Spy Vibe sat down for a virtual chat this week with our friend, Ian Dickerson. Ian is the host of the official Leslie Charteris website and has contributed to many works about the history of The Saint. He has a new book out about the Saint on Radio and is currently writing the Leslie Charteris biography. Welcome Ian!
Your
new book, The Saint on the Radio, has just been published. For
the uninitiated, can you talk a bit about the origins of the
character and his history?
Simon Templar, aka the Saint, was created
by author Leslie Charteris when he was just twenty years old. Charteris, the
son of a Chinese doctor and an English woman was born in Singapore in 1907 but
moved to England at the age of 12 when his parents split up. He had always
wanted to be a writer—his first published piece was a poem in The Straits Times at the age of nine—and
was determined to give it his best shot, despite his father considering all
writers “rogues and vagabonds” and wanting him to become a lawyer instead. His
parents sent him to Cambridge University, but Charteris was bored so quit his
law degree after a year.
He started writing his first book, X Esquire, whilst at Cambridge,
finishing it whilst in Singapore visiting his father. He sent it off to a
publisher who promptly accepted it for publication. It was his third book, Meet the Tiger, published in September
1928 that introduced the world to Simon Templar.
It was received well-enough but Charteris
wrote two further books—neither of which featured Templar—before returning to
his modern day Robin Hood. “I suppose I
got lazy, or I got the idea that it was better to continue and build up one
character than to spread yourself around among a dozen. I looked back over the
characters I had created so far and picked the Saint, liked him the best, and
decided to go on with him.” (Radio interview)
His book career continued with a mix of short
stories, novellas and full-length novels, which lead to the 1935 novel The Saint in New York. It was the
fifteenth Saint book and the one that sealed the popularity of the Saint and
Leslie Charteris on both sides of the Atlantic.
RKO quickly bought the film rights and
kicked off a series of movies with the 1938 film The Saint in New York staring Louis Hayward as Simon Templar.
Hayward was replaced by George Sanders, but after making five movies as the
Saint, Sanders quit and RKO persuaded him to become the Falcon. Leslie sued for
unfair competition and they ultimately settled out of court but it put the
kibosh on the movie careers of both characters.
Leslie had a strong belief that his hero
could be adapted for any media so with the advent of the golden age of radio
drama in the 1940s he was keen to see the Saint on the radio. He tried himself,
producing a pilot show in 1940 but it didn’t sell. It took radio producer James
L. Saphier to get the Saint on the radio, with the first two series airing in
1945. The show ran on a variety of networks with a number of different leading
men until the early 1950s when TV started to significantly impact on radio
drama.
Leslie’s fourth marriage in 1952
reinvigorated him and he wrote further Saint books, predominantly collections
of short stories, throughout the decade whilst devoting a lot of time and
energy to getting the Saint on TV.
It took film producer Robert S. Baker,
backed by the legendary Lord Lew Grade for that to happen, and the successful
seven year run of The Saint, starring
Roger Moore, sold to over ninety countries throughout the 1960s.
Whilst Leslie enjoyed the Return of the Saint in the 1970s,
further attempts at reviving the Saint’s TV career left him increasingly
cynical. He brought a stop to the Saint’s literary adventures in 1983 feeling
that both he and his creation had earned their retirement. All told he left
behind fifty English language Saint books, and another forty which were
published in French and Dutch but haven’t—yet—appeared in English, which have
sold in excess of forty million copies around the world and been translated
into over thirty different languages. Those books have inspired, at the time of
writing, fifteen feature films, three televisions series, ten radio series and
a comic strip that was globally syndicated around the world for over a decade.
What
aspects of The Saint's radio history do you cover in the book? Tell us a bit
about the scope of the project.
The origins of this book are found in a
time long before the internet, though that often seems hard to imagine
nowadays, when I first discovered that episodes of the old radio shows were
available on cassette. I bought some and rather enjoyed listening to them, so
naturally wanted more. But I couldn’t find anything that would tell me how many
there might be, or when the Saint first started on the radio show, or quite
frankly anything about the Saint’s radio career. And when I asked Leslie, well
he was approaching eighty years old then, and although he had a good memory and
could remember much about the cast, he couldn’t remember many details and had
no records.
The book documents the Saint’s adventures
on radio. But not just those you may know about, such as the Vincent Price
shows, but those you probably don’t, such as the South African and Norwegian
adaptations. It also looks at the attempts to get the Saint on the radio; those
by Leslie, which would ultimately resulted in the first radio series, and those
by others, which resulted in some very interesting comments by one or two
employees of the BBC. The icing on the cake, so to speak, is the inclusion of a
couple of radio scripts; one from Brian Ahern’s time as the Saint and one from
Vincent Price’s era.
You've
been involved with many projects to preserve The Saint in the culture and to
educate people about Leslie Charteris and his creation. Where can readers see
your various work for web, print, documentaries, etc?
What a lovely way of putting it. I’ve never
thought of it quite like that. One of the things that drives me is the desire
to read, watch or listen to more adventures of the Saint. Fortunately I know
I’m not alone in that so when I’ve dug into the Saint’s history and come up
with interesting stories or titbits to do with his career, or the career of
people who helped make his adventures, I’ve been lucky enough to find a way of
sharing it.
The Saint on the Radio is available now
from sites such as Amazon. At the time of writing this the book is currently
only available as a digital edition, but a print version is on the way and may
well be available by the time anyone reads this.
The documentaries are available on DVD, as
part of the British DVD releases of The
Saint and Return of the Saint,
and as a standalone called The Saint
Steps In…To Television, which combines the existing documentaries with some
extra material and was released in 2009.
The
Saint on TV, my first book, is now sadly out of
print but an updated version will be published in due course, depending on what
happens with the new show that’s currently in development.
My biography of Leslie Charteris is
currently with a publisher who assures me it will be available this side of
Christmas. And The Saint in the Movies
and The Saint in Comics are currently
being written.
As for online, well I’ll admit to being the
one behind www.lesliecharteris.com
and at some stage I’ll take a break from writing to update it!
Your
Saint Steps Into Television documentary did a great job including
reactions to the show by The Saint's author, Leslie Charteris. Did he comment
much on the radio shows over the years?
Leslie was, at first, keen to be closely
involved in the radio adventures of the Saint and produced the first two
American series himself. He later went on record more than once saying that he
was very happy with the portrayals of the Saint by both Edgar Barrier and Brian
Aherne and wished that Aherne had had the chance to play the Saint on film. He
did have issues with some people throughout the making of those shows and you
can read about those in the book.
By the time Vincent Price took over the
role, and with a change of network, Leslie wasn’t quite so closely involved. He
was happy for the show to continue, appreciated the financial reward of the
licencing fee, but was busy with other projects. Consequently I’ve not found
any real insight into his thoughts on the Vincent Price and Tom Conway shows
over the years. When I asked him about them his fairly minimal response ran
along the lines of them being okay but he couldn’t really remember much about
them, which isn’t entirely surprising since it was over forty years since they
were broadcast.
Apart
from perhaps having his work adapted, did Charteris do any writing
directly for radio?
In late 1943 his good friend Denis Green
was invited by Young & Rubicam, the agency behind the weekly radio show The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), to write for the show. Green needed
the job but confessed to Leslie that whilst he could write great dialogue for
radio he hadn’t a clue about plotting. So they went into partnership, with
Leslie concocting the plots and Denis Green writing the dialogue. Their episodes
ran from July 1944 through to March 1945 when Leslie quit the partnership; the
pressures of producing the Saint took their toll on his Holmes work. He was
replaced by noted writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who went on to have a very
successful partnership with Green. Whilst they were working on Holmes, Leslie
and Denis wrote an episode of Silver Theatre, which was broadcast in 1944.
I get the impression Leslie would have
liked to write more for radio. Radio drama was very much in its heyday in the
late 1940s and it coincided with a desire on Leslie’s part to be known for
writing something other than the adventures of Simon Templar. But none of his
discussions and proposals were ever picked up, which is a shame.
Vincent
Price is often noted as the most famous radio Saint. How long did he play the
role? Did he do any interesting promotions or interviews about The Saint?
His first episode aired on July 9th, 1947,
his last May 20th 1951; over 140 radio shows on three different networks (CBS,
MBS and NBC). I’ve not found much that he did in the way of promoting the show;
there’s a few small bits and pieces in various trade magazines and gossip
journals of the time which I’ve quoted from in the book. He did record a couple
of wide ranging interviews about his radio career which do of course mention
The Saint and some of the people he worked with, but they’re not comprehensive.
Were
any of the radio stories later adapted for the Roger Moore series?
No, the TV producers wanted to start
afresh. But many of the radio scripts did have an afterlife, for in the late
1940s demand for Saint books in France was much higher than Leslie was willing
to supply, so they hit on the idea of using some of the radio scripts as the
basis for Saint books which a collaborator would write and would then be edited
by Leslie prior to publication. There are forty of these books, which have not
yet been published in English, but it’s worth noting that not all of them were
based on radio scripts. Some were based on outlines for the New York Herald-Tribune comic strips,
which were written by Charteris himself.
Most
readers probably know Roger Moore's interpretation of The Saint. Did the
character itself change much over the decades and across various media (print,
comic, radio, film, tv)?
In print alone the character evolved
significantly over time. The author William Vivian Butler wrote a very
enjoyable book called The Durable
Desperadoes, which Leslie thought very highly of. In it Butler identified
five stages of the literary Saint’s evolution; the Mark 1 Saint is the Saint of
Meet the Tiger whom Butler describes
as “piratical, romantic, energetic, prone to healthy skipping on beaches, but
not considered a major hero, even by his creator”. The Mark 2 Saint is the
Saint who appears from Enter the Saint
onwards, Butler again, “…the very English Saint…rakehell, impudent, eccentric,
outrageously versatile, eternally versifying, prone to telling long stories
about characters such as Aristophanes, the bow-legged bedbug”. The Mark 3 Saint
is the Saint of The Saint in New York,
“smoother, less flamboyant and…a lot less outlandish”. With Leslie spending
more and more time in the USA—he went on to become an American citizen in
1946—we find the Mark 4 Saint at a time when America became involved in the
Second World War, Mark 4 Templar works for the Allies, as a secret agent in
everything but name. The Mark 5 Saint is perhaps the one that most people are
familiar with, for it is this version that got picked up for TV. Butler
describes him as “a smooth, relaxed, essentially solitary figure, always on the
move around the world, rarely seemingly to live anywhere but in hotel rooms…” Of
course to add another level of complexity into the equation the character
evolved again depending on the media: all the adaptations were products of
their time.
The
Saint is sometimes a controversial character among fans of 1960s spy
shows because he wasn't a spy- yet many of the stories seem to feature
international intrigue, agents, etc as was the fashion. Can you shed some
light on the Saint's brushes with the world of spies and secrets?
I guess any controversy is perhaps because
he was never a full time spy but one of the things I love about the Saint is
that you can adapt him to so many genres; after all the original books feature
him in capers, as a thief, as a detective, as a spy, and some stories have more
than a hint of the fantastical about them as well.
Consequently strictly speaking the Saint
was only occasional a secret agent. But before anyone jumps to the conclusion
that it was the influence of television and the 1960s that caused this
occasional career shift, it should perhaps be pointed out that the Saint’s
first brush with spies and secrets was in The
Saint Closes the Case (1930) where Simon saves a foreign prince from being
blown up or perhaps in The Saint Meets
His Match where Sir Hamilton Dorn has Templar join the Secret Service to
keep him out of legal trouble. Other pre-war tales include ‘The Miracle Tea
Party’ (from Follow the Saint (1938))
which includes more than a hint of espionage.
But it was the outbreak of WWII which led
Simon to become more involved in the security services; in The Saint in Miami (1940) he rescues secret agent Karen Leith, in The Saint Steps In (1944) Simon works
for the US government fighting American businessmen prone to fascism, in The Saint Sees It Through he’s back
working for Hamilton Dorn tackling a drug smuggling ring. Even in 1956’s ‘The
Inescapable Word’ Simon is asked to investigate murder on a secret installation
uncovering a Soviet spy in the process.
And of course it was inevitable that the TV
Saint would find occasional work in the spy field; whether with the likes of When Spring is Sprung, where he rescues
a Russian spy, or The Helpful Pirate
where he works for British intelligence.
Tell
us a bit about Leslie Charteris. How would you summarize
his character and life as a writer?
Leslie was born in Singapore in 1907. Like
his hero Charteris was tall, handsome and multi-lingual. And like his hero,
Charteris had plenty of adventures but unlike his hero, these haven’t been
documented. Until now.
Leslie Charteris was a very private person
and never sanctioned any in-depth study of his life. He told his first
bibliographer, W.O.G. Lofts “…what is interesting is either classified or
scandalous. I either could not or would not help you with anything that should
be printed for about 25 years after my funeral”.
In the 21st Century, not quite twenty-five
years after his funeral, Leslie’s name is indelibly attached to that of his
‘modern day Robin Hood’, Simon Templar but there was more to Leslie’s literary
acuity than the Saint alone. He was fluent in several languages, a passion that
led him to write a guidebook to learning Spanish, the English translation of a
biography of famed matador Juan Belmonte, and those forty French Saint adventures,
which have never been translated into English. He wrote true crime stories
about crooked religious leaders, had a monthly column in the epicurean journal Gourmet magazine, and devised a
pictorial sign language, which he called Paleneo subsequently writing a book
about it. And he was an early member of MENSA, whose requirement for membership
is an IQ within the top 2% of the population.
Charteris was the son of a Chinese doctor and
an English woman who struggled to shake the demons of his early years caused by
his mixed race. A boy who’s status as an outsider was only furthered when his
parents split up and who struggled to find acceptance in his adopted home of
Great Britain. Was the Saint simply a creation based on wish fulfilment or was
he symbolic of something deeper? The manifestation of the adventurer that
Charteris yearned to be? Was he writing
about his own unfulfilled self?
The life and times of Leslie Charteris are
as fascinating and thrilling as any of his Saint stories. What you will read in
the biography is both the classified and the scandalous. It is his story from
the early years in Singapore and days as a starving art student in 1920s Paris,
via the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg to the Golden Age of Hollywood. With
him we shall discover speakeasies in the dying days of Prohibition, we’ll hear
the report of his tennis match with Marlene Dietrich and we shall share in his
adventures sailing with Errol Flynn and Gregory Peck. We’ll learn of his
struggles to bring the Saint to TV throughout the 1950s and share in his
pleasure at seeing the Saint eventually conquer television the following
decade. We’ll track the Saint and Leslie Charteris around the world throughout
the 50s and 60s and we’ll see how his plans for retirement were frustrated by
ongoing interest in the Saint throughout the 1970s and 80s.
How did the matchstick man logo come about? Charteris created it, yes?
Back when he got his first typewriter at the age of seven he created his first magazine, which he sold to his Mum and Dad; the illustrations were a comic strip featuring stick men and women. When it came to the Saint he borrowed one of those stick men and put a halo over it. It’s now a registered trademark and can’t be used without permission of The Estate of Leslie Charteris. [Below: The
Did he have any interesting professional relationships with other genre writers?
Back when he got his first typewriter at the age of seven he created his first magazine, which he sold to his Mum and Dad; the illustrations were a comic strip featuring stick men and women. When it came to the Saint he borrowed one of those stick men and put a halo over it. It’s now a registered trademark and can’t be used without permission of The Estate of Leslie Charteris. [Below: The
Did he have any interesting professional relationships with other genre writers?
In the mid-1940s his company Saint
Enterprises maintained an office in Hollywood and a busy part of those offices
was the bar where you could often find the likes of Anthony Boucher, Stuart
Palmer, Baynard Kendrick and Michael Arlen (and since Michael Arlen created one
version of the Falcon and Stuart Palmer wrote some of the Falcon films, one can
only imagine what they talked about!). His friendship with Boucher would
continue via correspondence until Boucher’s death in 1968.
Many people credit him with being the first
President of the Southern California Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America
but I could find no evidence of this and later in life he went on record
eschewing organisations such as this one. But it’s not inconceivable that he
took on the role for a short while and that would have brought him into contact
with many genre writers of that era.
Tell
us a little about the Charteris biography you've been working on. You were able
to get to know him?
I was lucky enough to know Leslie Charteris
for the last few years of his life. He was in his eighties; I was still trying
to escape my teenage years; an odd relationship really but one that, fuelled
with a diet of long monthly lunches, frequent letters and weekly phone calls,
quickly graduated from acquaintanceship to friendship. After he died I talked
to his family and friends and became convinced that his was a story worth
telling.
Finally—just don’t ask how many years ago I
started it—it’s finished and should be available to read this side of
Christmas.
What do you remember about your first experience with The Saint? What was it that appealed to you?
As a child of the Seventies the first time
I met the Saint he looked an awful lot like Ian Ogilvy. I was nine years old at
the time and a TV series shot in glamorous locations and featuring a hero who
tackled the bad guys, rescued damsels in distress and drove one hell of a car
had a certain appeal. But what sealed my fate was when I discovered that my
brother had a couple of books featuring the character I’d been watching on TV.
I was so entranced by Leslie’s writing that
I invested many years of pocket money in a pre-internet world tracking down
every Saint book I could find. Whilst I enjoy all the various incarnations of
the Saint—except, perhaps the most recent film--it is Leslie’s writing that
grabs me every time. Read some of the early Saint books they’re life affirming
and it doesn’t take a great deal to imagine Leslie chuckling to himself over
the typewriter as he wrote them—something his daughter later confirmed to me
was quite a common sight.
When
did you start collecting Saint books and artifacts?
About a minute after my brother mentioned he
had some Saint books upstairs…
Do you have favorite book covers?
I love the style and simplicity of the old Hodder yellow jacket covers. They were one of the key inspirations for the covers of the recent UK reprints; as were the covers from many of the French Saint books published by Fayard from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Whilst both Leslie and Audrey liked the
Dutch covers done by Dick Bruna, I’ve never been that keen on them for they
seemed to lack style to me.
I also love, for all the wrong reasons, the
cover of the Turkish edition of The Saint
and the Fiction Makers, which features C3PO. No, I don’t know why either.
That's hilarious! Watch for a Star Wars Krimi cover coming up on Spy Vibe. Ian, what
are some of the interesting rarities in your archives?
I have a certain fondness for misprinted
book covers; I’ve got a copy of the Carroll & Graf paperback produced in
the 1990s where, according to the spine, it’s The Saint and Mrs Teal. And I’ve got two copies of Le Saint a Paris (based on one of the
comic strips); one features the stickman peering around the Eiffel Tower and
the other doesn’t, it just features the Eiffel Tower.
Or there’s stuff like The Saint and the Prince of Darkness, the unproduced script that
was originally written for Return of the
Saint, various books of Leslie’s that he had in his schooldays, copies of The Saint TV scripts he wrote in the
early 1950s, copies of Saint radio scripts, photos from the beer adverts Leslie
and Audrey made, photos, manuscripts…
Who
were some of your other favorite adventurer characters? Did you follow the
likes of The Avengers, Danger Man, The Prisoner, etc?
Where to start? I loved The Avengers, though being of a certain
age I had to wait until Channel 4 in the UK reran them in the 1980s and Dave
Rogers wrote some of his books before I really discovered them.
I watched The Prisoner and found it quite intriguing but it never grabbed me
as it has so many others. Danger Man,
on the other hand, did. I also loved The
Man From U.N.C.L.E., to the point where I would record the episodes on a very
battered cassette recorder and listen to them again and again (again showing my
age for this was pre-internet, definitely pre-DVD and pretty much pre-VHS).
Still love MacGyver, though watching recent repeats of it make me realise it
hasn’t aged terribly well. I’d love to see them get the much-touted movie off
the ground.
And then there’s Danger Mouse. And they’re bringing Danger Mouse back, so all will be right with the world once more.
I
loved Danger Mouse, too! And I’m glad I wasn’t the only kid who recorded audio
off the TV so I could listen to favourite stories over and over again on
cassette. For years I had old battered tapes of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
and Yellow Submarine. We were really creating our own radio drama editions.
Let's
finish by playing a Spy Vibe version of Desert Island Discs. Which 5 Saint
novels, 5 radio shows, and 5 Saint TV episodes would you take with you if
you were going to be stranded?
That’s tough. Last time I was asked to name
my favourite Saint book I got it down to about 16 titles: I love the early
Saint, love the short stories, love the war time Saint, and am rather fond of
some of the latter-day collaborations, as well. But, okay, five books:
Getaway (The Saint's Getaway): Action, adventure and Charterisian
enthusiasm for life and language. I vividly remember my eldest brother reading
this book for the first time and reading out loud the following passage; it
made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. The Saint's adventures weren't
constructed around some deep psychological meaning or meant to be subject to
deep analysis, they were Fun and Entertainment.
“After all, he had done nothing desperately
exciting for a long time. About twenty-one days. His subconscious was just ripe
for the caressing touch of a few seductive stimuli. And then and there, when
his resistance was at its lowest ebb, he heard and felt the juicy plonk of his
fist sinking home into a nose.
The savour of that fruity squash wormed
itself wheedlingly down into the very cockles of his heart. He liked it. It
stirred the deepest chords of his being. And it dawned persuasively upon him
that at that moment he desired nothing more of life than an immediate
repetition of that feeling. And, seeing the nose once more conveniently poised
in front of him, he hit it again.
He had not been mistaken. His subconscious
knew its stuff. With the feel of that second biff a pleasant kind of glow cantered
itself in the pit of his stomach and tingled electrically outwards along his
limbs, and the remainder of his doubts melted away before its spreading warmth.
He was punching the nose of an ugly man, and he was liking it. Life had no more
to offer.”
The
Brighter Buccaneer: When I was working on getting the books
reprinted by Thomas and Mercer and casting around for people to write
introductions one of the first things I did was keep this title for myself. I
have lost track of how many times I’ve read this book. Classic short Saint
adventures with neat plots that I could dip into as life necessitated; I’ve
long argued that the best of the Saint books (yeah, we’re back on that sixteen
again…) are life-affirming stories and none more so than this collection.
The
Saint in Miami: Leslie was happy for the Saint to evolve
and realised that he couldn’t go on fighting the same strain of Ungodly when
there was a War on. This is a last hurrah for the old gang before Simon moves
on to become a slightly cynical world-weary traveller. It’s a typical thriller
with the Saint slaying some classic dragons and Charteris writing his best.
The
Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace: When I first read this, as an
impressionable youngster, it didn’t occur to me that this wasn’t 100% Charteris.
Even now, when I’ve seen the original manuscript and know for sure it wasn’t
all down to Leslie, I’m not disappointed. It holds up extremely well as a
period Saint adventure, full of Saintly characters and action.
The
Saint and the Templar Treasure: The Saint was always about entertainment, adventurous entertainment and none
more so than this novel. It reads like it was entirely by Charteris and is
quite simply great fun.
Five radio episodes are a little easier, I
think. I first listened to the episodes more years ago than I will publicly
admit when I was living in Paris, didn’t have a TV and long before internet
streaming became the norm. I needed something to listen to and old time radio on
cassette was the thing. From that time one particular episode remains strong.
Indeed whilst writing the radio book I listened to it again to make sure my
memory wasn’t playing tricks on me. It wasn’t. ‘Dossier on a Doggone Dog’ is
one of the best examples of light comedy in the Saint’s adventures. The curious
thing is that the episode starred Barry Sullivan as the Saint, who filled in
when Vincent Price couldn’t get back from Paris in time.
Another favourite is ‘The Miracle Tea Party’,
an unbroadcast pilot which has now been released commercially by Radio Spirits.
It’s something Leslie put together in 1940, designed to try and sell a radio
series and since he was in complete control of it—there was no network or no
sponsor to interfere—it’s a unique opportunity to hear how he envisaged the
Saint on the radio.
At the risk of being lazy I’d also opt for
an episode—any episode—which featured Vincent Price and Larry Dobkin as Louie.
The Saint as a character always needs someone to play off. For a while in the
books it was Hoppy Uniatz, which Charteris made great fun to read. Louie the
taxi driver is, I’m sure, related to Hoppy and the comic interaction and banter
between the two characters and the two actors, is just great fun to listen to.
‘The Saint Plays With Fire’: I thought Paul
Rhys did a pretty good job in portraying the Saint for BBC Radio in the
mid-1990s, particularly given that they were period productions. But this
stands out from the trio as I think “Saint Overboard” was let down by casting
and “The Saint Closes the Case”, well maybe that one comes a very close second
to this one.
And at the risk of being vague and
cheating, I think I’d pick any Tom Conway episode. I like Conway as an actor,
he nailed the smooth, suave and sophisticated character so well in both the
Saint and the Falcon.
As for five TV episodes, well I’m glad you
didn’t specify from which series. As I’m a child of the 1970s I grew up
watching Return of the Saint so for
me Ian Ogilvy is the Saint and Roger Moore is some fellow called Bond. So first
and foremost on my TV episode list is…
The
Saint and the Brave Goose: Okay, I’m cheating here
and going for the TV movie version so that I can have it as just one episode
and not the original two-parter. And undoubtedly my fondness for this is
tainted by the fact that it was the first TV Saint that I could ever watch
again and again for I had it on VHS many years before the advent of DVDs. And
of course I’ve read the book that was based on it, Salvage for the Saint, many times as well.
It grew out of an unused script that was
originally written for the Roger Moore series but for me typifies everything
about Ian’s Saint; action, adventure, great locations, girls…and even Leslie
Charteris himself as he makes a quick cameo in the episode.
The
Saint Plays With Fire: When I eventually sat down
to watch some of Roger’s stint as the Saint—back in the days when we were
preparing material for ITC Home Video as it was then—this was one of many
episodes I watched but it’s impact remain strong to this day. I love the
original novel it’s based on—which isn’t listed above, before you ask, because
you were cruel enough to limit me to five titles—and this is just a brilliant,
thrilling update of it.
But although the series had its problems I
do like them. Sure there’s unintentional comedy in some of them (see The Blue Dulac?) and although they largely
haven’t aged too well (has anything from 80s TV?) you can see why they were
commissioned. This one is a great example that must have looked brilliant on
paper; a script by Anthony Horowitz, David Ryall as Inspector Teal and a great
opening sequence.
The
Saint and the Fiction Makers: I love the tongue in
cheek nature of the Saint, right back to the aside to readers that the literary
Saint would make. So a Saint adventure that parodies not just Bond, but itself
to some degree is bound to appeal. Of course being me it was the book I read
first, only discovering the film version with the advent of VHS machines. But
both are equally good.
The
Saint with Adam Rayner: Okay, so I’m obviously
biased and somewhat unfair since most people haven’t seen this. But I have a
certain fondness for the pilot we shot in 2013. Sure there were issues with the
script, but it was a lot better than some pilots I’ve seen make it to air. Adam
did a great job as the Saint and I’m only sorry that he won’t be carrying on.
Thanks again for stopping by, Ian! Spy Vibers, I'm away on a mission until July 12th. I'll try to post some fun covers in the meantime. I look forward to sharing details about my visit to location sites from The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Saint, and meeting up with fellow Bondologists to walk in Ian Fleming's London. Until then, enjoy!