Rob and Steve Holland in a ‘dossier’ for one of the volumes on who the characters may have been based on (Charlton Heston’s Moses for Trigo’s chief scientist, Peric; Sophia Loren for his daughter, Salvia?) but they never went for it, so my theory went unseen… until now!

Anyway, with Rebellion reprinting Trigan Empire once again (using the reworked captions from Rob’s volumes), perhaps you might consider an article on what is surely one of the greatest UK comic fantasy serials ever. I understand that over the last few years there have been attempts to turn Trigan Empire into a movie and, more latterly, a TV series (which I think could have worked really

well, especially looking at some of Chris Weston’s stunning concept art, which can be found fairly easily online) but neither got green-lit. Maybe one of these days…

PS: In doing a bit of internet surfing on She, I discovered that John had an affair with the female star, Ursula Andress. He also later starred with Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. Not only that, but he was married for a few years to the lovely Martine Beswick. Not a bad life really…

Mike O’Doherty, by email.

Not a bad life at all, Mike, but he was a very good looking lad. Don’t forget he appeared opposite Barbara Steele in Black Sunday (1960) too. I’d never heard of The Trigan Empire before we covered it in the mag, sounds like I should track some of these comics down.

Dear Allan, I absolutely love your magazine, having finally got round to subscribing (better late than never).

I’d previously got some issues from WH Smith and was lucky enough to have picked up issue 1 with the great Blade Runner feature including the wonderful concept art of Syd Mead.

I love the sheer range of subjects you cover, in articles that are well written and have a real affection for their subjects. I also love how visually interesting every page of Infinity is, with posters, concept art, book covers and tie-in merchandise, rather than just the usual photo stills. And of course your art covers are fantastic. The design doesn’t just make the magazine look attractive but really ramps up the nostalgia favour - a big thanks to Kevin Coward.

You have done justice to many of my favourites such as Space: 1999, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Buck Rogers, and have brought back fond memories of everything from Matt Helm to Look-in magazine - I used to love the art covers of that too. And I had completely forgotten the joys of View Masters, which in turn reminded me of another pre-VHS treat: photo novels, including the large format Alien one.

How about featuring the fabulous art of Chris Foss for Alien and the aborted Dune project, plus his covers for pulp sci-fi novels. His colourful spaceship designs really fired my imagination browsing remainder bookshops in The Lanes in Brighton in the late 1970s. It was there that I discovered the book of Alien before I was old enough to see it at the cinema, and the concept art of the space jockey on the cover sent my imagination into overdrive.

Everyone knows the incredible Giger designs but how about a feature on Ron Cobb’s designs plus more Ridleygrams, which were briefly glimpsed in issue 3’s News column? I would also like to see even more on Blade Runner, particularly the art. I am sure Kevin would agree!

On the same note, how about a Raiders feature illustrated with Jim Steranko’s rarely seen concept paintings, plus the various quad poster designs and some of the old serials that inspired it.

Talking about Indy, I loved the Biggles feature and agree it would make a great series of 30s-set adventures. I’d also love to see a follow-up to issue 19 on the great Ralph McQuarrie, this time on his lesser known work for Battlestar Galactica. But whatever you do just keep up the good work. I’ve not felt such anticipation since rushing home from school after picking up the latest Starburst in Our Price records.

Mark Pidgeon, Eastbourne.

Fabulous Chris Foss artwork for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune project

You’ve given us plenty to think about there Mark, and I’m pleased to be able to tell you that a feature on Raiders of the Lost Ark is already in the works since it celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Photo novels also seem like a perfect subject for us, but Kev seems keenest on more Blade Runner. Did you have to set him off?

Dear Allan, I was reading a letter by Sean Kenney in an older edition of Infinity (29) in which he stated that Star Trek’s James Doohan was on Omaha Beach. That is wrong because he got his wounds flying with the Royal Canadian Army Air Corps around the Canadian Juno Beach, As you are aware, James Doohan was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is in Canada. So unless the RCCA was helping out over Omaha then Sean is mistaken.

Next, can you do a piece on some of those films and television series that passed us by such as Jason of the Star Command, the space salvage series Quark, and the other, Salvage One? I remember in the early 80s going to a weird movie called Foes. Can we have an article on that one?

Other films that come to mind are: Laserblast, Slipstream, Space Cruiser, Starship Invasions, Message from Space and 60 Million Miles to Woomera. I have a good back catalogue of films and television, but these were only mentioned in a few books and magazines such as very old Starlog and Starburst editions.

I recently watched an episode of Robin of Sherwood entitled ‘The Children of Israel.’ Was the actress who played Sarah in this the same one who also appeared in The Children of the Stones some years earlier? Also, can you do a feature on the 1970s magazine Speed and Power, which later merged with Look and Learn?

Finally, what about looking at certain actors who have connections with science-fiction and fantasy, and famous figures from historical fiction such as Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot, William Tell, and Sir Francis Drake. I’d also like to see something

Star Trek’s Montgomery “Scotty” Scott in his days with The Royal Canadian Army Air Corps

on spy and sci-fi television from the 1950s to the present day. Meanwhile, keep up the good work. You have cornered the market and are the worthy successor to the two magazines mentioned above.

Glenn Cockburn, Clacton-on-Sea Thanks for chucking plenty of good ideas our way, Glenn.

Doohan was, as you say, involved in the Juno Beach landings. He was hit by six bullets: four times in the left knee, once in the chest, and once in the right hand. The bullet to his hand took off his middle finger (an injury he would always attempt to hide during his later acting career) and the one to his chest would have been fatal had it not been deflected by the cigarette case Doohan had just put back into his pocket, leading the actor to later quip that smoking had actually saved his life.

You are also correct in your assumption that the Children of the Stones and Robin of Sherwood actress are one and the same. Hampstead-born Katherine Levy is also known for The Watcher in the Woods (1980), A Legacy (1975) and David Copperfield (1974). She later retired from acting to become a television and theatre producer.

INFINITY 13

BIG APPLE GETS BITTEN

awa kene A feroc d by ious test an Ar dinosa Atla terro ctic a ur Big ntic and rises th tomic App , ult e Nor l e From in 19 imate th Han 20,00 53’s Th ly the kin l ooks 0 Fatho e Beast a Ra m y Ha at the m s. Mike rryh ause aking o n cla f ssic !

14 INFINITY

JOHN HUG

I

say, you don’t believe in this sea serpent fable, do you?

Unlike today, at the time of the release of Warner’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953, the image of a gigantic beast roaming a modern city street was still a novel idea. It was not a unique concept, of course, as a Brontosaurus had destroyed parts of London in the 1925 film version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and King Kong had done the same to New York in 1933. Yet, what was new was the idea of a creature from the prehistoric age being revived as the result of an atomic test which would form the premise of so many films to finally reach the point of cliché.

There is a connection between all three films. The prehistoric creatures in The Lost World and King Kong were brought to life by the model animation skills of pioneer special effects wizard Willis O’Brien. The movements of the Rhedosaurus, the imaginary resuscitated prehistoric creature that followed in the footsteps of Kong and also levelled a good portion of New York, was manipulated into being by the hands of Ray Harryhausen, working on his first solo feature film. Harryhausen was set on his career path by his fascination with King Kong and eventually met and worked with Willis O’Brien, first on the George Pal Puppetoon films in the early 1940s and then in 1949 the ‘Oscar-winning’ giant gorilla feature Mighty Joe Young.

Ray Harryhausen’s association with Willis O’Brien might possibly have lasted for at least a little while longer if any of the projects they tried to launch after Mighty Joe Young had come to fruition. The intended follow-up to Mighty Joe Young was a fairly obvious choice, as production company RKO already had a successful series with the title character.

Mighty Joe Young meets Tarzan (with the then current Lord of the Apes, Lex Barker) held a lot of promise, being totally set in the jungle realm, but despite the commissioning of a script by Leland Laurence, the lack of returns from Mighty Joe killed the project before it could go anywhere.

Another project, The Great Adventure, planned to expand on unused elements from Mighty Joe, garnered little interest in the production office and this too was soon discarded.

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A little more work was completed, including some large-scale drawings, on the intriguingly titled Valley of the Mist, which came from an original idea by Willis O’Brien, but this and an attempt to follow a Merian Cooper suggestion to film the H. G. Wells story of gigantism, Food of the Gods, all came to nothing.

Ray Harryhausen was in many ways a completely different character to Willis O’Brien. While O’Brien was patient enough to wait for the right project to come along, Harryhausen was eager to establish himself in his chosen field and continuously scanned the trade press for any production that could possibly utilise his specialist skills.

After a few false starts, he came across an announcement from an independent production company called Mutual Production Corp., that listed among its future projects a title that just leapt off the page, Monster From Beneath the Sea. Little did Harryhausen know that his name was already in the frame to bring the monster of the title to life. The Mutual partners of Hal E. Chester, Moe Kerman and Jack Dietz had employed the hugely experienced Eugène Lourié to be overall art director for the company. Lourié not only found himself intrigued by the monster movie concept, but also wanted to make it his first directorial assignment. Hal Chester could see the advantages of accepting this arrangement, with Lourié taking a single fee out of the meagre $150,000 (eventually rising to $247,000) budget. From the beginning, Chester and Lourié wanted to use model 16 INFINITY

Above left: Ray Harryhausen at work on a sequence for The Animal World (1956)

animation for the monster of the title, but were wary of the rumours that Willis O’Brien surrounded himself with expensive technicians. Along the way, Harryhausen’s name came to the fore, which resulted in Lourié visiting the young animator’s home studio, where he was filming a series of puppet fairy tale films.

A HUGE LEAP Make no mistake, when he accepted the assignment, it was a huge leap for Harryhausen to take on the single-handed

Left: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the 1951 science fiction short story by American writer Ray Bradbury, first published in The Saturday Evening Post (see illustration top right) and then in his first collection of short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, published in 1953, but retitled The Fog Horn

role of creating a believable creature in a movie that could make or break his career.

Despite his importance to the film, Chester knew that he could engage the services of Harryhausen for a fraction of his true worth, yet the deal he struck would prove to have a long-time benefit for this emerging special effect genius. Model animation requires specialist equipment, most importantly a precise single frame camera and projector.

Harryhausen knew that the equipment he needed was sitting in a store room at the RKO Studios, unlikely to be used for any future projects. Originally built at considerable cost for Mighty Joe Young by the mechanical genius Harry Cunningham, Chester at first tried to rent the equipment, but RKO were only interested in selling the bulky items that were taking up valuable storage space.

Securing it all for $6,500, this was offered to Harryhausen with the extra payment of $1 a foot of completed animation, that in the final analysis totalled $1,500. Hardly a fortune, until you come to understand that Harryhausen would use this equipment for the rest of his career. There was now the small matter of devising a method of filming

the monster in an alien environment without the use of extensive miniatures (although this would prove to be a facet of the process impossible to avoid) or the creation of timeconsuming glass paintings. The experience Harryhausen had gained when working on his own experimental films, as well as the complex animation set-ups on Mighty Joe Young, gave him the skill to devise a method of using a form of split screen photography, using optical mattes to, in essence, place his animated creature within live-action footage.

A number of experiments, including at one stage exploring the possibility of filming in the increasingly popular medium of the 3D process, proved it would work, eventually becoming the first use of what would become known as Dynamation.

THE BRADBURY CONNECTION It is time to dispel one myth that has grown up around the film: that being the claim that the film is based on a story by Ray Bradbury.

This is not strictly true, but nevertheless the author’s involvement is a tale of many a twist and turn.

The original Monster From Beneath the

Sea synopsis was written by producer Hal Chester, and according to him was inspired by newspaper reports of a frozen Mammoth found in Siberia whose flesh was still edible.

Chester reasoned this was just one step away from a creature brought back to life from the state of long hibernation. The first extensive treatment was written by G. J. Schnitzer and then this basic premise was fleshed out by writers Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, with input from the uncredited Robert Smith, [the black-listed] Daniel James and even director Eugène Lourié adding a few touches. It also must not be forgotten that Ray Harryhausen added to the scenario through the design of the Rhedosaurus action.

Ray Bradbury’s original short story, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (later retitled The Fog Horn) first appeared in the June 23, 1951 edition of Saturday Evening Post, with a spectacular full-colour painting of a gigantic creature attacking a lighthouse by James R. Bingham. This was barely six months before the Monster From Beneath the Sea project was first announced. If the Bradbury story was the original spark that initiated the project, no one at Mutual was willing to admit it. The producers were certainly aware of the story, because during the period when it was being decided what form the creature would take, Ray Harryhausen said that producer Jack Dietz came into the production office and threw down a copy of the Saturday Evening Post open at the dramatic spread of the Bradbury story and exclaimed ‘We have to get

this in the film, that’s the beast we want’.

Now, it might have been coincidence, but through Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury was invited into the Mutual production office by Hal Chester, with an offer to work on the script. Reading through the existing outline, Bradbury’s only words were that their monster was his monster. Chester knew the similarities were too great, with the result that they offered Bradbury $2,000 for the rights to the story and title, one use only, with no further commitment from the author. The most remembered sequence, the creature’s attack on a lighthouse, became part of the story, but you only need to look at the credits, with its ‘Suggested by’ instead of ‘Based on’ a story by Ray Bradbury, to realise Hal Chester hadn’t totally relinquished his hold on the original premise.

Surprisingly, although the script was coming together, the form the ‘Monster’ was still undefined. Preliminary designs were put on paper by both Ray Harryhausen and Eugène Lourié, which even included a type of octopus creature. When Jack Dietz expressed what type of creature he wanted, thoughts turned to a dinosaur of some sort. However, all known dinosaurs would be dwarfed in the concrete canyons of New York, plus using the largest specimen known at the time, the sauropod Brachiosaurus, would draw

The film was announced in the trades as The Monster from Beneath the Sea. Original prints of Beast were sepia toned

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Name of feature Below: Paul Hubschmid, Cecil Kellaway and Paula Raymond featured in the American advertising Lobby Card for the film

comparisons to the silent feature The Lost World (1925). Taking the James Bingham drawing as a starting point, particularly in dimensions, a completely fictitious creature formed on the drawing board, consisting of many aspects of a bulky, modern-day lizard, but giving it crocodiliantype skin details and a head finally resembling that of a Tyrannosaurus. Keeping the cost as low as possible, the single, interior metal armature was made by Harryhausen and his highly-skilled machinist father Frederick. The body and outer covering were built up by methods used in Harryhausen’s own early experiments and those he had seen employed by Marcel Delgado on Mighty Joe Young. One extra built into the model was a breathing mechanism, which eventually was only used in a few shots. To compliment the animation model, Harryhausen made a hand puppet of the head for the scenes such as the first view of the creature through the lighthouse windows.

Woods. Probably the one casting risk was that of the leading part, with Swiss-born Paul Hubschmid (here billed as Paul Christian) playing Professor Tom Nesbitt in one of his few American-made films. After considerable success in Germany on stage and screen, he had acquitted himself well as the love interest in his first Hollywood feature, Bagdad (1949), but then found himself cast in similar types of role until Beast came along. His assured and likeable persona in this film begs the question, why did he quickly return to Europe within a few years? Among the highlights of his later career was the particularly despicable villain Johnny Vulkan in Michael Caine’s second Harry Palmer spy film, Funeral in Berlin (1966).

TOUCH OF REALISM Away from the technical side of the film, the other important aspect was the quality the actors brought to add the all-important touch of realism to the proceedings. As witnessed in many later films of this type, attitude and delivery of lines can make all of the difference to give the film an overall sense of believability. The majority of supporting players were seasoned character actors, with the most recognisable being the extremely versatile Cecil Kellaway as Professor Thurgood Elson, a veteran of the classic fantasy film I Married a Witch (1942) and was ‘Oscar’ nominated for his role as a leprechaun in The Luck of the Irish (1950). This quality was mirrored by many others in the cast, including the always-reliable Kenneth Tobey (the lead in the equally classic The Thing from Another World from 1951), Paula Raymond and Donald 18 INFINITY

AN UNUSUAL SET Although the total final budget of $247,000 was considered low, even in those days, for a feature film, it still allowed for two days of location work in New York, where extras were filmed fleeing from an unseen menace. A total of thirty locations were used in the city, from a deserted early morning Wall Street, to the dock of the Fulton Fish Market under the Brooklyn Bridge. Other scenes were filmed on Paramount Studio’s New York Street with interiors completed at General Service Studios on Las Palmas Boulevard in Hollywood. Without doubt the most unusual set was for certain arctic scenes filmed in a rented icehouse. Hal Chester believed studio-manufactured snow looked fake and also wanted the effect of the actors’ icy breath. Even in the confines of the ice-house, the ‘snow’ was

made up of a combination of ice, cornflakes and salt, to prolong its filming life. For the effect of the ice floes breaking up as a result of the atomic bomb blast and the disruptive movement of the resuscitated beast, Willis Cook and his crew made a number of break-away ice-scapes. Possibly set-wise, most people remember the enormous skeleton of a theropod (stated as being related to the Rhedosaurus) seen in the palaeontology department of Professor Elwood during the first meeting with Tom Nesbitt. Not made for this film, but rented from the RKO Studio, where it previously had a starring role in the 1938 Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn film, Bringing Up Baby. Miniature sets consisted of the lighthouse destroyed by the beast, plus streets and buildings of New York for the Beast to wander down (when not placed in the real settings), that were made to break-away through the destructive actions of the

creature (plus the intricate animation skills of Harryhausen). The most complex miniature was for sections of the roller-coaster ride featured in the fiery climax. The live-action footage was shot at Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach near Los Angeles, representing New York’s Coney Island. Two sections were built. One was for the general view of the beast in the middle of the ride (breaking away chunks with his jaws) and a second, larger section for the crashing of the roller-coaster car. The model roller-coaster was coated with a rubber substance to burn convincingly at the climax of the film. Other extras included a ship sunk by the Beast and cars that were trampled on in New York.

A BEAST WITH CHARACTER Being in total charge of the animated effects, it was Harryhausen’s responsibility to make the integration of the creature into the live-action appear naturalistic, making it a living and reactive entity, rather than just a mindless monster trampling through the streets. Harryhausen’s ability to give his animated models character was clearly demonstrated in Mighty Joe Young, yet the difficulty he faced with the obviously unhuman-like Rhedosaurus was to give the creature traits, yet avoid the overuse

The climactic roller coaster live-action scenes were filmed on location at the Pike in Long Beach, California and featured the Cyclone Racer entrance ramp, ticket booth, loading platform and beach views of the structure.

Split-matte, in-camera special effects

by Harryhausen effectively combined the live action of the actors and the roller coaster background footage from the Pike’s parking lot with the stop-motion animation of the Beast’s destroying a shooting miniature of the coaster

of anthropomorphism. The true skill of a successful animator is being able to instil a fabricated figure with a life-force that the viewer will recognise and accept. While working on Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen watched endless footage of real gorillas, gradually picking up small nuances he could use. The animator could hardly adopt the same approach with a long-dead dinosaur, so needed to imagine how the creature would react to this alien, human environment.

One mannerism that was quickly dropped was the lizard-like flicking of the tongue.

Used in just a single shot, it is also the only time that the tongue is shown forked, when in the rest of the film it is just solid.

This shot was possibly part of an early test and during the evolution of the design Harryhausen decided to make it less akin to a modern lizard and altered the figure accordingly. Harryhausen had made the general physiognomy of the figure to closely resemble that of a more upright Komodo dragon, but with the walking gait less wide.

The action of ‘tasting’ the air with the tongue follows that design concept, although this line of thought probably changed when the creature was made semi-aquatic. During its time in New York the creature was certainly made to feel unwelcome, by being shot at, part-electrocuted and finally poisoned by a radio-active isotope (fired from the gun of future star Lee Van Cleef) and burnt before its agonising and highly dramatic death.

Hal Chester knew at the end of filming he had a finished product that could put his new company on the map, yet unknown to him his partners had other plans. Chester was called into the office of Jack Dietz’s attorney

and told that the company were selling the film outright to Warner Bros. for $875,000, giving them a huge profit over their initial investment. Chester really didn’t want this to go through, but he was told in no uncertain terms that agreeing to the deal would be in his best interest. This whole incident shook Chester so much that he didn’t work in the film business for the following two years.

Warner Bros. wasted no time in going to work on their new acquisition. First of all, they adopted the title from the Ray Bradbury story, with his name featured on all publicity.

A few extra scenes were shot with the original actors to bring the film up to ‘A’ feature length, then they mounted a huge publicity campaign. Chester was right, the film went on to make a staggering $5 million on its worldwide release.

From this point of time, we may dissect and find fault in the scientific statements or logic, but we must remember that in the period the film was made it was a very different world. Awareness of the effects of atomic testing were unknown, well, certainly to the general public. Even the very existence of such a device was something that was less than a decade in the past and fears of what this may mean for the world were very much on people’s minds. One thing is certain, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms did unleash a spate of nuclear-created creatures on the unsuspecting public, from the Japanese-made rip-off Godzilla, to mutated giant insects of all varieties. Not surprisingly, this surge of interest in giant monster movies would also include the work of Ray Harryhausen, with his creation of a giant octopus attack on San Francisco a few years later.

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Butch Patrick with Pat Priest, Al Lewis, Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo in The Munsters (1964) Opposite: Butch as he is today

20 INFINITY

NOT YOUR TYPICAL FAMILY

EDDIE’S

Steve Eramo interviews actor Butch Patrick, better known for his role as child werewolf Eddie Munster on the CBS comedy television series The Munsters from 1964 to 1966 and in the 1966 feature film Munster, Go Home!

MEMORIES…

F

or decades, TV has been home to countless fictional families, from the traditional to the comedic, and even some that are not of this world. Among the quirkier of these small screen broods were The Munsters. Living at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional city of Mockingbird Heights, the family featured in this popular CBS Television Network comedy made their debut on 24th September 1964.

Sporting an unusually high forehead and matching neck bolts, the head of the Munster clan was Herman, who along with his twin brother Charlie was created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein in 1815. Herman shares the household decision making with his wife Lily, a vampire, who he wed in 1865. Residing with them in their cobweb-adorned haunted house are Lily’s father Grandpa as well as her “plain looking” niece Marilyn, and Herman’s and Lily’s young half-vampire/half-werewolf son Eddie.

While The Munsters may, again, not be your typical family, underneath all the weirdness, hilarity and supernatural slapstick, you could not ask for warmer, more caring and morally upright (but never stuffy or pompous) next-door neighbours. Actor Butch Patrick had the good fortune to join the family when he was cast as Eddie Munster.

“I wasn’t living in Hollywood at the time,” recalls Patrick. “I was actually back in Illinois after just completing a year of work on [the TV comedy series] The Real McCoys.

My mom had married a baseball player who was traded from the Los Angeles Angels to the Washington Senators, so the family went back east. They [The Munsters producers] originally asked or were looking to get Bill Mumy [who went on to play Will Robinson in Lost in Space] to be Eddie, but his mother didn’t like the idea of all the makeup.

“They then did an extensive casting call, where several hundred kids went through the process, and ultimately chose a child actor named Nate “Happy” Derman to play Eddie. He appeared in [the first] The Munsters pilot together with Joan Marshall, who played Herman’s wife Phoebe. When the network saw the pilot, they liked the show, but weren’t pleased with the similarities between Phoebe and Morticia [from The Addams Family], and they also didn’t care for Eddie’s portrayal.

“The decision was made to change the Phoebe character to Lily [who was played by Yvonne De Carlo], and they set out to find someone else to play Eddie. My agent caught wind of this and told the producers, ‘Butch is in Illinois, but if you fly him out to California, you’ll probably want him to play Eddie.’

“She convinced them to buy me a plane ticket and fly me in for an interview, which turned out not to really be an interview.

My uncle picked me up at the airport, drove me to CBS Studio Centre, I did a screen test, and was then told to make

arrangements to report to work the next day. It was quite amazing, especially as, again, I wasn’t in Hollywood at the time, so it was kind of a process that was meant to be, I guess.

“I was really lucky as a kid, though. I never had any acting lessons, but my natural instincts and interpretation were usually acceptable to directors. Occasionally there would be a tweak here and there, but, again, my instincts were pretty good, so it [acting] came easy to me.

“One thing that sticks out in my mind about filming the first couple of episodes is the makeup. They were using a greasepaint that would crack under the studio lights and it was causing a great deal of trouble with all the characters’ looks. The makeup people then switched to this flexible foundation with a very unusual colour that Max Factor made for us. That worked great, and from there on in everything was rosy, so to speak,” jokes the actor.

“Also, Eddie originally only had pointed ears and looked pretty much like a normal kid. They stopped after a couple of days of production and said that my character wasn’t believable as the offspring of Herman [Fred Gwynne] and Lily. That’s when [award-winning makeup artist] Michael Westmore, who at the time was an apprentice, was given the job of changing up Eddie’s appearance. He added the widow’s peak and bushy eyebrows to round off my character’s look. Michael would do my makeup first thing in the morning, and then Beverley Owen’s [who originally played Marilyn] before sending us both off to the set for the day.”

YOUNG BUT EXPERIENCED Despite some rather odd physical characteristics as well as, of course, his unusual home life, Eddie Munster was just like most other kids his age. He went to school, loved sports, and enjoyed playing with his (human) friends.

Behind the cameras, Patrick had already begun building an impressive acting CV prior to being cast in The Munsters. Along with a handful of feature films, including The Two Little Bears and Hand of Death, the actor had guest-starred on such TV series as Ben Casey, The Untouchables, General Hospital, Death Valley Days and My Favorite Martian as well as played the recurring role of Greg Howard in the aforementioned The Real McCoys. With all this experience under his belt, Patrick was able to quickly adjust to the routine of being a child actor working on a weekly TV show and balance that with finding his footing playing Eddie Munster.

“I lived an hour away from the studios, so there was an hour commute, and then one hour of makeup in the morning prior to anything else,” notes the actor. “They would have to accommodate my three hours of [on-set] schooling, but what they tried to do was get me into school so that I’d be done by lunch, if at all possible, or arrange it so that I had done at least an hour or two by lunch. If that didn’t work, obviously we’d have to finish my schooling in the afternoon.

INFINITY 21

This page: Left is the Aurora Munsters Living Room Model Kit from 1965, above is the AMT Munster Koach from the same year

“I would work until five o’clock in the afternoon, but I had to go home after nine hours because of child labour laws. So I had an hour of makeup, three hours of school, an hour for lunch, and an hour of recreation.

That’s six hours right there out of my workday, which was the lion’s share of it, so they really had to structure my scenes very efficiently in order to have enough time for me to actually do my work.

“When Beverley Owen left the series after 13 weeks and Pat Priest came in to play Marilyn, they sort of shifted the dynamics of the dialogue and the action of the scripts. Some of the episodes became more about Grandpa [Al Lewis], Herman and Eddie in the dungeon and occasionally getting into mischief, or Herman and Eddie going out to play sports or to father/son events.

“The writers would load those episodes up for summertime, so when all the other kids were out of school, I was working, and the three hours that normally would have been my school time, were used as filming opportunities. So whenever there was an episode where Eddie was in it a lot, those were usually filmed in the summer.

“I worked quite a bit with Fred Gwynne, but I had a lot of scenes with Al Lewis, too. They both taught me so much as far as acting skills were concerned, which was great. I also learned a lot from Al about life in general outside the studio and the sound-stage, and just being a kid and tossing around a baseball. Al was a big sports fan, as was Fred. As for Yvonne De Carlo,

[played by Louie Nye], is a fake. Again, there are a lot of good episodes, but these three stand out for me for different reasons.”

A TOTAL PROFESSIONAL

she was a wonderful maternal presence for two years on-set because my family were back east, so I wouldn’t see my mom for months on end.”

FAVOURITE EPISODES As with any TV show, fans of The Munsters have their favourite episodes, and so does Patrick. “I actually have several,” he says.

“The one that immediately jumps out is Hot Rod Herman, which we shot on-location at Lions Drag Strip. In this episode we introduced Drag-u-la [a dragster built from a coffin, designed by Tom Daniel and built by auto customizer George Barris], which

was the second of two cars – the other being the Munster Koach – that was used by the Munsters in the show. It was like a new addition to the family. Because Lions was near my house, it was convenient for me to go directly to the drag strip for work and have them put on my makeup there as opposed to going to the studio first.

“Another of my favourites is Eddie’s Nickname, when Eddie grew a beard. I thought it was very funny that an 11-year-old kid would be sitting there with a full beard for a few days. I also like Zombo, where my character wins a contest and goes on a TV show only to discover that the host, Zombo

Whether you are a child or an adult, working on a TV series comes with certain responsibilities. As with any acting job, Patrick conducted himself as a total professional while filming The Munsters, but at the same time, never sacrificed being a child. “I wrote a book called Munster Memories: A Coffin Table Book, which came out on September 24th, 2014, the 50th anniversary of The Munsters, and it contains stories from all these people and what the show meant to them,” says the actor. “When I was finishing up the book, the gentleman who was editing it said to me, ‘OK, now we need your favourite memory about the series.’

“Well, I loved riding around in the car and all that sort of stuff, but my favourite memory wasn’t really about The Munsters.

It was my job and I enjoyed doing it, but it also afforded me the opportunity to be at Universal Studios. I was a kid working on the lot of the world’s greatest studio, and whenever I had free time, I would go off and explore what was going on around me.

So my favourite memories are, for example, poking my nose around the lagoon set used in McHale’s Navy or the Wagon Train and The Virginian sets up on the mountains with all the other TV Westerns.”

“With regard to the show’s fans, their response has always been really positive,” he enthuses. “The Munsters is sort of like Leave it to Beaver but with Universal

Above: Butch with Grandpa (Al Lewis) Left: With Yvonne De Carlo and Debbie Watson (as Marilyn) in Munster, Go Home! (1966)

INFINITY 23

“It will be right down the middle Americana. Not red, not blue, but red, white and blue, and about what America means to these people. Ideally, by the end of the year I hope to have 500 or so stories in the can for my YouTube channel. In-between my weekends of doing that, I’m going to check some things off my bucket list, see the sights and have a great time. It should make for quite a splash when a big diesel pusher pulls into a camp ground with the Munster Koach behind it.

“I’m also doing something for theatres, which have been really hard hit this year because of all the closures. I’m working with an illusionist named Dave Merlin [a.k.a. The Paranormalist], and we’re basically planning to visit theatres across the country. I’ll introduce a 90-minute movie, then following the movie, Dave and I will do a meet and greet in the lobby, and after that, Dave will perform his magic, which happens to include two Munsters illusions. The show is called Munsters and Merlin – Magic Spooktacular, so I’m looking forward to doing that along with travelling for my Koach to Koast channel.”

BEING PART OF THE PROCESS

Above: Eddie Munster wasn’t old enough to drive his own car in the 1960s TV show, and the George Barris Munster Koach was a classic.

When Butch Patrick got older, he decided to have his own monster-themed vehicles built by custom-car builder Rucker Posey. Now when Patrick makes public appearances he has his own Munster Koach replica and Drag U La racer to awe the crowds

24 INFINITY

Studios monster overtones along with great actors like Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis from Car 54 Where Are You? and Yvonne De Carlo from The Ten Commandments.

“The show was very popular at the time and has remained so over the years. People who were around in the 60’s watch it and fondly recall that time, and those who weren’t around back then, watch the show and enjoy the quality of the writing, the story-lines, the special effects, and the fact that it’s in black-and-white, which is like the classic Universal monster movies that so many people love.”

At the time of this interview (October 2020), the 67-year-old actor was hard at work on two exciting new projects, the first of which was inspired by 25 years of U.S. journalist/correspondent/news reporter Charles Kuralt’s award-winning On the Road segments for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

“Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember that back in the mid-60’s, Charles Kuralt became the original ‘road warrior’ when he started doing On the Road,” says Patrick. “He would drive around the country in an old motor home with two guys and present on-camera stories about his travels.

One of the guys he was travelling with would write his copy, and the other guy was the cameraman. I enjoy the open road and taking road trips. It’s just part of my make-up, so I was enamoured of On the Road.

I actually travel a great deal with the Munster Koach as well as Drag-u-la, and for the past three or four years I’ve criss-crossed the country.

“A friend of mine who I met years ago when he was a DOP [director of photography] is a big YouTube guy and he helped me set up my You Tube channel called Koach to Koast, both words spelled with a ‘k’ like the Munster Koach. In the upcoming year [2021], instead of going out on the road with a trailer with my cars in it, I’m going to buy a motor-home and bring my Munster vehicle along as my tow vehicle. I’m planning to go into all the RV parks and interesting places around the country and interview other people about their lives and what brought them to this point on this particular day.

In 1968, Patrick worked on a pair of two-part episodes, Way Down Cellar and The Young Loner, for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Both episodes presented him with different acting challenges, which, in turn, helped further build his confidence as a young actor. “I’m not a big crier and I’ve never really enjoyed crying on-cue,” he admits. “In Way Down Cellar there was a big crying scene. The episode was directed

by Robert Totten, who directed a lot of Gunsmoke episodes, after we shot this scene, he said [about Patrick], ‘Now there’s an actor.’

That made me feel really good that I pulled off something outside my comfort zone.

“In The Young Loner, I worked with Academy Award-winner Kim Hunter along with two other very big stars, Edward Andrews and Frank Silvera. I was the lead between these two camps of adults; I had a tremendous amount of work and a lot of dialogue that really tested me, but I pulled it off.

“I love being part of the process of taking something that doesn’t exist, working on it for a couple of weeks, a few months or however long it takes, and then all of a sudden it’s there forever. I never thought of myself as an actor, but rather just someone who could do the job. It wasn’t a career calling for me, and as soon as the director yelled, ‘Cut!’ I’d be back hanging out with the grips, the makeup people, the lighting people. and everyone else behind the scenes that you never see.

“As actors, we get that little window where we’re seen on TV or up on the big screen, but I was always fascinated by the collaborative effort of how many people there are who work behind the scenes in order to bring all the little moments together and make everything happen for all of us to see.”

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f you love reading The Dark Side and INFINITY magazines then you’re also going to want to check out our stunning limited edition books. Not for sale in shops, these glossy A4 tomes of terror are all superbly well written and beautifully illustrated throughout, and we think you’ll agree that they are a real bargain at just £20 apiece (INVASION! & ITALIAN HORRORS are both £22.50). In fact they are so cheap that you’re surely going to want to spring for the entire collection!

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BY HOBBITS HA

KIT CRAZY

MODEL BEHAVIOUR

During the recent quarantine period our resident model expert Andy Pearson built a model of Mount Everest - not to scale, just to look at.

He’s also been dabbling in the building construction trade…

Clockwise from above: War of the Worlds detail; Brick casting techniques and a junkyard diorama setting

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think it was Shakespeare who wrote that all the world’s a stage. That’s what’s known in the trade as a Radio 2 link, leading to the subject of staging models for display and photography and, specifically, the use of scale model buildings. There are a variety of approaches available to the wouldbe planner of miniature towns and perhaps the most obvious is to buy something readymade off the proverbial shelf.

If the model to be displayed in such a setting is the result of commercially available model kit assembly the chances are that the scale will be either 1:72 or 1:35, either of which will provide a wide choice of scenic subjects, although many of these will have been created with military projects in mind. But if you wish to create something with a civilian or even bucolic theme, it’s not usually too difficult to fill in the shell holes.

Should you decide to work at the smaller railway modelling scales (N-gauge [1:160], OO [1:76], HO [1:87] then the horizons are much broader.

I can’t profess to being a railway modeller, as the only toy trains I owned as a kid were clockwork jobs made of thin tin-plate that seemed designed to slice off portions of infant fingertips. A school mate owned the first electric train set I ever encountered and this was a thing of wonder as he seemed to have every accessory on

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the planet. The reason for that was that his mother was one of those ladies who liked to keep up with the Welsh family next door.

My chum’s tactic was to mention that Mrs Jones’ little lad had acquired a given item and said toy or, often, a superior version would miraculously appear. It was a sort of reverse take on child psychology.

Jealous? Not me. My dad used to set up and run real live miniature steam engines with which we’d power my structurally unsound Meccano creations whilst my mum and the cat hid behind the furniture. That was, as far as schoolboy rivalries went, top trumps.

The early exposure to top of the range model railways was, I suspect, yet another of the influences that got me involved in model making in general and that, combined with my involvement considerably later in life with a publication aimed, to some extent, at the professional modelling community, pointed me toward the creation of settings.

In the latter case, the editor was keen to show models and related items in a diorama whenever possible. The rates of pay didn’t really justify the extra work but someone was willing to give me money for doing something I enjoyed so that wasn’t a problem.

I made reference to railway model scales earlier and there are a number of companies that manufacture and sell buildings and furnishings aimed at that hobby market.

My personal favourite supplier is Metcalfe Models & Toys of Skipton, North Yorkshire and you’ll be hard pressed to find a UK model shop that doesn’t stock their products.

For readers with young families to entertain, these models might be a good and inexpensive way to keep the older ones entertained, although there’s a certain amount of cutting and trimming required but that shouldn’t stop you inspiring the budding architect (or archaeologist; they produce some historical buildings) in your life. I’ve included a couple of examples of builds that I’ve produced using Metcalfe kits here. These are printed card kits and, in addition to being relatively easy to assemble as previously suggested, the detail and authenticity of the products adds much to their appeal…and before you ask, no, I’m not a shareholder.

DARK SATANIC MILLS An early use of these buildings for me was to produce a street-scape to host a model of one of the Martian tripods from H. G. Well’s War of the Worlds and that led, in turn, to a suggestion (I forget from where) that I produce a model that illustrated the William Blake sentiment regarding ‘…dark satanic mills…’.

Metcalfe don’t actually produce a Dark Satanic Mill model kit but they do offer a number of warehouse and factory buildings which can be coaxed into a representation of same. Having assembled the buildings and applied a good deal of additional weathering to the setup I then got rather literal minded and began to model a satanic figure just to emphasise the subject matter. This was deemed extra to requirements but did lead to an experiment in texture which has since proved useful.

I had it in mind to render the demonic figure in a colour to match the brickwork of the mill but then thought, whilst in literal minded mode, that it might be interesting to add some brick texture to the creature’s skin. In order to do that I took a silicone rubber ‘pull’ from an old Airfix resin model building of suitable scale and impressed that into the finished clay creation before the

sculpture was fired. I’ve used the technique since to extend walls for models and even, on occasion, to create complete buildings.

Another useful technique here is to utilise the aluminium that’s used to make the pie plates that are sold through supermarkets.

Here one simply takes an existing texture section of, say, brickwork, places a piece of the thin metal over it and gently inscribes the brick pattern using a pencil, toothpick or something similar. All that remains then is to prime and paint it having first mounted the aluminium duplicate on heavy card or foamcore board.

Models representing book titles are often a source of inspiration (and, indeed, potential paid-for commissions) and a subject that provided a prompt some time ago was the novel The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. This, again, provides an example of a Metcalfe building and a simple technique which I may have touched on in a previous article.

FORCED PERSPECTIVES If the object of the exercise is to produce a photograph of the model looking reasonably

realistic, forced perspective can work well. By way of a preamble a few words of explanation might be in order, as the novel in question is evocative of weirdness on all sorts of levels and features, among other things, supernatural pig creatures. Mr Hodgson seemed to have something of a fascination with pigs as representatives of otherworldly nastiness. Rather than introduce battalions of predatory porkers into my rendition I thought I might evoke the atmosphere of oddity with the presence of a looming amorphous thingy behind the eponymous house plus a suitably gloomy sky, providing the weather obliged.

The forced perspective effect entails photographing the model, perhaps suitably adorned with scale landscaping, against a real and complementary background. The theory is that the viewer is, subconsciously, more inclined to accept the reality of the model due to the undeniably reality of the surroundings (for want of a less clumsy explanation). This was a technique popular within the film industry when combined with other special effects and that same industry still uses models of buildings, vehicles and so on in this way despite the ubiquity of CGI techniques.

When Roland Emmerich wanted to represent naughty aliens destroying the White House in Washington, D.C. a detailed duplicate of the building was made in a scale of 1:12, resulting in a model approximately 14 ft wide x 5ft tall destined to be blown up on camera. Quoted in an article in the September 1996 issue of Cinefex magazine, Visual Effects Supervisor Volker Engel said that rooms even contained miniature furnishings and office equipment such as computers. Of course such techniques, whilst producing spectacular visuals, just beg for one of those ‘Ready when you are Mr DeMille!’ moments when cameras fail to turn but that’s not wishful thinking, just the chance to reference a very old and somewhat dusty joke.

Even for the hobbyist modeller making a building on a more manageable scale, the addition of some interior detail can be beneficial as I’ve tried to illustrate here. In this instance the model is in a 1:35 scale and includes some tools within a conservatory or workshop, itself simply a backdrop for the vehicle involved. These wonderfully detailed accessories are by Miniart and their inclusion just lends a little extra depth to the model

and, again, helps enhance the illusion without the viewer being very aware of their presence.

A similar level of attention to detail as that used by Mr Emmerich’s crew enhanced many of the early Japanese monster movies featuring Godzilla and his (assuming that he is a he) chums. Whilst the creature effects were achieved for the most part with men in suits, these cinematic treats benefited greatly from the skill of studio technicians in producing extremely detailed miniature buildings for the costumed actors to trample on, push over and otherwise destroy.

The master craftsman during what is often referred to as the golden age of Japanese science fiction was a Mr Tsuburaya and if you can get your hands on the book Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters I recommend it highly. It’s much more informative and entertaining than any of the foregoing.

Clockwise from left: Dark Satanic Mill detail, and with its scary occupant; Borderland model set up for a forced perspective shot; House on the Borderland image with some tweaks; workshop with some interior detail

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THE DREAM TRIP Mike Hankin recalls a very special holiday where he got to meet George Pal’s widow, hang out with the likes of Forry Ackermann and Bob Burns, and take a seat in the actual Time Machine from Pal’s classic 1960 film!

W Above: Mike with Ray Harryhausen and Forrest J. Ackerman at London’s Scala Cinema

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hen I began to write my book on the George Pal puppet films towards the end of the 1990s, I immediately faced an enormous problem, namely finding the surviving members of studios that had operated in the 1930s and 1940s.

George Pal had been gone nearly twenty years and, most probably, very few others would still be working in the film industry.

Tracking them down would be a major task.

I was fortunate that I was already in contact with one person who had worked at the Pal Puppetoon Studio right from the beginning: Ray Harryhausen. Many of the stories he had told me about working in the studio were destined for the biography I was still writing about him at the time, Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Majicks, but I decided to hold back on some for a follow-up book. Ray was much more than a starting point, he was also my stepping-stone to locating further former Pal personnel, beginning with his life-long friend, the immensely talented Wah Chang. As often happens, once I had made contact with one, others seemed to drop into place.

In the days of paper correspondence, there was always that long wait to see if these letters would reach their intended destination, let alone receive a reply.

I was incredibly lucky and soon was having regular correspondence with many people who had worked at the Puppetoon Studio in Los Angeles, including Gene Warren, who had gone on to be an ‘Oscar’-winning special effects producer and Bob Baker, still involved with puppets at the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre in Los Angeles.

I also managed to secure incredibly valuable unpublished interviews with many people George Pal had worked with in Europe as well as America through the director of the 1994 documentary Pal’s Puppets, Paul Madden. The sticking point was, interviewing people through letters is never entirely satisfactory, as you are unable to pick up on points they may casually raise in a direct interview. One contact in particular, Duke Goldstone, who was an editor and director on the Puppetoons, told me that he could tell and show me much more if we could meet in person.

My enthusiasm had to be tempered with the guilt of how much these book projects had actually cost, coupled with the reality that at this time there had been very little return. Yet, the urgency of the trip to America became all the more evident, when in quick succession both Gene Warren and Duke Goldstone died, but through my association with Ray Harryhausen I still had the chance to speak to George Pal’s widow, Zsoka. It took me

two years to save enough money, although in the process a lot of my precious film memorabilia collection had to be sacrificed.

NOT A NORMAL HOLIDAY This was never going to be normal holiday abroad, but with my youngest son Steve deciding to go with me, we were determined to have a bit of fun too. Staying within a stone’s throw of Disneyland made this a little easier, as well as giving us a chance to get to grips with driving on the wrong side on the road.

Discovering the joy of breakfast at the International House of Pancakes quickly got us into the American way of living, as did the sheer enjoyment of trips to Universal Studios, Santa Monica, inside a submarine and the Queen Mary at Long Beach and Hollywood itself. However, these were mere distractions from the purpose of the trip, to get material for both my book projects. The first excursion was to realise a long-held ambition.

Growing up, I occasionally managed to get copies of the American magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. At the time, everything that appeared in its pages apparently came from the mind and from the private collection of the strangely named Forrest J. Ackerman, or as he was sometimes called Forry or 4SJ. He often talked about visitors to his house, affectionately called The Ackermansion, in far-off Karloffornia (Forry was fond of puns). When I finally made my first trip to California in May 2000, this was top of my list of places to visit. I had met Forry a few times before. First when he had appeared at the World Science Fiction Convention held in Brighton in 1987 and then a Famous Monsters event at the Scala Cinema in London a few years later. Each time he said, “You’ll have to visit” and now I had the chance to take up the offer.

However, fate seemed to be against me, as Forry was deeply embroiled in a lengthy court case with former Famous Monsters co-publisher Ray Ferry and his home had remained closed to visitors. As luck would have it, the case came to an end during the first week I was there, allowing the doors of the Ackermansion to open once more on a Saturday morning.

As I stood outside the entrance of his home in Los Feliz with my son Steve and my book publisher Ernest Farino, I was jarred from my thoughts of what I was about to see by a voice from nowhere asking who wanted to enter the Ackermansion. It was Forry himself through an intercom, carrying out a well-rehearsed routine. It was obvious that word hadn’t got round that the house was open again, as there were only about ten people waiting to go inside.

Half of the experience was Forry pointing out various items as you toured the rooms, occasionally accompanied by a smattering of his terrible puns. It was impossible to take it all in, as posters and stills covered every wall and shelves sighed with the weight of props and celebrity busts, mostly from fantasy films. Bookshelves were filled to the brim with copies of fantasy-orientated journals dating back to the 1920s and many rare editions of books such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, often in several languages.

As much as I was fascinated by the sheer volume of rare material everywhere, it was one room in particular that made my jaw hit the ground. The first thing that caught my

Clockwise from left: A display at the Ackermansion; the Ymir from Ray Harryhausen’s 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); an outside view of the Ackermansion, display; Forry and Mike; miniatures from Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and other Harryhausen films; a styracosaurus from Son of Kong, and a stegosauraus from King Kong (1933)

eye was a beautiful, large Disney Nautilus model hanging from the ceiling, but when I dragged my eyes away, behind me, on a shelf stretching the length of the room was a collection of miniatures from the early films of Ray Harryhausen.

A section of the Golden Gate Bridge, Oakland Ferry Building and Clock Tower from It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) was vying for a place next to two detailed miniatures of The Capitol Building with a flying saucer firmly embedded in the top dome plus the Washington Monument from Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and The Temple of Jupiter with a plaster cast of the Ymir from Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957). This cast had been given to Forry by Ray Harryhausen (as had all of the other miniatures from his films) and was taken from the original animation figure mould. It had been severely damaged in an earthquake, but had been expertly restored to its original condition. As this is an animation figure that no longer exists, it was a joy to see it as it must have originally appeared.

MORE TREASURES Wherever I looked there were more treasures, the giant catapult from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), early drawings by Ray and several animation models from King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933). These particular models were partially hidden behind a translucent sheet of plastic, but seeing my extra interest in these figures, Forry came over and removed the plastic.

My camera was working overtime. This was someone who wanted to share his precious collection and made a point of telling me how they came into his possession.

After a while Forry left to allow us to look around on our own, a generous act that was frequently abused, with many items being stolen by so-called fans. I found his collection so eclectic, with valuable props nestled next to cheap plastic dinosaurs and other figures, or a rare poster pinned to a wall on the stairs, where hundreds had passed by catching the paper on their clothes, leaving little rips. In the basement, unique items had been left on a bare earth INFINITY 29

Clockwise from left: Bob Burns rocketships and a Bob Burns model of the Nautilus; Mike with Bob; costumes and robots from Bob’s collection; the unused Nautilus model guarded by a Mogwai!

floor, which although dry, was surely not the place to store irreplaceable pieces. At one stage I picked up an original lobby card from Forbidden Planet (1956) that had been left on the floor where it could be easily trodden on.

The warren of rooms revealed further treasures, including much original fantasy art. Every wall seemed to have a still personally signed to Forry by numerous horror and fantasy stars, plus filing cabinets filled with thousands of other stills. Perhaps it was that, with such a vast collection, it was impossible to take care of everything?

The last half-hour or so was spent with Forry in his ‘den’ as he answered a stream of questions. Sadly, the legal fees from the recent court cases would have a devastating 30 INFINITY

effect on Forry and his collection and within a few years much had been sold and eventually the house went too, with Forry retaining a mini-museum of favourite pieces in a smaller home until he died in 2008. It is anyone’s guess where everything is now, but I am so glad that I managed to see it during that narrow window of time.

A PRIVATE MUSEUM The Ackermansion may be no more, but on the same day we travelled the short distance to Burbank to visit a private museum that, if possible, I was more excited about, as it was home to a fabulous prop from a film I had always loved. Once again, we had been a little lucky, as there was some question as

to whether or not museum owner Bob Burns would accept visitors after there had been a major water leak from the air-conditioning unit in part of the building. Thankfully he relented, although the part of the museum with classic toys was covered in protective plastic and out-of-bounds.

As we approached the house, we noticed a large object on the driveway covered in tarpaulin. Bob Burns came out to greet us and could see we were curious about the hidden item, that certainly wasn’t a car.

Lifting part of the covering it was revealed as the spacecraft Nostromo from the film Alien (1979), one of many props from the film given to Bob by James Cameron.

As soon as we entered the museum proper, my eyes immediately focussed on the single most treasured prop in Bob Burns’ collection and the one thing I was most eager to see, the full-size vehicle from The Time Machine (1960). We were the only visitors, so we had Bob’s undivided attention, and he regaled us with stories of how many of the objects came into his possession, including the rough treatment this most elegant of props had received after filming had ended and even after an army of craftsmen had restored it when it arrived at his museum.

This most iconic of props was seen on screen again in TV programmes such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in 1980 and Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), but over-zealous film and television crews occasionally forgot it was a fragile prop and breakages often happened.

Hearing these stories, I was fearful to ask if I

could sit in it, but Bob just said “Sure” and all three of us got our photo opportunities. These days, a full-size figure of actor Rod Taylor sits in the machine to ward off similar request.

One dream fulfilled, our group set off to explore the rest of the museum. The other item dominating the room, apart from The Time Machine, was a part-completed, 12-foot model of the 20,000 Leagues Nautilus. Bob told us that it had been a long-time project of the film’s ultimate fan, artist Tom Scherman (who had helped on the restoration of The Time Machine), but had died before it was completed. In glass cabinets there were animation figures and replacement heads and faces from the George Pal films, tom thumb (1958), one of the elves from The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and the Loch Ness Monster from The 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964), as well as a few of Pal’s early 1940s Puppetoon figures.

The saucer from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) hung from the ceiling (sharing space with the same vehicle from the less salubrious 1959 film, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and there were matte paintings and artwork from George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and The Time Machine among others on the walls.

A replica of the Luna spacecraft from Destination Moon stood in the original highly-detailed gantry, while the fabulous part-built Space Ark from When Worlds Collide rested on its take-off ramp.

Science-fiction film costumes and robots from movie serials abounded, along with numerous horror masks and full-size suits

like the wolf from An American Werewolf in London (1981). Star Wars (1977) fans would recognise figures from the cantina sequence, as well as Darth Vader’s severed hand, still clutching a light-sabre. There were more smaller Nautilus models, including one for a sequel that never happened. I couldn’t help thinking that just a single part of this collection would take pride of place in any fan’s home, but then it would be hidden away, unlike here.

Thinking the day could not get any better, Bob wandered off, saying he had a couple of items he was sure we would like to see. He quickly returned with the original armatures for both King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

I was eventually left alone to take pictures and just look closely (with a few movements of the armatures) at these incredible, iconic pieces of work. The love and care that Bob Burns lavishes on these movie artefacts is fully evident in the displays and I for one left the museum with my head buzzing. I feel that a hologram of Bob should be created so that he can guide visitors around this marvellous museum forever, preserving our movie dreams for all time.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY The visits to Forry Ackerman and Bob Burns’ open museums had given me the opportunity to photograph items that would benefit both of my book projects, but over the following few days I would get to see collections that were purely aimed at the proposed George Pal book. George Pal’s widow, Zsoka, now lived in an apartment

Clockwise from left: Original artwork from George Pal’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962); the rocket ship from When Worlds Collide (1951); Mike with Bob Burns’ King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949) armatures; Mike with Mrs Pal, Puppetoon elves from The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

some way from her former Beverley Hills home, yet this was still a substantial residence, filled with wonderful furniture, some of which, she told me, had been made by her husband. At 91 years of age her memory of her early life with husband George was still remarkably clear, recalling the difficulties of her upbringing in Hungary and the fearful time she had spent in pre-war Germany and Holland.

Beyond the interview, she took me around the apartment to show me the framed, non-winning Academy Award nominations for several of the Puppetoon films, then proudly showed me the ‘Oscar’ he did win for the overall process. Original pre-production artwork from The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was displayed beside George Pal’s own imaginative paintings. One seascape had a Woody Woodpecker figure painted in, added by the Pal’s good friend Walter Lantz.

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PRESLEY PUPPETEER

Clockwise from above: Bob Burns’ Screwball Army Puppetoons from Tulips Shall Grow, a George Pal 1942 Puppetoon release about the terrors of totalitarian aggression; George Pal’s Woody Woodpecker, elves from The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and more George Pal artwork courtesy of Zsoka Pal; Mike with Bob Baker; George Pal’s Oscar nomination certificate for The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), in the Bob Burns collection

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We finally arrived at some cabinets filled with scores of wooden animation figures from his European puppet films as well as many from the Puppetoons. Zsoka graciously opened the doors and told me to take the figures out if I wanted to photograph them. Handling these figures was almost enough, but I took advantage of this unique opportunity to capture images I would certainly use.

I was fully aware of not outstaying our welcome, but Zsoka wanted to show us more.

She opened a door to reveal a cupboard filled with boxes. Opening one, my eyes fell on three rows of replacement faces from a couple of the Grimm elves. Another couple of boxes contained two of the full elf animation figures. I was in seventh heaven.

It was time to leave, but as a parting gift Zsoka gave me a mint copy of the 1946 George Pal written and illustrated book, Jasper and the Watermelons, along with The Time Machine II paperback book by George Pal and Joe Morheim and a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland that contained an obituary of her husband. My head was spinning when I left, knowing that I had captured something really important with these stories of George Pal and my next port of call only confirmed that.

Bob Baker was one of those people whose enthusiasm for any undertaking clearly showed in his work. In the years following the Puppetoon period I was particularly interested in, his interest in marionettes had brought him work in such diverse projects as monster-maker for Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), operating puppet costars for Elvis Presley in G. I. Blues (1960), manipulating dancing shoes in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and his ‘Oscar’-winning puppeteering of the lead alien in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He had a longtime association with Walt Disney, most famously creating the Pinocchio puppets sold in Disneyland. His greatest love was the opening of the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre on 1345 West 1st Street in Los Angeles with his co-founder Alton Wood in 1963 which, because of its longevity, was given the distinction of being granted the title of a Historic and Cultural Landmark by the city.

It was to this theatre that I made my way towards the end of my American trip.

A huge room had rows of high, whitepainted benches and to one side an area where there seemed to be hundreds of various puppets hanging from the ceiling.

One of the walls had numerous photographs, showing Bob operating puppets from the early days right up to the present shows that were put on at a regular basis. He had prepared for my visit, by having a number of Puppetoon figures arranged on one of the benches, and it was difficult not to go straight to these before talking to Bob first.

Bob had not been the greatest correspondent, but in person the stories just flowed and I thanked my lucky stars that I had brought along a stack of blank cassette tapes. We talked for over four hours and feeling sorry for my son (although he told me after that he really enjoyed the conversation) I reluctantly brought it to an end, but knew there was so much more to hear.

I then remembered that I had to take photos of the figures on the table and Bob, gently squeezing my arm, told me he would be back in a moment, as he had something for me.

I was already so excited about the stories I had to work with, when Bob came back carrying some paper material in his hand. What he was giving me were original timing sheets from the Puppetoon Studio and some original publicity material.

He apologised for not having more (as if this wasn’t enough), but apparently a large part of his collection of Puppetoon memorabilia had been stolen from his office.

In the years to come, packages would arrive at my home with video tapes of the entire Puppetoon series, plus audio tapes of further memories and cuttings relating to the films. I talked to Bob many times by telephone and would meet up with him again on my final trip to America a couple of years later, when he gave me a couple of his handmade puppets.

This brings up the question of what happened to the thousands of Puppetoon figures when the studio closed? I was told, they were originally put into storage, but producers William and Edward Nassour approached George Pal to use the figures to create further Puppetoon short films. The whole collection was placed into the hands of the Nassour Studio and there they would remain until they were auctioned (wrongly) in 2009 as part of the William Nassour Estate

by Profiles in History for enormous sums.

Now they are scattered to the four winds.

My only regret was that, due to a lack of time, I was unable to take up the opportunity of visiting Wah Chang at his home in Carmel, but he did send me an audio tape of his memories and photographs of his Puppetoon creations to add to the wonderful story. I did find the old Puppetoon Studio, and drove into the Hollywood Hills to meet Dian Fauntelle, a long-time companion of writer/producer/ director Duke Goldstone, who allowed me to look through his many scrapbooks covering his time on the Puppetoons.

This was a trip when everything just fell into place, giving me one of the most unique times of my life. Many years on, I am so thankful that I made the trip when I did, as it opened up many other avenues to pursue. The book on the George Pal puppet films is now complete and hopefully will be published very soon.

SCIENCE FICTION LIBRARY

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JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969) Blu-ray. Out now. Fabulous Films. Cert: PG

While there’s no denying the success he had with puppets, Gerry Anderson’s forays into live-action were far more hit-or-miss. Case in point: this 1969 feature film about the discovery of, and trip to, a previously unknown planet on the far side of the Sun that turns out to be a twin of our own.

Co-written and produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the film (originally titled Doppelgänger in the UK, which tells you a little more about what to expect from the newly discovered world) takes an intriguing concept and bogs it down with seemingly endless scenes of political bureaucracy and humdrum domesticity that bring any narrative momentum to a crashing halt.

Then, after wheeling out Anderson’s

Anton van Beek, Roger Crow, Steve Kirkham and John Martin check out some of the latest sci-fi and fantasy home video releases…

(admittedly exquisite) rocket models, the ‘journey’ itself turns out to be an interminable 15-minutes of slowmotion, sub-2001 psychedelic tedium.

Things finally perk up when astronaut Colonel Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes) crashes on what turns out to be a mirror duplicate of his world.

But by then the film has used up so much of its 102 minute running time that there’s not enough time to really dig into the ramifications of it all; instead concentrating on his attempt to try and get back to his own world.

Considering the same people seem to live exactly the same lives on both planets, you’d think at the very least somebody might bring up the concept of pre-determinism. But it doesn’t seem as if anybody involved in the production even considered this most obvious of issues.

It’s a shame, because there’s clearly an interesting idea at the heart of the story. But it’s one that Journey to the Far Side of the Sun has no real interest in exploring. It would have probably worked better as either a twisty Twilight Zone-style short or as an ongoing series with the time and space to tackle the central ideas in more satisfying fashion.

Still, it’s always great to see the often underrated Roy Thinnes taking centre-stage again, and the model

work (particularly the explosive climax) is an absolute blast for fans of Anderson’s meticulous crafting.

Extras: A trailer is the only extra included on this Blu-ray. AvB.

They Came From Beyond Space (1967) Blu-ray. Out now. Studiocanal.

Cert: PG

Confession time: I haven’t read Joseph Millard’s 1941 novel The Gods Hate Kansas, which served as the basis for this 1967 Amicus sci-fi B-movie. As such I can’t comment on how close Milton Subotsky’s script sticks to its apparent source material (although the title alone make me

think there may have been at least one big change). What I can say is that the film itself feels like nothing more than a bunch of reheated leftovers from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and — more pertinently — rival studio Hammer’s 1957 sci-fihorror sequel Quatermass 2.

When scientists sent to investigate some unusual meteorites that have landed in Cornwall begin acting strangely and start requisitioning vast amounts of scientific equipment, fellow boffin Dr. Curtis Temple (Robert Hutton) decides to investigate. Sneaking into the heavily guarded site, Temple makes the shocking discovery that alien beings of pure energy, carried to Earth in the meteorites, have taken over the minds and bodies of all humans in the area — including his lover Lee Mason (Jennifer Jayne).

Thankfully, the silver plate that was put in his head following a car accident just happens to make Curtis immune to alien takeover. Using this knowledge he sets about creating a device that can free his colleagues from enslavement and help kick those pesky aliens off our planet.

While handsomely helmed by the ever-reliable Freddie Francis, They Came From Beyond Space is let down by a run-of-the-mill script INFINITY 37

INFINITY REVIEWS

that only ever comes to life through occasional moments of unintended humour. Leading man Robert Hutton only serves to makes things worse, giving a performance so utterly lacking in personality that he appears to be the one who has been taken over by aliens.

Still, some fun can be had spotting sets and props handed down from the previous year’s Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. and just when it’s all threatening to get too boring, Michael Gough pops up as the Master of the Moon!

Extras: Film historian David Del Valle joins schlockmeister David DeCoteau for a curiously unsatisfying commentary that spends most of its time pointing up the film’s various problems and has very few positive things to say about it. As much as I didn’t rate the film much myself, I’d still much rather hear a commentary from somebody with some enthusiasm for the subject being discussed, which could help me look at it in a new light. A trailer is the only other extra. AvB.

the identity-swap occurs and the main plot gets underway, the story picks up a real head of steam and definitely pays off all of that careful set-up; events are revisited to hilarious effect as things spiral more and more out of control.

Extras: Critics Kat Ellinger, Jonathan Owen and Mike White provide a detailed and informative analysis of the film in their audio commentary, while a booklet essay by Graham Williamson offers further insight, including an amusing anecdote regarding a BBC2 TV broadcast of the film in 1982 benefiting from a delay to that night’s Match of the Day. A trailer is also included. AvB.

against Deathstroke had ever come to anything.

Thankfully, as messy as the storytelling may be, this second season is still fun. While some of the characters are underused, others fare better, with Dick Grayon’s story in particular paying off very well in the season finale. Meanwhile, the arrival of runaway Superman and Lex Luthor clone Conner (Joshua Orpin) and his trusty super-powered canine chum Krypto add some unexpected fun to proceedings. And best of all this season does have a definitive conclusion.

Extras: The two-disc set’s sole extra is Jason Todd: Fate by the Fans. This 12-minute featurette explores the differences between the Dick Grayson and Jason Todd incarnations of Robin, as well as looking at how this second season played with audience expectations by harking back to the notorious 1988 fan-vote that killed the character off in the comics. AvB.

TITANS: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (2020) Blu-ray. Out now. Warner Bros. Cert: 15

TOMORROW I’LL WAKE UP AND SCALD MYSELF WITH TEA (1977) Blu-ray. Out now. Second Run. Cert: 12

Having previously taken a rather more serious trip into the world of science-fiction with 1963’s Ikarie XB-1 (aka Voyage to the End of the Universe), a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Magellanic Cloud, Czech director Jindrich Polák tried his hand at something much funnier with this 1977 anti-facist time travel farce. Turning on its head the usual question about using time travel to go back and kill Hitler, Polák’s comedy finds a group of disaffected former Nazi officers conspiring to use the technology to give Hitler an atomic bomb to change the course of history.

Set in a near future where commercial time travel tourism is commonplace, the gang’s plan ultimately hinges on the corrupt pilot of one such craft who has agreed to help them. But when he chokes on a croissant on the morning of the mission and dies, his identical twin brother ends up taking his identity and becomes an unwitting accomplice — and then hindrance — to their carefully laid plans.

A cleverly plotted comedy bolstered by a superb lead performance from Petr Kostka, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea (Zítra vstanu a oparím se čajem) takes a little time to get going as it lays the foundations of its near-future setting and introduces its various characters. But once 38 INFINITY

The first season of Titans was an enjoyably sweary and violent take on the familiar DC Comics team of young superheroes: former Robin Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites), amnesiac alien Kory Anders (Anna Diop), half-demon Rachel Roth (Teagan Croft) and shapeshifter Gar (Ryan Potter). While there were some issues with pacing, the major problem was the fact that the season didn’t so much end as stop, with the powers-that-be bizarrely opting to hold that season’s final episode over to act as the first of this second run and leaving storylines hanging unresolved.

Once it gets that little anti-climactic bump out of the way, this second season is able to tell its own story, or more accurately: stories. Now dealing with a much larger cast — first season bitplayers Jason Todd/Robin (Curran Walters), Hawk (Alan Ritchson), Dove (Minka Kelly) and Donna Troy (Connor Leslie) have all been promoted to series regulars — the show becomes bogged down with too many sub-plots as various characters go off to have their own adventures.

It doesn’t help that the season’s main arc deals with the assassin Deathstroke (Esai Morales) coming out of retirement after learning the Titans have reformed. While the super villain is a key figure in the Teen Titans comics, thanks to a major role in several seasons of The CW’s Arrow and getting his own animated movie (Deathstroke: Knights & Dragons), the character feels almost as over-exposed as Joker these days. Still, it could have been even worse if the ‘Snyder-verse’ DC movie pitting Affleck’s Batman

DOOM PATROL: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (2020) Blu-ray. Out now. Warner Bros. Cert: 18

Having raved about the first season of this insane (and insanely entertaining) DC comic book show back in Infinity #31, I naturally leapt at the chance to review this second season and find out what sort of trouble its dysfunctional group of superpowered misfits were getting into now.

Thankfully, the answer is every bit as wild and unpredictable as you’d hope. From a miniaturised Cliff Steele waging a one (Robot-)man war on rodents, to an inter-dimensional Jack the Ripper, the return of a group of ageless astronauts blasted into space decades earlier, tiny creatures that infect you with bad ideas, and a shadowy Pentagon group (the SeX-Men) trying to stop an orgasmically-summoned sex demon from giving birth to baby whose first cry will kill all children, Doom Patrol continues to cut its own distinctly nutty path that is unlike anything else out there.

Among all of the madness, however, the show also manages to double-down on the emotional involvement, bringing fresh layers and depth to its characters. There are plenty of moments of genuinely affecting pathos among all of the swearing and crazy antics as the characters repeatedly confront their own past transgressions in life and missed opportunities with their own families. Central to this is the arrival of Niles Caulder’s ‘ape-faced’ daughter Dorothy, a being of unimaginable power that he has kept locked up

and infantilised for decades, fearing what would happen if she was free to grow up.

So, given all of the above and how much I enjoyed every minute of it, why would I give the season a lower rating than its predecessor?

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic halted production before the final episode was in the can, meaning the season as it exists is unfinished, leaving both narrative and emotional threads hanging. I have complete faith that the production team will pull it all together perfectly eventually, but until then it’s hard to recommend this as an entirely satisfying release in its own right.

Extras: Just the two featurettes; one worth a look, the other not so much. Doom Patrol: The Magic of Makeup (nine minutes) explores the practical effects used to bring Dorothy and some of the second season’s other creations to life.

Meanwhile, Doom Patrol Season 2: Come Visit Georgia PSA (two minutes) is essentially an ad for the State where the series is shot masquerading as a discussion of some of the locations. AvB.

SAFER AT HOME (2021) Digital.

Out Now. Signature Entertainment. Cert: 18

It seems that every other film I have been reviewing recently features a pandemic of some kind — inevitable I guess, in these current times.

Safer at Home is set 3 years into Covid and uses real life news footage to frame its story.

With video conferencing the new normal for many, and LA under curfew and effectively a police state, several young friends who were originally planning on a celebration in Las Vegas, which is no longer possible, instead have to turn to modern tech in order to party remotely with their buddies.

They play games, talk (a lot), take drugs and even argue on screen — then one of the spats goes too far, which they all witness and can’t ignore... and makes them all complicit in a crime.

What can they do? How will this play out?

Unfortunately you won’t care, as this lacks any kind of tension and the performances all feel like actors acting, playing unlikeable characters not real people you could believe in, within a contrived plot line — unlike say the similar setup in the excellent Zoom horror Host from last year, which gripped from the start and drew you in. As for the setting within the world situation we find ourselves in — this eventually has little bearing

on what transpires except to force the use of video messaging as the driver behind the story.

The main takeaway from Safer at Home — all the folks involved had really good internet connections and amazing cameras on their devices, even when driving in a car! SK. PORTAL (2021) Digital and DVD Out now. Signature Entertainment. Cert:15

When I first saw the trailer for Portal (originally called Doors) I thought this looked like an interesting sci fi movie well worth catching up with. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the forthcoming attraction offered more than the final product could deliver.

The basic over-riding premise is that all over the world strange, possibly alien, portals have appeared. Where do they lead? What is on the other side?

Story One has four students finding themselves locked in their school during a detention; their teacher leaves them to it and they decide to try and leave when the power goes out. They are then greeted by one of these strange doorways in the corridor, and tensions rise within the group as they decide whether or not to step into the unknown. It has to be said that it makes for an inconsequential start to this anthology.

Story Two is called Knockers — the disparaging name for those willing to enter these new gateways to explore and find out what has happened to the millions of people who have gone missing. With slight echoes of Arrival (2016) this builds a sense of foreboding within its freaky framework but comes over as pretentious.

The third tale — called Lamaj — has a guy living in the woods using his equipment to study the odd openings and the fourth and final story is an interview over computer with a spaced out, weird, odd expert which doesn’t work. Neither amounts to much.

Overall this is a great concept, unsuccessfully delivered, and it does feel like four disparate shorts rammed together, rather than a cohesive whole, despite its over-arching concept, with the ambition shown by the filmmakers not fully realised and each of the mini movies being minor excursions. SK. FINAL DAYS (2020) Digital and DVD. Out now. Signature Entertainment. Cert: 15

Aidan (Tyler Posey from TV series Teen Wolf) lives in an apartment block. One day he hears sirens, people panicking and being attacked by others and a helicopter falls crashing from the sky. So begins Final Days (originally called Alone).

A worldwide virus has broken out, turning ordinary folks into cannibalistic killers. Yes, you guessed it... a global pandemic. Rather sensibly

he decides the best way to keep safe is to barricade himself in his flat and keep away from those infected. It can be weird watching films of this nature when you are living through similar restrictions — though I don’t recall bumping into marauding zombies down at the local supermarket and it is true to say this was made before Covid.

As the situation worsens and he begins to run out of food he starts to vlog about his experience and the isolation. Then, in a life saving moment, he notices another survivor, a young girl Eva (Summer Spiro Westworld), in the residence opposite his.

Is this all sounding rather familiar? If you have seen the very similar (and frankly far more entertaining) Korean movie #Alive on Netflix in recent months then you have already seen this story play out. This is one those dreaded US remakes — though Matt Naylor co-wrote the original and is the solo scripter on this outing.

Director Johnny Martin is best known for his stunt work though he has overseen several films before this one including a Nicolas Cage thriller Vengeance: A Love Story (2017). There are bursts of action as Aidan ventures outside but these can’t compensate for the overall laboured and dour feeling with not even a late in the day appearance

by Donald Sutherland lifting proceedings about the mundane. SK SHORT CIRCUIT 2 (1988) Blu-ray.

Out now. 88 Films. Cert: PG

Here’s a fun release from 88 Films in a Deluxe Collector’s Edition which will appeal to the nostalgia in fans. The robot ‘Number Five’ or Johnny to his friends, returns in this cute and charming follow up. With original stars Steve INFINITY 39

Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy out of the picture we instead get returnee Fisher Stevens, brought to the fore as the mechanical marvel’s creator Ben (surname Jahveri in this film but called Jabituya in the original. Why? I have no idea).

Poor old Ben has been reduced to selling toy versions of his creation on the city streets and teams up with hustler Fred Ritter (Michael McKean — probably best known currently for Better Call Saul) when he is approached by Sandy (Cynthia Gibb who you may recognise from the TV series Fame), a deputy buyer at a department store, who asks them to create 1,000 of the mini robots. Luckily Johnny Five turns up to help and much fun then ensues as he explores the big bad city.

Penned by original writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson this is slickly directed by Kenneth Johnson (creator of the TV series V) and makes for an enjoyable if silly confection mainly pitched at kids but likely to broadly appeal.

Johnny Five is a triumph of what are now considered old school effects — I am sure the mooted remake, which has yet to appear, will be using CGI to depict the metallic centrepiece — and, once again voiced by Tim Blaney, is a convincing concoction of metal and radio controlled motors.

If you are a fan you will love this limited edition presentation from 88 Films which comes with a tranche of extras.

Alongside an 80-page booklet you get a commentary from helmer Kenneth Johnson plus an interview with him in Here’s Johnny!: Making Short Circuit 2 (16 mins); Nuts & Bolts: Writing Short Circuit 2, an interview with the screenwriters (13 mins); Storyboard Sequences with Johnson commentary (10 mins); Rehearsal videos with the animatronic star (27 mins); an amusing Gag Reel (14 mins); an archive actor profile of Fisher Stevens (3 mins) and the usual trailer and photo gallery. SK. 40 INFINITY

A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX (2020) DVD and Blu-ray Out Now. Dogwoof. Cert 15

“Took too many drugs… saw God… big f*#king deal!” was Philip K. Dick’s own flip dismissal of his life and work but his central preoccupation, that the reality we perceive is a simulation cooked up by some Higher Intelligence, has proved incredibly influential in terms of big budget films successfully adapted from (e.g. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report) or inspired by (notably the Matrix franchise) his prodigious output of hyperimaginative novels and short stories.

PKD didn’t just hit on his big theme out of the blue. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), waxing poetical, wondered if “all that we see or seem/is but a dream within a dream”. Bishop Berkeley (1685-

1753) suggested that everything and everybody is “an idea in the mind of God”. As far back as Classical Athens, Plato expounded similar notions in his Allegory of the Cave.

What Dick did was to popularise such solipsistic speculation in the mass market worlds of pulp Science Fiction and ultimately mainstream Cinema, where it resonates ever more vibrantly amid our current cultural mind-stew of conspiracy theory, fake news and “alternative facts”. Fertile, febrile ground indeed for documentarian Rodney Ascher, whose Room 237 (2012) showcased various obsessive interpretations of esoteric significances supposedly concealed deep within the fabric of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

A graduate of the Louis Theroux/Jon Ronson school of incredulous journalism (though unlike those guys he tends to stay behind the camera), Ascher’s latest doc is brim full of scientists, philosophers and Simulation Theory enthusiasts, a few of whom get right into the spirit of things by appearing as their own avatars, and the whole thing is tricked out in appropriately trippy graphics.

Thought-provoking observations alternate with personal “Road to Damascus” moments, some of which seem amenable to far more mundane explanations than the ones which are ascribed to them here. There’s a plethora of illustrative film clips, from the usual Dick-derived suspects to an eclectic selection ranging from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. The real jewel in this doco’s crown though is undoubtedly footage extracted from a lecture Phil Dick himself delivered at Metz in September 1977, entitled “If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others!” It’s fascinating stuff, well worth checking out in (what I assume is) its entirety on Youtube. Pity, though that Ascher skirts around the question of any connection between Dick’s revelatory visions and his previously noted epic intake of drugs.

Outside the rareified arena of theoretical philosophy, Simulation Theory as represented in the cinema has had a much more drastic impact on Society via such cases as that of Joshua Cooke, whose audio confessions take up much of AGitM’s second half. His escalating obsession with the Wachowski Brothers’ mind-bending cinematic offerings culminated in the murder of his adoptive parents. Ultimately he pleaded guilty despite his lawyers’ attempts to pursue “The Matrix Defence”, a new wrinkle on the hoary old insanity plea in which it’s argued that the defendant was suffering from the delusional belief that he was in or trying to shoot his way out of some kind of video game.

Depending on their personal predispositions, viewers will either take A Glitch in the Matrix with several pinches of salt or find its arguments philosophically challenging. Perhaps you’ll even start pondering whether the copy of Infinity that you’re currently reading is real or not. As long as the £4.25 you paid for it is, Brycie won’t mind. JM. LADDIE: THE MAN BEHIND THE MOVIES (2017) Out Now. Streaming.

Imagine a world without Star Wars, Alien or Blade Runner. For this fan of all three it’s a pretty bleak concept, but that’s just a trio of masterpieces that were given a green light because of one man: Alan Ladd Jnr. Without this humble Hollywood producer, chances are fantasy cinema would be a

SCIENCE FICTION & NOSTALGIA LIBRARY

very different genre to the one we know. As anyone in the industry will tell you, “Laddie” is a bit of a closed book. He’s so quiet that many A-list stars lean in just to hear what he’s saying, but you know what they say about empty vessels making the most noise.

A documentary about the great man has been long overdue, but he is a master of understatement, and his sound-bites don’t fly at

you thick and fast, unlike Mel Brooks, one of the contributors. So who better to make a film about him than his own daughter, Amanda?

Of course many will know Alan Jnr’s dad, the star of Shane and other classic movies. Alas, Alan Ladd (Snr) died at 50, and Alan Ladd Jnr was left on the cutting room floor of many reports about his father’s personal life. ALJ sought solace in movies; when he got a job in the mail room at a film

company, it was the first rung on a ladder which would see him move to London with his young family, so he could eventually return to Hollywood and become a key player.

When he set up The Ladd Company, its simple tree logo and John Williams theme would become one of my favourite idents. It preceded some of the best films of the 1980s, including Outland, The Right Stuff and Blade Runner. Just the frisson of excitement seeing that logo for the countless viewings of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece has an almost Pavlovian response for fans of Harrison Ford’s masterpiece. If you played Williams’ theme in a room full of movie buffs and asked what it was followed by, most would say the thunderous opening bars of Vangelis’ Blade Runner theme.

And possibly a few other flicks.

This documentary is bursting with great contributors, including Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Ron Howard, Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman and Mel Gibson. Perhaps best of all is Richard Donner, who has long been worthy of his own doc as one of Hollywood’s greatest TV and film directors.

These days the movie industry is dominated by bean-counters and analysts who examine every aspect of a film to ensure it appeals to the largest audience possible. Alas, it also means many of the quirks that make a good movie great are usually thrown out because an analyst thinks it won’t sell in Texas or Italy for example, so we’re left with the blandest of films.

Thankfully Laddie was never one of those guys.

He relied on his gut instinct and trusted a filmmaker. If he hadn’t, some of our best loved movies would be stuck in development hell.

He might not be the most dynamic screen presence, and his answers are almost funny in their brevity, but Laddie’s actions spoke louder than words.

This isn’t a perfect documentary by any means, but it’s from the heart, and that counts for a lot. The main thing is it sheds a spotlight on a man who might not blow his own trumpet, but thankfully a lot of A-list talent are more than happy to do so.

So next time you watch Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner or The Right Stuff, raise a glass to the man who made them all possible. Cheers Laddie. RC. INFINITY 41

‘HE FELL DOWN THE STAIRS, SARGE’

EUSTON MANIFESTO Joseph Oldham continues his look back at Euston Films’ Special Branch, the hard-hitting police series that laid the foundations for later gritty action shows such as The Sweeney and The Professionals…

n 17 November 1969, during the first week of colour broadcasting by leading ITV companies, viewers could enjoy an evening of networked crime drama. At 21:00 was ‘Short Change’, the latest episode of Thames Television’s espionage-themed police series Special Branch.

Following seamlessly from the nine blackand-white episodes already transmitted, this looked much like most other television dramas of the era – recorded on videotape in Teddington Studios using a multi-camera set-up, with location material confined to pre-filmed inserts.

But the programme which followed at 22:00 was a different matter. Produced

by Thames as standalone film for the ITV Playhouse strand, Suspect depicted an investigation by DI Barnes (George Sewell) and DS Brightwell (Roger Rowland) into a young girl’s disappearance. Unlike the studiobased style of that evening’s Special Branch, Suspect was shot entirely on location on 16mm film, effectively capturing the bleak, wintry atmosphere of its rural settings.

Film production was not, of course, unknown in British television drama. The numerous action-adventure series produced

by ATV’s wholly-owned subsidiary ITC, such Danger Man (1960-68) and The Saint (1962-69), were shot on 35mm film in feature film studio facilities. This, however, was an expensive practice only viable for series aimed at the export market. The look of 16mm film was rougher and grainier, 42 INFINITY

and less attractive to the export market (particularly the US). Its advantages, however, were in breaking out of the studio environment with smaller cameras – offering a new sense of authenticity from filming in real locations – whilst keeping costs broadly equivalent to studio production. Across most of the 1960s, 16mm film had mainly been used for news and current affairs programmes such World in Action (1963-98).

Using 16mm for drama, however, was almost unknown, limited to some pioneering efforts by director Ken Loach on the BBC’s The Wednesday Play (1964-70) including Up the Junction (3 November 1965) and Cathy Come Home (16 November 1966).

This had initially met resistance from BBC management, who feared that the rougher quality of 16mm was unsuitable for drama – Loach’s aim, however, had specifically been to capture the World in Action style for dramatic effect.

Suspect was the product of a similar climate of experimentation at Thames – a new broadcaster formed in 1968 from a merger of ABC Television and London Rediffusion – under the auspices of Controller of Drama Lloyd Shirley and Head of Film Facilities George Taylor.

Thames’ first attempt at 16mm drama had been a six-part adaptation of Aylmer Hall’s children’s novel The Tyrant King (1968), directed by Mike Hodges. Hodges had then been invited to write and direct an original filmed drama – the result was Suspect.

Though viewers watching on 17 November 1969 could not have known it, Suspect was an early stage in a movement that would, in the long term. utterly transform British television drama. Even more strangely, perhaps, it offered a preview of where Thames’ Special Branch series would end up in a few years’ time – more so even than the episode of Special Branch broadcast earlier that evening.

THE NEXT GENERATION After writing and directing another ITV Playhouse film – Rumour (2 March 1970) – Hodges moved out of television and into feature films with the gangster classic Get Carter (1971). Meanwhile, other broadcasters were increasingly exploring the possibilities of 16mm filming.

Most notably, from 1969 ITC found its export-focused business model undermined by changes to the taxation of ITV companies.

In response, ITC began to do what would once have been unthinkable – shooting new adventure series like Jason King (1971-72) and The Protectors (1972-74) on 16mm film.

But the grainier qualities of 16mm were an awkward fit for series that, in other respects, still aspired to the glamorous style of ITC’s 1960s heyday.

The financial problems of ITV companies were ultimately somewhat assuaged by the arrival of extended broadcasting hours, creating more sources of advertising revenue. This posed a new problem for Thames, however – with facilities at Teddington and Euston Road at capacity, the company struggled to accommodate the newly-increased demand for studio space.

But this was a situation where Thames’ earlier experiment in drama requiring no studio space would pay dividends. Thames soon set up a fully-owned subsidiary specifically for producing such programming – Euston Films, named after Thames’ headquarters on Euston Road.

Although similar to ITC’s position within ATV on an organisational level, the leading figures at Euston were determined that their output should have a different identity to ITC’s mid-Atlantic style. Interviewed by Manuel Alvarado and John Stewart for Made for Television: Euston Films Limited (1985), Shirley described how ‘We didn’t want to do that particularly because it seemed to us that Grade and ITC would do it a heck of a lot better than we were ever likely to, and secondly, why should we try and duplicate the work of somebody else?’

In contrast to the main operation of Thames Television, Euston would have only a small nucleus of permanent staff and no resident studio facility – instead most production staff would be employed on a freelance basis, with equipment and premises hired as needed.

In 1972 Thames’ Managing Director Howard Thomas announced plans to invest £5½ million in drama over the next two years. Euston Films would be integral to this, with an ongoing series as their first venture.

It was a rushed process – as Taylor told Alvarado and Stewart, ‘it was virtually like

L A I C E P S H C N A R B firing a starting pistol. We actually had to launch a series within six weeks’. But intensive as this was, ‘we felt that it was a unique opportunity and it had to be done.’

With little time to devise a new concept, the team chose to revive an existing format.

As Shirley recalled, ‘we wanted to narrow our imponderables in the first Euston film exercise and it seemed to us a reasonable bet to take a tape series that had enjoyed decent public acceptance on to film, so at least we would know there was some sort of audience for it.’

The format that Euston selected was Special Branch – devised by writer George Markstein to provide a realistic look at the world of national security, it had consistently occupied the JICTAR ratings top ten in two series over 1969-70. On 3 February 1973, Shaun Usher of the Daily Mail reported on a ‘new-look version of the Special Branch thriller series’ to be made on a budget of £500,000.

What is striking about his revival, however, is that – aside from the title and focus on the Metropolitan Police unit of the same name – Euston seemed entirely disinterested in the format of the earlier Special Branch. Markstein – Series Editor and leading creative force on the original – would have no involvement with the new version, despite still being active in Thames studio

Above l-r: Patrick Mower, Paul Eddigton, George Sewell and John Carson, the latter playing Phillip Weston in the episode “Sounds Sinister”

drama at this time as Series Editor on The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971-73).

Nor did any regular cast members from the 1969-70 run return – indeed, with no continuity links at all, it was not even clear whether the new series took place in the same story world.

A feature on the revival in the trade publication Broadcast (13 April 1973) described it as merely a ‘guinea pig’ to help Thames establish ‘how exactly to set about making movies’. Thames’ Public Relations Controller Donald Cullimore was quoted describing Special Branch as ‘a good, straightforward, almost “safe” formula’, chosen as ‘an experiment to find out the teething troubles around shooting a TV drama series wholly on location’.

Following this, the longer-term goal was for Euston to ‘make ninety minute films for a series embryonically called “Armchair Cinema”’ – a film-oriented companion-piece to Armchair Theatre (1956-74), Thames’ main anthology vehicle for television plays.

It was a puzzling way to treat the original Special Branch, with its loyal audience. The appeal of Markstein’s version of the series lay in what James Thomas of the Daily Express (19 August 1970) had described as its ‘firework scripts’. Reducing it to a ‘safe’

formula for a primarily technical exercise seemed to show a disregard for the very strengths of that format.

The new lead character would be the tough, rugged DCI Alan Craven who, Usher reported, was deliberately ‘picked as a contrast to Derren Nesbitt’s trendy young [DCI] Jordan in the original series’. Yet as a working-class operative in the elite world of national security, Craven, in fact, bore some resemblance to another Thames Television protagonist.

As Peter Black of the Daily Mail (5 April 1973) noted when Special Branch commenced broadcast, ‘Craven was a by no means unrecognisable relation’ to the titular character of Callan (1967-72). This spy drama had been one of the most popular thriller series last few years, with protagonist David Callan (Edward Woodward) voted ‘Most Compulsive TV Character’ by TV Times readers in 1972 – Craven was therefore wellplaced to take this mantle.

Cast as Craven was George Sewell, who had previously played the similar role of DI Barnes in Suspect. Sewell had been brought up in London’s East End, and a Thames press release noted that he ‘has probably known many villains typical of those he is out to catch in the character of Craven.’

INFINITY 43

In an interview recorded for Network’s original DVD release in 2004, Sewell wryly remarked how, from his youth, ‘I knew a fair amount about the interiors of police stations… the way coppers behave and talk, generally speaking, weren’t strange to me.’

Sewell had only entered the acting profession at the age of 35 when he had been discovered by Joan Littlewood in 1960.

His life before that had included spells as a builder, Merchant Seaman, photographer, and courier, in which capacity he learned to speak fluent French and German – his linguistic skills would be showcased numerous times in Special Branch.

As the series entered production in September 1972, only one other regular character was in place, unlike the larger ensemble of the 1969 series – DS Bill North.

Cast in this role was Roger Rowland, who had made a one-off appearance in ‘Troika’ (17 September 1969), first episode of the original Special Branch, as DCI Fielding. He had also played DS Brightwell alongside Sewell in Suspect, making the new Special Branch a reunion of this on-screen partnership.

ON LOCATION WITH THE BRANCH As it entered production, the new 16mm filmed version of Special Branch pioneered what would become standard practice for Euston productions. Short-term leases were taken on premises – in this instance a production base and editing rooms in Redan Place, and a shooting base at the former Colet Court School in Hammersmith (disused since 1968).

As part of Broadcast’s feature on the series, new producer Geoffrey Gilbert penned an article describing production of a typical episode. ‘Preliminary work on analysing the script can take place in bizarre circumstances’, he wrote, ‘such as all night sessions with story editor Ian Black in hotel rooms… Then comes the production meeting with the full team… This is when we analyse all the physical requirements of the 44 INFINITY

script, the facilities required and actors to be cast.’ This would be followed by a smaller meeting between production manager Laurie Greenwood, location manager Nick Gillot and the episode’s director to break down ‘the requirements for the shoot still further’. Most of the directors were veterans of Thames studio drama, including Mike Vardy and Dennis Vance who had worked on the original Special Branch.

Filming a typical episode of the new Special Branch took 10 working days, with around five minutes captured per day.

Locations, Gilbert wrote, could be ‘anywhere within London and the South of England’ with often ‘as many as 40 different locations in any film’. It was an ambitious venture – whilst one-off projects had been shot all on location, Broadcast noted that ‘no one has ever tried to deal with the vagaries of the of the English climate on a regular basis’.

The mode of production contrasted enormously with how videotaped dramas like the original Special Branch were made – characterised by a long rehearsal period leading up to a concentrated recording session in Teddington Studios. The new Special Branch, by contrast, had only minimal ad hoc rehearsal, with the filming order guided by location practicalities.

Sewell, nonetheless, appreciated the change, recalling that ‘it was wonderful to be out there and doing something really where it looks as if it was actually happening.

It gave us a kind of freedom – you’re a bit hemmed in in a studio.’

Even interior scenes were shot in real rooms rather than studio sets. Many of these were provided by Colet Court itself – as George Taylor remembered: ‘We used the hall to build sets in and used the whole building extensively: police station, offices, etc.’ Scenes set here, however, were kept to a minimum to focus more on exterior locations and action on the streets. Interiors were often saved for bad weather to maximise the efficiency of the 10-day schedule. The original Special Branch had implied that

Above l-r: Derren Nesbitt with Hilary Dwyer in the ‘Care of Her Majesty’ episode from the original 1969-70 run of Special Branch; Roger Rowland with George Sewell; Geoffrey (Catweazle) Bayldon with Sewell in ‘All the King’s Men’

the offices where Jordan and his colleagues were based were located inside the real Metropolitan Police headquarters at New Scotland Yard. The Euston revival instead showed the Branch operating from a fictional headquarters in Hammersmith – for this, Colet Court provided the exteriors as well as the interiors.

Finally came post-production – Gilbert described how ‘every night and morning the film rushes are viewed for quality and sound is married to the picture by editors Chris Burt and John S. Smith. But on any film there is still an enormous amount of work to be done at stages beyond these. To name but many – the dubbing of all the sound tracks and effects into the film. After this, while the production unit are out making yet another film, the finally graded prints are examined and accepted. Then we are ready for transmission.’

The practice of location filming on 16mm completely transformed the style and pace of Special Branch. As Ted Childs, who later took over as producer, described, ‘there were things we were very good at in comparison with a tape production in the TV studio – they were action and two-handed dialogue on the run. What we weren’t good at were courtroom scenes and massive dinner parties because we had no rehearsal time.’

This threatened to undermine one of the major appeals of the original series, acclaimed by critics such as James Thomas of the Daily Express (19 August 1970) for ‘its contempt for the strong-arm operator and its concentration on the brains behind the police.’ By contrast, with its hard-man protagonist, gritty locations and tendency to avoid extended conversations, the new Special Branch would lean more towards action and violence.

STRONG-ARM OPERATORS Nonetheless, the style of the new Special Branch dovetailed neatly with the emergence of a new set of headline anxieties. From

around the turn of the 1970s, groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Palestine Liberation Organization had increasingly disengaged from established political processes, turning more and more towards political violence.

International terrorism had been a relatively marginal feature of the original Special Branch, although Markstein had identified the potential it offered for storylines – in an interview with John Mellor of The Sun (16 September 1970) he had suggested that Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – notorious for her involvement in two recent plane hijackings – ‘could be straight out of a Special Branch script.’

Markstein had even claimed that ‘a script about the hijacking of a British jet from London was dropped’ from the series but – Mellor noted mysteriously – ‘he would not say why.’ On a more prosaic level, a taped studio drama was perhaps limited in its ability to depict terrorism, and the original Special Branch had tended to focus more on the intrigues of Cold War espionage.

But a few years later, the Euston revival – with a production style better geared towards action and spectacle in exterior locations – offered new possibilities for dramatising terrorist acts. And by now, the real Special Branch was increasingly involved in policing domestic urban terrorism, including bomb attacks by anarchist group the Angry Brigade from 1970 to 1972.

The Angry Brigade would, in fact, provide the inspiration for the first episode to go in front of the cameras. ‘Red Herring’ (ultimately transmitted as the sixth instalment on 9 May 1973) was written by Peter Hill – a veteran of the Met’s C1 Department (known as ‘the Murder Squad’) who had made his television writing debut on an episode of the original Special Branch.

‘Red Herring’ sees Craven and North on the trail of an anarchist group responsible for a series of bomb attacks - here shooting on London streets gives a vivid sense of terrorism as a real-world threat to public safety.

Rather different was the first episode to be broadcast –from prolific writer Roger Marshall, best known for his work on The Avengers (1961-

69) and Public Eye (1965-75), ‘A Copper Named Craven’ sees the titular character suspended and placed under investigation by Detective Chief Superintendent Pettiford (Peter Jeffrey) of Department A10 after he is framed for corruption.

The involvement of A10 alludes to controversies surrounding the Metropolitan Police, which over the preceding few years had been beset by allegations of widespread corruption. In 1972 Robert Mark had been appointed as Commissioner with a remit to clean up the force, setting up the specialist department A10 to investigate all complaints against police officers.

It is a strange choice of storyline for an opening episode – asking the audience to root for a character whom they’ve not yet had an opportunity to get to know and trust. Nonetheless, Pettiford’s inquisition helps to introduce Craven by filling in some of his background.

We learn that Craven lost both of his parents in the Second World War and went to a council school in Stoke Newington where ‘if you had two pairs of trousers you were a sissy’. Craven served as a sergeant in army intelligence, before transferring to the Special Branch at the age of 28. Whilst serving in France, he married a Frenchwoman, from whom he is now separated.

(Oddly this contradicts a press release which declared that ‘Craven is a tough, long-serving policeman who started on the beat but whose ambition was to be in Special Branch’. The alternative back-story – of beat policing rather than army intelligence – is occasionally alluded to in other episodes, perhaps a consequence of the show’s rushed development.)

Soon the suspended Craven sets out to clear his name, and the advantages his working-class background soon become apparent – he can move through environments like pubs and building sites where the dandyish Jordan would be more conspicuous, speak the vernacular, and get in touch with the criminal underworld to help find out who framed him.

But this plotline also highlighted a problem that would plague the series. On transmission, Peter Last of the Daily Telegraph (5 April 1973) complained how ‘most glaringly lacking was any specific field of “Special Branch,” a want belatedly recognised by the writer, Roger Marshall, when at the end he pinned the villainy on the IRA instead of the usual run of the mill criminal.’

Indeed, Craven eventually discovers that he

has been framed by an Irish republican seeking revenge for activities undertaken by Craven whilst serving Northern Ireland. This alluded to the UK’s most serious internal security problem – the eruption of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s. By the time the episode was transmitted on 4 April 1973, this had become more topical still –from 8 March 1973, less than a month before, the IRA had expanded its bombing campaign onto the British mainland.

‘A Copper Called Craven’ also introduces the recurring character of Pam Sloane, Craven’s girlfriend, portrayed by African American actress Sheila Scott Wilkinson. This depiction of an interracial relationship, then relatively unusual for a British television series, would attract press attention – for the TV Times (31 March – 6 April 1973) it showed how the writers had not ‘pussyfooted around what people today think, feel and do’.

Pam works as a nurse in a busy hospital – like Craven, her profession regularly sees her face intense life or death situations, and this often puts a strain on their relationship.

Another episode which showcased the new style of production to good effect was ‘All the King’s Men’ (23 May 1973) by Trevor Preston. Here computer scientist Douglas Sumner (Geoffrey Bayldon) has a breakdown, wiring up a Millbank office block with explosives and threatening to kill himself and a hostage. Although mostly set around one building, this episode deploys the mobile 16mm camera to move down corridors and up stairwells, creating a more vivid sense of the location than possible with studio sets.

Seven episodes were shot with the original Sewell-Rowland cast, but the production was soon beset by a growing feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The chemistry between Craven and North was less than compelling, the episodes often lacking a dramatic core. It wasn’t too late to change course, however, and soon a new arrival would breathe new life into the show…

EUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM One evening actor Patrick Mower was at his home in Kensington when he received a phone call from Lloyd Shirley inviting him to come out to the Royal Garden Hotel that night. Mower was known to Shirley through his leading role in the ABC supernatural drama Haunted (1967-68) and his regular part in Callan as Section agent James Cross from 1970 – coming in at the height of INFINITY 45

Above and opposite: Smooth talking ladies man Patrick Mower as fashion conscious cop DCI Tom Haggerty and Cockney actor George Sewell as old school DCI Alan Craven

46 INFINITY

Callan’s popularity, the latter role had made Mower into a household name.

Mower met with Shirley and another executive in the hotel. Here, as he later recalled in an interview for the Network DVD release, Shirley told him, ‘Patrick… we’re doing a new series, and it’s not working – we don’t think it’s working the way it is. What I want you to do is to come in, to grab the show by the balls and give it a kick up the ass.’

Cross’s role on Callan had been as a professional rival to Edward Woodward’s title character – in the words of producer Reginald Collin, ‘the young man who’s coming up’ and ‘the challenge to the old man who might be getting past it’. So, given the similarity between Craven and Callan, who better to spice up Special Branch than one of Callan’s old foils?

Mower was thus cast as DI Tom Haggerty, with his long hair and flamboyant taste in 1970s fashions bringing back some of celebrated glamour of Nesbitt’s Jordan in the original series. According to Mower, Haggerty was essentially created by Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley, a writing duo who had contributed to the original Special Branch and had been newly re-enlisted for the Euston version. The pair scripted three episodes, all of which were intended to place a significant focus on Haggerty – or at least, that was the original plan…

First was ‘Round the Clock’, designed as the character’s introduction. On transmission, this would follow ‘A Copper Called Craven’ as the second episode on 11 April 1973, coincidentally echoing how a new second episode (‘Smokescreen’) has been belatedly inserted into the original Special Branch to smooth over aspects of the series that had been rethought during production.

Haggerty is introduced as an old rival of Craven’s from the Flying Squad – another specialised Met unit whose remit focused on armed robbery and related professional crime. This background perhaps showed a desire to focus more on car action, with

Craven’s boss Commander Knight (Richard Leech) likening to Haggerty to the motor racer Jackie Stewart.

Haggerty is seconded to the Special Branch to aid Craven in round-the-clock surveillance on the residence of gold smuggler George Ford – their observation post is in an abandoned school across the road, allowing Euston to use the unconverted classrooms of Colet Court. The scenario is a pastiche of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), with the officers watching the various comings and goings of various people to try and discern what has happened to Ford.

Confined to the derelict school together for hours, the tensions between the two men come to the fore. Craven blames Haggerty for ruining an operation the last time their paths crossed, creating work pressures that ultimately ruined his marriage.

Nonetheless, over the course of the episode the two officers learn to overcome their differences and work together – by the end, Haggerty has been promoted to DCI and transferred to the Special Branch.

‘Assault’ (25 April 1973), also by Brennand and Bottomley, sees the Branch try to catch a serial mugger active around Euston Station who has attacked Haggerty’s father.

However, a third script by the duo intended to showcase Haggerty did not turn out quite as planned…

In ‘Threat’ (6 June 1973) the Branch is assigned to protect actress Sue Arden (Stephanie Beacham), recently returned from the US where she has angered many conservatives with her radical politics – now her life is now in potential danger.

The episode is largely based around a millionaire’s home and the action is split – in the finished episode, Craven is mostly based inside the house sharing many scenes with Sue, whilst Haggerty is stuck patrolling outside. Mower recalls his discovery that the original script, in fact, had featured Haggerty in the house with Sue. However, ‘I gradually found out that George Sewell… had gone in to

see the producers and said “Look, Patrick’s getting all the good lines, the good stuff here – it’s about time I had a story”.’ Panicking that Sewell might quit, they simply swapped the names round.

Yet the problem already apparent in ‘A Copper Called Craven’ was increasingly evident - the series often didn’t seem very interested in the remit of the Branch.

Haggerty and Craven often ended up investigating other types of crime on technicalities that felt crowbarred into the script. In ‘Assault’, for instance, they are assigned to track down the mugger only after he apparently attacks a senior civil servant and steals some top-secret papers.

And in ‘Threat’ they are assigned to protect Sue only because she is the daughter of an influential man in the City.

By contrast, original series creator Markstein had taken the opportunities and limitations of the national security-focused premise very seriously. In a 1970 TV Times feature by John Deane Potter, he had noted that, for instance, ‘a script about a bank robbery, however exciting, was out. For that would involve the C.I.D., which could only be dealt with in a crime series.’

Without the benefit of Markstein’s interest in intelligence, however, the Euston team often gave the sense of wanting to make a straight crime show without the obligatory spy intrigues. Still, this was somewhat countered by the continued focus on topical terrorist anxieties. In ‘Hostage’ (27 June 1973), for instance, Arab terrorists kidnap a German diplomat’s daughter and hold her to ransom. The climax takes full advantage of 16mm location filming, as the Branch mount a daring armed raid on the abandoned dockland warehouse where the terrorists are hiding.

The revamped Special Branch debuted on 4 April 1973, networked in the 9pm Wednesday evening slot where most episodes of its taped predecessor had been shown. It achieved similar ratings success, watched in 7.15 million homes and hitting seventh place in the JICTAR charts.

The all-on-location nature of the series was emphasised in publicity. ‘Not one studio corner has been furnished, not one studio light switched on,’ declared the TV Times (31 March – 6 April 1973). ‘The result is an immediacy not always found in TV police stories.’ Broadcast (1 April 1973) hailed the revived Special Branch as marking ‘a new development in the manufacture of dramatic films for television in this country’.

As transmission of the series progressed, the six episodes featuring Mower were mixed up with the earlier episodes in production to create the impression of Haggerty as a recurring presence rather than a late addition – Mower was billed as ‘Guest Artist’.

Ratings remained strong – the series never dipped out of the JICTAR top ten, with ‘Threat’ and ‘Hostage’ topping the charts.

MORE ADVENTUROUS, MORE EXCITING When the new Special Branch made its debut, Broadcast noted that in addition to this 13-episode run, a further series was already planned for later in the year

– although in the end, this would not appear on screens until early 1974. For this run, the entire production moved to Colet Court, consolidating the production base and editing rooms with the existing shooting base.

With Geoffrey Gilbert otherwise engaged, Ted Childs took over as producer. Childs’ background was mainly in documentary, including on Thames’s The World at War (1973-74), for which he had made two episodes and was lined up to make a third. But before he could get started, he received a call from Lloyd Shirley, an old friend from the early days of ABC. Childs recounted to Pat Gilbert, author of Shut It!: The Inside Story of The Sweeney (2010), that they met in a patisserie in Bayswater where Shirley asked, ‘Do you want to produce some drama?’ Although Childs had no drama background, Shirley needed a new Special Branch producer quickly and was mainly interested in Childs’ experience in shooting on 16mm film.

Childs accepted the challenge, left The World at War and set up base in Colet Court. Feeling that the Special Branch format left something to be desired, Childs soon set about making some changes – as Mower later commented, ‘I did notice when Ted Childs came in, it took on a much more adventurous, much more exciting format.’

Most obviously, Mower himself was added as a permanent cast member. Indeed, there was a return to the more ensemble-based approach of the original Special Branch more broadly. Craven and Haggerty gained a new boss, Commander Fletcher (Frederick Jaeger), whilst other new regulars included DS Maguire (Paul Antrim) and DS Mary Holmes (Susan Jameson).

Most significant, however, was Charles Henry Strand (Paul Eddington) – an aloof, aristocratic civil servant described by the TV Times (9-15 February 1974) as ‘a nasty on our side’. Strand represents the intelligence agency DI5 – a substitute for MI5 which had featured heavily in the original Special Branch but which had been mostly absent from the 1973 series.

Strand revives the role played by DI5’s Charles Moxon in the original series – sometimes straightforwardly assigning cases to the Branch, but at other times embroiling them in Machiavellian schemes, the nature of which only become apparent by the episode’s conclusion.

Strand’s addition was the most obvious indicator of how plot-lines would now be more firmly focused on the remit of the Special Branch, returning to the strengths of the original series.

This year the Branch’s assignments included protecting visiting diplomats (‘Catherine the Great’, 21 February 1974), supervising a defection (‘Rendezvous’, 21 March 1974) and hunting enemy spies responsible for smuggling secret microfilm (‘Date of Birth’, 11 April 1974).

The interest in terrorism also carried over from the previous series. In ‘Stand and Deliver’ (7 March 1974) two farm-food delivery men steal an experimental anti-tank weapon from the army and attempt to hold the country to ransom. One of the villains was portrayed by Dennis Waterman, whose association with Euston was set to grow over the coming years – indeed Mower recalled feeling ‘that they were testing Dennis at the same time’ for another project…

Craven’s back-story is revisited in ‘Entente Cordiale’ (4 April 1974) – here, Craven’s ex-wife Claudia seeks his assistance when she becomes embroiled with the terrorist activities of the

remnants of the French paramilitary organisation, the Organisation Armée Secrète.

Yet even amidst the glamour of espionage was a new focus on gritty realism. A press pack proclaimed the 1974 series to have ‘a hard authenticity, with believable characters in realistic situations, filmed entirely on location against real London backgrounds that few foreign tourists get to see.’ Favourite locations included ruined warehouses and car-wreckers’ yards – Sewell commented that ‘it was nice to see that it was getting maybe a bit more direct, a bit more hard’.

The second run of the new Special Branch debuted with ‘Double Exposure’ on 14 February 1974. This time networked transmission was moved to Thursdays, with the first two episodes shown at 9pm and subsequent instalments at 8:30pm. But although ratings proved as high as ever, this would prove the last viewers would see of Special Branch in any incarnation.

Some thought was apparently given to a spin-off project for Haggerty – Mower recalled that ‘they were going to take Tom Haggerty out

of Special Branch at the end and he was going to go off and become a journalist’.

He claimed an hour-and-a-half film script was even written by the character’s creators Brennand and Bottomley, but in the end this was never produced. This may have been connected to Euston’s long anticipated move into television films, with the Armchair Cinema anthology commencing production towards the end of filming on Special Branch. Six films were produced, with some considered as pilots for potential series, although in the end only one was developed further - Regan (4 June 1974)

by Ian Kennedy Martin, who had also contributed the Special Branch episode ‘Intercept’ (18 April 1974) in the same year.

Based around a duo of Flying Squad cops, DI Jack Regan (John Thaw) and DS George Carter (Dennis Waterman), Regan was swiftly developed into a replacement for Special Branch with Childs carrying over as Producer. The new series would be named The Sweeney (1975-78). Markstein had once been firm that the premise of Special Branch ruled out scenarios like bank robberies – now, however, national security was pushed to the margins and armed robbery was the archetypal crime. Refining the 16mm production style, The Sweeney soon surpassed Special Branch in popularity, becoming Euston’s main flagship series. Armchair Cinema, meanwhile – once anticipated as the more prestigious venture – fell by the wayside after 1975.

Perhaps The Sweeney was essentially the series that Euston had wished to make all along – had they not rushed into reviving Special Branch with little planning. Even Regan’s trademark line, ‘get your trousers on, you’re nicked!’, had been said first by Haggerty in ‘Date of Birth’.

Still, despite its uneven development, the 1973-74 Special Branch remains a television landmark – establishing Euston Films and making crime series central to the company’s output. By the end of the decade, 16mm filmed genre series had spread across British television landscape, from London Weekend Television’s The Professionals (1977-83) to the BBC’s Shoestring (1979-80) – all building on the foundations laid by Euston’s pioneering venture.

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PLAYING THE

I

t was the debate that ran wild across the school playgrounds of the late-1970s.

It didn’t matter if it was superheroes, Gothic monsters, or dinosaurs—who would win in a fight? Who would triumph if Superman fought Batman? Who would be left standing if Dracula clashed with Frankenstein?

What would happen if a T-Rex tackled a Brontosaurus? There was only one way to find the answers: the Top Trumps card game!

The simplicity of the game play is what made Top Trumps an ideal playtime pursuit.

A themed card deck (usually of 30 cards in the modern game) would be split evenly between two-to-four players. Whoever went first would look at their first card and then select the statistics from a list of usually four that they were strongest in—each card would break down a character’s attributes into such topics as Strength, Endurance, Intelligence, Ferocity, or Wisdom. Usually, the highest number wins and the winner collects their opponents cards (sometimes, the lowest number is the better one, as in the time a sprinter might take to complete a specified distance). Gameplay continued until one player held all (or the majority) of the cards—or until the school bell rings!

Brian J. Robb takes a trip back to the playgrounds of the 1970s where the gruesome Horror Top Trumps card game was all the rage…

48 INFINITY

FOUR INTO ONE Although its mainstream popularity began in the late-1970s, Top Trumps has a longer history. Fittingly for a concept sometimes used as an tool educational tool, its original incarnation was the game Quartets, designed as an educational activity for children that could easily be played anywhere. Quartets

CARD was first packaged as a game system in the 1960s by Austrian company Piatnik. Founded in 1824, Piatnik had a 170 year history of card game creation. One branch of the company could trace its history of creating card games back to the 12th century, with examples of their ancient playing cards discovered in Korea and China.

Quartets was a variation on the traditional playing card system, although instead of 52 cards the game featured only 32 cards, split into eight suits with four cards in each (hence the name). The rules were similar to ‘Go Fish’, but Piatnik innovated by producing themed card decks and adding statistical information to fuel game play, elements which would become the core of the eventual Top Trumps brand.

As the 1970s dawned, German firm Altenburg-Stralsunder built upon Quartets to create Ace Trumps, a line of statistics-driven cards aimed at boys and themed around military and transport subjects. The idea in Quartets was to collect four sets of four cards by ‘trumping’ your opponent (producing cards of a higher value). In the Ace Trumps variation, the idea was to win all the cards by beating the statistical details held on your opponents’ cards.

The hidden secret behind this card game was the educational intention—while playing against friends and fielding armaments or vehicles that had higher statistics than your opponent, the idea was you’d be learning something through competitive game-play.

For almost a decade, Ace Trumps ruled the roost, introducing extra cards like the Super Trump that beat any other card, regardless of the data it contained. They also introduced

football style yellow and red cards, which forced opponents to hand over their cards.

Ace Trumps also hit on the idea of promoting their game through competitions with astonishing prizes. In 1976, a flight on the newly-introduced Concorde was offered as a competition prize—if you didn’t win the flight, there was the compensation of a giant Concorde poster in return for proof-ofpurchase credits from card game packs and the princely sum of 18p postage.

The following year, a trip to see the Italian Grand Prix in Monza was on offer, which required contestants to answer five multiple choice questions and then design a futuristic Formula One racing car; again the losers compensation of a huge poster (this time of racing cars) was available.

The success of the Ace Trumps line saw several competing companies jump on the Trumps card game bandwagon. Ace had produced several themed variations including Sporting Aces, Mini Trumps, and National Football League (NFL) Fact Packs.

Vehicle sets from Piatnik included cars, motorbikes, Formula One, Hot Rods, jets, and ships. Two German companies—Dubreq (inventors of that other 1970s icon the Stylophone!) and FX Schmid—streamlined the game play and were the first to use the now universally recognised Top Trumps brand name.

Their first series in 1977 covered such subjects as military vehicles (tanks and planes), cars, and dragsters. Aimed at boys who’d previously memorised football team statistics, the games were an instant school playground hit. Kids would play against each other, valuable cards would be swapped, and some attempted to collect sets in subjects they were interested in.

They also introduced the idea of

‘redemption sets’—by collecting tokens in packs available in shops, players could send off for exclusive packs only available through mail order. It would be this themed card set approach that would eventually catch on and give the Top Trump card games their longevity. The ever-diversifying list of themes kept the game alive, and the expansion into film and television sets (with tie-ins to specific worldwide franchises) helped to secure the game through to the present day.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR! Aside from mundane sporting subjects like cricket, football, and the Olympics, the most memorable of the Dubreq sets were Horror, Prehistoric Monsters, and Space. Each of these was specifically designed to attract the attention of monster kids and fans of such screen science fiction as Star Wars (1977) and Doctor Who (1963-89).

The first pack of the Horror set was notoriously fronted by a painting of Dracula that was clearly based upon a promotional image of Christopher Lee from one of the Hammer movies. There was a second Horror set (known as the Devil Priest set; an original can cost up to £150 in ‘excellent’ condition on eBay!) that featured a cover card of a haunting hooded figure of death wielding a scythe in front of a spooky castle and a cloud covered moon. The Prehistoric Monsters (aka Dinosaurs) cover image was—of course— that of a rampant T-Rex, every kid’s favourite dinosaur. This is all kids of the 1970s had on the dinosaur front, this and Ray Harryhausen movies, long before the likes of Jurassic Park.

The Space sets came in two versions.

Rockets was themed around launch vehicles and missiles, while Space Craft covered everything from Soyuz to Apollo to the then-proposed Space Shuttle and various ‘intergalactic space craft’, often knock offs of ships seen in movies and television. The ‘Space Colonies’ card shamelessly featured the Death Star from Star Wars! These were the card sets kids of the 1970s loved, getting

away from the mundane vehicles (fire engines, for goodness sake) and into the realms of the imagination.

It was the somewhat gruesome Horror set that finally allowed imaginative 1970s ‘monster kids’ to set fantasy creatures like Dracula, Frankenstein or the Wolf Man against each other in statistical battles.

Top Trumps launched in the UK in late1976, early-1977 with packs priced at just 50p each, within most kids’ pocket money reach.

There were eleven packs in the first series, and the game quickly took off. That resulted in a wider range of sets being produced, taking in such subjects as pets and history, sparking off a collector mentality among some players. Top Trumps became the Pokemon of its day—gotta catch ‘em all! The range quickly expanded, but the Horror set is worth looking at in greater detail, because if you were any kind of monster kid in 1978 when it launched, this was the must-have item. The gruesome illustrations alone were enough to upset your mother!

No-one seems to know who it was that came up with the idea for the Horror Top Trumps set—suitably, this arcane knowledge has been lost to the mists of time... Equally, the people responsible for the distinctive artwork, much of it mimicking well-known movie stills, are just as mysterious. Whether it was one artist, a team, British based or abroad (maybe Spain, where much of the British comic book art of the 1970s originated) has escaped the attention of even the most dedicated of internet sleuths. The Hypnogoria website notes that the sets are simply weird, appearing to have been ‘flung together by some gibbering madman’! It is altogether suitable that the Horror Top Trumps card set should have appeared almost from nowhere with no-one taking responsibility!

Where the Horror sets innovated was in the area of statistics. Prior to these more fanciful themed sets (and it was the same with Dinosaurs), the stats were based on real world things—it was a simple task to decide how fast various cars went, or the fire-power of a particular model of tank. How, though, could the key characteristics be determined for such fictional monsters as Death, Zoltan, or The Slime Creature?

It was easy enough to give Death a Physical Strength rating of 99, but does it/ he deserve the top marks of a Horror Rating of 100?

Opposite: The artwork may not have been classic, but the monsters featured in this popular Top Trumps set certainly were!

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Whoever was behind devising the statistics gave it their best shot, but while some of the numbers seem reasonable enough guesses, others are just wild flights of fantasy.

The great thing about the artwork used in the Horror sets is how blatantly they disregarded copyright and simply drew upon movie stills, many of them from the 1970s itself. Dracula (Fear Factor 81) is, of course, based on Hammer-era Christopher Lee, while Phantom of the Opera (Killing Power 74) is clearly based upon a still from The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) starring Vincent Price! Strange, then, that the Lord of Death (Horror Rating 83) is modelled after a still from 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney.

Chaney turns up again on the card for The Mad Magician, with art based upon a still from the notoriously missing movie London After Midnight (1927), and in his unmasked Phantom guise for The Hangman (Killing Power 78; surely that should be higher, after all he is a hangman!). That makes Chaney the most frequently used fear-film star in the Horror Top Trumps set.

Other cards based on movie stills include The Freak (Fear Factor 84), based on the monster from Hammer’s The Reptile (1966); The Thing (Fear Factor 81) is a sketch of the rat-bat-spider-crab monkey monster from Ib Melchior’s Angry Red Planet (1952), without the enhancement of CineMagic!

Looking further afield than Hammer, the Prince of Darkness (Killing Power 94) was based upon a still from Japanese movie Onibaba (1964). Some went even further back in time, with The Ghoul (Horror Rating 82) being a knock off of the creature from The Monster Maker (1944), and the ManEating Plant (Physical Strength 96) being the spitting image of the pretzel-like invading extra-terrestrials from I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)! The rest of the cards came from the warped imagination of the set’s creator, including such would-be horror 50 INFINITY

icons as Granite Man (Killing Power 89), Zetan Warlord (Fear Factor 88), Maggot (Physical Strength 76), Circus of Death (Fear Factor 85), and The Risen Dead (Horror Rating 93).

Many of these drew from standard ‘horror’ tropes—slimy crawly creatures, the undead and zombies, clowns, and whatever the Zetan Warlord was meant to be... They really were scraping the bottom of the barrel with the card for the Mad Man (Fear Factor 64), however. King Kong, a poorly drawn giant monkey (based on a movie still from Konga, 1961), rates a 100 for Physical Strength, while that perennial the Vampire Bat reaches only 45 on that score, poor thing.

The Devil Priest set was a similar story, with many of the card images sourced from movie stills. Suitably enough the Colossus (Physical Strength 90) is ripped from The Colossus of New York (1958), while The Living Skull (Fear Factor 58) bears an uncanny resemblance to Vincent Price’s Witchfinder General (from the 1968 Michael Reeves movie). The Creature From Outer Space (Killing Power 76) is none other than the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth (1955), while Lizard Man is in fact the title character from It! The Terror Beyond Space (1958)—the same source was used for the Gargantua card!

Dr. Syn (Horror Rating 73) looks more like Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu than the character played by Patrick McGoohan in the Disney movie Alias the Scarecrow (1963). The Fire Demon (Horror Rating 77) is in fact the Devilish Daemon Azal from the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who serial The Daemons (1971).

There’s more Doctor Who inspiration, as the creature inhabiting the Venusian Death Cell (Horror Rating 98) is clearly a Sea Devil from 1972’s Doctor Who tale The Sea Devils. No wonder these two Horror Top Trump card sets made such an impact—they mined various fantasy and horror creatures that were deeply embedded in kid’s psyches from both teatime terrors and late night double-bill viewing of scary creature features!

Above left: It’s easy to see where these Top Trumps illustrators drew their inspiration from.

The Hangman and The Lord of Death were obviously based on scenes from The Phantom of the Opera and The Phantom of the Opera card was actually The Abominable Dr. Phibes!

FANTASY ISLAND Among the more imaginative Top Trumps card sets the nearest rival to the Horror set for the attention of 1970s kids was the one simply labelled Fantasy. This allowed for a wider range of creatures and monsters than Horror, meaning not all those included had to be evil or scary. The Fantasy set featured such characters as Mermaid (whose Skill rates 90, but her Fear Factor is a mere 10), Wizard (Magic Power 99, naturally; the Necromancer goes one point higher with a Magic Power rating of 100), and Dragon (Fear Factor 99).

While the Horror cards had the very specific character of Dracula, the Fantasy set included the more generic Vampire (Fear Factor 97). Rather than The Risen Dead, the Fantasy set offers the Zombie (Skill and Strength a mere 20, but a Fear Factor of 90).

The Fantasy set goes further afield than Horror into wider mythology to pull out such Tolkienesque creatures as Water Troll (Magic Power 5), and Wraith (Fear Factor 92), and the Demon (the only card to score 100 across all stats: Strength, Skill, Magic Power, and Fear Factor).

The set hits a mythological low, though, with the seemingly dull character of the King, although both his Strength and Skill ratings are 100, while Magic Power rates 98 and his Fear Factor is 90, making him a more powerful and useful card than his benevolent image alone might suggest.

By 1982, games company Waddingtons

TRUMP MEETS HITLER IN CARDS CRISIS!

had taken over Dubreg and hugely widened the range of Top Trumps packs available. They took the Top Trumps concept through the 1980s and into the 1990s. By that time, there were a wide range of not-quite Top Trumps style knock-off card games looking for a piece of the playground card game action. One notorious set was produced in 1978 by Jotastar Games—Doctor Who and the Legendary Legion Trump Card Game! This set of 40 cards featured Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, alongside a batch of Heroes and Villains. The Villains all came from the television series, including the Cybermen, Sea Devils, Autons, and many more. Notably missingin-action were the Daleks, probably because Dalek creator Terry Nation was rather litigious! Somehow, though, Dalek creator Davros did manage to make the cut...

Weirdly, rather than use Doctor Who companions or the UNIT officers like the Brigadier in the Heroes category, Jotastar selected random folks from history. The Doctor was able to call upon the aid of such historical or fictional good guys as Davey Crockett, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Samson, and Sherlock Holmes, among others.

There were a total of three statistics for all the characters: Mental Ability (the Doctor scores a perfect 10 here; Sherlock Holmes only rates 9), Special Powers, and Weapons. In this games, the TARDIS counts as a hero! It appears that 1975’s Doctor Who Monster Book was a handy reference for whomever threw this set together! Jotastar also produced an equally dodgy Marvel Superheroes Trump Card Game set.

Horror and fantasy were

The ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States in 2016 caused a crisis for the Top Trumps game brands. As the new resident of the White House was branded ‘toxic’, Winning Moves Top Trumps decided to stick with their own well-known brand.

‘We won’t be changing our brand name,’ was the pithy comment from one spokesperson. Others, however, were not so gungho. Environmental games company Eco Action Games (retaining the educational origins of the Quartet games) produced Eco Action Trumps. When the great orange puffball took over the US, they changed the name to Eco Action Toppers to get away from the Trump image.

‘It’s a branding disaster for us,’ said Eco Action Games—who sold 50,000 game packs—to BBC News. ‘The awful irony of a positive, educational, eco-themed game bearing that man’s name became just too much for us to bear.’ They decided to give away the remaining stock of their Trump card game sets.

Another Top Trumps style game about dictators (not Donald Trump this time) made the news in 2011. German games maker Weltquartett released a Tyrants themed card game, featuring Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Idi Amin (we’re sure Trump would have been in there if it’d been after 2016). The statistics included an estimate of how many people each dictator had killed. The one that got them in trouble was, of course, Tyrant #1, Adolf Hitler.

The company was investigated by prosecutors in Nuremberg over the use of a swastika on the Hitler card—such imagery is illegal in Germany. The law states the swastika, as used by the Nazis, is a ‘symbol of an unconstitutional organisation’ and so cannot be displayed in public. The Top Trump card game is known in German as ‘Die Blitztrompf’, bringing us right back to Trump!

particularly well served by new collectable card game ranges that followed Top Trumps from the likes of Games Workshop (Citadel Combat Cards, from 1988) and the phenomenally successful Magic: The Gathering (from 1993) card games.

In 1992, Winning Moves replaced Waddingtons as the owner of the original Top Trump brand.

They began a new, far more expansive era for the card game. As well as continuing to feature old favourites like Military Hardware, Supercars, and Sharks, Winning Moves branched out to release sets inspired by comic books, television shows, and franchise movies.

Just as LEGO expanded in the same period by latching on to such properties as Star Wars and Harry Potter, so too did Top Trumps. This gave rise to a plethora of licensed Top Trumps games, with Harry Potter spawning six individual sets, Star Wars scooping five sets, Doctor Who working up a mere four sets, and The Lord of the Rings supporting three sets (appropriately enough for a trilogy).

The big winners were comic books. Alongside sets for such British comic favourites like the Beano, it was Marvel’s Super Heroes and Villains Top Trumps sets that

claim the top title with around 20 packs. Other TV shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons (four sets), and even Only Fools and Horses were given the Top Trumps treatment in the 1990s. Footballers and politicians even got in on the act.

Although kids had always done it, with cardboard and crayons, there is now a fullyapproved App that allows fans to produce their own Top Trumps card sets, but these new-fangled digital creations are not a patch on the very tangible nature of the originals.

‘Retro’ editions of the two Horror sets and the Fantasy set have been made available (and been snapped up by those now 50-something 1970s school-kids). These ‘retro’ sets are all very well, but nothing will ever recapture the original excitement of those Horror and Fantasy Top Trumps sets of 1978, mainly because the kids who first played with them will never be 10 again (no matter how young-atheart they remain).

Visit the splendid blog at hypnogoria.com for a insanely detailed card-by-card discussion of the Horror Top Trumps card sets.

INFINITY 51

DICK EMERY (1915-1983)

“Hello Honky Tonks Ooh he was awful… awfully funny! Robert Ross celebrates the life and laughter of the late, great Dick Emery…

F

rom the summer of 1963, and for nigh-on twenty years, master of comic disguise Dick Emery was one of the biggest stars on British television. Week in and week out The Dick Emery Show was like The Beano or The Dandy comic come to flesh. Audiences, in their tens of millions, not only expected but demanded the same crazy characters: the toothy vicar; the crew-cut bovver boy; the camp crusader; the bespectacled spinster; the buxom bombshell. All of them were loveable grotesques forever cemented in the consciousness of a nation.

And all of them were Dick Emery.

Richard Gilbert Emery wasn’t quite born in a trunk, but he was destined to be a music-hall turn. His parents were the popular variety double act of Bertha Callen and Laurence Emery. Less than a month after coming into the world, young Dick was picked up and taken on tour, as often as not being carried on stage as an audience-pleasing soft prop. This fragmented life on the road came to an end when Callen and Emery split as both performing and life partners. Dick was eight years old, and remained in the care of his mother.

Bertha well and truly brushed the dust of show business off of her highbutton boots, and the by-now stage-struck Dick was forced into a myriad of menial jobs before being called up to serve with the Royal Air Force.

Along with a whole generation of performers, Dick found World War II duties led to performing. Ralph Reader’s Gang Show was a hot-bed of talent, which recruited Emery as impressionist, entertainer, and clown. Most importantly, the all-male units necessitated the beginning of his celebrated female impersonations. Vera Thin, a warbling morale-booster not a million miles from Forces’ Sweetheart Vera Lynn, became a much-requested characterisation. The laughter and applause became the fuel for Emery’s comedic engine. Inventive, abstract, and mischievous, these outrageous camp concerts were the blueprint for his entire career.

He was also keeping the best of company. In the same unit was Tony Hancock; while the fledgling Goons were all demobbed conquering heroes returning to Britain in the hope of spreading their unique brand of surrealist mayhem. As a result, Emery chalked up several memorable cameo roles opposite Hancock on television, and wallowed in the creative atmosphere of the Grafton Arms pub, where the hive-mind of The Goon Show foregathered.

GOONISH HUMOUR Emery’s greatest embrace of Goonish humour was the short film The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956), co-starring opposite Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, and squeezing in a gallery of idiotic creations, from raffish scoundrel to grinning loon. On BBC Television, Emery became an indispensable member of Michael Bentine’s convention-bending sketch

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show It’s a Square World. And, in 1960, Bentine, Emery and the gang of television funsters even took to the West End stage, starring in the satirical Don’t Shoot We’re English, at the Cambridge Theatre. The shadow of militaryinspired lunacy was long and fruitful.

Still, it was on commercial television that Emery first became a comedy star.

He may have been a late addition to the khaki ensemble cast of Granada’s pivotal situation comedy The Army Game, but his cheeky, greedy, and authority-baiting Private ‘Chubby’ Catchpole became instantly popular. Not only that but the role gave him a lifelong catchphrase: ‘Hello Honky Tonks!’, one which would serve his flamboyantly-clad happygo-lucky Clarence on The Dick Emery Show. Throughout the sixties, Dick Emery was attracting huge viewing figures, making him one of the most popular and beloved comedians in the country.

Still, the small screen wasn’t enough. He had worked with friend and contemporary Peter Sellers often enough. Now he wanted to *be* Peter Sellers, and not just where the fast cars and fast women were concerned.

Emery yearned to be a film star.

The swinging sixties and the saucy seventies indulged him in memorable and intriguing assignments. Emery was a cynical used car ownership manager in the bright and breezy romp The Fast Lady (1962), and he joined the criminal gang of mastermind Sid James for the breakneck heist caper The Big Job (1965). Emery even hung out with the beautiful people, lending his voice to fast-talking intellect Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D. - the Nowhere Man - for the splendidly spaced- out Beatles animated feature Yellow Submarine (1968).

There was the champagne guzzling Harry in Alastair Reid’s controversial Baby Love (1969), and Mr. Bateman, the ever-demanding hotel guest, in Silvio Narizzano’s jet-black film adaptation of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970).

Emery’s film choices were never straightforward or easy: as an actor, seeming to relish getting as far away from his television audience’s expectations as possible.

Annoyingly then for Emery it was the dreaded drag characters that the people wanted. Utilised at their best in the Vox Pop on-street interview segments that had been a favourite element in his show from the beginning, there was man-hungry, up-tight brunette Hettie, and, far in-front of all the rest, there was Mandy, the over-sexed, innuendo-enriched, but ultimately coy flirt. She quickly became Emery’s best-loved character and, as a result, something of an albatross around his neck. He didn’t see himself as a female impersonator but as a character comic. Still, audiences bayed for Mandy, with her shocked reactions, seductive smirks, and that killer catchphrase: ‘You are awful, but I like you!’.

The oft-quoted line became such a large part of Emery’s legend that his 1972 big screen starring vehicle was called Ooh... You Are Awful. For all intents and purposes a feature film spin-off of The Dick Emery Show, the slap and tickle premise allowed our comic of a thousand faces to wallow in

BRIAN J.ROBB

s!”

PAST MASTERS OF COMEDY

Dick Emery in his early days at the BBC and below some of his classic comedy grotesques - which included the toothy Vicar, First World War veteran, Lampwick, Hettie; the frustrated spinster, Gaylord, the effeminate swinger who referred to everyone as ‘Honky Tonk’, upper-class tramp, College, and Mandy, the brassy blonde who always misunderstood the street interviewer

the familiarity of his television characters, all as part of a plot to ascertain the serial number of a security safe containing ill-gotten gains. Typical of the era, the all-important digits were tattooed on the rear-ends of a clutch of dolly-birds. Emery’s subtle performance lurking behind the wacky characterisations, a solid supporting cast, and a suspenseful sub-plot makes for a thoroughly enjoyable film. But it failed to make it big internationally - despite the dropping of the Anglo-centric title in favour of Get Charlie Tully, for the American market: it’s very pastiche of Get Carter signalling the gangland conventions at work here.

NATIONWIDE POPULARITY Big screen roles would take the obscure and obtuse path to the ramshackle crime comedy Find the Lady, but throughout the seventies The Dick Emery Show continued to reign supreme on British television.

Moreover, Emery capitalised on his nationwide popularity. 1973 was his year. Summer season and pantomime kept him busy on stage, while his gallery of comic characters were utilised for the long-playing Dick Emery Sings, from Pye Records. An earlier album, under the same Dick Emery Sings title, had showcased the star’s hitherto under-used tenor voice. Emery as author revealed the inspirations and influences for his characters in the book, Dick Emery In Character - described as a kind of living scrapbook.

By 1979 there was even Dick Emery’s Cookbook.

With Emery’s own complete understanding of the characters and an army of brilliant scriptwriters in his writing room, the quality and quantity of episodes over the years was remarkably consistent.

Boredom did strike though, and in the early eighties the essence of the Ooh... You Are Awful film was cleverly embraced for television.

Instead of a petty crook, Emery Presents... cast Dick as an ineffectual detective, Bernie Weinstock.

Jewish, dogged, and hilarious, this central character was supported by Emery’s expected and beloved cast of characters, as well as fresh-faced assistant Barry Evans, and ever- cheerful Patsy Rowlands. What a company.

‘Legacy of Murder’, broadcast in early 1982, was followed by a Bernie Weinstock crime sequel ‘Jack of Diamonds’. Sadly, the broadcast of this series was delayed due to Emery’s death, in January 1983.

Dick Emery’s legacy of laughter has been rather dismissed of late, with any celebration justified with a half-hearted apology for the perceived sexism in his work. Still, the tide seems to be turning.

A monumental talent as a character comedian and a master of sketch comedy, his influence on subsequent generations is clear, from The Fast Show to Little Britain.

Twenty years ago, Steve Coogan’s chameleon ability to morph into a glut of comic characters urged one enthused critic to dub him the ‘new Peter Sellers’.

Coogan himself countered this, seeing himself as the ‘new Dick Emery’. There was a modesty at play here, but also an understanding of Emery’s important place in the history of television comedy in particular.

Dick Emery was a huge fish in a relatively small pond. He was a hard-working, hard-living performer, forever lacking in confidence and distrustful of praise, who channelled every ounce of nervous energy into his work. The undiluted laughter he generated is still as powerful as it ever was.

Visit the website of Robert Ross, Britain’s Comedy Historian, at www.robertross.co.uk INFINITY 53

MAKING SCREEN MAGIC

L 54 INFINITY

“Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile”. hat was the official acronym for Tiswas, the anarchic kiddies programme that visited endless muck-based atrocities on the denizens of Studio 3 at Birmingham’s ATV Centre from 5 January 1974 to 3 April 1982. Of course the word ‘tiswas’ actually means a state of confusion or commotion, and that was a more appropriate description.

Most famously hosted by future Who Wants To Be a Millionaire legend Chris Tarrant it featured the young Lenny Henry and occasionally Jim Davidson together with Bob Carolgees and his puppet, Spit the Dog. John Gorman, former member of 1960s cult band The Scaffold, was also in regular attendance.

Like its cleaner BBC counterpart, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Tiswas had a running order but no script. It was a seemingly random stitch-together of competitions, film clips and pop promos, just about held together by sketches and links from the cast. The show also regularly featured spoofs of BBC children’s programming.

One regular feature of Tiswas was The Cage wherein initially the child audience, and later their fathers, were confined and periodically doused in water (one spin-off of the series was the hit The Bucket of Water Song, performed by the Four Bucketeers), whilst the series was also frequently visited by the Phantom Flan Flinger, who would throw flans around the studio at all and sundry.

Both Tarrant and the Flan Flinger would take great delight in trying to ‘flan’ cameramen who would go to great lengths to avoid being hit.

Tiswas was generally an all-boys affair until the arrival of Sally James, who quickly gained viewers among the dads as well. In her “Almost Legendary Pop Interviews,”she interviewed many famous musical acts including Elvis Costello, Sting, The Clash, Motörhead, and The Pretenders.

We were delighted that Sally could find time to chat to us about her days on Tiswas, and as you can see this lively and still beautiful lady does love a chin-wag!

They blew up Bernard Manning, made St Winifred’s School Choir cry and lifted children of under eight by their ears.

It was all part of the fun in Tiswas, as legendary presenter Sally James recalls to Simon Hooper…

Your father was a highly regarded film set photographer. Is that where your interest in becoming an actress first developed?

Yes, my father worked on many, many films. He took that iconic still of Ursula Andress coming out of the water in Dr. No. You could say I was bought up in a bit of a showbiz world, although my over-riding memory of my dad is that he was always away on location.

One of the highlights of my childhood was he did A Hard Day’s Night, and I was allowed to go to the film set in Twickenham, which was incredible. I think I was 13, and I was virtually mobbed by the crowd outside who were so jealous that I was being allowed in and actually getting to meet the Beatles.

So yes, I had a great childhood.

Come on dads, if you didn’t fancy Sally James back in the day you must have had a secret stash of wrestling mags and Village People albums. She is seen here with her Tiswas pals Chris Tarrant, Bob Carolgees, Bob Monkhouse and Frank Carson

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I’m an only child and we were a very close-knit family. There was a lot of time with me and my mum on our own but we did go out to locations.

I really wanted to be a ballet dancer and I went to the Arts Educational School, which at that time was where the Intercontinental Hotel now is in Piccadilly. But I wasn’t really tall enough and when I was just coming up to 16 my dad was doing a film called To Sir with Love and they wanted all of the same kids in the classroom. I went and saw the director James Clavell and he gave me a small part. It wasn’t a speaking part but I was in the whole movie because every time you went to the classroom I was there.

It was a learning curve really, you learnt a lot about how things worked and so from that it was a sort of a springboard for me to go into acting.

And I did act for many years. I did a long running soap called Castle Haven, I did Z-Cars all sorts of stuff, and then, in the mid 70s, London Weekend Television were looking for a presenter.

What they wanted to do was liven up Saturday mornings. At that time you had things like Space 1999 and the in-vision announcer between those programmes would say, “Coming up is...” They decided they wanted to elongate those links leading in to a programme. It was so done on the cheap. It was literally one locked-off camera. So although I loved acting I wanted something that I could get more involved in and when you’re presenting you are.

It’s a different thing completely. I went for many auditions and I got that job. So every Saturday morning I’d be there with my locked-off camera between the programmes and if I had an interview it would be me turning here to the person next to me. They just had the one shot. Eventually it evolved into two cameras in the ‘On the Ball’ studios and recorded it on a Friday night. But Saturday Scene really took off because it was in London so it was easy to get good guests. And that was my launch pad, if you like, until I was asked to join the madness up the motorway that was Tiswas. So that’s a very long, long answer to your question.

Did you have to audition for Tiswas?

Was there much competition for the role?

When I was asked to join them I’d become quite well known, well, not well known but sort of well known in London. But they had a new producer who took over at Tiswas and he looked at it and said, “This is ridiculous.

It’s just far too male oriented.” The boys were badly behaved, still are probably. “We need a female presence in here”, and he knew what I was doing down in London. This was Glyn Edwards, the producer,

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so he asked if I would go up and meet the lads and they asked me to join, basically.

It’s rumoured that Chris Tarrant was not happy about a woman joining what was an all-boys club. Is that true?

Oh yes, he said: “What do we want a girl up here for? That’ll ruin all the fun,” and he was against it. But Chris is a great guy and we got on like a house on fire. I sort of walked up and met them all and thought, “This is completely different from anything I’ve done.” It was completely mad and wild, and nothing was more than 3 minutes long.

It was off the scale of madness but they were lovely people and he grudgingly agreed to Glyn having a girl on. So I was the one kind of keeping the boys in check, and Chris would forever be saying “Jamesie, what on earth happens next?”

It was great fun though and all these hundreds of years later people still want to hear about it.

Trevor East wasn’t around for too long before he moved on and went behind the scenes, Why did he leave?

His major love was always sport. He was sport mad, and although he’d fallen into Tiswas he had his sights on doing big things in the sporting world and he sort of moved on. So then it was me and Chris, then Bob Carolgees joined. Frank Carson used to float in and out whether he was invited our not.

What was the working week leading up to the 10.30am Saturday morning transmission time?

I became the music editor as well, so the whole success was how we gelled as a team and we were a very small contained group. I was responsible for getting all the video sorted out, guests and that sort of thing. So on a Monday we might have a chat about likely things that might be happening and then we’d do whatever we needed to do to work towards our Thursday meeting.

I’d get up to Birmingham really early on a Thursday morning so we’d have our first meeting

about 10am, look at the clips that were going to be shown. We had a really good editor and I’d supply the video clips and any other bits and pieces. Then we’d chat through the order and the guests, then we would go to this restaurant which was an Indian called the One With a Tree because for some reason it had a tree in the middle of it.

So we’d go there and eat and drink the afternoon away and further discuss the show.

Then on a Friday morning we’d meet again and go through it and if there were little sketches we might rehearse it. But in those days if you were going to be introducing a clip it was either out of VTR or telecine. So the P.A. would come round on a Friday afternoon and would want our cue words to roll either VTR or TK so I used to do most of those cues. Then on a Saturday we’d turn up to go to make up. Some of us in there much longer than others, me of course! Then we’d do the show, then go to the bar and have a few drinks, and that was the week!

So, no studio rehearsals before going live?

We didn’t rehearse a lot on the morning because you probably had a hundred kids running around.

The cameramen might like to line up shots and that sort of thing, but actual rehearsal we didn’t do much of that at all on a Saturday morning. It was more a case of getting ourselves ready and meeting the guests prior to it and we would talk them through where they were going to stand what they were going to do, that sort of thing.

We didn’t over-rehearse anything because with custard pies and water you don’t want to rehearse that sort of thing, and that’s where a lot of the time things would go askew. Things just went wrong sometimes or people got over excited with the children and the guests. I could be sitting at the desk in the middle of a competition with Chris and he’d have the overwhelming urge that he had to throw a bucket of water over the people in the cage. The cameramen were so nimble that they could catch all this. So it was very much thinking on your feet for those two hours.

These days presenters are nearly all on earpieces taking instructions from the gallery. Was that the same for you?

No, We weren’t on an earpiece, we didn’t have autocue. We did rely very heavily on floor managers who would be giving you (makes cutthroat signs or wind up cues) “Keep it going!” Normally we were drastically overrunning because you might have allowed 3 minutes for ‘Flan your Folks’, one of Chris’s highlights, and that could go on and on and on with people rolling in custard.

In the last half hour we’d be cutting stuff or cutting it short. There was one classic where somehow we under-ran by about 6 minutes, it was ridiculous. We got to the end of the show and it was Chas & Dave performing live doing ‘Rabbit Rabbit’, and so the floor manager was getting them to do it again and again. It went on and on and Chas Hodges, no longer with us sadly, always used to credit that with making it a hit as it had so much exposure on Tiswas with this almost nonstop performance of it.

With a hundred children, custard pies everywhere and water being flung around a studio full of electrics it must have been a floor manager’s nightmare. How did Tiswas get away with it?

How indeed? With health and safety nowadays we wouldn’t be allowed to do half of it. One of the highlights, it still makes me laugh now, was St Winifred’s School Choir. These gorgeous little girls all turned up in their beautiful dresses, all aged between about five and ten, and stood in a row singing “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma”.

And then halfway through Chris is pelting them with buckets of water, really hitting hard and they’re falling over, they’re crying. I mean you just wouldn’t be allowed to do that now.

The other was the ‘Under Eights’ winners. Chris and I would be sitting at the desk and underneath the desk would be the three children all under eight, and winners would be pulled up by their ears and chatting to them sitting on our lap.

When we did Tiswas Reunited in 2007 we had to fill out a health and safety application and they had to go through the whole show. Well, the manual that came back was crazy. “The Phantom Flan Flinger must carefully place pies on people’s faces, not throw them! The buckets can only be filled with 3 inches of water, and the water must be heated.”

And at the end of the show when we wanted to pelt the whole audience, they all had to have protective clothing on and we were limited to the number of buckets we were meant to throw.

They said that if we disregarded any of those rules then H&S had the power to come in and stop us. So we said, “Oh yes we’ll do all that.” Then we did exactly what we wanted. The Phantom Flan Flinger didn’t carefully place the pies because he didn’t read the memo anyway, and at the end Chris had somehow managed to get a hosepipe connected to a whole load of buckets.

What everyone wanted to know was, “Who was the Phantom Flan Flinger?”

Well that information is out there. Chris is fiercely loyal to people and somehow Benny Mills who was a cab driver in Birmingham got this gig. It was so odd. When the Phantom Flan Flinger was first created by Glyn Edwards, we didn’t have anyone to be him. So the very first time it was Jim Davidson.

He was about the only person knocking about who wasn’t doing anything at that moment. Then his fiancée did it one week but then someone said, “Why’s the Phantom Flan Flinger wearing INFINITY 57

WHEN SALLY MET ADAM All self-respecting teenyboppers were glued to the telly on Saturday mornings in the mid-70s to watch the LWT glam rock showcase Saturday Scene presented by Sally James. In one memorable episode she interviewed Batman star Adam West while dressed as Robin! Holy stressed-out Y-fronts!

a diamond engagement ring?” We got round that but then we realised we needed someone to play him.

It must have been someone who was driving Chris or he knew from the pub or something, and suddenly he was the Phantom Flan Flinger. When we did the Tiswas Reunited show again, H&S stepped in. Benny was 70 then, I think, and they said, “We think you should have a younger flan flinger, he could have a heart attack, anything could happen.” But Chris said, ‘ No, he’s the Phantom Flan Flinger we’re having him!’ Somehow we squashed him into the tights because the phantom had let himself go a little bit and he did it. We couldn’t have done it without Benny. He IS the Phantom Flan Flinger.

For a kids show you got some astonishing guests on, but did any take umbrage at what happened and who was the most troublesome?

People did used to ask to come on. We were sitting in the office one day and we had this lovely assistant Gayle, and she was opening the post, “Oh there’s a letter here from Spike Milligan saying, ‘I think you’re all mad, can I come on the show?’”

We went, “Don’t be daft, that’ll be a scam or something,” but it wasn’t and he turned up and came on and he was incredible.

And we had Michael Palin who just wanted to come on and did loads of stuff with us.

Such a lovely man. Chris and I were sitting in the Holiday Inn one evening, I think it was a Friday night, going over the show, and suddenly we got this tap on the shoulder and this person said, “Sorry to disturb you and I can see you’re busy but I’m Robert Plant.

Is there any chance I can come on the show tomorrow?” So we went, “Well of course” and hastily rewrote and stuck him in Compost Corner in a bucket with a flower round his head and poured a load of muck all over him.

Those were the sort of things that happened.

We didn’t really have to sort of court people. As for the most troublesome... well this has been well documented. I do love Madness but they did go a bit wild during one of my ‘Legendary Pop Interviews’. Because it was so mad in there, people kind of thought that

they had to subscribe to it. They’d got hold of a load of spray string and I was talking to them and they sprayed it at me and it went straight down my throat and I was choking so that wasn’t necessarily a good look. So when we had them on again we had them outside in the car park and the questions were passed from me to someone - who happened to be my stepson, who was about eight at the time - and he would ask the same question to them out in the car park.

Anything that went wrong we made into a bit of a joke. We blew up Bernard Manning, which was very unfortunate because he was recovering from a heart problem. We put him on a scales and of course, well it’s an old gag when it said “Overload, overload!” and then it would explode. Well the people who worked in props loved this stuff. They went mad for everything. So this explosion literally sent Bernard across the floor and Chris had already said to him before, “We’re live! Watch your language!”

So first of all thought Chris thought, “Have we killed him?” The sound man was very quick and just cut his mic. There were worries like that obviously of being live. All these comics they were all so great, people like Bob Monkhouse, they were so professional, funny, great. We were so privileged. Frank Carson, well everyone adored Frank and he never ever stopped talking, a bit like me now.

He’d come into a room and start telling you a joke or a story really and he would go on a bit and people would gradually leave the room but he’d still be telling the story. He’d turn up even when he wasn’t booked and it was him who found Bob Carolgees.

When did you become aware of the audience reaching beyond children, and dads taking an interest solely due to you?

It was gradual, really. It started in the Midlands don’t forget, then gradually was picked up by other areas before finally getting into London. Tiswas had always appealed to the student dynamic. 58% of our audience were over 18, there were Tiswas appreciation societies in pubs. It had a dual appeal so it wasn’t just the dads, it was massive with students. We actually did a tour of Universities which was a sell out wherever we went. We

literally had to swim out of Leicester University because we used to end our performance with the Bucket of Water song. Somehow we got a hosepipe to keep refilling the buckets and we’d be singing it endlessly and we’d have people fighting to get to the front shouting, “Over me, over me!” like some weird form of baptism, it was really wild.

So along with all that, we all became more popular and the press went on about it as I was the only female in it, so it was all the stuff that was attached to me at that point. Looking back it was all a bit surreal really. And then off the back of all that success Chris always had this little underlying ambition that he wanted to do an adult show.

Tiswas ended really when he went off to do OTT. I stayed on with other presenters but it just wasn’t the same and never would have been because the strength of Tiswas was us as a team.

Lew Grade who ran ATV was famously outspoken in his dislike for the programme.

What sort of complaints did the programme have to deal with from both management and sometimes parents too?

Everything was OK until Lewis Rudd came in as Head of Children’s Entertainment at ATV and he took one look at it and said, “This is completely inappropriate for a Saturday morning show that’s supposed to be for children. There’s nothing educational in there.” And so he put down a load of directives about how things should change which were largely ignored, but Chris decided that for an educational item he would do a segment on mouse washing.

So he sat at a desk next to me and said, “This is really important children. If you’ve got a mouse you need to know how to wash it properly.” So he got this poor little mouse on the desk and he washed it. Now Chris is cack-handed and he got soap all over this mouse and then he got this hair dryer and blasted this mouse! We had more complaints about that and animal cruelty and everything than we ever got about pulling children up by their ears or drowning St Winifreds school choir. So yes we did get a lot of complaints and we were asked to be more educational. The complaints were more from management about the lack of educational content not so much from viewers because they liked it.

Was there any chance of maybe Chris Tarrantbdelaying OTT until management would allow you to join?

It wasn’t like that. He wanted to do OTT and don’t forget Chris had done Tiswas for a long, long time.

Tiswas aficionados will know but I don’t know how many years it had started before I was on there. It started about two months after Saturday Scene so it was about 4 years. So Chris had been doing it a

long time and he was ready to do something else.

There would never have been a situation where Tiswas finished and OTT started, although that probably is what should have happened when you look back on it. That would have been better than running the two. Yeah that’s my opinion.

Do you think Tiswas impacted on your future career in any way?

I don’t think people thought of Tiswas as children’s TV. I know it was but I think if you asked anyone, “Was Tiswas a programme for children?” I don’t think anyone would say, “Yes”. It was just that it was on a Saturday morning. I went on to do 6.55 with David Soul and I did lots of other programmes like Ultra Quiz going all around the world. I worked with a lot of people who went on to become famous for all the wrong reasons.

I did lots of other work but then I started my intensive breeding programme and produced my three sons and during that period I was offered things that didn’t fit because I was either pregnant or had just given birth and so my career went down a lot really. I appeared as guest on numerous things, Blankety Blank, you name it I was on it but then I think there was a big shift really that people were offered shows to present if you were famous for something else. You know, making your name for doing something different and then of course all the reality shows so everything shifted and I never really, after I’d had my kids, got back into it with a decent series.

So what were the most memorable moments for you from Tiswas?

It’s a really hard question, as there were so many highlight moments. There so many great guests, and the tours and the hit record we ended up with, that was left field. John Gorman came in one day and said, ‘I’ve written this song. It’s called The Bucket of Water song. We’ll have to film it at the end of the show and you could go outside the studio where there was this window looking down to the car park and we could put a camera there and if we wanted to chuck a lot of water we would put the camera through the window and film it downstairs. We ended the show on this Bucket of Water song and there were so many requests about where people could buy this that we ended up making a record and it ended up being a hit.

So things like that were all massive highlights but again not planned. There’s just so many moments that I can’t say but we were just such great mates. We worked very, very hard. People think we just turned up on a Saturday morning with a bucket and a custard pie and off you go but there was planning involved and I was very much involved in keeping the timing of it going. It was hard work but massive fun.

You alluded to this earlier with your time in make-up but you managed to avoid getting gunged. Was that due to the turnaround round needed to get you ready again?

(Laughs). It would have taken too long. Hours. Chris would always say, “It takes hours to get her ready, hours!” He used to mock me that it took so long.

I didn’t mind the water but the custard pies were made of shaving foam. It was okay for the lads, if they got it on their face they could just wipe it off.

But it would stick to your mascara and it’s like soap in your eyes. It would take me a long time to get me looking okay again so we saved my worst until the end of the show. That was where Chris would produce all these letters that he’d written himself saying such things as, “Sally needs semolina over her”. Semolina is probably the worst to get out of your hair, if anyone needs that information; it just sticks like glue so don’t try this at home.

Bob Carolgees opened up a shop and you did too with school uniforms. How did that come about?

As with a lot of things in life it wasn’t planned. My eldest son was at a school called Park Side and one of my closest friends was Chairman of the fundraising committee. To raise funds we thought it a good idea to introduce new sports clothing. We started doing that and it was very successful, and then we thought, “Well why don’t we look at doing the whole uniform?” And it literally just grew from there. We grew it into a business and we’re still going strong 28 years later.

We’ve been through a lot of interesting situations over the last year. Obviously the shop is currently closed and we can only do click and collect. It has been quite a challenge but I’m very proud of it. It’s my little baby and I’ve grown it from nothing. It’s a good business and we also do children’s designer wear. We’re all champing at the bit to get open again and to start trading properly.

My priority in life now is my little grandchildren.

Are you still getting stopped in the street by people recognising you?

I get stopped by people saying, “I know you from somewhere don’t I? Do you play tennis?” or something like that. Certain places I get recognised a lot and my sons will say, “You’ve just been clocked over there!” I do still get it, and I get asked to do the occasional thing. That’s not to say I wouldn’t do the right thing if it came along. I’d be very happy. I’ve done some radio in the past and I do still love doing TV work. It’s interesting to go back down memory lane and fascinating that people still want to hear all this stuff.

Have you ever been approached by Strictly or I’m a Celeb?

I’d love to do Strictly but I’m not sure my knees are up to it. I wouldn’t want to be in the jungle though.

I did go for an interview once with the jungle show many years ago. It was more in the early days when things weren’t quite so cruel. Some of them have got really unpleasant since then.

It’s been lively talking to you. Would love to see a 40th anniversary Tiswas Reunited We’ll start working on it. I’ll go and get my denim jacket out. Hopefully next year. We’ve all been in isolation. That would be a great celebration.

2022 could be the year!

INFINITY 59

REM

LO Steve Eramo chats to Wesley Eure, star of 1974’s Land of the Lost, a cult TV show that mixed live action show with claymationanimated dinosaurs…

60 INFINITY

FUN WITH SID AND MARTY

MEMBERING TV’S

OST WORLD I

f you were flipping through US TV channels in the mid-70’s and early 80’s, you more than likely came across stage and screen actor Wesley Eure at some point.

His good looks, blue eyes, and curly black hair, not to mention his affable nature and acting talent, made him difficult to miss.

Besides playing the regular role of Dr. Michael William “Mike” Horton on NBC’s long-running daytime drama Days of our Lives, Eure appeared on such popular game shows as Password Plus and Match Game PM. On Saturday mornings, the former teen idol also played Will Marshall on NBC’s Land of the Lost.

Created by the award-winning Canadian sibling team of Sid & Marty Krofft as well as Allan Foshko and David Gerrold (uncredited), the children’s adventure series took viewers on a journey with the Marshall family – father Rick and his two children, Will and Holly – to a world where dinosaurs roamed and two very different species, the peaceful primate-like Pakuni and hostile humanoid/ lizard creatures called the Sleestak, lived in anything but perfect harmony. Eure became involved in the show during what was already a very busy period in his professional life and. looking back, he could not be happier about making such a commitment.

“I was starring on Days of Our Lives and playing Mike Horton when I met Sid Krofft at a party,” recalls the actor. “Sid said to me, ‘I have a new series that you would be perfect for called Land of the Lost.’ So I went in to audition and then travelled to New York because I had been asked to replace the lead in a Broadway production of Candide. I was in my hotel room when I got a call from my agent, who told me that I got the role of Will Marshall. I was torn because the character was 16 years old, and at the time I was 22. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to play someone that young, but thank goodness I said, ‘Yes!’ because it turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life.

“Sid actually called recently and told me I was the only one they ever considered for the part, which was quite a compliment coming from one of the legendary Sid and Marty Krofft

brothers. Again, the character was younger, but I found that not only easy but also fun to play. I guess I am a true Peter Pan. I love the fact that Will was adventurous as well as brave enough to fend off the giant lizard Sleestak and an angry Tyrannosaurus Rex.” Having originally set out on a short camping trip, the Marshall family take an unexpected detour when their raft plunges down a 1,000-foot waterfall and travels through a dimensional portal. Stranded in a prehistoric world fraught with peril, Rick Marshall (Spencer Milligan) and his children Will (Eure) and Holly (Kathy Coleman) set up camp inside a cave. Unsure of when or even if they can return home, the California family must determine how to survive on their limited supplies and what their new surroundings can provide.

American actor, singer, author, producer, director and lecturer Wesley Eure, best known for his roles in Land of the Lost and the American soap opera Days of Our Lives

OPENING EPISODE In the show’s opening episode, the Marshalls befriend Cha-Ka (Phillip Paley), a member of the Pakuni, who becomes a friend and ally.

As season one of Land of the Lost unfolds, they encounter the reptilian Sleestak, who possess telepathic powers, as well as Enik (Walker Edmiston), an ancestor of the Sleestak and a time traveler who could help the Marshalls get home.

Early on in the second season, an alien researcher named The Zahn (played by Van Snowden and voiced by Marvin Miller) along with his “combat” robot Fred are introduced into the story, and their presence ultimately threatens our heroes’ survival. In the season three opener, After Shock, an earthquake opens the dimensional portal, sending Rick home and bringing Will’s and Holly’s Uncle Jack (Ron Harper) to the land of the lost.

As his character rolled with the punches associated with him and his family’s ongoing adventures, Eure relished the opportunity to help tell such an entertaining story that was built on a solid familial foundation.

“The Land of the Lost set was the most fun of any in Hollywood,” he says. “We had two complete soundstages to play in. One was a jungle with a lagoon and the exterior of our cave, while the other was the cave’s interior and the largest blue screen – now they use green screen – in town. It was a

fantasy playground.

“Since both shows were on NBC, I filmed all my scenes for Days of Our Lives in the morning at Burbank, and then raced over to General Services – the old Charlie Chaplin studios – in Hollywood and filmed Land of the Lost. So in the morning I was crying that my girlfriend was leaving me, and in the afternoon I was running from monsters and screaming, ‘Run, Holly! Run! There’s a dinosaur!’ It was very schizophrenic,” jokes Eure.

“When Will and Holly lost their father in the third season and their Uncle Jack entered the land of the lost, Will definitely matured INFINITY 61

This image: Stop-motion animator Harry Walton at work on the series, and below effects supervisor Gene Warren Jr with one of his creations

and became much more of a protector for his sister. However, she was always a scrappy girl who rescued her brother more than he rescued her, and Holly was a role model for many young girls.

“What I loved about my character was how much his family meant to him. At the end of the day what made the show work was that the Marshalls were a single parent family surviving together. As actors, we truly loved each other, and to this day, Kathy Coleman, Phil Paley, Spencer Milligan and I are dear friends and family. I like to think that the Kroffts didn’t just cast my TV family, they also created a real-life family for me. I came from a broken home where my father abandoned us when I was only two years old, so this cast really touched me and created a permanent bond.”

Land of the Lost may have been considered a Saturday morning kid’s show, but that did not discourage some of the most recognisable names in the Sci-Fi literary and entertainment fields from

penning scripts for the series. “My favourite episode is The Circle [the first season finale], which was written by sci-fi superstars Larry Niven and David Gerrold, who also wrote Star Trek’s The Trouble with Tribbles,” says Eure.

“In The Circle, the talking Sleestak, Enik, tells the Marshall family that they must walk into the time mist doorway and return to Earth, otherwise the land of the lost will be destroyed. Because of a time-paradox, he explains, ‘Three must leave so that three may enter.’ When the original Marshall family walks through the doorway, their doppelgangers enter the land of the lost and the family’s adventure starts all over again. This was pretty ‘heady’ sci-fi for Saturday mornings.”

GROWN-UP FAN BASE Medicine Man, the third season/series finale of Land of the Lost, aired 4th December 1976 on NBC. That was almost 45 years ago, and while the program’s original fan base is all grown up now, its appreciation of the series as well as Eure and his fellow castmates has not waned.

“We have met many fans who are now astrophysicists, archeologists, and scientists in all sorts of other disciplines who were inspired as children watching our show to enter those fields as adults, including two current bigwigs at Jet Propulsion Labs or JPL,” says the actor. “The great science fiction is, of course, one reason for the show’s longevity, but the closeness of the family dynamic, I think, gives it its staying power.

“At autograph shows, when fans come to our table, they seem to transform right before our eyes into little kids eating a bowl of cereal in front of the television. The experience of sharing that long-ago moment in time is a bond that truly makes my heart soar. One man in his 50’s tearfully told us that when he was a little boy, his mom and dad were getting a divorce and he was devastated. Watching the Marshall family survive when they lost their dad in the third season gave this man the strength and hope that his family would also endure.”

Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Eure’s interest in acting was piqued as a child.

Growing up he kept his eye on what he saw as the proverbial prize, and the budding actor’s determination was subsequently rewarded. “At the age of five, after playing an oak tree at George Hurst Elementary School in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, I was hooked,” he says. “I came from a family of Southern educators and no one in my family aspired to perform in the theatre. I was truly a fish out of water, and with my father gone, I think I was just craving a lot of attention.

“During my first year of college at UNLV [University of Nevada, Las Vegas] I met Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence while selling artwork at the Frontier Hotel. When I turned 18, they employed me to drive their mobile home on a summer tour throughout the East Coast. When the tour was over, I stayed in New York City and began pounding on doors. My first job was at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut understudying Ariel and the Tempest. A year and a half later, I moved to Los Angeles, and within a week I’d booked

my first television series.”

Eure became a familiar face to daytime TV audiences after making his debut on the aforementioned Days of Our Lives, and while it was not a typical 9 to 5 job, it did present its own daily challenges. However, he could not have wished for a better job to show him the ropes when it came to acting in front of the camera. “Days of Our Lives was a dream role,” says the actor. “For almost a decade I had one of the most wonderful TV families you could imagine. This was my grandmother’s favourite show, and when I was a little kid, I would sit in front of the TV watching it while she ironed. My grandmother passed away before I was cast on the show, but every time I watched it, I could smell an old iron burning.

“The most difficult part of working on Days of Our Lives was learning all the lines every day. Some days I would have one page of dialogue, and other times I would have up to 30 pages to memorize overnight. After a while, it somehow became an automatic skill.

Oftentimes I wouldn’t even read the script until I got to work that morning, although if I had over 10 pages to memorize, I did get a bit panicky.

“I’ve been so lucky to have been afforded a wonderful career. I have met the most extraordinary people, from superstars to fans, that I never would have had the opportunity to meet as a little boy from Mississippi. Not a day goes by that I’m not filled with gratitude.”

Above left to right: Kathy Coleman, Wesley Eure, Phillip Paley (as Cha-Ka) and Spencer Milligan; Wesley as he is today

INFINITY 63

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From jigsaw puzzles and board games to books, comics, model kits and even ice lollies… Alistair McGown looks at the many merchandising spin-offs exploiting the appeal of Gerry Anderson’s Space 1999 series…

NO PROBLEM W

hen Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s blockbusting sci-fi saga Space:1999 began filming at Pinewood Studios in November 1973 it was the most expensive TV series made to that point, with a budget of £3m and with hopes (ultimately dashed) of a primetime US network broadcast among planned global sales.

Alongside such a massive undertaking was a concerted push to bring additional revenue and promotion via licensed merchandise, orchestrated by Gerry Anderson’s faithful old hand in this area, Keith Shackleton, managing director of Gerry Anderson Marketing since February 1973. Shackleton had forged partnerships across merchandise sectors including publishing, toys, games, records and even confectionery on every Anderson series since Supercar in 1960.

Thunderbirds’ arrival in 1965 witnessed an unprecedented degree of merchandise success, with Shackleton pioneering new levels of sophistication in licensing. While Space:1999 didn’t reach the dizzy heights of Thunderbirds’ mid60s merchandise craze, it nonetheless spawned an impressive range of items, mostly focused on the first season. Shackleton had done well to sell (or mis-sell?) what was a very adult take on science fiction into almost exclusively children’s and young teenage leisure markets.

While there was significant material also available in the US, Germany, Italy and Japan among other territories, the chief focus of this article is to recall as much as possible of what was produced for the UK market during the original mid-70s lifetime of the series. Occasional mentions will be made where other countries produced items that filled a gap in the UK market – with some imported to these shores – or produced prized collectables of notable quality.

24 INFINITY

Opposite: A promotional shot of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and the couple on set with Sylvia and Gerry Anderson Main images this page: Comic strip action from the Space 1999 annuals

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end CIRCUS Oan SAE to: FH PO BOX 4O5RRORS LONDO 38 SW19 8XNU

on tour 2021 Houghton Le Spring 0191 5848630 Rainton Arena 22 MAY raintonarena.co.uk Wellingborough 01933 270007 Castle Theatre 25 MAY parkwoodtheatres.co.uk Ŧ London, Clapham Grand 26 MAY bit.ly/2RmblPn Ŧ Poole Lighthouse 01202 280000 28 MAY lighthousepoole.co.uk Ŧ Weymouth Pavilion 01305 783225 29 MAY weymouthpavilion.com Reading Hexagon 0118 960 6060 1 JUNE bit.ly/3uGKYSH Exeter Corn Exchange 01392 665938 3 JUNE exetercornexchange.co.uk Paignton Palace Theatre 01803 665800 4 JUNE palacetheatrepaignton.co.uk Bournemouth Pavilion 0300 5000595 5 JUNE bhlivetickets.co.uk Ŧ Winchester Theatre Royal 01962 840 440 6 JUNE theatreroyalwinchester.co.uk Yeovil Octagon 01935 422884 7 JUNE octagon-theatre.co.uk Ŧ

Bracknell South Hill Park Theatre 01344 484123 12 JUNE southhillpark.org.uk Liverpool M&S Arena 0344 8000400 13 JUNE mandsbankarena.com Ŧ Brighton Festival 074 9477 4008 19 JUNE bit.ly/31XdFyp Ŧ Elgin Town Hall 01343 619900 2 AUG elgintownhall.co.uk Ŧ Dundee Whithall Theatre 01382 434940 3 AUG whitehalltheatre.com Ŧ Aberdeen Beach Ballroom 4 AUG bit.ly/31XdFyp Ŧ Glasgow Barrowland Ballroom 5 AUG bit.ly/31XdFyp Ŧ Ayr Town Hall 6 AUG bit.ly/31XdFyp Ŧ Warrington Parr Hall 01925 442345.

7 AUG parrhall.culturewarrington.org Ŧ Swindon Wyvern 01793 524481 18 AUG swindontheatres.co.uk Ŧ Exmouth Pavilion 01395 222 477 19 AUG ledleisure.co.uk/exmouth-pavilion Ŧ Beautiful Days Festival Devon 20 AUG beautifuldays.org Wimbourne Tivoli 01202 885566 21 AUG tivoliwimborne.co.uk Ŧ

Weston Super Mare 01934 645544 Playhouse 22 AUG bit.ly/2QeRGQY Hereford Courtyard 01432 340555 23 AUG https://courtyard.org.uk/ Eastbourne 01323 802020 Royal Hippodrome Theatre 3 SEP royalhippodrome.com Ŧ Frome Memorial 01373 462795 4 SEP fmt.website Ŧ Tullys Shocktober Fest Crawley 1 OCT - 6 NOV shocktoberfest.co.uk Blackpool The Globe 27 to 31 OCT bit.ly/2KxOOvx Ŧ Telford 01952 382382 Oakengates Theatre in the Limes 1 NOV theplacetelford.com Ŧ Portsmouth 023 92649000 New Theatre Royal 2 NOV newtheatreroyal.com Ŧ Swansea Grand Theatre 07387 233055 3 NOV swanseagrand.co.uk Newport Riverside 01633 656757 4 NOV bit.ly/3uGP3X1 Kings Lynn Corn Exchange 01553 764864 5 NOV kingslynncornexchange.co.uk Ŧ

Blackburn King Georges Hall 01254 706006 6 NOV bit.ly/3mFWg6U Ŧ Kettering Lighthouse 01536 414141 7 NOV lighthousetheatre.co.uk Ŧ Billingham Forum 01642 552663 8 NOV forumtheatrebillingham.co.uk Stamford Corn Exchange 01780 766 455 9 NOV stamfordcornexchange.co.uk Ŧ Lowestoft Marina 01502 533 200 10 NOV marinatheatre.co.uk Ŧ Barnsley Metrodrome 01226 730060 11 NOV bit.ly/3uCF6K5 Ŧ Darlington Majestic Theatre 12 NOV majestictheatre-lee.com Ŧ Holmfirth Picturedrome 01484 689759 13 NOV picturedrome.net Ŧ Middlesbrough Town Hall 01642 729729 15 NOV middlesbroughtownhall.co.uk Ŧ Wolverhampton 0844 4771000 KKS Steel Mill 16 NOV kkssteelmill.co.uk Ŧ Grimsby Auditorium 0300 300035 17 NOV grimsbyauditorium.org.uk Ŧ = tickets also available to purchase from ticketmaster.co.uk 08444 993 666

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circusofhorrors.co.uk *2 for 1. Available for most theatre venues, in some cases other discounts apply, Subject to availability.

WARNING: The Circus of Horrors contains some nudity and language of an adult nature. NOT SUITABLE FOR UNDER-16s.