Saturday 22 June 1963

Tonight's Ghost Squad episode, The Man with the Delicate Hands, has a script by future crack Avengers scribe Philip Levene and direction from the imaginative Peter Sasdy - all good signs, and indeed for the most part it's excellent.  We start off with an enigma that's pure Avengers - in Holland, a car's set on fire with an unfortunate chap still inside...

It turns out that the victim was Paul Lambert, an interpreter at the International Monetary Fund - or so all the evidence would suggest.  However, Paul's sister Helen (the - from a 21st century perspective - unfortunately named Rosemary Dorken) is adamant that it can't possibly be him - he had delicate, beautiful hands while the corpse's fingers are all short and stubby.

Given that there are certain unscrupulous types who'd love to get hold of the top secret information Paul possessed on which countries intend to devalue their currency, the Ghost Squad decide to investigate the situation. Anthony Marlowe's Superintendent Stock's got yet another week off, and this week he's replaced by the very prolific character actor Basil Dignam (who doesn't suit a moustache at all).

In what would become an Avengers standby, an eccentric expert's called in to examine the corpse's tattoo, identical to one Paul picked up in Singapore while on national service. This fellow, Vaughan (Patrick Boxill) recognises the tattoo as the work of a Netherlands-based artist named Hans DeLarge - and it's only been done in the last week or so.  Tony Miller's sent out to interview DeLarge about what's going on.

But on arrival, Tony finds that Helen Lambert's ahead of him, and trails her to DeLarge's shop.  He turns out to be played by dear old Erik Chitty - practically the antithesis of how we think of tattoo artists these days.

DeLarge denies all knowledge of Paul, but Tony follows him to the mansion of the episode's baddie, amoral art dealer Peter Brenner (Derek Francis).  Brenner is holding the real  Paul captive and torturing him for his currency secrets. Francis plays him as a full-on Bond villain, complete with ever present pussy (actually, the cat-stroking Blofeld was yet to be seen on screen, making his debut in From Russia with Love, released in October '63).

DeLarge is, obviously, in Brenner's pay, but he's getting panicky now he knows someone's on to him.  Which means, of course, that the poor old chap's not long for this world.

At first convinced that the corpse wasn't her brother's, Helen begins to be swayed by the medical opinion of Dr Arne (Anne Blake), who happens to have examined Paul both before and after his crash.  But she's another of Brenner's henchpersons - he's blackmailing her over her part in Nazi concentration camp experiments - and is assisting in the attempts to get Paul talking.

Eventually both Tony and Helen end up in Brenner's wicked clutches...

The problem with The Man with the Delicate Hands is that throughout we're kept a few steps ahead of Tony and Helen in finding out what's going on.  Rather than heightening the suspense, this just makes it a bit frustrating that they don't just hurry up and work out where Paul is and who's holding him captive.  Other than that it's a far above average instalment.

Ghost Squad will be back next week, but it's the only one of the three shows on tonight's menu that will.  Next up, it's the last ever Man of the World.

The show goes out on a high: The Prince (that's the title, I know you can barely read it) is easily the strongest episode this series, thanks mainly to exciting direction from Ealing alumnus Charles Crichton.  In civil war-torn Loscha (near Burma), an old woman begs the American consulate to take in her little boy  - who she claims is in fact Prince Tulan, missing since the assassination of the rest of the country's royal family six years ago.

Consul Forrester and his wife (Warren Stanhope and Ann Gillis) are a thoroughly unappealing pair: he's a drip and she's an exasperating bossyboots.  But they take the child in.  Now they need to find out whether or not he really is the Prince.

Man of the World Michael Strait, who went to Loscha to write a magazine feature on the royal family shortly before their assassination, is one of four people called out to help confirm or deny the child's identity.  The others are his elderly former governess Miss Bentley (Enid Lorimer), the king's former financial advisor Count Maximillian Korvin (Geoffrey Keen), and Anna, the king's former mistress (Sylva Langova).

Anna's convinced the child really is the prince, and Korvin seems equally convinced he isn't. Miss Bentley claims she knows the only sure way to find out - by seeing if the boy can tell her the treasured possession he gave her before she left Loscha. Unfortunately she just ends up scaring the poor lad.

When the child runs off, Miss Bentley starts to follow, only to be hit by a stray bullet from the fighting taking place outside the consulate.  Now she's out of the way, how can the boy's identity be confirmed?

Strait cunningly gains the child's confidence and gets him to admit he was put up to pretending to be the Prince by the decidedly dodgy Korvin.  Michael Sirr, as the little boy, is a cute enough kid but not the most talented of child actors - and his distinct Cockney accent jars a bit.

Strait confronts Anna, and finds out that Korvin's paid her a load of money to confirm that the boy's the prince, in the hope that he can control the throne of Loscha.  What Strait's also been able to work out (though it's not entirely clear how) is that, by coincidence, the boy chosen for the masquerade really is the prince.  Confronted with this information Anna feels utterly ashamed of herself.  Sylva Langova is a highly glamorous and tremendously camp figure, and the episode gets about 50% more entertaining whenever she's on screen.

When Strait confronts Korvin, the villain ends up shooting poor Anna, seemingly for no reason other than that she's annoying him.

The ensuing fight scene between Korvin and Strait is brilliantly staged, but the highlight is the extremely campy shots of a very slowly expiring Anna, as she reaches for the gun and finally, with her last ounce of strength, dispatches Korvin.

You see? Very exciting stuff.  With Strait's encouragement young Tulan remembers it was his ceremonial earring he gave Miss Bentley, he's reinstalled as Prince and the country's troubles are on their way to being eased.  Hooray!

Now it's time for the last in the present series of The Human Jungle, which has an especially appropriate title.

After a worrying period of radio silence, experienced test pilot Mike Barclay (Ian Bannen) crashed his plane, managing to eject first. Aircraft manufacturer Mr Black (Eddie Byrne) is determined to find out whether it was plane or pilot at fault, and enlists the help of a reluctant Dr Roger Corder to find out if Mike's mentally disturbed in any way.  Black's trying to nudge Corder into concluding that Mike was attempting suicide, so the production of the plane won't be held up, but as ever Corder insists he'll make up his own mind.

Mike's recovering in hospital with support from his wife Vera (Zena Marshall).

And look who's playing Mike's nurse!

Yes, it's The Avengers' Venus Smith herself, Julie Stevens.  It's a shame to see her playing such a tiny role, particularly as she's credited as "Second Nurse" in spite of appearing on screen ages before "First Nurse" (Ilona Rodgers).

Mike keeps rambling the word "Honey", which Corder soon works out is a reference to his secretary Honey Benson (June Barry), with whom he's been having a long affair.

Conflicting stories arise: Honey claims she and Mike were planning to move to San Francisco together (and indeed Mike did buy airline tickets there), but Vera insists the affair was just a stupid fling and she'd talked Mike out of leaving her.  What's more, Honey paints a picture of an utterly fearless Mike while Vera insists he was always terror-stricken prior to flying, and she's spent their entire marriage helping him with his nerves.  It's all very confusing, and Corder decides the only way to get to the bottom of what happened is to reconstruct Mike's last flight.

Creating a mock-up of Mike's cockpit, Corder hypnotises the pilot into reliving the flight. It turns out that, with the need to decide between two women burdening his mind, Mike's flight fears overwhelmed him and he flipped out.  Few people have ever been able to flip out quite as entertainingly as Ian Bannen, who throughout the episode gives us a quite remarkable display of bonkersness.

The crash was caused when Mike attempted to land the plane -but pressed the wrong button because they were so close together! Mr Black's happy that he knows what to do to make the plane safer, and Mike and Vera are happy as they decide to give it another try.  Honey's not best pleased, but we get the feeling she'll find another pilot to ensnare before too long.

In contrast to last week's multi-plotted episode, Over and Out focuses purely on Mike's rather twisty tale, and gives us a full-length portrait of a troubled mind. As such it's a highly satisfying end to the series.  The episode ends with an interesting new sartorial decision from Corder, who's taken to wearing his overcoat like a cape.

Perhaps he's attempting to prepare us for the show moving into his timeslot next week: there'll be capes aplenty as ATV's Sergeant Cork investigates the seamy side of Victorian London.  The Human Jungle will return, but not for a while yet, I'm afraid.

Saturday 15 June 1963

This week's episode (it's called Lost in Transit, by the way) sees the Squad (I've never called them that before; possibly I never will again) up against the New Link, a dangerous Berlin-based neo-Nazi organisation led by the powerful Mr Van Tempel (the extremely sinister-looking Anthony Jacobs).

Van Tempel's propaganda chief Karl Eppler (the always very welcome John Woodvine) is on his way to London, where Ghost Squad's Tony Miller's waiting to see what mischief he plans to get up to.

The smoking chap above is played by Walter Randall, a ubiquitous TV bit player of shady types.  His role here's no different from usual, as he swiftly meets up with the new arrival from Berlin in the gent's lavatories (which feature some fantastic wall tiles).  "Van Tempel told me you had something for me," "That is correct - I have it right here."  I'm sure this sort of thing goes on in the gent's loos at airports all the time - but in this case it ends up with Eppler apparently shot dead.

Ghost Squad boss Geoffrey Stock's livid at finding out that Miller's quarry's been killed under his very nose.  It turns out, you see, that Eppler was in fact a Ghost Squad agent who had infiltrated the New Link and was preparing to destroy it from within.  Miller's sent to see if he can get any information from Eppler's estranged wife (Delphi Lawrence) who left him because of what she thought were his Fascist views.  Mrs Eppler's been receiving strange messages about her husband from an unknown source that she's been unable to make head nor tail of.  Miller accompanies her to identify the body - which isn't Eppler at all (explaining why we only saw the back of his head).  And look - it's Dalek Operator extraordinaire John Scott Martin playing the morgue attendant! Miller and Mrs Eppler head out to Berlin to try and find the real Eppler.

Van Tempel, we learn, replaced Eppler on the trip to London with an errant New Link member at the last  minute.  The double agent himself's still in Berlin, attending what look like extremely dull meetings with the very drab inner circle of the New Link at the bar where they have their secret hideout.

The organisation are planning to blow up the Berlin Opera House during a performance at which a number of  the great and good will be present.  Eppler manages to get an obscure message to his wife before being exposed as a traitor and getting tied up with a bomb in his face.  By the time Miller manages to work out what he was blithering on about the is the device has gone off, but Eppler looks surprisingly intact and even manages to get a few words out, alerting Miller to the coming disaster.

Lost in Transit is, sadly, an extremely dull episode of Ghost Squad in which little happens and what does is interminably drawn out.  The scene where a New Link member plants the bomb at the opera house, for instance, feels like it takes at least 15 minutes.

Miller, of course, gets there, puts Opera House boss Arnold Diamond in a flap, and manages to disarm the bomb.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about this sequence (and indeed the whole episode) is the vast amount of eyeliner Neil Hallett appears to be wearing.

Now on to this week's Man of the World, which is surprisingly free of anything of such international import as sinister far-right organisations, with Michael Strait instead poking his lens into the affairs of one Spanish family.

Unsurprisingly, given the title, we're at a bullfight, where the young chap we see in close-up (saucer-eyed Joseph Cuby) seems to have no connection whatsoever with the fellow actually fighting the bull.

In the audience are Michael Strait and a cigar-chomping Spanish friend (Ferdy Mayne, who must have played every European nationality at one point or another).

Strait's here to do an article on the young bullfighter, Luiz Rivera - son of Francisco Rivera, one of the most revered matadors of all time.  The plain and simple reason for Strait taking this assignment is that Luiz's sister Carmen (Marla Landi, from Hammer's The Hound of the Baskervilles) is an acquaintance from New York, and he's trying to get his end away with her.  ("Do you know a place round here I could use as a darkroom?" he asks her at one point, the dirty beggar).

Strait's whisked off to the Villa Rivera, where he meets an assortment of characters including Luiz's mother (the marvellous Eileen Way), his manager (the John Shuttleworth-ish Richard Montez) and the family's doctor and lawyer (Michael Peake and George Street), all of whom behave very shiftily.

This being (pretend) Spain, we're treated to an elaborate Flamenco performance at the Villa.  Pictures can't do justice to how ridiculously camp the man in the spotty top is, you'll need to see the episode for yourself.

A room in the house is kept as a shrine to Luiz's father (the artefacts including his enormous moustache, by the looks of things), who supposedly died in an accident in the ring, though nobody likes to talk about it.  Strait takes some photos of the room for the article, but they mysteriously disappear...

Later, inspecting the villa's very own bullring, Strait has a (tiny) bull set on him.

Who could be responsible for these misdeeds? And why? Strait finds Luiz's manager skulking around the bullring but sadly doesn't tell him his unlikely excuse is a load of bull.

It turns out all the furtive characters we've met are in on the plot to sabotage Strait's article, the reason being - in true gothic melodrama style - that Francisco Rivera's still alive (in the form of John Bailey, Hattie Jacques' gay best friend), and hidden away in a room accessed through a secret door in the trophy room.

Disappointingly, Francisco's not insane or hideously deformed or anything like that, he just lost his nerve in the bullring and ended up paralysed because of it, and decided it would be better for Luiz to think he was dead.  "Look into my eyes," he tells Strait, "do you recognise what you see? The worm of fear!"

Mr Wormy Eyes

Francisco thought hiding himself away would prevent the worm infecting his son, but Strait harshly informs him that it's actually had the opposite effect.  Still, knowing his dad's alive after all spurs Luiz onto a splendid performance in the ring.  Hurrah.

The explanations of what's going on in The Bullfighter are laughably unconvincing, but that's gothic melodrama for you.  It's unusual enough to remain interesting throughout, the small scale of the drama making an enjoyable change from the usual espionage-type stuff.

Also departing a bit from its usual style tonight is The Human Jungle, focusing on two contrasting disturbed patients, rather than the usual one.

There's an especially gripping start to this week's episode.  A young woman, Fay Bridges (Reggie Perrin's Pauline Yates) arrives home to find the lights aren't working.  She calls out to her husband but there's no answer, though we can see a man skulking in the darkness, heading upstairs.   Fay hears sobbing coming from her young son's room and tries the door, but it's locked.  Turning round she sees the scary man (her husband David) advancing up the stairs with a belt...

Fay consults Dr Corder, begging him to give her the strength to leave her abusive husband, which somehow she's just unable to do.  Strangely, she seems to expect him to be able to do this in just the one session, and becomes distraught on learning that's just not the case.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Davis is stumped by the case of a new mother, Doreen Stokes (Susan Burnet) who's determined that her baby be adopted, claiming the hovel she lives in just isn't good enough for it.  Here she is having a fag against a backdrop of spectacular 60s NHS posters.

Jimmy's investigations reveal that far from living in grim surroundings, Doreen and her husband (Minder's Glynn Edwards) live in the whole top floor of her mother's perfectly nice house.  And far from them being poor, her husband earns over £20 a week (!).  So what's the real reason she doesn't want the child?

As Jimmy tries to get to the bottom of this, Fay Bridges is admitted to hospital after being assaulted.  She won't admit it, but it's obvious who the culprit is.  David visits her alongside his domineering parents (Frederick Piper and Beatrice Varley).  He's a frightening, silent character, and strangely, he's not even credited (if anyone recognises the actor I'd love to know who he is).

After initially refusing to see Dr Corder again, Fay secretly meets up with him and reveals an alarming fact about her marriage: she had initially had doubts about marrying David, but his parents sent her to a psychiatrist, who rapidly hypnotised them out of her - she'd been expecting Corder could do the same to get her to leave her husband.  Corder's horrified that Fay's had such a cowboy rooting about in her mind, and having taken over the case of Doreen Stokes, sends Jimmy to track down this  unscrupulous character, who goes by the name of Algernon Wirral.

Corder himself tries out a spot of (responsible) hypnotism on Doreen, and learns that the root of the rejection of her child is the secret happiness she felt at age six when her brother died.  She was overjoyed that she'd now be the centre of attention, and the coming of her baby now has stirred up subconscious worries that it'll steal the limelight from her.

Doreen's deeply upset to learn she has these feelings, but Corder sets her on the path to dealing with them and accepting her baby.  Fay's case might be trickier: it turns out that Algernon Wirral isn't a psychiatrist at all but a confidence trickster and bigamist currently in Wandsworth Prison.  He's played by the wonderful Roger Delgado with a great deal of roguish charm (it's a refreshing change to see him playing something other than a generic foreign baddie).  Seeing Delgado as a wicked but charismatic hypnotist serving time at Her Majesty's Pleasure should be especially resonant for Doctor Who fans.  "I think she was quite my most successful client" says Wirral of Fay.  "Financially?" asks Jimmy, contemptuously.  "My dear fellow," responds a bemused Wirral, "How else does one measure success?"

David's parents paid Wirral £50 to ensure Fay married their son - a dangerous paranoiac who's now been readmitted to a mental hospital.  In a wonderful display of blazing indignation from Herbert Lom Corder turns the full force of his wrath on them, scandalising the awful Mrs Bridges: "At least that Mr Wirral was a gentleman!"

The Two Edged Sword's a fantastic episode with superb dialogue (from star writer Bill McIlwraith) and performances - though Fay's storyline could easily have been extended to fill the whole episode, with David built up into more of a proper character and more screen time for the gleefully amoral Mr Wirral.  

In between dealing with the problems of Fay and Doreen we're treated to another endearing glimpse of Corder's home life, focusing as usual on overprotective daughter Jennifer's fearsome inability to cook.

I'm sad to say that next week's episode will be the last in the current series of The Human Jungle.  Don't miss it, I know I won't.