The Man Who Invented the Daleks (30 page)

The pairing was an unqualified triumph, and the opening titles of what had now become known as
The Persuaders!
set the scene perfectly. Over the moody drama of one of John Barry’s best theme tunes, a split screen shows us snapshots illustrating the contrasting life stories of the two characters. Danny Wilde (Curtis) emerges from a Bronx tenement to become a major player on Wall Street, while Lord Brett Sinclair (Moore) is seen as the product of Harrow, Oxford and the Grenadier Guards, with a particular emphasis on his sporting prowess: rowing, rugby, motor racing, even a winning ride at Ascot, however implausible that might be for a man of Moore’s stature. The contrast between the products of these varying back-grounds was spelt out in the opening to Chain of Events’, one of the stories scripted by Nation. Danny wakes up by a campfire in a field; wearing western gear, complete with fringed buckskin jacket and wide-brimmed hat, he’s on a back-to-nature holiday. He starts fixing his breakfast until, two minutes into this pastoral idyll, the camera pans back to show Brett waking up. He’s at the other end of the same field, in a tent equipped with every luxury from television to electric blankets, from a hot shower to a deep freeze; there’s even a chandelier. ‘I must admit I rather like roughing it,’ he says languidly, ‘but I miss the morning papers.’

Curtis brought to his character a couple of tics – ‘I always try to get in close to people when I talk to them and I always keep my gloves on no matter what I’m doing’ – which added to his sense of fussy restlessness, bouncing in an unpredictable orbit around the calm understatement of Moore. From the outset, there was a sense of male bonding that veered towards sexual chemistry, as the two characters bickered and bantered with each other like a divorced couple in a 1940s screwball comedy. They walk arm-in-arm down the street, they worry about breaking a nail and ruining their manicures, and they are intensely loyal and devoted to each other. They weren’t as camp as Jason King, but at times it was a near-run thing. When Danny is praised for renovating a run-down cottage all on his own, he makes no comment on the plastering and structural work he’s done, focusing instead on the soft furnishings: ‘I picked out every little fabric you see in the place.’ They were not, however, supposed to be seen as homosexual, for they are in perpetual friendly rivalry over women, most famously over Joan Collins, playing a character named Sidonie, in the episode ‘Five Miles to Midnight’. Their competition however tends to result in stalemate; that particular story ends with Sidonie driving off, leaving the two men stranded in the Swiss countryside, thirty miles from the nearest town.

In the same episode, Nation gave the pair the opportunity to outline their motivations for allowing themselves to be recruited by a retired judge (Laurence Naismith) as freelance righters of wrongs, bringing justice to bear where the legal system has failed. ‘I need the money,’ says Danny, in echo of the self-deprecating claims of Steve Mannering in
The Baron.
‘I thought you did things for strong, noble reasons like justice and integrity and all that sort of thing,’ pouts Sidonie, and Brett gives the game away: ‘That is what the Judge likes to think, but I’ll let you into a little secret: quite frankly, I’m having the time of my life.’

So strong are the central performances, and so focused is our attention on them, that the stories mostly fade into insignificance. Which was perhaps just as well, for they were not overburdened with originality. Most of the plots could happily have found a home in other ITC shows, though they did benefit here from the higher budget – which allowed for location shooting, some of it abroad – and from some strong guest stars. Of Nation’s scripts, ‘A Home of One’s Own’ (guests: Hannah Gordon, Talfryn Thomas) was effectively a modern western, with a man defending his homestead from villains who, as in ‘The Man Outside’ in
The Baron
, are engaged in smuggling forged banknotes. The aforementioned ‘Chain of Events’ (Peter Vaughan, George Baker) was a simple chase through the woods, with Danny being pursued by several different interest groups. And ‘Someone Waiting’ (Donald Pickering, Sam Kydd) saw the pre-announcement of Brett’s death, much as had happened to the Saint in Nation’s story ‘The Time to Die’. This latter plot went back still further to Edgar Wallace’s 1905 novel
The Four Just Men
, as did the show’s central premise of wealthy men acting as a supra-legal force for justice. The most unlikely borrowing, though, which was surely initiated by Nation, was Walter Black’s script for ‘The Morning After’, in which Brett wakes up with a thundering hangover to find that he’s now married but has no memory of how it happened, a revival in somewhat different circumstances of the
Hancock
episode ‘The Night Out’.

Influences were also discernible from
The Avengers
– the sped-up fight sequence in ‘Someone Waiting’ with silent movie accompaniment – and from
The Saint:
when Danny is captured in ‘A Home of One’s Own’ and has his hands tied behind his back, he tries to burn the rope on the flame of an oil lamp, but only succeeds in burning himself. ‘Ow! Always works in the movies,’ he complains. And, as in
The Baron
, there is the occasional moment that is darker than one expects. ‘Someone Like Me’ appears to be a rerun of ‘Masquerade’ in
The Baron
, with someone creating a double of Brett Sinclair, until it turns out that there’s no double at all, just a deeply brainwashed Brett. Unaware of what he’s doing, he gets into a genuinely nasty fight with Danny on a building site, attacking his partner with a shovel and displaying not a hint of the insouciant charm that Moore brings to the rest of his performance.

The stand-out episode is ‘A Death in the Family’, in which a murderer in a clown mask is killing off members of Brett’s family, heirs to the title of the Duke of Caith, in an attempt to get their hands on the dukedom. Moore plays three other members of the family in an explicit tribute to Alec Guinness in the film
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(1949), whose plot this borrows. Unlike that movie, the attention here is on the family rather than the killer, leading one academic study of the action genre to point out that ‘what was originally a subversive narrative about usurping the existing social structure becomes a conservative narrative about preserving that social structure’. It is, however, just about possible to watch the programme without such subtexts entirely overwhelming one’s pleasure at the sight of Moore in drag, particularly when he’s joined by Curtis as his Aunt Sophie – the first time he’d dragged up on screen since the film
Some Like It Hot
(1959). As in the very best episodes of
The Avengers
, each of the murders is tailored to the eccentricities of the character. A crusty old general is killed by an exploding toy tank, a retired admiral is found floating in the lake, rock musician Onslow (Christopher Sandford) is electrocuted by his guitar, Roland (Denholm Elliott), a collector of rare weapons, dies from a poison dart, and the alcoholic Lance (Willie Rushton) drowns in a vat of his own wine. (‘I said that wine needed a little more body,’ reflects Danny.) There’s also a characteristic Nation touch when Danny finds himself locked in the Sinclair family crypt and pours gunpowder from a shotgun cartridge into the lock to blow it, saying he saw someone do the same trick in the 1935 film
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

It all looked like tremendous fun on the screen, tongue-in-cheek adventures with a central relationship that evoked some of the mood of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the
Road to
… films. Robert S. Baker, said Moore, ‘had always wanted to make a buddy movie, and this was his chance’. Nation’s contribution to this atmosphere was valued by others on the production team. ‘It was a great comfort to know that Terry wasn’t a temperamental type,’ remembered Johnny Goodman. He wouldn’t throw a paddy, he wouldn’t suddenly go into a fit about something. Terry would simply get on with the job, and that’s what made him such an attractive personality.’

But in private at least, Nation was feeling the pressure. He had a more active role in the production than on any previous series, and this time he didn’t have an old friend to share the burden in the way that Dennis Spooner had on
The Baron
or Brian Clemens on
The Avengers.
‘It would drive me bananas,’ he recalled. ‘Like an actor in a long run. Actors find a way to handle it, but I didn’t find a way to handle this – week after week trying to find new things for the same characters to do. It was tough. After a few months, I’d come home on a Friday night and say: “I’m not going back in, I’m going to quit, I can’t take it anymore, it’s driving me crazy.” And of course on Monday morning, I’d go back in, because that’s what you do.’ Risking the wrath of Tony Curtis, he continued to smoke heavily. ‘Making any long running TV series has its pressures, as the turnaround of episodes is always very tight,’ observed Moore. ‘Terry smoked to relieve the pressure, and I rarely saw him without a cigarette.’

‘The situation wasn’t made any easier by Curtis’s habit of making changes to his script as he went along, and turning what was a twelve-month schedule into a fifteen-month one’, in Roger Moore’s words. The American star came from a very different culture of filming and seemed to make little attempt to adjust to the reduced circumstances of British television. ‘He was,’ remembered Nation, choosing his words carefully, ‘demanding. He was an American movie star, and we had not had that experience before. What he could ask for, and did ask for, was stuff like: “I need a sauna.” So a sauna cabin had to be built in the room next to his dressing room. All the kind of Hollywood trimmings you’d expect.’ Others in the production team felt much the same. ‘Tony on the screen could be charming, elegant, whatever was required of him,’ said Johnny Goodman. ‘But in real life, he was a difficult man to handle, and I can’t say I found the relationship particularly rewarding.’ Malcolm Christopher, the production manager, was more diplomatic in his appraisal of the two stars: ‘Roger was a really generous, warm, kind-hearted guy. And Tony was Tony.’

None of those tensions appeared on screen, but even so the series was slammed by the critics. ‘Curtis reached new heights of mediocrity’, commented Morton Moss in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
‘Mostly it is lousy,’ wrote Stanley Reynolds in
The Times.
‘Awful’, agreed John Weightman in the
Observer
, while his colleague on that paper, the play-wright John Mortimer, was very haughty indeed: ‘Although there is not a nude in sight, they made me understand at last what Mr Muggeridge means by the “decline of standards in television”.
The Persuaders!
must make Edgar Wallace turn in his grave.’ It was left to the more perceptive Nancy Banks-Smith to admit the attraction of the show: ‘Tooth rot perhaps but sweet temptation.’ She was presumably closer to the audience’s feelings, for the show was a big hit; all twenty-four of the episodes reached the top twenty in Britain, and it peaked at number one. It also sold extensively around the world, proving particularly – and enduringly – popular in Europe. At the end of 1971 Lew Grade announced that ATV’s overseas sales would exceed £17 million, the highest they had ever been, and
The Persuaders!
was listed as the key series, alongside one-offshows such as a Burt Bacharach special and
Robinson Crusoe on Ice.

And yet, with all the success it enjoyed,
The Persuaders!
again failed to make an impact in America. Screened by ABC, it didn’t even finish its run before being pulled from the schedules. Several reasons were proffered for its failure, including the fact that it was up against the established
Mission: Impossible.
Curtis argued in his autobiography that ‘It was more tongue-in-cheek and less violent than American audiences were used to.’ In the immediate aftermath, he had complained too that there weren’t enough American writers on the show and that consequently he ended up with lines that didn’t ring true: ‘I had to say: “Give me the gat, I am a gangster.” No American gangster says that.’ Perhaps not, but for British writers of Nation’s vintage there was a clear precedent; Lefty, the American gangster played by Jack Train in Tommy Handley’s
ITMA
, used precisely that language, his first ever line being: ‘Get out your gat and shoot up the joint.’

But there was another factor at work here as well. America was becoming less receptive to imported culture, whether from Britain or elsewhere. This was to become particularly acute in the mid 1970s following the triple whammy of recession, defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal; the loss of faith in core American institutions – big business, the military, the presidency – provoked a marked cultural turn inwards. The early signs of that process, however, were already visible early in the decade, evident, for example, in the way that the glam rock of David Bowie, T. Rex and Roxy Music became the first British rock and roll phenomenon since the Beatles not to make inroads in the States. On television there was a more formal expression of the same isolationist tendency; the American Federal Communications Commission ruled that from October 1971 the slot from 7.30 to 8 p.m. had to be occupied by home-made programmes. ‘Multiplied by three networks over the year,’ calculated the
Guardian
, ‘this means that British television is to be deprived of potentially some 546 hours of American screen time in a slot frequently inhabited by British programmes.’

One solution was that pioneered by Beryl Vertue at Associated London Scripts: selling to America not the original productions but simply the show formats. Thus in 1971 Alf Garnett’s Wapping in
Till Death Us Do Part
became the Queens district of New York City in
All in the Family
on CBS, and the following year the Shepherd’s Bush of
Steptoe and Son
became Watts, Los Angeles in
Sanford and Son
on NBC. Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson all benefited as the creators of those programmes, but more generally it seemed that the American people’s infatuation with British popular culture, which had in the 1960s been so crucial to Britain’s economy and to its sense of identity, was definitely on the wane. As the political climate became harsher, the demand for imported fantasy diminished.