Frank Herrmann Filming The Saint, 1962

In our series unearthing the contact sheets of historic photographs, we revisit the Elstree Studios set of TV series The Saint, which starred a pre-007 Roger Moore

Words by Gill Morgan

The launch of newspaper colour magazines in the 1960s heralded a golden age of photojournalism. This was the era when Don McCullin’s images of war and famine from across the world would influence political debate and when David Bailey’s portraits brought into stylish focus the rapidly changing celebrity and social zeitgeist. The Sunday Times Magazine boasted its own illustrious team of staff photographers, including the much-admired Frank Herrmann, whose assignments ranged from chronicling epoch-defining events such as the Paris ’68 riots and the Yom Kippur War to capturing the most iconic pop-cultural moments of the day. Granted extraordinarily intimate access, Herrmann would be dispatched at short notice to shoot everything from the Beatles recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at Abbey Road Studios to the making of the first-ever episode of The Saint, the subject of this contact sheet.

Filming at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, The Saint was to become one of the most popular TV programmes of the decade, running on ITV from 1962 to 1969. The show consolidated the star power not just of its leading man, Roger Moore – playing the urbane adventurer Simon Templar – but also of his (almost) equally famous white Volvo P1800 coupé. The photographs show Moore on set, in his dressing room and opposite co-star Shirley Eaton (later to find fame as the woman who is painted gold in 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger).

Herrmann, who came to London from Berlin with his family in 1937 and whose portrait subjects included Orson Welles, Winston Churchill and Duke Ellington, is now in his nineties and his work is held in the National Portrait Gallery collection. But beyond its interest to fans of The Saint, this contact sheet is an encapsulation in miniature of a lost era of photography, from the stamp bearing the name of the long-closed camera equipment shop on Baker Street, Pelling & Cross, to the un-PR-controlled nature of the images themselves. As Herrmann once said of another of his projects, “It was to be a fly-on-the-wall occasion, which was my favourite way of working, being able to observe people discreetly.” A limited-edition copy of this contact sheet is available to buy, priced £450-£750, from Pap Art, pap-art.co.uk