Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 9780719098932

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The book explores the history of swashbuckling television from its origins in the 1950s to the present day. It maps the major production cycles of the Anglophone swashbuckler both in Britain and in the United States and places the genre in its historical, cultural and institutional contexts. It shows how the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s established a template for a genre that has been one of the most successful of British television exports, and considers how America responded to this ‘British invasion’ with its own swashbuckling heroes such as Zorro.

Swashbucklers is intended for students and teachers of popular television drama as well as for adventure-lovers everywhere. James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester Cover: Anthony Andrews in Ivanhoe (1982). Rosemont Productions/Columbia Pictures Television

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

THE COSTUME ADVENTURE SERIES

Chapman analyses the cultural politics of the swashbuckler, considering how it has been a vehicle for the representation of ideologies of class, gender and nationhood. While some swashbucklers have promoted consensual politics, others such as Dick Turpin and Robin of Sherwood have presented us with heroes on the margins of society who challenge its inequities and injustices. The relationship of the television swashbuckler to the founding myths of the tradition is discussed, along with how it has responded to the changing cultural and ideological contexts in which it is produced. What emerges is a picture of a genre that has proved remarkably flexible in adapting its form and style to match the popular tastes of audiences.

CHAPMAN

Swashbucklers is the first study of one of the most popular and enduring genres in television history – the costume adventure series.

THE COSTUME ADVENTURE SERIES

JAM E S CHAPMAN

SWAS HBUC KLER S

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SWASHBUCKLERS The costume adventure series

JAMES CHAPMAN

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James Chapman 2015 The right of James Chapman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN

978 0 7190 8881 0 hardback

First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

For Sue Harper

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Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6

List of figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

viii xi xiii

Introduction Exporting Englishness Fantasy factories Revisionist revivals Rebels with a cause Heritage heroes Millennial mavericks Conclusion

1 10 49 103 137 171 212 255

Select bibliography Index

262 267

vii

Figures 1.1 Greene of the Greenwood: Richard Greene starring in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Sapphire Films for ITPC/Network DVD).

17

1.2 The Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Wheatley) offers Robin (Richard Greene) a pardon if he will swear allegiance to the usurper Prince John in ‘Secret Mission’. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Sapphire Films for ITPC/Network DVD).

32

2.1 The bold knight and the wily magician: Lancelot (William Russell) and Merlin (Cyril Smith) in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (Sapphire Films for ITPC/ Network DVD).

51

2.2 Captain Dan Tempest (Robert Shaw) was rarely without female company in The Buccaneers (Sapphire Films for ITPC/Network DVD).

56

2.3 Marco del Monte (Edmund Purdom) narrowly escapes an assassin’s dagger in Sword of Freedom (Sapphire Films for ITPC/Network DVD).

60

2.4 A smug Sir Percy Blakeney (Marius Goring) again outwits his antagonist Chauvelin (Stanley Van Beers, right) in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (Towers of London for ITPC/Network DVD).

66

2.5 A mature Edmond Dantes (George Dolenz, centre) with his sidekicks Rico (Richard Cawdron) and Jacopo (Nick Cravat) in The Count of Monte Cristo (TPA/Network DVD).

70

2.6 The masked avenger of Old California: Guy Williams starring in Zorro (Walt Disney/Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD).

81

viii

List of figures   ix 2.7 A Swiss Robin Hood: Conrad Phillips starring in William Tell (ITP/Network DVD).

85

2.8 The patriotic pirate: Terence Morgan starring in Sir Francis Drake (ITC/Network DVD).

90

3.1 Arthur (Oliver Tobias) and Kai (Michael Gothard) wear their hair like 1970s pop stars in Arthur of the Britons (Heritage Enterprises for HTV/Network DVD).

107

3.2 Revisionist Robin: Robin (Martin Potter) and Marion (Diane Keen) in The Legend of Robin Hood (BBC/2Entertain DVD).

115

3.3 An adult Richard Shelton (Simon Cuff) is revealed as the mysterious masked archer at the end of the second series of The Black Arrow (Southern Television/Renown DVD).

123

3.4 A prodigal son of Scotland returning to his roots: David McCallum starred as Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped (HTV/Network DVD).

128

4.1 The English highwayman: Richard O’Sullivan starring in Dick Turpin (LWT/Network DVD).

139

4.2 A brooding Oliver Tobias as Jack Vincent in Smuggler (HTV West/Network DVD).

147

4.3 The Hooded Man (I): Michael Praed starring in Robin of Sherwood (Goldcrest Film and Television for HTV/Network DVD).

157

4.4 The Hooded Man (II): Jason Connery starring in Robin of Sherwood (Goldcrest Film and Television for HTV/Network DVD).

163

5.1 Ivanhoe (Anthony Andrews) and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (Sam Neill) in a duel to the death in Ivanhoe (Rosemont Productions for CBS/Sony DVD).

178

5.2 The Romantic Englishman: Sir Percy Blakeney (Anthony Andrews) and his wife Marguerite (Jane Seymour) reunited in The Scarlet Pimpernel (London Films).

184

5.3 Boys’ Own Heroes (I): Sean Bean as Lt Richard Sharpe in ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’. Sharpe (Celtic Pictures for Central Television/Carlton DVD).

187

x   List of figures 5.4 Boys’ Own Heroes (II): Ioan Gruffudd as Lt Horatio Hornblower in ‘The Duchess and the Devil’. Hornblower (a United Production for Meridian Television/Granada Ventures).

195

5.5 Gerard Depardieu as a brooding Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo (Cité Films for TF1/Arrow Films DVD).

205

6.1 Just your average date night in Sherwood Forest: Marion (Anna Galvin), Little John (Richard Ashton), Robin (Matthew Porretta) and Friar Tuck (Martyn Ellis) in The New Adventures of Robin Hood (Tarnview/Baltic Ventures International/Turner Network Television/ Warner Bros. International Television).

220

6.2 Behind the mask: Tessa Alvarado (Tessie Santiago) adopts a minimal disguise as the Zorro-like ‘Queen of Swords’. Queen of Swords (Fireworks Entertainment for the Global Television Network/Fremantle Media DVD).

225

6.3 ‘They seek him here, they seek him there …’ Richard E. Grant in his element as the apparently foppish Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (BBC/London Films/Stax Entertainment).

235

6.4 Robin the hoodie: Jonas Armstrong starring in Robin Hood (Tiger Aspect for BBC1/BBC DVD).

242

Note: All the images in this book are DVD grabs, which are reproduced here under the fair dealing guidelines relating to criticism and review as suggested by the Intellectual Property Office (published 12 June 2014).

Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making. I first became interested in costume adventure series while writing my first book on popular television genres, Saints and Avengers, a study of British secret agent and detective series of the 1960s. That the project has taken so long to come to fruition has been due partly to my diversion into other topics and partly to the fact that only recently have many of the series included herein become available on DVD. (In researching film one can call upon the viewing services of the British Film Institute for those elusive titles: it is rather less easy for television when one wants to see thirty-nine episodes of Sword of Freedom – available on DVD only since 2011 – let  alone all 143 episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood.) Over the decade or so that I have been researching television swashbucklers, many friends and colleagues have been generous in the provision of their time and advice. Thank you especially to Tony Aldgate, Guy Barefoot, David Ekserdjian, Tobias Hochscherf, Steve Neale, Andrew Spicer and Susan Sydney-Smith. I am particularly grateful to those who have supplied copies of television episodes I would otherwise have been unable to see including Jeffrey (‘Ivanhoe’) Richards and Andrew (‘Scarlet Pimpernel’) Pixley. A special thank you, as always, to Nathalie Morris and the Special Collections Unit of the British Film Institute for facilitating access to archive materials and to the BFI Library staff for their patience in explaining how to use the digitised microfiche collection. I should also like to record my appreciation to Matthew Frost and his colleagues at Manchester University Press for their faith in ‘The Swash’ and their patience in awaiting its delivery. Swashbucklers is my principal output arising from the ‘Spaces of Television’ project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2010–14). I should like to record my thanks to colleagues on xi

xii   Acknowledgements this project at the universities of Reading, Glamorgan and Leicester – fellow investigators Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, postdoctoral researchers Leah Panos and Billy Smart, and PhD researchers Victoria Byard and Ben Lamb  – for their collegiality and intellectual generosity in sharing sources and ideas. I am also grateful to the Study Leave Committee of the College of Arts, Humanities and Law at the University of Leicester for the sabbatical year that enabled me to complete the writing of this book. An earlier version of Chapter  1 appeared as ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood and the origins of the television swashbuckler’, Media History, 17: 3 (2011), pp. 273–87. It has been substantially revised and expanded for inclusion here. This book is dedicated with much affection to Sue Harper, Professor Emerita of Film History at the University of Portsmouth, a fellow swashbuckler whose own intellectual swordplay is an exemplar of style and élan. Long live cultural history and confusion to our enemies!

Abbreviations ABC ATV BBC CBN CBS FCC HBO HTV HUAC   IFE ITA ITC ITP LWT MGM NBC ORTF RAI TNT TPA

American Broadcasting Company Associated Television British Broadcasting Corporation Christian Broadcasting Network Columbia Broadcasting System Federal Communications Commission Home Box Office Harlech Television House UnAmerican Activities Committee Italian Film Export Independent Television Authority Independent Television Corporation Incorporated Television Programme Company London Weekend Television Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer National Broadcasting Company Office de la Radiodiffusion et de la Télévision Française Radiotelevisione Italiana Turner Network Television Television Programs of America

xiii

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Introduction The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, Zorro, Ivanhoe, William Tell, Sir Francis Drake, The Black Arrow, Arthur of the Britons, Dick Turpin, Robin of Sherwood, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sharpe, Hornblower … Swashbucklers  – in their various guises  – have been a feature of the television landscape for over half a century. Since the emergence of the genre in the 1950s there has been a long and distinguished tradition of costume adventure series chronicling the exploits of those chivalric heroes of old: knights bold and good, dashing swordsmen, gentleman outlaws, daring sea captains and fearless masked avengers. Swashbucklers have been produced in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, and the genre has provided some of the most successful exports in television history. For example The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) – which more than any other series can be said to represent the origin of the television swashbuckler – was the first British telefilm series sold to an American network and remains to this day one of the biggest overseas currency earners in the history of British television. Furthermore the swashbuckler is a universal genre that crosses boundaries of nationhood, culture and language. The swashbuckling hero is a mythic archetype that exists in the popular folklore of all cultures. As Sidney Cole, producer of The Adventures of Robin Hood and a host of other swashbucklers, observed: ‘Robin Hood is an international symbol – he has an equivalent in practically every language.’1 Swashbucklers sets out to map the history of this enduring but critically marginalised television genre from its origins in the 1950s to the present. In this sense the book should be understood as an addition to a growing body of television scholarship that focuses on popular drama, 1

2   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series and especially the episodic series, as a legitimate site of critical inquiry. A decade ago in the introduction to my book Saints and Avengers (2002) – a study of the cycle of stylish British-made secret agent and adventure series during the 1960s to which the present work is in a sense both a sequel and a prequel  – I suggested that popular genres had been neglected in television historiography in preference to ‘quality’ drama in the form of either social realism (what might be termed the Cathy Come Home paradigm) or costume literary adaptations (the Pride and Prejudice paradigm).2 This is no longer the case. A significant trend in television studies over the last decade or so has been the emergence of what might be called the ‘new television history’, focusing on genres such as the Western, the police series, medical dramas, science fiction and fantasy adventure series. The intellectual resistance to taking popular drama seriously that I observed a decade ago seems largely to have been overcome: Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now as much a part of the television studies agenda as The Wednesday Play or Brideshead Revisited. Yet the absence of the swashbuckler (a term that I am using to describe the telefilm costume adventure series) from histories of popular television is curious on several accounts. For one thing the swashbuckler was integral to the early history of independent television in Britain. It was ITV that led the way in the production of a cycle of halfhour telefilm costume adventure series in the late 1950s that – to a much greater degree than the critically acclaimed but now for the most part ‘lost’ live studio dramas of the time – really put British television on the international map. The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers were all sold to American networks. Yet these series have been marginalised in the television historiography of the 1950s that focuses instead on innovative live dramas such as The Quatermass Experiment and Nineteen Eighty-Four and the tradition of the single play exemplified by Armchair Theatre.3 While the preference for aesthetically and formally progressive drama is entirely understandable, this does not mean that other programme forms are not also culturally significant. Yet the adventure series has tended to be seen primarily as an economic product rather than as a cultural artefact. This tendency can be traced back to the contemporary publicity discourses of series like The Adventures of Robin Hood, which focused on their

Introduction   3 international sales. In December 1955, for example, TV Times declared: ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood, which has been sold to the United States, has brought to England a million and a quarter dollars – nearly half a million pounds.’4 The television swashbuckler is also important historically because the genre was at the forefront of international co-production and distribution arrangements. The pioneer in this regard was the Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP), which from the very outset sought US co-production and distribution partners for its swashbuckling series. This was necessary because the swashbuckler has usually been towards the higher end of the cost bracket for television drama production and this has necessitated international co-production. In the 1950s series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood were Anglo-American productions in terms of funding and distribution. Furthermore, it has since been conclusively established that many of the writers involved in the British-made swashbucklers of the 1950s were in fact American writers blacklisted during the anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood.5 In the 1970s Anglo-European co-productions enabled HTV, one of the smaller ITV companies, to make Arthur of the Britons and Kidnapped, both of which secured international distribution, while in the 1990s both ITV (Hornblower) and the BBC (The Scarlet Pimpernel) produced swashbucklers in association with US cable broadcaster the A&E Network. The international co-production contexts of many costume adventure series therefore raise important questions about economic and cultural capital in the television industry: to this extent the swashbuckler makes a particularly good case study not only for the analysis of genre but also for examining production contexts. The history of the Anglophone swashbuckler involves understanding the institutional contexts of both the British and the American television industries. The first question to be asked in any historical study of a genre is to define it: what is (and is not) a swashbuckler? All definitions of genre are to some extent arbitrary, of course, largely because we all intuitively know what constitutes a particular genre and tend to fall back on a common-sense understanding of, say, the Western. For the swashbuckler, however, the issue is rather more difficult due to the dearth of scholarly (and, for that matter, popular) literature on the subject. In his book Swordsmen of the Screen (1977) – still the only major study of the

4   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series cinema swashbuckler – Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘it is basically in form and ethos that the swashbuckler is to be distinguished from other genres. Stylization rather than realism, fictional adventures and not historical fact are the keynotes.’6 Unlike the Western, which is defined by its geographical and historical location, swashbucklers may be set in different historical periods and locations, including Arthurian Britain (The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, Arthur of the Britons), Plantagenet England (Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow), Renaissance Italy (Sword of Freedom), seventeenth-century France (The Three Musketeers), Spanish California (Zorro), during the French Revolution (The Scarlet Pimpernel) and the Napoleonic Wars (Sharpe, Hornblower), and even in the mythical kingdom of Ruritania (The Prisoner of Zenda). Regardless of its period and location, however, the swashbuckler features archetypal characters and situations. It is characterised by narratives of adventure, political intrigue and romance. Swordplay is also an essential ingredient: a literal definition of a swashbuckler is ‘one who makes a noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with his sword’.7 Sharpe, which some readers may feel does not properly belong to the swashbuckling genre because its protagonist is a plebeian rifleman rather than a gentleman adventurer, earns his inclusion here by dint of his proficiency with a sword. The television swashbuckler shares other characteristics with its cinema equivalent. In Swordsmen of the Screen, Richards provides a cultural history of the cinema swashbuckler by charting the different lineages of the genre – including the Knights of the Round Table, the Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Three Musketeers, the Masked Avengers and the Gentlemen of the Road  – in terms of their underlying ideologies and their relationship to the founding myths. Most of these lineages also inform the television costume adventure series. There have been, for instance, no fewer than six television series based on the Robin Hood story (1951, 1955–60, 1975, 1984–86, 1997–98, 2006–09) as well as various one-off plays and spoofs (such as the BBC children’s series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men). And, like the cinema swashbuckler, television has drawn extensively upon the literary roots of the genre. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for example, has been adapted for British television on four occasions (1958, 1970, 1982 and 1997). So too has Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet

Introduction   5 Pimpernel (1950, 1955 – as The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel – 1982 and 1999–2000). There have been three adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1951, 1958 and 1972–74) and no fewer than five versions of his Kidnapped (1952, 1956, 1963, 1979 and 2005). Alexandre Dumas is probably the most oft-filmed author of the swashbuckling genre with multiple versions of his classic tales The Three Musketeers (filmed in Italy in 1955, Britain in 1965, and at least twice in France, in 1959 and 1969) and The Count of Monte Cristo (filmed in Britain in 1955 and 1964, Italy in 1976, and France in 1979 and 1998). Like the cinema swashbuckler, which can be mapped through three major production cycles – 1920–28, 1934–40 and 1946–55 – the history of the television swashbuckler is best understood as cyclical rather than as a continuous unbroken lineage. The first cycle between 1955 and 1961 – comprising The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, Zorro, Ivanhoe, William Tell and Sir Francis Drake – established the style and conventions of the genre. All but one of those series (Zorro) were British-made, though often with an American co-production partner. The emergence of the swashbuckler on television coincided with its decline in the cinema as the films became too expensive to mount at a time of declining cinema attendances. For Richards the telefilm costume series ‘pre-empted the ground hitherto occupied by the cinema swashbuckler. Small-scale, black and white, often studio-bound, these series were none the less well acted, fast-moving and entertaining, perfect pocket-sized versions of the great cinema originals.’8 The swashbuckler was largely absent from British and American television during the 1960s (though there was a cycle of Alexandre Dumas adaptations by the BBC in the mode of the classic serial), but it returned in the 1970s following the arrival of colour television. The second swashbuckling cycle between 1972 and 1986 included both telefilm series (Arthur of the Britons, Kidnapped, Dick Turpin, Smuggler, Robin of Sherwood) and serials shot on the more economical medium of video (The Black Arrow, The Legend of Robin Hood, Warrior Queen, Beau Geste, The Prisoner of Zenda). By the 1980s the increasing costs of production meant that the traditional half-hour episodic series was

6   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series becoming uneconomical. Accordingly producers of swashbuckling television turned to alternative models. One trend was the rise of the feature-length television film either as a stand-alone ‘special’ (pioneered by the American producer Norman Rosemont with his sumptuous productions of The Count of Monte-Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask and Ivanhoe) or as series of feature-length episodes (exemplified in Britain by Sharpe, Hornblower and The Scarlet Pimpernel). Another swashbuckling cycle emerged on US cable television in the 1990s (Zorro, The New Adventures of Robin Hood, Queen of Swords) where different funding arrangements and international distribution meant the episodic format was viable once again. The most recent example of the swashbuckler has been the BBC’s Robin Hood (2006–09), which in a sense has brought the genre full circle. I am understanding the ‘swashbuckler’ to mean a period adventure series that is set in a ‘real’ world, no matter how far removed from historical actuality. (It is interesting to note that a feature of the production discourses of many television swashbucklers has been their assertion of period authenticity: this began with The Adventures of Robin Hood and persisted until Hornblower in the late 1990s.) I am excluding sword-and-sorcery sagas with a magical element, such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Merlin and Game of Thrones. However, I am including Robin of Sherwood, where the magical theme is consistent with the popular belief in magic during the Middle Ages. To keep the length manageable, I have also focused on the Anglophone swashbuckler. The Francophone swashbuckler remains a subject for further research, especially the cycle of handsomely mounted Dumas adaptations during the 1960s and 1970s.9 These represent a distinct tradition in their own right that differ from Anglophone swashbucklers in several key respects including their fidelity to the source texts and their pervading mood of romantic melancholy. Here I am also influenced by the fact that these series will be unfamiliar to most readers, while many of the Anglophone swashbucklers have frequently been repeated and most have been released on DVD. There are, inevitably, some omissions. The BBC’s live dramatisations of The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Black Arrow and Kidnapped from the 1950s are no longer extant of course.10 And even some telefilm series

Introduction   7 are currently unavailable for viewing. To my regret I have not been able to see any episodes of The Gay Cavalier (1957) or Richard the Lionheart (1961), two series by independent British producers that may (or there again may not) have provided an alternative to the dominant production template and narrative formula of ITP in the late 1950s. The Italian-made telefilm series of The Three Musketeers (1955) also seems to have disappeared from the archives – though judging by the contemporary reviews this may not be such a bad thing. The feature-length television films of The Mark of Zorro (1974) and The Corsican Brothers (1985) have remained elusive, while the 1980s Franco-American series Crossbow, a revisionist interpretation of the William Tell legend, is currently available only in pared-down form as a feature-length film called The Adventures of William Tell. The methodology of Swashbucklers is best described as culturalhistorical in so far as it is my aim to analyse the genre conventions and cultural politics of the series themselves – it is soon apparent that the swashbuckler is a rich site for representing ideologies of class, nationhood and gender (and to a much lesser extent ethnicity) – and to consider their contexts of production and reception. I have attempted to combine a broadly chronological survey of the swashbuckler with case studies of particular series that either mark significant landmarks in the genre or are representative ordinary examples. My concern throughout is to place the various cycles and lineages of costume adventure series in their institutional, ideological and cultural contexts. In particular I have paid attention to the political and cultural economies of the series discussed. In hindsight I feel that this was something I did not emphasise enough in Saints and Avengers: the content and ideological orientation of television fiction reflects to a very large extent its production arrangements, assumed audiences and the creative personnel involved in bringing it to the screen. This is particularly important for the swashbuckler due to the prevalence of international co-production and distribution arrangements. I have also looked for evidence of the contemporary reception of swashbucklers. Reviews are revealing not only of the perceived quality of television series but also how they were understood and positioned in cultural terms. American reviewers, for example, saw the British-made costume adventure series of the 1950s as alternatives to the Western. It is also instructive to consider

8   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the assumed audiences for swashbucklers. In the 1950s the US trade paper Variety saw most swashbucklers as being intended for what it termed ‘the smallfry’ and ‘the moppet mart’. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, swashbucklers were being produced for primetime audiences, while in the 1990s Sharpe was the first swashbuckler shown after the 9 p.m. watershed. In the last analysis, however, the principal focus of any genre-based study must be on the texts themselves. In researching this book I have viewed over 500 half-hour episodes of swashbuckling television, over 100 longer episodes and the equivalent of forty feature films. It is my contention that in researching television drama one should consider as many episodes as possible so that generalisations about content and style are made in an informed manner and the examples chosen are representative. To base an analysis of The Adventures of Robin Hood, for example, on half a dozen episodes would be disingenuous in the extreme. The narrative conventions and ideological structures of popular genres emerge through repetition and variation: therefore it is necessary to consider the series in their entirety. Moreover, there are some cases, such as The Buccaneers and The Black Arrow, where the narrative formula changes during the course of the series and in so doing brings about a degree of ideological realignment in their politics. My discussion of each series is therefore based on saturation viewing. To this extent Swashbucklers has been as much a labour of love as a work of scholarship. I have ridden through the glen with Richard Greene, sailed the Spanish Main with Robert Shaw, fought tyranny and injustice with Roger Moore, ridden the King’s Highway with Richard O’Sullivan and drawn cutlasses with Ioan Gruffudd. It is my hope that readers will find the resulting book both informative and entertaining in equal measure. Notes 1 Quoted in Leslie Mallory, ‘Robin draws his longbow  – and Davy bites the dust!’, News Chronicle, 5 September 1956. 2 James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London, 2002), p. 3. 3 See, for example, John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford, 2000), Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford, 2000), and

Introduction   9 Janet Thumim (ed.), Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London, 2002). An honourable exception focusing on telefilm series – though on detective rather than costume adventures – is Dave Mann, Britain’s First TV/Film Crime Series and the Industrialisation of the Film Industry 1946–1964 (Lampete, 2009). 4 ‘Looking around’, TV Times, 11–17 December 1955, p. 4. 5 Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “un-American” contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (2003), pp. 245–57. 6 Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), p. 1. 7 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II. Ed. C. T. Onions (3rd edn) (Oxford, 1973), p. 2209. 8 Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen, p. 19. 9 The Francophone swashbuckling cycle – known in France as feuilleton de cape et d’épée – includes Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (1963), Le Chevalier d’Harmental (1966), Les Compagnons de Jéhu (1966), Thibaud ou le Croisades (1966–8), Les Aventures de Lagardère (1967), Le Chevalier Tempête (1967), D’Artagnan (1969) and Quentin Durward (1971), all produced for French state broadcaster ORTF. 10 The earliest surviving extracts are from a live serial of Robin Hood by the BBC in 1951, starring future ‘Doctor Who’ Patrick Troughton. These can be viewed online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_lccLNUUY (accessed 10 June 2013).

1



Exporting Englishness

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) marks the origin of the television swashbuckler. Its history is inextricably linked to the early history of the ITV network in Britain: its first episode, broadcast in the London region at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday 25 September 1955, was one of the highlights of ITV’s opening weekend. It was an immediate popular success, not only in Britain, where it regularly featured among the top-ten shows, but also in the United States where it was bought by the national CBS network. The Adventures of Robin Hood remained in production for four years and ran for 143 half-hour episodes. It was repeated with such frequency that in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was hardly ever off the airwaves in Britain. Now fondly remembered for its catchy theme song (which became a top-twenty hit for David James in 1956)  and for its repertory company of stalwart British character actors in sackcloth costumes, sporting bad wigs and even worse ‘yokel’ accents, The Adventures of Robin Hood has recently attracted critical interest due to the involvement of a number of blacklisted American writers whose contributions had a significant bearing on the politics of the series.1 The semi-American parentage of The Adventures of Robin Hood, moreover, raises important questions about the economic and cultural capital of this representation of perhaps the most quintessentially English of all popular folk heroes. The political economy of The Adventures of Robin Hood Steve Neale has argued that The Adventures of Robin Hood ‘was transnational in origin and appeal and in financial and institutional terms from the very outset’.2 In order to contextualise the series it is necessary to consider it in relation to the production strategies of both British 10

Expor ting Englishness   11 and American commercial television in the mid-1950s. The Adventures of Robin Hood was produced by Sapphire Films for the Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP), a subsidiary of Associated Television (ATV), one of the regional franchise operators in the ITV network which broadcast in London on weekends and in the Midlands during the week. The advent of the ITV network as a commercial rival to the monopoly of the BBC had come about through a range of factors including, but not limited to, the election in 1951 of a Conservative government that supported the principle of competition, an orchestrated campaign by theatre managers and talent agencies who wanted more television exposure for their artistes, and the building of new television transmitters, which meant that by 1953 all but the remotest parts of the United Kingdom could receive television signals.3 ITV was derided by its critics as representing the worst kind of commercial enterprise and for pandering to the lowest common denominator in taste. For its supporters, however, ITV marked the triumph of populism and consumer choice. ‘So far,’ declared the first TV Times editorial, ‘television in this country has been a monopoly, restricted by limited finance, and often, or so it seems, restricted by a lofty attitude towards the wishes of viewers by those in control’. ITV, in contrast, aimed ‘at giving viewers what viewers want – at the times viewers want it’.4 The Adventures of Robin Hood exemplifies two separate, though related, processes in the television industry during the 1950s: the rise of international co-production-distribution arrangements and the move into telefilm series production. Most accounts of The Adventures of Robin Hood tend to see it as exceptional: the first British series sold to a US network.5 Lew Grade, the flamboyant, cigar-smoking theatrical agent, was one of the driving forces behind the formation of independent television in Britain: Grade was both managing-director of ITP and deputy managing-director of ATV (later becoming its managing­director in 1962). In his autobiography Grade claimed that he committed £390,000 of ITP’s original capital of £500,000 to the production of the first series of The Adventures of Robin Hood and that it ‘grossed millions of pounds’.6 Although it was undoubtedly the most successful example of its kind, The Adventures of Robin Hood was by no means unique. Sapphire Films was just one of several producers at the time making telefilm

12   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series series for ITV but with a view also to international sales: others active in the mid- and late 1950s included Towers of London (whose managingdirector, Harry Alan Towers, was a shareholder and board member of both ITP and ATV), Danziger Productions (run by American brothers Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger) and George King Productions (King had been a prolific director of ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s, who moved into television in the 1950s). Towers produced The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1955), another costume adventure series that aired during ITV’s first week, while the Danzigers, specialists in lowbudget crime films, turned their hands to television with Mark Saber (1954–55) and The Man from Interpol (1959–60).7 While the funding arrangements varied, the usual model was for a series to be made in association with an American partner who would provide ‘end money’ in return for the lucrative US distribution rights. The Adventures of Robin Hood was produced in association with Official Films: ITP distributed it in the western hemisphere and Official Films in the eastern hemisphere. Official Films was one of several companies specialising in selling telefilm series in the United States: others included National Telefilm Associates and Screen Gems (a television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures). The involvement of American co-production partners in British television reflected a trend in the film industry during the 1950s. As part of the move towards so-called ‘runaway’ productions, Hollywood studios became increasingly involved in British-based production to the extent that some, such as MGM, even opened their own British production facilities. There were several reasons for this trend: cheaper production costs, especially following the devaluation of Sterling in 1949; the limitation on dollar remittances imposed by the Treasury which meant that US distributors had ‘frozen funds’ in Britain; and eligibility for a subsidy from the British Film Production Fund (commonly known as the Eady Levy, introduced in 1951), provided that the films were produced by a nominally British company using British studio facilities and with three-quarters of the labour costs paid to British workers.8 At this time Britain was still the most lucrative overseas market for American films and largely as a consequence of this a large proportion of ‘Hollywood British’ films were on British subjects, including costume films and swashbucklers. MGM, for example, produced a

Expor ting Englishness   13 cycle of three chivalric epics – Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1953) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955) – while other studios producing swashbucklers were Warner Bros. (Captain Horatio Hornblower RN, 1950; The Master of Ballantrae, 1953; King Richard and the Crusaders, 1954), Columbia (The Black Knight, 1954), Twentieth Century-Fox (Prince Valiant, 1954), Universal-International (The Black Shield of Falworth, 1954)  and Walt Disney (The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, 1952; Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, 1953; Kidnapped, 1959). Disney’s Robin Hood film, starring Richard Todd and directed by Ken Annakin, was to a large extent the template for The Adventures of Robin Hood.9 The reasons for US investment in telefilm production in Britain were very similar to those which attracted Hollywood to British shores. Variety observed that ‘sound and obvious economic reasons’ lay behind the growth of Anglo-American production partnerships.10 For the British producer a US partner significantly increased the likelihood of US sales, either to a network (which guaranteed a fast return on the initial investment) or through syndication (where, as Variety put it, the British partners ‘have to wait much longer before they can share in the American gravy’). The network sale of The Adventures of Robin Hood meant that ‘the British company not only acquired desperately needed product for its own use, but also hit the jackpot with their quick US return’.11 At the same time British production was attractive to American partners because costs were on average 20 per cent lower in Britain and because this British-made product gave them a foothold in the British television market. The British commercial companies, regulated by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), had agreed to impose a quota of imported television (no more than seven hours a week) in response to concerns over the ‘Americanisation’ of British airwaves. (This policy was similar to the film industry, where the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 set a minimum quota of British films for distributors and exhibitors. The distributors’ quota was abolished in 1948.) A television series shot in Britain with a predominantly British cast and crew qualified, like its film counterparts, as a British production rather than an import.12 The Adventures of Robin Hood also exemplified the shift towards telefilm production in the 1950s. Until the advent of magnetic videotape

14   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series and the introduction of Ampex video machines in the late 1950s, there were two options for television drama: live performance in the studio or shooting on film. The former was the preferred mode of production during the early years of television for a combination of economic and aesthetic reasons: it was cheaper than film and it led to the emergence of a distinctively televisual style that differentiated the new medium from cinema. Early live television drama was characterised by an aesthetic of intimacy and immediacy that privileged interiors and close ups and thus encouraged intense, character-focused psychologically oriented narratives. Thus it was that the ‘golden age’ of US television drama in the 1950s was notable for the production of social realist television plays by writers such as Paddy Chayefsky (Marty), Rod Serling (Requiem for a Heavyweight) and J. P. Miller (Days of Wine and Roses). Yet this golden age was short lived, as telefilm production was already on the increase by the mid-1950s. This process coincided with the relocation of US television production from New York to Hollywood and with the increase in the number of television stations in America after 1952 when the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on the issue of new licences. The rapid rise in the number of television broadcasters – from 108 in 1952 to 650 by 1960 – in turn led to the expansion of the syndication market. In 1957 it was estimated that the syndication market in the United States was worth $60–70 million a year.13 There was a demand for ‘product’ to fill airtime, especially episodic series that could be scheduled according to local circumstances. A further advantage of telefilm series over live drama, moreover, was that it offered the possibility of sales to overseas broadcasters – sales which usually represented clear profit for their distributors. The two most lucrative overseas markets for the US television industry were Britain and Canada, partly because the programmes did not need to be dubbed but also because the markets were larger due to higher levels of television ownership than in the rest of Europe or Latin America. In 1959 Britain, with an estimated nine million sets, accounted for threefifths of all the television sets in Western Europe.14 Variety estimated that by the late 1950s ‘those tv film distributors with good product and heads-up foreign distribution may be doing almost half their business in foreign distribution’.15

Expor ting Englishness   15 Telefilm production in Britain lagged behind America, but it was given a significant boost by the arrival of ITV. The BBC made only occasional forays into telefilm production during the 1950s, such as the detective series Fabian of the Yard (1954–56) and the adventure series The Third Man (1959–60). The latter, which borrowed only its title and the name of its protagonist Harry Lime (Michael Rennie) from Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film, was produced in association with National Telefilm Associates.16 Independent television was better placed to invest in telefilm production than the BBC – funded by advertising revenue it could more easily afford the greater costs – and from the outset telefilm production was one of its key strategies. The Adventures of Robin Hood was squarely in the upper-cost bracket of telefilm production in the 1950s: its budget of £10,000 ($35,000) per half-hour episode was on a par with American series such as the Western Gunsmoke ($34,000) and the police series Dragnet ($37,000), both of which were half-hour series at the time.17 Variety praised the production values of The Adventures of Robin Hood, which it felt ‘is well-produced and stacks up as one of the superior foreign tv pix imports’.18 Sapphire Films and the making of The Adventures of Robin Hood Sapphire Films was a British-based production company set up by the American Hannah Weinstein, a progressive journalist who had supported the New Deal during the 1930s and had campaigned for independent candidate Henry Wallace in the US presidential election of 1948. Weinstein, along with other left-wing writers and activists, left the United States at the height of the ‘witch hunts’ inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, living first in Paris and then in London. She became involved in television production with Colonel March of Scotland Yard, based on John Dickson Carr’s The Department of Queer Complaints and starring Boris Karloff as the urbane eyepatched investigator. Colonel March of Scotland Yard had a complex production history. The first three episodes, directed by the blacklistee Cy Endfield, were credited to Criterion Films and were edited into a theatrical feature film, Colonel March Investigates, released in Britain in 1953.19 The remaining twenty-three episodes, credited to Foundation Films, were shot at Southall Studios in Middlesex in 1954.20 Among the

16   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series writers involved in the series were blacklistees Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky. Colonel March of Scotland Yard also premièred in the ITV London region on its opening weekend (Saturday, 24 September 1955); it was syndicated in the United States. According to Sidney Cole, the associate producer of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Weinstein had set her sights on making a British-themed costume series: She asked various people’s advice, including me, particularly in regard to subjects, and she especially wanted to be the producer of a ‘period’ series. One suggestion was Robin Hood and one was King Arthur. I strongly recommended Robin Hood because it has the advantage of having it both ways – it has a hero who is outside the law but morally justified. You’ve got an excuse for every kind of story, and so it proved – we did 134 [sic] episodes!21 The involvement of Cole, an alumnus of Ealing Studios where he had worked principally as an editor and producer between 1942 and 1952, was significant. Like Weinstein, Cole was a left-wing activist with an interest in progressive causes. In 1938 he had worked with Thorold Dickinson on two documentaries about the Spanish Civil War (Behind Enemy Lines and Spanish ABC) and during the Second World War he was involved in making the pro-Soviet short Our Film (1942) and the explicitly socialist feature film They Came To a City (1944). Other members of the British Left involved in some capacity with The Adventures of Robin Hood were Leon Griffiths, a journalist for the Daily Worker, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who wrote several episodes for the final series, and the socialist aristocrat Ivor Montagu, who had worked with Cole at Ealing Studios.22 The Adventures of Robin Hood was shot at Nettlefold Studios, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey – one of the oldest studios in Britain, a converted house originally bought by pioneer film-maker Cecil Hepworth that had latterly seen service for the production of quota films – with exteriors shot on nearby Wisley Common. An article in TV Times pointed out that Nettlefold was ‘near the historic field of Runnymede, where the English barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215’.23 This can be seen as part of a production discourse that was at

Expor ting Englishness   17

1.1  Greene of the Greenwood: Richard Greene starring in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

pains to assert the ‘painstaking historical authenticity’ of the series. Hal Hackett, managing-director of Official Films, attested that ‘the habits of the people of the 12th century every minute of the day had to be recorded, their money, their customs in eating, their slang, clothing, household effects and many, many other subjects were researched completely’.24 Various episodes refer to arcane aspects of the feudal system such as the heriot tax collected on the death of a bondsman (‘The Final Tax’) and the principle that a runaway serf who has evaded capture for over a year wins his freedom (‘A Year and a Day’). However, the research was not always quite so rigorous: one viewer pointed out that Robin and his men could not have eaten roast turkey (‘At the Sign of the Blue Boar’) as the turkey is a bird of American origin not introduced into England until the sixteenth century.25 The Adventures of Robin Hood starred Richard Greene as Robin of Locksley, with Bernadette O’Farrell as Lady Marian Fitzwalter, Alan Wheatley as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Archie Duncan as Little John and Alexander Gauge as Friar Tuck. (Rufus Cruikshank stepped in as Little John for thirteen episodes of the first series when Duncan broke his leg in an accident on set. Patricia Driscoll replaced O’Farrell for

18   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the third and fourth series, and in the fourth John Arnatt, who played the Sheriff’s deputy, was promoted to principal villain.) The casting of Greene, in particular, was crucial to the success of the series as he had established swashbuckling credentials from films such as The Desert Hawk (1950), Captain Scarlett (1952) and The Bandits of Corsica (1953). TV Times averred that the Plymouth-born Greene ‘makes history as the first major Hollywood star to come to England to film a TV series’.26 In truth, though, Greene was never really more than a secondrank Hollywood star and by the mid-1950s his career was in decline. Nevertheless, Variety felt that ‘Greene is a familiar face to the American audience and a happy choice for the title role’.27 Perhaps the outstanding performance, however, was by Alan Wheatley, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham as an intelligent, and therefore dangerous, antagonist, entirely different from the pantomime villains later portrayed by Alan Rickman and Keith Allen in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and the later television Robin Hood (2006–09). The production of The Adventures of Robin Hood became a model for other telefilm series over the next two decades as Weinstein and Cole recruited directors from the British film industry to shoot it in accordance with film rather than television production methods. These included old hands such as Bernard Knowles, Arthur Crabtree and Terence Fisher, all of whom had worked on the Gainsborough costume melodramas of the 1940s, and several trained in wartime documentary including Compton Bennett, Daniel Birt and Terry Bishop. Others, like Lindsay Anderson and Robert Day, were newcomers gaining their first directing experience. A total of seventeen directors were responsible for all 143 episodes.28 Anderson, who directed four episodes, described the streamlined production methods: There is a resident band of leading players; a stock company for supporting parts; and a small number of guest artists in each story. To increase speed and economy all the sets are designed from a set of basic components, mounted on wheels, which can be assembled in an infinite variety of combinations – Baronial Halls, Sheriff’s Castle, Taverns and Outlaw Headquarters. A main unit shoots in the studio; a second unit (working mainly with doubles) looks after exteriors. Each episode runs for just over twenty-five minutes, and is shot in five days.29

Expor ting Englishness   19 The imperative of a fast shooting schedule and the limitations of the studio itself (Nettlefold had three sound stages, all very small) did not allow much scope for visual expressivity. The ingenious mobile sets devised by art director Peter Proud were intended to facilitate the fast, streamlined production methods but at the same time militated against much scenic variety: artfully placed drapes are sometimes the only means of telling one interior from another. Anderson, an admirer of John Ford, claimed ‘to pinch a composition from Wagonmaster’ for a scene in ‘Secret Mission’ where the Sheriff attempts to lure Robin and his men with the promise of a pardon. ‘I doubt, though, whether Ford would have recognised it,’ he conceded. ‘Those “nobility” close ups are harder to get exactly right than you might suppose.’30 The economical nature of the production was also evident in the stock company of actors used throughout the series. One of the advantages of telefilm production in Britain at this time, at least from a producer’s point of view, was that British artists were paid a flat rate, unlike their American counterparts who received additional fees for repeat screenings.31 Paul Eddington, for example, who played various small roles before graduating to play Will Scarlet in the final series, recalled that he was paid ‘fifteen pounds a day with one day’s pay extra per episode in exchange for “world rights for ever” ’.32 It was not uncommon for actors to double up in different parts in the same episode: John Dearth, John Longden, Willoughby Gray and Victor Woolf can all be spotted in various guises. Even guest stars would crop up in different roles: Leo McKern, for example, played the cowardly villain Sir Roger de Lisle in the first episode, ‘The Coming of Robin Hood’, turning up again the following week as the avaricious Herbert of Doncaster in ‘The Moneylender’. The most significant aspect of the production of The Adventures of Robin Hood, however, was the involvement behind the scenes of a group of blacklisted American writers. This was a closely guarded secret at the time and has come to light only in retrospect. In total some fifty-three writers were credited on The Adventures of Robin Hood – a large pool in comparison to other long-running series from the ATV/ Grade stable – but it has since emerged that many of the writing credits were pseudonyms for American writers blacklisted following two sets of investigations into the US film industry by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 and 1951. HUAC was a product

20   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series of the paranoid climate of the early Cold War when right-wingers were prone to detect ‘Reds’ lurking under every other bed. The US film industry instituted an informal blacklist of those who refused to co-operate with HUAC and those who were suspected of being Communist Party members or fellow travellers. Over two hundred writers, producers, directors and actors found themselves blacklisted, and there was a further ‘greylist’ of those deemed too sympathetic towards liberal and progressive causes.33 The options for those who found themselves blacklisted were limited. Some, such as director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Carl Foreman, went into self-imposed exile in Britain where a less hawkish climate prevailed and where they were able to find work, at first under assumed names, later achieving recognition and critical acclaim in their own right. Others remained in the United States where they worked, secretly, under pseudonyms. It was a cause of much embarrassment to the Hollywood establishment that the ‘Robert Rich’ who won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Brave One (1956) turned out to be none other than Dalton Trumbo, one of the original ‘Hollywood Ten’ imprisoned for refusing to ‘name names’. Television was another channel through which blacklistees found employment: there was a constant demand for material and producers of episodic series favoured using the same writers for consistency. Abraham Polonsky, Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff, for instance, all wrote for the CBS series You Are There, where they took every opportunity ‘of selecting historical subjects who were exemplars of defiant individualism, civil disobedience, philosophical radicalism, and personal integrity’.34 Weinstein had already employed some blacklistees on Colonel March of Scotland Yard and would take this further with The Adventures of Robin Hood. According to Robert Lees, one of those so employed, there were two groups of writers in the United States: The Robin Hood series with Richard Greene was being shot in England. The very progressive Hannah Weinstein was the producer who realized there was a gold mine of blacklisted writers waiting in the U.S. who would have no problem being hired for British productions since the blacklist didn’t exist there. Ring Lardner Jr headed one group writing in New York, and Adrian

Expor ting Englishness   21 Scott did the same for L.A. I did four Robin Hood episodes, all with gag names on the credits, like Cecil B. Humphrey Smithe or Alfred Leslie Higginbottom.35 Ring Lardner Jr (Academy Award-winning writer of Woman of the Year and a Communist Party member since 1936)  and Adrian Scott (producer of the anti-racist thriller Crossfire, but never himself a member of the Communist Party) were two of the original ‘Hollywood Ten’. Lardner claimed that ‘we involved up to twenty blacklisted writers in this process – Waldo Salt did a great many’.36 Salt, a Communist Party member and one of the ‘unfriendly witnesses’ called before HUAC (so-called because they refused to co-operate with the Committee), was something of a specialist in film swashbucklers having been involved in the writing of Burt Lancaster’s The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and MGM’s Ivanhoe (1952). A third group of writers based in Europe was headed by Norma Barzman, whose husband Ben had been a political activist since the 1930s but had escaped being called before HUAC as they had been working abroad at the time of the subpoena. Barzman claims that Weinstein ‘left us with an order to write a halfdozen scripts for a series she was to produce in London, Adventures of Robin Hood … I wrote three of those with the musician Mischa Altman.’37 It is probably impossible ever to arrive at a definitive list of all the blacklistees involved with The Adventures of Robin Hood, but there is evidence to suggest that, in addition to those already cited, John Berry, Gordon Kahn, Lee and Tammy Gold, Maurice Rapf and Michael Wilson may also have written scripts.38 Wilson, like Lardner, was an Academy Award-winning writer (for A Place in the Sun, as well as being an uncredited contributor to The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which the Oscar went to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel, who was credited for a screenplay he did not write), so The Adventures of Robin Hood had some impressive scripting credentials. In his invaluable empirical study of the involvement of blacklistees in the Sapphire costume series, Steve Neale marshals a wealth of archival and anecdotal evidence to suggest that Ring Lardner Jr and his frequent writing partner Ian McLellan Hunter (Academy Awardwinning writer of Roman Holiday, though it transpires he was fronting for Dalton Trumbo) ‘played a major part in planning and writing

22   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the series’.39 They were responsible, either individually or jointly, for at least thirty-three episodes and possibly more. It is difficult to ascertain the authorship of individual episodes as some of the pseudonyms seem to have been shared between different writers. Furthermore some of the real writers – including Ralph Smart, who is credited on six episodes – may have lent their names as a ‘front’ for the blacklistees. There were almost certainly more credited than actual writers. As Lardner explained: ‘We had to put different names on the scripts because we didn’t want to call attention to any one name, and the networks might want to see a writer who had done quite a few scripts’.40 The most oftused pseudonym, with thirteen episode credits, was ‘Eric Heath’. It has been suggested that Weinstein’s employment of blacklistees was economically motivated in that they were a form of cheap labour who, due to their circumstances, would work for lesser rates. This, certainly, is the impression given by Michael Eaton’s film Fellow Traveller (1989) in which the fictional protagonist Asa Kaufman ekes out a living writing for The Adventures of Robin Hood while living in a dingy bedsit in austerity-era London. Eaton has said: ‘Fellow Traveller was a work of fiction, yet it drew loosely upon the experiences of real, living people.’41 Norma Barzman lent support to this view when she claimed that ‘[we] wrote these teleplays under false names for far less than the going rate’.42 This is flatly contradicted, however, by Louis Marks (one of the real writers whose wife was Weinstein’s production assistant) who said the blacklistees ‘were paid fully in accordance with Writers’ Guild of America’s US rates and cheques were issued from an American bank made payable to the writers’ agents’.43 The charge that Weinstein exploited blacklistees as a source of cheap labour does not stand up when it is taken into account that American writers were more expensive than their British counterparts. The fact that she employed blacklistees, when cheaper and less risky alternatives were available, suggests that it was for ideological reasons, rather than to save costs, that she brought them in from the cold. The reception of The Adventures of Robin Hood The reception discourses of The Adventures of Robin Hood  – which was both a popular and a critical success  – provide evidence of how

Expor ting Englishness   23 the series was understood at the time. In particular it is revealing that the series was popular with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic – a rare achievement for a British-made series. It was an immediate hit in Britain: by January 1956 it had become the second most watched programme in the ITV London region.44 When ITV began broadcasting in the Midlands later that year, The Adventures of Robin Hood was again second in the audience ratings.45 Its success in the United States, where there was far more competition, was even more remarkable. For its first two series, in 1955–56 and 1956–57, The Adventures of Robin Hood was placed among the top twenty most popular television shows in America alongside such favourites as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Phil Silvers Show and Lassie. It was evidently a profitable commodity. TV Times reported that the network sale of the first series of The Adventures of Robin Hood ‘has brought to England a million and a quarter dollars – nearly half a million pounds’.46 Further evidence of its appeal can be seen in the amount of spin-off merchandising the series spawned, including games, toys, watches, wallets, picture cards and comic books.47 In 1957 Variety reported that retail sales of licensed merchandising for The Adventures of Robin Hood totalled $42 million.48 How can we account for the popular success of The Adventures of Robin Hood? On one level its appeal was no doubt due in large measure to the fact that it was a well-made action-adventure series with solid production values. Variety, reporting on the series’ British première, felt that it ‘gave promise of a lively entertainment for juveniles and adults alike’.49 It is significant, too, that The Adventures of Robin Hood was understood as a family series rather than as being only for children. This is suggested both by broadcast patterns and by reviews. In Britain, for example, The Adventures of Robin Hood was originally broadcast in a Sunday teatime slot at 5.30 p.m., seen as a time when the whole family would be watching, but it was repeated at different times including Tuesdays at 7.05 p.m., Thursdays at 8.45 p.m. and Fridays at 10 p.m.50 That it was repeated in a late-evening slot would suggest that there was a significant adult audience for The Adventures of Robin Hood.51 In the United States, CBS broadcast the series on Monday evenings at 7.30 p.m. This was regarded as a family viewing slot usually occupied by light entertainment and variety shows. Variety noted that the network’s

24   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series decision to air the first series in that slot was an ‘experiment’ but predicted that it ‘should attract a sizeable chunk of the moppet and for that matter the adult audience’.52 It welcomed the second series on the same grounds, suggesting that ‘this Official Films release will have little difficulty in ensnaring the smallfry viewers and even their elders’.53 The ‘crossover’ appeal of The Adventures of Robin Hood to both juvenile and adult viewers can also be deduced from its content. In several episodes, including ‘The Youngest Outlaw’, ‘Children of the Greenwood’, ‘Tables Turned’ and ‘The Christmas Goose’, Robin and his men are obliged to look after young children. This seems like nothing less than a deliberate narrative strategy to appeal to both child and adult viewers. For younger viewers such episodes have a transgressive appeal in the idea of an outlaw lifestyle free from parental authority, while parents in turn could identify with Robin’s predicament in finding himself in the role of a surrogate father who has to control unruly children. Indeed, some commentators have seen Richard Greene’s Robin Hood as a somewhat avuncular figure: Jeffrey Richards, for example, suggests that he ‘turned Robin into everyone’s favourite uncle’.54 The theme of adolescent love is even hinted at in ‘Tables Turned’, where Suzette, the precocious daughter of Count Ledger, develops a crush on Robin. The Britishness of The Adventures of Robin Hood was also an important theme of the reception discourse. However, this was articulated in different ways in Britain and America. In Britain it was championed as an example of British-made product, especially against the influx of Westerns bought by both ITV and the BBC. A correspondent to TV Times, for example, wrote: ‘Before the advent of ITV my two small daughters played at cowboys. Now there isn’t a gun about the house or a “bang, you’re dead”. Instead they have home-made bows and arrows like their new hero, Robin Hood.’55 This was echoed by Leslie Mallory, film critic of the News Chronicle, who wrote that ‘today’s youngsters have a new TV idol  – Robin Hood. Davy Crockett and Superman have been ousted to the limbo of television while the kids clamour for English longbows and jerkins of Lincoln green.’56 Variety also felt that the series’ Britishness was a selling point for the US market: ‘There’s an obvious advantage to the made-in-Britain tag on this one. Some highly authentic looking interiors and the real mccoy on the way of castles [sic] were put to good use to provide authentic flavor.’57

Expor ting Englishness   25 In America it would seem that the British pedigree of The Adventures of Robin Hood was seen as an indicator of quality. In particular the series was praised for its literate scripts and dialogue. The US listings magazine TV Guide, for example, remarked: ‘Robin Hood, as produced in England, could very well be the answer to a mother’s prayer about Westerns, as produced in Hollywood … [It] comes as a welcome relief from the “they-went-thataway” school of “children’s hour” programming.’58 Hannah Weinstein told TV Times: ‘We have been highly praised by the schools in America, because the kind of English spoken in my films is infinitely more literate than the kind of stuff the kids hear around them at home.’59 Variety, however, felt that the series had made some concession to US tastes, observing that Weinstein ‘wisely eliminates British accents in her casting of the subsidiary roles, and this should overcome alleged midwestern resentment toward British-made pix’.60 The Adventures of Robin Hood can be understood, therefore, as vehicle for both the economic and the cultural export of Britishness (or Englishness – ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ are used more or less interchangeably in the contemporary trade press). And it was not only in America that it was successful: it was sold to markets as diverse as Canada, Australia, Japan, Syria, Iran and Puerto Rico.61 Its international appeal would seem to have been due in part to its British pedigree but also to the fact that its content differentiated it from American series. Hal Hackett attested that British historical-costume subjects had wider appeal in the world market than contemporary US subjects: Historical costume adventure types of programs which pre-date the American Revolution and have more or less to do with the British Empire at its height, find a responsive audience in all English speaking countries of the world, as opposed to contemporary programs of the American ‘cops and robbers’ type, which are not as well understood by countries remote to the United States.62 In fact in the 1950s the pre-eminent American television genre was the Western rather than the ‘cops and robbers’ series. In an international television market saturated by Westerns – including juvenile series such

26   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series as The Lone Ranger and Davy Crockett and more adult fare exemplified by series like Gunsmoke and Cheyenne – The Adventures of Robin Hood represented a form of product differentiation. It is interesting to note that, given the Anglo-American origins of the series, it was evidently understood as being culturally British. The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Robin Hood myth The success of The Adventures of Robin Hood may also be due in part to its mobilisation of the Robin Hood myth. Robin Hood is probably the most ideologically flexible of all popular heroes. For this reason Robin appeals across the political spectrum. For the Right, he is a warrior-patriot and a staunch defender of the Crown: his allegiance is to King Richard and according to the legend he fights to protect the absent king’s throne from the ambitions of his treacherous brother Prince John. For the Left, however, Robin is a proto-socialist engaged in the redistribution of wealth: again, according to the legend, he robs from the rich to give to the poor. And there is also what might be called a Green Party reading: Robin as a forest-dwelling back-to-nature ecowarrior, harvesting the natural resources of the greenwood and leading an alternative lifestyle outside the capitalist system.63 The tale of Robin Hood has been appropriated and embellished according to different historical circumstances. It is possible that the character has some basis in historical fact: during the reign of Edward II (1307–27) there was a Robert Hood of Yorkshire who was outlawed for supporting a revolt by the Earl of Lancaster but was later pardoned by the king. The first recorded mention of the outlaw ‘Robin Hood’, however, is in William Langland’s poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (c.1360). It is significant that the Robin Hood myth took shape during a period of social unrest and dissent, exemplified by the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Lollards’ Rebellion of 1415. Robin Hood legitimates the principle of limited revolt: he takes up arms not against the state itself but rather against the abuse of power by corrupt clergymen and petty bureaucratic functionaries. This explains the prominence of the Sheriff of Nottingham as Robin’s arch enemy in the myth. The myth took shape through the various ballads during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, several of which were collected together

Expor ting Englishness   27 as A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood (c.1420). The Geste established many of the foundational aspects of the story: how Robin helped Sir Richard of the Lea pay his debt to the avaricious Abbot of St Mary’s, how a disguised Robin won an archery contest held by the Sheriff of Nottingham, how the king sought out Robin in the forest, dined with him, pardoned him and took him into his service, and how Robin tired of courtly life and returned to the forest where years later he was poisoned by the Prioress of Kirklees. It would seem that the Geste was one of the sources consulted for The Adventures of Robin Hood as individual episodes are very close to the ballads, including ‘The Knight Who Came to Dinner’ (Robin helps Sir Richard of the Lea pay his debt to Abbot Franklyn), ‘A Guest for the Gallows’ (the rescue of innocent Will Stutely from the hangman’s noose), ‘The Challenge’ (Robin wins an archery contest) and ‘Secret Mission’ (the king’s arrival disguised as a pilgrim). The relationship to the ballads is further enhanced by the device of having each episode begin with a sung ballad that summarises the plot. Over the next few centuries the legend developed in several ways. The characters of Maid Marian and Friar Tuck were later additions in the ‘May plays’ popular during the Tudor era. By the end of the Elizabethan period Robin had become part of legitimate theatre, notably in a brace of plays written in 1598 by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle which for the first time identified Robin as being of noble birth: Robert, the Earl of Huntingdon. This is part of a process through which Robin was transformed from a commoner into a nobleman. His exploits were now placed at the end of the twelfth century during the reign of Richard I (1189–99). The circumstances of Richard’s reign provided ideal background for the Robin Hood myth: there was a heavy burden of taxation to pay for wars in the Holy Land and France, and to raise the king’s ransom of 150,000 marks when he was imprisoned by Leopold of Austria, while Richard’s prolonged absences on foreign wars created a power vacuum that increased the power of the barons and led to significant growth in the independence of the administration. This is the background against which The Adventures of Robin Hood is set. The series maps a social landscape of England in which self-interested power groups jockey for power in the king’s absence. As a character remarks in ‘The May Queen’: ‘England is sick. With the king

28   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series away the barons vie for power. They steal the land of better men who are at the wars.’ This, indeed, is what happens in the first episode, ‘The Coming of Robin Hood’, when Robin returns from the Crusade to discover that his manor and estates have been seized by Sir Roger de Lisle. Throughout the series there are numerous attempts to usurp the throne. In ‘Checkmate’ Count de Waldern plots to seize power by impressing all able-bodied men in the shire for military service. In ‘The Youngest Outlaw’ Waldern is holding Richard’s son, Prince Arthur, as a political prisoner: when the boy escapes into Sherwood Forest Robin saves him from assassination by the agents of Prince John. In ‘The Prisoner’ John intends to have himself crowned king as there has been no news of Richard for four years: he imprisons a messenger who brings news that Richard is alive. Robin releases the messenger and prevents John’s coronation. This episode marked the first appearance in the series of Prince John, here played by Donald Pleasence as a neurotic weakling. The final important element of the Robin Hood legend to take shape was grafting on to the narrative of Robin’s resistance to domestic tyranny the historical context of social and political divisions between Normans and Saxons. This was the theme of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819), in which Robin appears as a supporting character. Robin of Locksley is here characterised as the champion of the Saxons, the true Englishmen oppressed by their Norman overlords. Scott averred that he chose the reign of Richard I ‘not only as abounding with characters whose very names were sure to attract general attention, but as affording a striking contrast betwixt the Saxons, by whom the soil was cultivated, and the Normans, who still reigned in it as conquerors, reluctant to mix with the vanquished, or acknowledge themselves of the same stock’.64 It is no matter that in the view of most historians the Saxon–Norman rivalry probably did not persist for more than a generation after 1066: as so often the popular history is more appealing than that described in the textbooks. The Saxon–Norman rivalry, which might be read as a metaphor for class conflict, was the basis of what many regard as the definitive version of the legend, the magnificent Warner Bros. film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) starring Errol Flynn as Sir Robin of Locksley, Olivia de Havilland as Lady Marian Fitzwalter, Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy of Gisbourne and Claude Rains as Prince John. Directed with great

Expor ting Englishness   29 panache by Michael Curtiz, The Adventures of Robin Hood remains one of the supreme achievements of the Hollywood studio system. It provided the template for two post-war ‘Son of Robin Hood’ films from Columbia Pictures: Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946), starring Cornel Wilde, and Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950) with John Derek. The next major film was Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), but here there was a clear effort to make it different from the Flynn version. To this end The Story of Robin Hood distanced itself from the theme of Saxon–Norman rivalry and restored the Sheriff of Nottingham (Peter Finch), a supporting character in the 1938 film, to the role of principal villain. Here Robin (Richard Todd) is Robert Fitzrooth, son of the chief forester to the Earl of Huntingdon, and Marian (Joan Rice) is the Earl’s daughter. And it was the 1952 Disney film, rather than the more celebrated 1938 Warner Bros. version, that provided the template for The Adventures of Robin Hood. There are several parallels between the Disney film and the television series. The first is the use of sung ballads as a structuring device: the film’s framework of ballads sung by the minstrel Alan-a-Dale (Elton Hayes) is replicated in the ballads that introduce episodes of the series. (This practice was dropped after the second season.) The second link is that there are cast members common to both film and television: Patrick Barr played King Richard in both; Archie Duncan, the television Little John, had played archer Red Gill in the film; and James Hayter, who was Friar Tuck in the film, appeared as Tom the miller in two episodes of the television series (‘The Haunted Mill’, ‘The Road in the Air’). In addition Ian Hunter, who had played Richard the Lionheart in the 1938 film, was a recurring guest star as Sir Richard of the Lea, a knight fallen on hard times, and Robin frequently has to extricate him from his pecuniary circumstances. A third link is the role of the Queen Mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, played in the film by Martita Hunt and by Jill Esmond in two episodes of the television series (‘Queen Eleanor’, ‘The Deserted Castle’), where she acts as the custodian of Richard’s ransom. Several episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood also drew upon Celtic folklore. ‘The Highlander’, another story based on the ballads, introduced Duncan of Stonykirk (Hugh McDermott), like Sir Richard of the Lea an occasional character whose appearance usually spells trouble for Robin. Duncan is a caricature Scot replete with kilt,

30   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series bagpipes and comedy accent who seems to have strayed into the series from Brigadoon. He is a wild man of the Highlands, a sort of early Rob Roy who leads a band of outlaws north of the border and is an unreliable ally of Robin. Two episodes of the second series (‘The Mystery of Ireland’s Eye’, ‘The Little People’) sent Robin to Ireland in response to a summons from Marian’s uncle Sir Edward de Coercy. In ‘The Mystery of Ireland’s Eye’ a self-styled high priest, Rolf, has introduced a cult of pagan worship. Friar Tuck is outraged at this affront to religious authority (‘It’s an evil thing to live in fear of anything but God’) and Robin resolves to combat it (‘You should fight ignorant superstition and those who trade on it anywhere you find them’). The episode borrows a device from the film Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), whereby Robin appears in disguise as Norse god Thor and exposes Rolf as a charlatan. ‘The Little People’ is a piece of whimsy in the manner of Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), in which it transpires that the fabled leprechauns are in fact a band of children living in a cave, whose parents have all been killed following the King of Munster’s rebellion. The politics of The Adventures of Robin Hood The Adventures of Robin Hood stands out as the most complete version of the Robin Hood story in either film or television. Its episodic format allowed all the familiar characters their place in the sun, while its longevity meant that it covered most narrative possibilities. (In fact the only element of the myth it does not feature is the death of Robin Hood: Robin would not die on screen until the BBC’s The Legend of Robin Hood in 1975.) The Adventures of Robin Hood also caters for both the Right and Left interpretations of the myth in so far as it presents Robin both as the defender of the Crown and as a champion of the people. Robin is characterised as an unequivocal royalist. In ‘Dead or Alive’, for example, he declares: ‘Our loyalty is to the king, wherever he is, and not to those who rule for him and dishonour his name.’ In ‘The Deserted Castle’ Queen Eleanor calls him ‘the most loyal subject His Majesty has in this shire’. The fullest assertion of Robin’s royalist credentials is in ‘Secret Mission’, where a hooded pilgrim, Peregrinus, returns from the Holy Land and seeks out Robin in Sherwood Forest.

Expor ting Englishness   31 Peregrinus has heard it said that ‘the only fighting men in England loyal to Richard are Robin Hood are the outlaw rogues of Sherwood Forest’. Peregrinus is a witness when the Sheriff of Nottingham enters the outlaws’ camp under a flag of truce with the offer of a pardon for Robin and his men if they will pledge their allegiance to Prince John. Robin rejects utterly the attempt to buy his allegiance: ‘If Prince John had all England to give away and King Richard were not able to offer more than two farthings for my loyalty, I would still remain as I am – a devoted subject of my king.’ It transpires that Peregrinus, true to the legend, is actually Richard in disguise. In the next episode, ‘Richard the Lionheart’, the king, who has returned incognito to seek out those who remain loyal, tells Robin that ‘I would grant you and your men public pardons, except that it would reveal my presence here’. The pro-royalist ideology of The Adventures of Robin Hood might on the face of it sit somewhat uneasily with American sensibilities, given that the United States has historically prided itself on breaking away from the British monarchy. Significantly, however, it is clear that the monarchy the series endorses is a constitutional rather than an absolutist monarchy where there are legal limitations on the power of kings. This theme is explored in the episode ‘The Charter’, which concerns a document granted to the nobles by Henry II that ‘provides for a drastic limitation of the royal power’. Thought to be lost, the charter is, in fact, in the possession of the dying Lord Greenwood and is coveted by the Sheriff of Nottingham, who realises that it would proscribe the power of Prince John if and when he succeeds his brother. Robin prevents the Sheriff from destroying the charter and delivers it into the safekeeping of the Archbishop of York, reporting that the Archbishop said ‘this is only the beginning’ upon receiving it. The episode thus subscribes to a Whiggish view of history that sees the charter – clearly being equated with the Magna Carta  – as a founding document of English liberties. It also echoes the films Bandit of Sherwood Forest and Rogues of Sherwood Forest where the Magna Carta functions ‘as a shorthand for the democratic American Constitution’.65 To make the point explicit Rogues of Sherwood Forest even includes a preface stating: ‘The Bill of Rights and the liberty and justice we enjoy today stem from the Magna Carta, a great charter which the oppressed people of England forced from the tyrannical King John.’ No matter that Magna Carta made no

32   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

1.2  The Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Wheatley) offers Robin (Richard Greene) a pardon if he will swear allegiance to the usurper Prince John in ‘Secret Mission’, The Adventures of Robin Hood.

reference to ‘the people’ and is now seen by historians as upholding the power of the barons: the historical narrative of the defence of liberty against tyranny had much ideological currency in Britain and America after the Second World War. Yet, on the other hand, Robin is also very much a man of the people. There is in fact some ambiguity about his social status in the series. ‘The Coming of Robin Hood’ establishes that Robin is son of the chief forester to the king and heir to Locksley Manor. He is evidently wellborn: in ‘The Ordeal’ a Norman knight describes Robin as ‘a traitor to his class. He was well-born – almost as well-born as me.’ And in ‘The Path of True Love’ Robin tells Marian, daughter of baronet Sir William Fitzwalter and his childhood sweetheart, that he cannot propose to her while he is outlawed but that ‘when King Richard returns from the wars and justice has returned to England, I shall be Lord of the Manor of Locksley’. Unlike Errol Flynn’s Robin, however, he is never referred to as Sir Robin of Locksley. The reference in the opening ballad of ‘The Coming of Robin Hood’ to Robin as ‘a knight bold and good’ is probably a generic term rather than an actual description of his social status,

Expor ting Englishness   33 especially given that he is skilled with a longbow, the weapon of a foot soldier rather than a knight. Where there is no ambiguity, however, is in the series’ social politics. The principal antagonist, the Sheriff of Nottingham, is a corrupt functionary who exercises power on behalf of Prince John, whose power base lies with the upper classes, the barons and manorial lords. Robin’s followers, in contrast, are mostly from the peasantry, and his support comes from the common people: ‘We’re never alone as long as we have friends among the people’ (‘A Guest for the Gallows’). The Adventures of Robin Hood is preoccupied with social justice: many episodes are concerned with the iniquities of the feudal system. In this version, for example, Little John is originally a serf in bondage to the Earl of Bedford, who is offered his freedom if he captures an outlaw: meeting Robin in the legendary quaterstaff duel, he joins the outlaws and becomes Robin’s trusted lieutenant. The episode’s opening ballad summarises the theme: ‘Freedom is beckoning for Little John the Giant/ Robin helps him understand a serf can be defiant.’ And in ‘The Path of True Love’ the new owner of Locksley Manor reneges on the will of Robin’s father by evicting tenants from their homes on the estate. It is established in this episode that the Locksleys represent an enlightened and progressive form of feudalism as Robin’s father had intended that tenants should be allowed to hold their own property in perpetuity in return for providing services for the common good such as road maintenance. Various episodes revolve around the abuse of lordly privileges. In ‘The Salt King’ Lord Guthrie, who has exclusive rights to mine and sell salt in the shire, engineers a shortage so that he can increase the price. Salt is a commodity that everyone, rich and poor, needs for the preservation of food. As Robin declares: ‘Taking the people’s salt supply is as bad as taking their bread.’ In ‘Food for Thought’ Count Olivier levies a new tax on the people of Upper Minton in order to lay on a sumptuous banquet to impress his guests. The villagers appeal to Robin for help: ‘He took the food we had in our store cupboards and left us nothing but scraps … There will be a famine in our village this winter.’ In ‘The Ransom’ Count de Severne extracts 500 crowns from his tenants in order to pay the ransom demanded by Lord Beaumont for the return of his son who has insulted Beaumont’s honour. One of the villagers

34   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series protests (‘You can’t squeeze any more out of us – it isn’t right, it isn’t human. Why should we starve to pay some idle boy’s ransom?’) and is duly sentenced to twenty lashes. The Adventures of Robin Hood is consistent with the Robin Hood legend in so far as the villains tend to be unscrupulous landlords and parasitic money lenders. Their avarice and greed is contrasted with Robin’s unselfish altruism. In ‘The Miser’ Sir William de Courcier collects double rents from his tenants in order to cover his own taxes; Robin tricks him into thinking that an alchemist can turn buttons into silver and returns the money to the villagers. In ‘The Final Tax’ the unscrupulous Sir Charles of Bixby Manor is concerned less with the death of his serf Tom as with the share of the serf’s possessions he is entitled to collect from the widow. When Tom recovers, after having been wrongly pronounced dead, Robin devises a scheme whereby other bondsmen transfer their livestock and chattels to him which will exempt them all from heriot tax in future. In ‘The Moneylender’ Herbert of Doncaster is a medieval loan shark who exploits the poor by charging exorbitant interest rates: ‘He comes around in winter when the people are hard put to find food and lends them a few shillings … He collects twice as much as he lends, and those that can’t pay, his friend the Sheriff arrests them.’ The association of legal authority with exploitation of the poor provides the moral legitimacy for Robin’s resistance to the bureaucratic tyranny of the Sheriff. The Adventures of Robin Hood also displays progressive credentials in its attitude towards education. In ‘The Brothers’ Robin helps a serf who has learned to read without his master’s consent escape from the Sheriff and enter an abbey as a scholar. ‘To Be A Student’ features much the same plot as Friar Tuck helps Peter Larkin escape from impressed service in Prince John’s army. In both episodes Tuck makes a comment to the effect that the talents of promising scholars should not be wasted. It is impossible not to read this commitment to education for all, including the serfs, in the light of the Education Act of 1944, which had laid down the principle of free secondary education and introduced the eleven-plus examination to select bright children for state grammar school. ‘Brother Battle’ focuses on the progressive Brother Wutan who sets up a school for the local children in Sherwood Forest. The episode rehearses the liberal discourse that education is the first step towards

Expor ting Englishness   35 freedom. As Brother Wutan explains: ‘Children must learn to cypher and write and read … Ignorant people are an enslaved people. Teach them to read and write and they make formidable adversaries.’ The progressive social politics of The Adventures of Robin Hood are also evident in its representation of minorities and outsiders. ‘The Wanderer’ centres on Joseph of Cordova, a Jewish healer called to Nottingham by Sir Walter de Lys to cure him of the ague but who arouses the jealousy of the other healers. The episode is a critique of anti-Semitism in which the Sheriff refers to ‘these foreign elements with their new fangled ideas’ and exiles Joseph for treating the relative of one of the outlaws. Joseph is characterised as a sympathetic figure, who is resigned to his fate and his transient lifestyle. He tells Robin: ‘We have been outlaws for over a thousand years. You are not doing too bad for beginners, but if you ever want some lessons in survival send for me.’ In ‘The Infidel’ Robin comes to the aid of Ali Ben Azra, son of the Caliph, a captive who is to be exchanged for Lord Rossmore, held by Saladin. The racist attitude of Rossmore’s nephew Sir James towards the ‘Saracen dog’ is contrasted with the more progressive Baron Mark who treats him with dignity and respect as a prisoner of war. Sir James tries to prevent the exchange in order to inherit his uncle’s estate and murders Baron Mark, pinning the blame on Ali. Sir James attempts to rouse a mob to kill Ali, but Robin persuades them to hold a trial by fire in the knowledge that Ali is able to walk on hot coals. The episode is notable for its emphasis on religious and racial tolerance: Robin recognises that there is ‘more than one breed of man worthy of respect’, while Ali remarks that ‘the Lionheart is more respected in Islam than he is in your own country’. The politics of The Adventures of Robin Hood, combining popular monarchy and a commitment to social justice, were very much a product of the ideological context of Britain in the 1950s. In 1954 The Economist coined the term ‘Butskellism’  – after R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1951–55) and Home Secretary (1957–62) in the Conservative governments, and Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party (1955–63) – to describe the broad congruence in post-war British politics between progressive Conservatism and moderate Labour.66 On the one hand this was a time when the monarchy enjoyed high levels of popular support and prestige  – evident in the two million people

36   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series who lined the streets of London to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and in the fact that 20 million people (56 per cent of the British population) were estimated to have watched it on television and another 12 million listened on radio.67 On the other hand it was a period marked by the public acceptance of the Welfare State and of institutions such as the National Health Service that had been introduced by the post-war Labour government in response to the expectations that had arisen during the Second World War. The Welfare State offered a comprehensive system of social insurance ‘from the cradle to the grave’: its introduction had been opposed by some on the Right (who perhaps regarded it as robbing from the rich to give to the poor) but had become almost universally accepted by the 1950s. The Adventures of Robin Hood might be seen as an expression of the ‘Butskellite’ consensus. Robin stands both for the Crown and for the people: he represents national unity and social justice. To this extent the ethos of the series reflected the outlook of those involved in its production such as Sidney Cole and Ivor Montagu. The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Cold War As well as responding to British society in the 1950s, The Adventures of Robin Hood can also be read in relation to Cold War America. Michael Eaton remarks of the moment he learned that blacklisted writers contributed to his favourite childhood television series: ‘Suddenly the penny dropped: it now became impossible for me to see this series except as some kind of McCarthyite allegory, reflecting the experiences of its writers.’68 Indeed, The Adventures of Robin Hood seems, in hindsight, to be nothing less than a highly schematic and programmed commentary on HUAC and McCarthyism: Robin and his men are outlawed because of their political beliefs, authority is exercised by a corrupt judiciary that seeks to expose ideological dissidents, and rewards are promised for anyone who informs on their comrades. There are several episodes where one of the outlaws is captured and offered a pardon if he will betray his fellows. In ‘The Blackbird’ Little John quarrels with Robin and leaves Sherwood Forest: he is captured by the Sheriff who offers to spare his life if John will reveal the whereabouts of Robin’s camp. The same situation is rehearsed again in ‘Goodbye

Expor ting Englishness   37 Little John’, in which the Sheriff learns that Little John has left Robin in a fit of pique and attempts to foment division among the outlaws by offering him an unconditional pardon. Little John, naturally, rejects the offer: ‘The pardon proves that anyone who wants to leave Robin Hood’s band and live under the law of a tyrant can do so by toadying to you.’ Another recurring motif is the tribunal or inquisition. This was a favourite device of blacklisted writers in films such as Ivanhoe and The Robe (1953). The most explicit statement in The Adventures of Robin Hood is in ‘The Inquisitor’. Friar Tuck is arrested by the Abbot of Beresford, a notorious inquisitor, who accuses him of ‘consorting with outlaws’. In what can only be read as a reference to the pressure brought on witnesses before HUAC to renounce their political affiliation and name communists in the film industry, Tuck is told: ‘Your only salvation is to denounce Robin Hood and his band under a sacred oath and aid the authorities in their capture.’ However, in a scene reminiscent of the testimonies of witnesses such as producer John Howard Lawson and actor Lionel Stander, who used their appearances before HUAC to denounce their inquisitors, Robin rescues Tuck and, disguised as the inquisitor, reads his ‘confession’ to the court: ‘Our misdeeds have been manifold. We have given aid and comfort to the poor and oppressed of our unhappy kingdom. We have rescued from the Sheriff’s noose innocent men who have been unable to pay his exorbitant taxes. We have tried to put into practice the Christian precepts of charity and brotherhood … Long live King Richard and confusion to his enemies!’ The legacy of the blacklist can be detected in the mood of paranoia and suspicion that pervades the series: there are many references to the prevalence of spies and informers. Some of the blacklistees maintained that they had been betrayed to HUAC: Ring Lardner believed that ‘there must have been at least one informer in the ranks of the Party’.69 In the first episode the outlaws even suspect Robin himself: ‘There’s a price on our heads, so the Sheriff has sent out informers and spies. And we think that you’re one of them.’ The question of political allegiance is a recurring theme. The Sheriff acts not unlike HUAC chair J. Parnell Thomas, in demanding that characters should declare their political affiliation or face imprisonment. Those who remain loyal to Richard have to keep their allegiance secret. In ‘The Youngest Outlaw’ Lord

38   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Torrence is afraid to declare himself for Richard publicly: ‘I hesitate to say. There are so many informers, spies and counter spies around these days.’ Several episodes feature betrayal of the outlaws by informers. In ‘Errand of Mercy’ Robin and Little John, conveying a wagon of medicine to Nottingham during an outbreak of plague, are recognised by a beggar who informs the Sheriff  – who refuses the pay the reward. They are betrayed again by a surgeon who claims the reward for their capture. In ‘Queen Eleanor’ the Queen’s servant Bruno turns out to be one of Prince John’s agents: the Sheriff calls him ‘the loyalest of Prince John’s informers’. And in ‘The Jongleur’ Robin is right not to trust Master Bartholomew, who is in the Sheriff’s employ (‘You are the first informer I have ever employed who showed some sense’), though in this instance Bartholomew redeems himself by warning Robin of the Sheriff’s trap. What is significant here is that the informers come from all ranks of society, from beggars to royal retainers. The series seems to be suggesting that loyalty is a question of political conviction rather than social class. ‘The Angry Village’ explores the social consequences of this climate of suspicion. During a drought a group of villagers resort to hiding their grain in a cave to conceal it from a grasping landlord. When the hiding place is discovered by soldiers and the grain confiscated, suspicion falls initially on Robin and Little John, who have been hunting in the area and whom the villagers suspect of being spies. They escape a lynching, whereupon it is Jason, one of the villagers, who comes under suspicion. The villagers are about to hang Jason when Robin discovers that the soldiers knew of the grain because of a secret passage between the cave and the castle. Robin delivers a moralising sermon to the villagers: ‘If you hadn’t found out there wasn’t a traitor amongst you, none of you would have escaped being destroyed by your hatred and suspicion of each other. We all know times are hard, but the only comfort is to share them together. You won’t make things any better by taking it out on the man next to you.’ The stance against mob violence and the tyranny of the lynch mob has some affinity with the Western genre, where it is usually an indication of a liberal outlook in films such as Young Mr Lincoln (1939) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

Expor ting Englishness   39 The liberal ethos of The Adventures of Robin Hood is also apparent in its commentary on other aspects of Cold War politics. In ‘The Scientist’ the Sheriff seeks to acquire for Prince John the plans of a powerful weapon invented by Albertus of Oxford that is capable of focusing the rays of the sun by magnifying them through a glass lens. Albertus is a scientist and philosopher (‘Magic is just a word for things we don’t understand’) who concludes that his invention, based on theoretical physics, would be ‘too frightful to use on anyone’. Clearly Albertus is being equated with Albert Einstein, the German-born physicist who published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915 (to make the point explicit, Robin refers to the ‘general theories in your books’) and who is often credited with having persuaded the US government to proceed with development of the atomic bomb in a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 before later coming to regret his role in creating such a terrible weapon. As played by Miles Malleson, Albertus bears more than a passing likeness of Einstein. In suggesting the weapon is ‘too frightful to use’, the episode distances itself from the strategy of the nuclear deterrent and anticipates the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958. A similar anti-nuclear message can be detected in ‘A Tuck in Time’ where Tuck’s twin brother Edgar returns from the Far East with the secret of gunpowder. He has invented what he calls a ‘death tube’ (a prototype cannon) which he will sell to the highest bidder. Here the episode takes significant historical liberties: gunpowder and cannon were not introduced into Europe until the fourteenth century. Although the episode is played as a comedy – the Sheriff and Prince John are left in cartoonish smoking rags after the cannon explodes in their faces – it concludes on a serious note as Robin expresses relief that the formula has been destroyed: ‘If he’d been allowed to sell that invention, in time it could have destroyed the whole world.’ The discovery of gunpowder was a favourite plot device in the swashbuckler: it also features in episodes of William Tell (‘The Magic Powder’) and Ivanhoe (‘The Treasures of Cathay’). There is no evidence to suggest whether or not viewers recognised the political subtexts of The Adventures of Robin Hood, though given that the audience for the series included adults as well as children it seems reasonable to assume that some would have done so. In any event the contemporary

40   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series references are hardly disguised: they cannot have been anything other than intentional. Coda: Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960) Following its network run in the United States, The Adventures of Robin Hood enjoyed a long afterlife in syndication from 1958. Ironically its very longevity was the reason for its eventual cancellation. According to Sidney Cole: ‘We could have gone on, but the American end of the deal decided that they had enough to offer all the stations across America with a “rerun” deal – you could show them in any order and go on for years – so there was no point in making any more.’70 However, there was a feature film spin-off, Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), produced by Sidney Cole and Richard Greene (who during the fourth series had been credited as ‘production associate’) and directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer Film Productions. In the late 1950s the Hammer name had become synonymous with Gothic horror films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), all directed by Fisher, who, after years as a journeyman director of supporting features and television series, including ten episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, emerged as the studio’s foremost auteur with these visually stylish, full-blooded melodramas.71 The success of its horror films, however, has tended to obscure the fact that Hammer also produced films across a range of genres including low-cost swashbucklers. Indeed it had already made one Robin Hood film, Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), directed by Val Guest with American Don Taylor as Robin. Sword of Sherwood Forest was shot at the Ardmore National Studios, Ireland, with locations in County Wicklow, with a subsidy from the Irish Film Finance Corporation that at the time was seeking to promote Ireland as a production base.72 However, the film dispensed with the entire supporting cast of the television series. Hammer regular Peter Cushing was cast as the Sheriff of Nottingham (reduced here to a secondary villain), while other roles went to Nigel Greene (Little John), Niall MacGinnis (Friar Tuck) and Sarah Branch (Marian). Sword of Sherwood Forest is consistent with The Adventures of Robin Hood in so far as it revolves around a conspiracy by a group of

Expor ting Englishness   41 noblemen led by the Earl of Newark (Richard Pasco) to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jack Gwillim). Like so many of the television episodes it presents a power vacuum in which a self-interested aristocratic elite attempts to usurp legitimate authority: the archbishop is ruling in the place of the absent King Richard, who is away fighting in France. Robin is already an outlaw at the beginning of the film, though it dramatises his first meeting with Marian when he comes across her swimming in a pool in the forest. (A reversal of this scene, in which Marian spies on a bathing Robin, occurs in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.) The now familiar motif of betrayal is rehearsed once again when the Sheriff captures one of Robin’s men, Martin of Eastwood (Derren Nesbitt), and presents him with a stark choice: ‘Tell me where your camp is and you shall have a free pardon. Refuse and you’ll be shot.’ There follows a perverse demonstration of legal principle: Martin reveals the location of the camp and is then hanged, but the Sheriff still orders that a pardon be made out in his name. It is difficult to say whether this was meant as a reference to HUAC  – the script was by Alan Hackney, a British screenwriter best known for the comedies Private’s Progress (1955) and I’m All Right, Jack (1959) – but it does demonstrate the extent to which the motifs of informers and pardons had become such ingrained elements of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Sword of Sherwood Forest was generally well received as an efficient, unassuming minor swashbuckler. The trade press praised its entertainment value. Kinematograph Weekly thought it ‘innocuous entertainment … It can hardly fail to amuse and thrill the “ninepennies” and youngsters.’73 Variety concurred that it was ‘a versatile, companionable attraction wherever general audiences assemble for traditional uncomplicated entertainment’.74 It merited a favourable notice in the New York Times, where Howard Thompson felt ‘the script wedges in one or two interesting characterizations’ and liked it ‘for giving Hopalong Hood a little reality’.75 A dissenting note was sounded in Britain, however, by the Monthly Film Bulletin, which called it a ‘joyless romp’ and suggested that it was not only risible in content but exhibited some of the less attractive characteristics of the Hammer brand: ‘Pantomimic dialogue, a sprawling plot and a rouged and lipsticked Prioress are but three of the hazards common to this type of film; a needless flogging

42   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series scene, and the flea-bitten costumes and performances of the small-part players, are more alarming and unpleasant elements in a tradition that remains specifically Hammer’s.’76 Hammer made one more foray into the greenwood with A Challenge for Robin Hood (1967), directed by C. M. Pennington Richards and starring Barrie Ingham. Pennington Richards had directed episodes of The Buccaneers and Ivanhoe, though not The Adventures of Robin Hood. This film offers an entirely different interpretation of the Robin Hood story: Robin de Courtney, a Norman unjustly accused of murder by his treacherous cousin Roger, escapes into the forest and takes over as leader of an existing band of outlaws after proving his skill with longbow and quarterstaff. It is unique, therefore, as the only film that makes Robin a Norman. Nevertheless, it maintains some links back to previous versions, with John Arnatt reprising his suave and duplicitous Sheriff of Nottingham from the final series of The Adventures of Robin Hood and James Hayter back in the role of Friar Tuck he had played in The Story of Robin Hood. Marian in this version (Gay Hamilton) is a commoner and daughter of a man murdered by Roger de Courtney (Peter Blythe). The film is briskly paced, with a rousing action climax, and is generally regarded as the best of Hammer’s Robin Hood films. Like its predecessor, A Challenge for Robin Hood was released during the Christmas holiday period and received good notices as a lively and unpretentious costume adventure.77 It was The Adventures of Robin Hood, however, that for a generation remained the definitive version of the Robin Hood story. It remained a favourite for many years through frequent repeats and was still being shown on British television in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s it became an object of nostalgia for a generation of children now grown to adulthood and it featured both in the launch of Channel 4 in 1982 and the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the launch of ITV in 2005. In 1991 ITC released three Robin Hood ‘features’ on home video ‘to capitalize on renewed interest in the character sparked by two new highly anticipated productions, including the feature film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’.78 These each comprised episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood laid back-to-back, colourised and with new music though maintaining the original dialogue. There have been other versions of the Robin Hood story on television and film since The Adventures of

Expor ting Englishness   43 Robin Hood – including a radical revisionist interpretation of the myth in Robin of Sherwood and a poor-quality postmodern series, The New Adventures of Robin Hood – but none have matched the popular success of the original, which not only established the template for the television swashbuckler but also remains one of the most successful exports in the history of British television. Notes 1 See Michael Eaton, ‘A voice from the Hood, or Adventures in the green trade: A convulsion in seven fits’, in Thomas Hahn (ed.), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 79–86; Louis Marks, ‘Hood winked’, Listener, 18 January 1990, p. 8; and Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “un-American” contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (2003), pp. 245–57. 2 Steve Neale, ‘Transatlantic ventures and Robin Hood’, in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years (Maidenhead, 2005), p. 82. 3 The fullest account of the introduction of commercial television is Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. I: Origin and Foundation, 1946–1962 (London, 1982). See also Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. IV: Sound and Vision 1945–55 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 803–931. 4 ‘22nd September 1955!’, TV Times (London region), 22 September 1955, p. 3. 5 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford, 2000), p. 55. 6 Lew Grade, Still Dancing: My Story (London, 1987), p. 158. Grade’s autobiography is a less than reliable source: he discusses events out of sequence, cites the wrong number of episodes for The Adventures of Robin Hood (claiming 165 rather than 143) and refers to his production company ITP from the outset as ITC (it became the Independent Television Corporation in 1961). 7 On the Danzigers, see Dave Mann, Britain’s First TV/Film Crime Series and the Industrialisation of the Film Industry 1946–1964 (Lampeter, 2009).

44   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 8 See Jonathan Stubbs, ‘The Eady Levy: A runaway bribe? Hollywood production and British subsidy in the early 1950s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6: 1 (2009), pp. 1–20. On Anglo-American productions in the 1950s, see Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), pp. 114–36. 9 Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), p. 67. 10 Harold Myers, ‘A lion’s share for Britain’, Variety, 31 July 1957, p. 31. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Brit Film Finance Corp makes loans for telefilm prod’, Variety, 5 June 1957, p. 26. 13 ‘$60–70,000,000 domestic gross on syndicated pix’, Variety, 5 June 1957, p. 27. 14 ‘Global count: 70,000,000 tv sets’, Variety, 25 February 1959, p. 25. 15 Michael M. Sillerman, ‘The increasing importance of foreign TV markets’, Variety, 9 January 1957, p. 105. 16 In the early 1950s BBC Television had produced live versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel (5 February 1950), The Black Arrow (two episodes: 20 May 1951 – 27 May 1951) and The Three Musketeers (six episodes: 24 November 1954 – 29 December 1954). These were seen more as adaptations of adventure novels than as fully fledged swashbucklers. The BBC also broadcast a live, original drama serial of Robin Hood (six episodes: 17 March 1953 – 21 April 1953), starring future ‘Doctor Who’ Patrick Troughton. 17 ‘Estimated weekly network TV program costs’, Variety, 16 November 1955, p. 26. 18 Variety, 28 September 1955, p. 14. 19 Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film (London, 2009), p. 223. 20 Patricia Warren, British Film Studios: An Illustrated History (London, 1995), p. 159. 21 ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), p. 265. 22 The Ivor Montagu Collection held by the Special Collections Unit of the British Film Institute contains two files of material relating

Expor ting Englishness   45 to The Adventures of Robin Hood. Item 274 includes a ‘Synopsis of 29 Robin Hood Films’, dated 1956: these are synopses of episodes from the second season. Item 275 is an ‘unrealised Robin Hood script’, entitled ‘Blackbird’. There is a second season episode, ‘The Blackbird’, on which the script’s credit is Francis Nesbitt. 23 ‘How Robin Hood was filmed’, TV Times, 7 October 1955, p. 7. 24 Hal Hackett, ‘When knighthood was in flower on TV film’, Variety, 9 January 1957, p. 103. 25 ‘Talking turkey’, TV Times, 18–24 April 1958, p. 3. 26 ‘How Robin Hood was filmed’, p. 7. 27 Variety, 28 September 1955, p. 42. 28 The most prolific director on The Adventures of Robin Hood was Terry Bishop (34 episodes), followed by Bernard Knowles (20), Ralph Smart (17), Robert Day (12), Peter Seabourne (12), Terence Fisher (10), Anthony Squire (9), Don Chaffey (7), Lindsay Anderson (4), Gordon Parry (4), Don Birt (3), Peter Maxwell (3), Arthur Crabtree (2), Compton Bennett (2), Gerry Bryant (2), Ernest Borneman (1) and Sidney Cole (1). 29 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Notes from Sherwood’, Sight and Sound, 26: 3 (Winter 1956–57), p. 159. 30 Ibid. 31 ‘British fear H’wood reprisals if telefilm prod. upbeat continues’, Variety, 27 February 1957, p. 36. 32 Paul Eddington, So Far, So Good: The Autobiography (London, 1996), p. 89. 33 There is an extensive historical literature on HUAC and the blacklist, including, but not limited to the following: Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York, 2003); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60 (Berkeley, CA, 1983); Bernard Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington, KY, 1989); and Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York, 1997). 34 Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, p. 404. 35 McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, p. 437. 36 Quoted in David Robb, ‘Naming the right names: Amending the Hollywood Blacklist’, Cineaste, 22: 2 (1996), p. 28.

46   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 37 Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York, 2003), p. 260. 38 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, pp. 247–9. Neale finds evidence to indicate that ‘Eric Heath’, ‘Ian Larkin’, ‘John Dyson’, ‘Paul Symonds’, ‘Leighton Reynolds’, ‘Oliver Skene’, ‘Neil R. Collins’ and ‘Robert B. West’ were all pseudonyms for either Ring Lardner Jr and/or Ian McLellan Hunter. Waldo Salt and Robert Lees also both used ‘John Dyson’ and ‘Neil R. Collins’, and Salt used ‘Arthur Behr’, while ‘Leslie Poynton’ and ‘John Ridgley’ were both probably used by Adrian Scott. There is less concrete evidence that ‘Anne Rodney’ was Norma Barzman’s pseudonym. It would also seem likely that ‘C. Douglas Phipps’ and ‘Milton S. Schlesinger’ were pseudonyms. Some sources, including Neale, cite the writing credit for the first episode, ‘The Coming of Robin Hood’, as one ‘Lawrence McClellan’, perhaps suggesting Ian McLellan Hunter, though the credit on all the prints I have seen – including the ITC video release from the 1990s and the Network Entertainment Region 2 DVD box set – is ‘Eric Heath’. 39 Ibid., p. 247. 40 Quoted in Robb, ‘Naming the right names’, p. 28. 41 Eaton, ‘A voice from the Hood’, p. 82. 42 Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist, p. 260. 43 Louis Marks, ‘Hood winked’, Listener, 18 January 1990, p. 8. 44 ‘“Robin Hood” Brit fave’, Variety, 3 March 1956, p. 23. 45 ‘Britain TV faves’, Variety, 14 November 1956, p. 31. 46 ‘Looking around’, TV Times, 11–17 December 1955, p. 4. 47 The Adventures of Robin Hood comic was produced by the Sussex Publishing Company of New York. It includes good likenesses of Alan Wheatley as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Archie Duncan as Little John, though Robin looks more like the young Tony Curtis than Richard Greene and Marian has become a pert-nosed blonde. 48 ‘$42,000,000 yield thus far for “Robin Hood”’, Variety, 30 October 1957, p. 33. 49 ‘Reviewing British entries’, Variety, 5 October 1955, p. 32. 50 Neale, ‘Transatlantic ventures and Robin Hood’, p. 75. 51 I have found one critic who believed that The Adventures of Robin Hood was unsuitable for young children. George Mikes took exception to the episode ‘A Good Hanging’, as it contained ‘a long discussion on hanging and a song about the gallows’ and lines such as ‘a fine

Expor ting Englishness   47 bird of death’. Mikes was reviewing so-called ‘Children’s Hour’ programming and also took exception to The Lone Ranger, Jungle Jim and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. ‘During my one week’s viewing of Children’s Hour’, he wrote, ‘I saw four major crimes of violence committed on the screen; twenty-four men knocked out violently; twenty-seven men were forced to hold their hands up at the pistol point; I heard 100 shots fired, not counting the carnage done with bows and arrows in Robin Hood and Sir Lancelot.’ ‘Is this television for toddlers?’, Observer, 13 January 1957, p. 3. 52 Variety, 28 September 1955, p. 42. 53 Variety, 3 October 1956, p. 52. 54 Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, p. 68. 55 ‘Viewpoint’, TV Times, 28 October 1955, p. 4. 56 Leslie Mallory, ‘Robin draws his longbow – and Davy bites the dust!’, News Chronicle, 5 September 1956. 57 Variety, 28 September 1955, p. 42. 58 TV Guide, 12 November 1955. 59 ‘The Weinstein theory for brighter TV’, TV Times, 6 June 1956, p. 19. 60 Variety, 28 September 1955, p. 42. 61 ‘United States telefilms in display around the globe’, Variety, 4 June 1958, pp. 36–7. 62 Hackett, ‘When knighthood was in flower’, p. 103. 63 On the history of the Robin Hood myth, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994). The history of Robin in cinema is analysed in Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), pp. 187–216. 64 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. A. N. Wilson (London, 1986 [1819]), p. 536. 65 Jeffrey Richards, ‘The politics of the swashbuckler’, in James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 128. 66 Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 118–19. 67 Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (London, 1996), p. 105. 68 Eaton, ‘A voice from the Hood’, p. 80. 69 Quoted in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, p. 239.

48   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 70 ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’, p. 265. 71 Fisher had directed the Adventures of Robin Hood episodes ‘Trial by Battle’, ‘The Traitor’, ‘The Thorkill Ghost’, ‘Ransom’, ‘The Hero’, ‘Hubert’, ‘The Dream’, ‘The Blackbird’, ‘The Path of True Love’ and ‘The Infidel’. Although Fisher’s work has since attracted sympathetic critical interest, Sword of Sherwood Forest is not regarded as one of his better films. Jeffrey Richards describes it as ‘competently if unmemorably handled’, while Peter Hutchings considers it ‘a listless, meandering affair, and Fisher’s direction competent but nothing more’. Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen, p. 204; Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher (Manchester, 2000), pp. 113–14. 72 Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London, 1987), p.  113. On the production of Sword of Sherwood Forest, see Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio, Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography (Jefferson, NC, 1996), pp. 188–91. 73 Kinematograph Weekly, 24 November 1960, p. 12. 74 Variety, 11 January 1961, p. 43. 75 New York Times, 26 January 1961, p. 32. 76 Monthly Film Bulletin, 28: 235 (February 1961), p. 25. 77 Johnson and Del Vecchio, Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography, pp. 288–90. 78 ‘ITC brings “Hood” TV series to video’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 March 1991, p.  5. The compilation features were entitled Robin Hood: The Movie, The Return of Robin Hood and Robin Hood’s Greatest Adventure.

2



Fantasy factories

The success of The Adventures of Robin Hood is often credited with inaugurating the cycle of costume adventure series that followed in the late 1950s. This was the ‘golden age’ of the television swashbuckler as a cycle of adventure series came forth from the British studios at Nettlefold, Twickenham and Elstree: The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, William Tell, Sir Francis Drake. ITP, which had a hand in all those series, led the way, though there were also contributions from other producers, including Sydney Box (Ivanhoe), George King (The Gay Cavalier) and the Danziger brothers (Richard the Lionheart).1 American producers also jumped on the swashbuckling bandwagon with two series, The Last of the Mohicans and Zorro, which represented a merger of the conventions of the swashbuckler and the Western. Most of the lineages of the swashbuckler were covered in this cycle, including the Knights of the Round Table, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Gentlemen of the Road and the Masked Avengers. The production histories of these series demonstrate the shifting political and cultural economies of the television industry. In the mid-1950s three ‘made-in-Britain’ series  – The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers – were sold to US networks. ITP’s breakthrough in the US market encouraged other producers, with the consequence that within a few years the market became saturated. For later entries in the swashbuckling cycle British producers went it alone without co-production and distribution partners, depending upon the expanding syndication market for their sales. While it would be fair to say that none ever quite matched the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the fact that so many were made within 49

50   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series such a relatively short period is evidence of the cultural and ideological currency of the swashbuckler at this time.

The Sapphire standard: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956), The Buccaneers (1956), Sword of Freedom (1957) The most successful costume adventure series of the 1950s were those produced by the group responsible for The Adventures of Robin Hood. The ITP–Official Films–Sapphire Films team produced another three swashbucklers: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers and Sword of Freedom. The trade press reported that Sapphire also shot a pilot episode for a series entitled The Highwayman with Louis Hayward in 1957.2 (I have not been able to find any information about the story content, though the title suggests a Dick Turpin character or equivalent. Hayward had played Turpin in Columbia’s The Lady and the Bandit in 1951.) The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers were sold to American networks (NBC and CBS respectively) and were shown in America and Britain in 1956–57. The American rerun rights were then sold to the third US network (ABC).3 The network sales of the three ITP/Official Films series meant that revenues were quick to accrue and swelled the pot for investment in further production. It also meant that ITP was emboldened to embark upon new series without necessarily having a network deal in place.4 This was the case with Sword of Freedom, which was syndicated in America in 1957 and shown in Britain from early in 1958. Although it was regarded as being less successful than other swashbucklers, Sword of Freedom was reported to have earned $750,000 from US syndication alone, which would have accounted for three-quarters of its total production cost and would almost certainly have made a profit when sales to other markets are taken into account.5 The Adventures of Sir Lancelot essentially replicated the production arrangements of The Adventures of Robin Hood: the two series were shot side-by-side at Nettlefold Studios with the same associate producer (Sidney Cole) and script supervisor (Albert G. Ruben). The production of the series demonstrates the significance attached to US sales in that fourteen of its thirty episodes were shot in colour: American networks had started broadcasting some programmes in colour in the ­mid-1950s,

Fantasy factories   51

2.1  The bold knight and the wily magician: Lancelot (William Russell) and Merlin (Cyril Smith) in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot.

but it was not until the late 1960s that colour television arrived in Britain. The additional costs of colour filming were paid for by the series’ US sponsors Lever Bros.6 At $32,500 per episode, the production values were on a par with The Adventures of Robin Hood.7 Variety felt that ‘a lot of care has gone into this vid-pixer. Settings, costuming and thesping all fit nicely into the pattern of the adventure series.’8 Dallas Bower, who had produced Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V (1944), assumed production duties once the series was underway. William Russell starred as Lancelot, with Jane Hylton as Guinevere, Bruce Seaton as King Arthur (replaced after a few episodes by Ronald Leigh-Hunt) and Cyril Smith as Merlin. Like The Adventures of Robin Hood the series employed a stock company of supporting actors, including Patrick McGoohan, Nigel Green, Derren Nesbitt and Edward Judd. The writers included several of the blacklistees who had contributed to The Adventures of Robin Hood, including Ring Lardner Jr, Ian McLellan Hunter and Adrian Scott.9 The publicity for The Adventures of Sir Lancelot maintained that it was based on Sir Thomas Malory’s chivalric romance Le Morte d’Arthur (c.1470), though the period setting was changed ‘from the sixth to the

52   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series fourteenth century to add a little pomp and tapestry’.10 This suggests a casual relationship with historical authenticity, to say the least, which is also evident in the fact that in ‘The Queen’s Knight’ Guinevere can be glimpsed wearing high heels under her dress! The vague sense of period in the series, nevertheless, seems not entirely inappropriate given that much of its paraphernalia  – Camelot and the Round Table, tournaments, jousts and tales of gallantry – were themselves inventions of the later Middle Ages far removed from the post-Roman Britain that the real Arthur, if indeed he ever existed, inhabited. The ‘pomp and tapestry’ – which surely influenced the decision to switch to colour mid-way through the series – was a feature of Arthurian films such as MGM’s Knights of the Round Table (1953) and Twentieth Century-Fox’s Prince Valiant (1954). It was, in other words, a representation of an Arthurian world according to the popular imagination, rather than a historically accurate one. This point is illustrated by a revealing anecdote. Initially the series used authentic plate armour and heavy broadswords, but these gave way to chain mail and lighter fencing swords when NBC executives felt that the fight sequences looked too cumbersome.11 The Adventures of Sir Lancelot is shorn of the fantasy elements that feature in some versions of the Arthurian legend: here Merlin the Magician is a clever trickster rather than a sorcerer. He invents the myth of Excalibur as an invincible sword to give courage to Sir Bernard who has lost confidence in his fighting abilities (‘The Magic Sword’). The Round Table as featured in the series includes knights both familiar (Tristan, Gawain, Galahad, Lionel, Kay) and hitherto unknown (Holdred, Raynold, Christopher, Bernard). The opening episode, ‘The Knight with the Red Plume’, adapts Malory’s account of how Sir Lancelot of the Lake comes to Camelot to join the Knights of the Round Table. He is initially distrusted by the other knights who suspect him of being the ferocious warrior who had slain several of their number in a recent battle. Lancelot explains that he was bound by an oath of fealty to serve Arthur’s enemy King Gwyle, but that Gwyle, on his deathbed, released Lancelot from his oath. Lancelot is accepted into the Round Table when he gets the better of Sir Gawain in a duel and becomes the Queen’s champion. The relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere is entirely platonic  – understandably so in a series intended for a juvenile audience  – with the attraction between them only hinted at in occasional furtive glances.

Fantasy factories   53 In content, however, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot owes more to the Western than to Malory. It is to all intents and purposes a Western with chain mail and swords rather than stetsons and six-shooters. There are uncanny similarities between the series’ representation of Arthurian Britain and the popular image of the Old West: both are lawless societies where a lack of central authority creates a vacuum of power. Lancelot rides out to right wrongs and resolve disputes: he is the Wyatt Earp of Olde England who brings peace and justice to the land. The series has its equivalents of familiar Western motifs: the landowners who enslave their people are the equivalent of the Western’s corrupt cattlemen (‘Maid of Somerset’), the peasants more used to farming than fighting are the homesteaders (‘Shepherds’ War’) and the Viking raiders who ransack the countryside perform the role of the Indians (‘The Pirates’). Another link to the Western is the title song, reminiscent of the themes of juvenile Westerns such as Casey Jones and The Adventures of Champion the Wonder Horse: ‘Now listen to my story, listen while I sing/Of days of old in England when Arthur was the king/Of Merlin the magician and Guinevere the queen/And Lancelot the bravest knight the world has ever seen.’ Variety picked up on this when it mentioned that ‘there is a theme song that may catch on and save the show. Haven’t had a good one, you know, since Davy Crockett.’12 Like the Western, in which the imposition of law and order is a central theme, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot is concerned with the establishment of the rule of law. Arthur is referred to several times as ‘king of all Britain’, though it is also made clear that Camelot is only one of several kingdoms and that Arthur has rivals in King Marhaus of Mercia and King Mark of Cornwall. A recurring theme of the series is Arthur’s ambition to unite Britain around a strong central authority. King Marhaus, it is said, ‘opposes your every move towards unifying Britain and establishing a peaceful order here’ (‘Lancelot’s Banishment’). In ‘Roman Wall’ Lancelot agrees to rescue the daughter of King Boltan if in return Boltan will ‘swear fealty to King Arthur as overlord of Britain’. Although the idea of several kingdoms rather than one central authority is appropriate for post-Roman Britain, it makes no sense for the later Middle Ages, as suggested by the series’ costumes and period trappings. The Adventures of Sir Lancelot promotes the medieval code of chivalry in which a knight is sworn to defend the body of his king, to ride

54   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series abroad redressing wrongs, and to serve and protect women of all ranks in word and deed. To this extent the series shares the ethos of The Adventures of Robin Hood: Lancelot sees the role of a knight as being ‘to protect the innocent against those who attack them’ (‘The Fearless Fathers’). In the same episode he tells Sir Ergan: ‘I am pledged to fight that many-headed serpent that threatens us all – one is called injustice, another is greed, a third is prejudice.’ In common with The Adventures of Robin Hood a recurring theme is the protection of the weak and oppressed. ‘Shepherds’ War’ is a representative example. In a plot that bears uncanny similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) – itself later remade as the Western The Magnificent Seven (1960) – villagers terrorised by renegade knights appeal to Arthur for help. The Round Table is reluctant to commit knights, as an attack from Mercia is believed to be imminent, but Arthur reasons that his position will be stronger with the support of the common people. Lancelot is sent to teach the reluctant shepherds how to fight and when the renegade knights return they are defeated in battle. Lancelot returns to Camelot, declaring that ‘for the first time in my life I realised the strength of the common people and I realised that without them we cannot survive’. There is some evidence that, like The Adventures of Robin Hood, the writers aimed to use the series as a commentary on contemporary politics. The experience of the blacklisted writers before HUAC clearly informs ‘The Outcast’. In this episode Lancelot’s squire Brian is training as a knight despite the prejudices of others for not being of noble birth. He is tricked by other boys into a rite of passage involving stealing the matron’s nightcap but is framed for the theft of a ring belonging to Queen Guinevere. The episode is replete with references to informers and comrades. Brian is betrayed by the treacherous Osbert: ‘I’d be the first to protect a comrade if it were just a lark, but as it’s so serious I feel duty bound to reveal that Kitchen Boy was out just now for some time.’ It transpires that it is Osbert, squire to landless knight Sir Glavin, who stole the ring and framed Brian. Osbert, in this reading, is a ‘friendly witness’ who informs on his comrade. ‘Leslie Poynton’, the credited writer for this episode, was a pseudonym for Adrian Scott, one of the original ‘Hollywood Ten’.13 Similarly it is difficult not to read a scene in ‘Winged Victory’ – which Scott also wrote, this time under the pseudonym ‘John Ridgely’ – as a reference to his principled stance

Fantasy factories   55 against HUAC. Lancelot, captured by King Mark, refuses to submit despite being tortured: Brian: Where is the honour in being killed? Lancelot: Brian, if I give in now, I shall live out my days as a Judas, hated and scorned by all men. As with The Adventures of Robin Hood there is no evidence to suggest these references were noticed by contemporaries, though in hindsight, and with knowledge of the involvement of the blacklisted writers, the meaning of such scenes is quite clear. There was also a significant involvement by blacklistees in The Buccaneers, which had a similar production history to The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. The Buccaneers started out at Nettlefold under the supervision of Sidney Cole and initially starred Alec Clunes as Woodes Rogers, the Governor of Nassau. Rogers was a real historical character: here he is cast as a former privateer who has ‘pledged to clear the pirates out of the Caribbean’. Clunes was dropped after three episodes, however, and Robert Shaw, introduced in the third episode as Captain Dan Tempest, became the star of the series. This was at the suggestion of Hunter and Lardner, who wrote the first three episodes. Other blacklistees who contributed to The Buccaneers included Waldo Salt, Arnold Perl, Millard Lampell and Michael Wilson.14 From its fourth episode the series moved to Twickenham Studios, Richmond-uponThames, with production duties alternating between Ralph Smart and C. M. Pennington Richards. The Buccaneers cost $28,000 per episode: Variety felt it was ‘replete with top production values’.15 For its seagoing sequences, shot in Falmouth Harbour by second unit director Robert Day, the series used a schooner that had previously seen service in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island (1950). The acting stock company on this occasion included Willoughby Gray, Terence Cooper and Roy Purcell, with Peter Hammond as the hapless Lieutenant Beamish. The Buccaneers is a more satisfying experience than The Adventures of Sir Lancelot: it is a rousing adventure yarn with robust action sequences and a more virile and charismatic leading man. It draws upon the visual codes and conventions of piratical swashbucklers such as Against All Flags (1952), Blackbeard the Pirate (1952) and The Crimson Pirate

56   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

2.2  Captain Dan Tempest (Robert Shaw) was rarely without female company in The Buccaneers.

(1952), and is replete with sea battles, Spanish galleons, treasure chests, buxom wenches, shanties and much general piratical jollity. The series’ prime asset is Shaw, who seems to be having the time of his life and whose performance is modelled on Burt Lancaster’s Captain Vallo in The Crimson Pirate. (The pirate genre is one that lends itself to excess: one only needs to think of the performances of Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Robert Newton and Johnny Depp in their pirate films.) Shaw played up the larger-than-life nature of the character by inventing his own pirate ancestry, telling one interviewer: ‘My family are Cornish. I’m directly descended from the notorious Cornish pirate Avery, who was put to death.’16 The ideological strategy of The Buccaneers is to legitimate its piratical activities within a framework of political authority. It is repeatedly asserted that Tempest is a reformed pirate now in the king’s service as a privateer (meaning that he has the royal warrant), though his attitude towards authority, as represented by the acting governor Beamish, is cavalier to say the least. In the first episode (‘Blackbeard’) it is revealed that King George I has offered a pardon and reward for turning in any other pirate  – a motif once again redolent of HUAC and the witch

Fantasy factories   57 hunts in Hollywood. The same episode also reveals some sympathy for sailors who turned to piracy after being demobbed from the Royal Navy: ‘England showed its gratitude to them by letting them rot for want of an honest berth’, remarks Woodes Rogers. This is the first indication of a liberal attitude towards outcasts and outsiders that informs the series. The legitimation of Tempest’s buccaneering exploits – he is commissioned to patrol the waters around the colony of New Providence  – allows him to wage his private war against the enemies of the Crown. There are two main threats. The first is from pirates who threaten to destabilise the fragile economy of the colony. Their selfishness and greed is presented as a threat to the people of New Providence, who are routinely faced with starvation and disease. The pirate Blackbeard is a recurring foe in early episodes including ‘Captain Dan Tempest’, ‘The Wasp’ and ‘The Ladies’, while other pirate threats are the feared Black Corsair (‘Gunpowder Plot’) and the Spaniard El Supremo (‘Before the Mast’). The other main threat is from the Spanish, who declare war in the fourth episode (‘Dan Tempest’s War with Spain’) and remain a constant menace. In ‘The Surgeon of Sangre Rojo’ and ‘Articles of War’ the Spanish blockade New Providence and attempt to starve the colony into surrender. The Spaniards make ‘the perfect all-purpose villains’ in the piratical swashbuckler: Spain during this period (the series is set between 1715 and 1722) is generally associated with tyranny and slavery.17 The Spaniards of The Buccaneers conform to the familiar stereotype: swarthy and treacherous, with heavy accents and pointed beards. The politics of The Buccaneers demonstrate the liberal ethos of social justice that was a characteristic of other series from the same stable. This is most evident in the anti-slavery theme that runs throughout the series. ‘The Raider’ introduces a wealthy Dutch plantation owner, Van Brugh, who profits from slave labour and is in league with pirate Charlie Vane. In ‘The Slave Ship’ Van Brugh’s workers complain about their harsh treatment and are flogged. Three of them escape, seizing a ship that is transporting slaves from West Africa. Tempest is sent to intercept the stolen ship, but he lets the three ‘pirates’ escape to Jamaica (‘England needs men like you for the war – you can enlist there, no questions asked’). He also frees the slaves, paying off the captain with his own money (‘Don’t you like the colour of my money,

58   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Captain Scobie?’). Tempest is therefore associated with the opponents of slavery – sixty-five years before the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Committee by William Wilberforce in 1787. Another area where The Buccaneers demonstrates its progressive credentials is in its gender politics. While it could hardly be described as a feminist text, The Buccaneers offers a more progressive representation of women than either The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. The women in The Buccaneers are no mere maidens in distress: they are often characterised as strong-willed settlers whose role is to impose order on the unruly menfolk. A recurring theme is the absence of women in New Providence: ‘The Ladies’ and ‘Dan Tempest and the Amazons’ both feature shiploads of women coming out to settle the colony. The scarcity of women gives them a commodity value which they use to set their own terms. ‘Dan Tempest and the Amazons’ is about women asserting control of their own destinies: a group of Englishwomen being shipped to Barbados as indentured servants are shipwrecked and picked up and sold by the French; but they respond by taking control of the ship which enables them to negotiate their own terms. ‘Gentleman Jack and the Lady’ features female pirate Anne Bonney (Hazel Court) who conceals her femininity by disguising herself as dandy privateer ‘Gentleman Jack’. This is not to claim The Buccaneers for ‘queer theory’ – despite the cross-dressing motif and the fact that Tempest takes some time to realise that his rival ‘Jack’ is in fact a woman  – but it does suggest a more sophisticated awareness of gender identities than in most examples of the genre. The last ten episodes of The Buccaneers shifted the action from New Providence to the coast of South Carolina. This change was at the suggestion of Waldo Salt.18 Usually a change of narrative format is an indication that a television series has run out of ideas and that its producers feel it needs refreshing: it rarely works. In The Buccaneers, however, the change also brings about an ideological readjustment that is quite intriguing. By shifting the action from the Caribbean to the American mainland, Tempest is detached from the service of the Crown – a role that had always sat uncomfortably with his anti-authoritarian tendency – and is repositioned within the politics of Colonial America. The series sides unequivocally with the colonial settlers as Tempest helps them against corrupt governors, unjust magistrates and grasping customs officials. In

Fantasy factories   59 ‘Dan Tempest Holds an Auction’ and ‘To the Rescue’, he runs across Sir Charles Johnson, the Governor of Charleston and chairman of the South Carolina Trading Company, which uses its monopoly to exploit the tobacco farmers who are forced to sell their goods at less than market price. In ‘Instrument of War’ he rescues a young Scotsman who has been imprisoned illegally in a notorious penal colony. In ‘Printer’s Devil’ he aids pamphleteer Josiah Parkerhouse in his campaign for a free press and to expose the corruption of Sir Joplin James, the Governor of Cape May. And in ‘Indian Fighters’ Tempest comes to the aid of the militiamen who have protected the colonies against Indian attacks, only to find their lands and property have been seized by Governor Johnson on the grounds that they have not paid their rents (‘You send me to fight your war, then behind my back you steal my land, burn my house and raise my rents’). The Buccaneers therefore highlights the tensions between the colonists and their rulers that would ultimately lead to the American War of Independence. This not only reveals the influence of American writers, but also suggests that the series was angling towards the sympathies of American viewers.19 Although neither The Adventures of Sir Lancelot nor The Buccaneers would ever match the longevity of The Adventures of Robin Hood, their network sales represented a major success for ITP and Sapphire Films. Their next venture, Sword of Freedom, marked a change of production strategy. In 1957 the US partner, Official Films, ‘elected to return to the first-run syndication field’ rather than prioritising network sales.20 At this time the domestic syndication market in the United States was estimated as being worth upwards of $60 million a year. Sword of Freedom was a lower-cost production: at $25,000 per episode its budget was nearly 30 per cent less than The Adventures of Robin Hood.21 Variety found it ‘a poorly-produced swashbuckler’, lacking in production values: ‘The apparent shoestring budget may enable Official and the producers to make some coin out of this entry, but its audience appeal is close to nil.’22 Nevertheless, it had no difficulty in picking up syndication sales in the United States, where it was shown in 1957 before it aired in Britain in January 1958.23 The production arrangements for Sword of Freedom were consistent with previous ITP-Sapphire costume series. It was produced at Walton Studios (formerly Nettlefold) and Twickenham Studios by Sidney Cole,

60   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

2.3  Marco del Monte (Edmund Purdom) narrowly escapes an assassin’s dagger in Sword of Freedom.

with Sapphire’s regular script editor Albert G. Ruben and the usual balance of British directors (Terry Bishop, Peter Maxwell, Terence Fisher, Bernard Knowles) and US writers (Ring Lardner Jr, Ian McLellan Hunter and Waldo Salt all wrote several episodes).24 Sword of Freedom, originally to have been called Sword for Hire, starred Edmund Purdom as Marco del Monte, a brilliant artist and swordsman in Renaissance Italy. Like Richard Greene, Purdom was a British actor, groomed for stardom by Hollywood, who had appeared in a minor film swashbuckler, The King’s Thief (1955). Sword of Freedom co-starred Adrienne Corri as Marco’s model Angelica, Rowland Bartrop as his loyal retainer Sandro, Martin Benson as the villainous Duke de Medici and Kenneth Hyde as Machiavelli. It was reported that Sapphire had originally intended to film on location in Florence, though in the event the series was shot in the studio with a few local exteriors.25 The reputation of Sword of Freedom has suffered in comparison with other adventure series of the time. Tise Vahimagi, for example, contends that it was ‘a lacklustre piece of period staging, generally lacking in zest and conviction’.26 Yet this verdict – offered at a time when episodes of the series were difficult to see – does not stand up to scrutiny. Sword of

Fantasy factories   61 Freedom may have a more austere visual style than other swashbucklers and some highly unconvincing backcloths of Florentine buildings but the action sequences are lively – Purdom is proficient with a sword – and the series is not without its points of interest. The historical background is unusual, and there is some attempt to understand the characters within their historical contexts. Thus Medici is characterised as an amoral tyrant (‘Conscience, my dear Master Leonardo, is a luxury I cannot afford while there are others more powerful than me’) but also as a patron of the arts, while Machiavelli is a pragmatic schemer who successfully negotiates the shifting political landscape. As with The Adventures of Robin Hood, there is evidence that the producers had researched the historical period.27 Sword of Freedom offers a reasonably authentic picture of the social and economic institutions of fifteenth-century Florence with its system of guilds and its network of political patronage. It is populated with real historical characters, including Leonardo da Vinci (Andrew Keir), who appears in two episodes featuring his designs for a prototype machine-gun (‘Choice of Weapons’) and an ‘under-the-water machine’ (‘Forgery in Red Chalk’). The art director evidently had a sense of humour: the latter episode sees Leonardo carrying a portrait of a smiling Mona Lisa. Otherwise there are two features of Sword of Freedom that deserve attention. One is its politics: Sword of Freedom was television’s first explicitly republican swashbuckler. Medici, the Gonfalonier of Florence, is a banker who controls the city’s ruling council and uses his power to impose taxes on the merchants and artists’ guilds. This is another indication of the series’ greater than usual attention to historical context: Florence had been a republic in the twelfth century before its rule was contested by rival families such as the Medicis and the Pazzis during the fifteenth century. The objective of the resistance movement in Sword of Freedom is the restoration of the Florentine republic. There are references throughout the series to the republican cause. In the first episode (‘Francesca’) Marco asserts his republican credentials: ‘You know that I stand for Florence as a free republic!’ The republic is associated with freedom and liberty, whereas Medici is an unelected oligarch who has ‘all but destroyed the liberty that Florence knew under the republic’ (‘The Assassin’). Several episodes, including ‘The Hero’, ‘A Game of Chance’ and ‘The Eye of the Artist’, revolve around Medici’s

62   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series attempts to assassinate republican activists. Another recurring theme is the efforts of the resistance to protect freedom of expression. In ‘The Sicilian’, for example, Marco’s friend Sebastiano has written a pamphlet containing ‘the first clear statement of republican principles since the Medicis came back to power’. And in ‘The Value of Paper’ Medici’s attempt to suppress Master Umberto’s ‘seditious’ Treatise on Liberty backfires when Marco has more copies printed and distributes them in the marketplace. The politics of Sword of Freedom differentiate the series ideologically from royalist swashbucklers where protagonists fight to uphold the authority of the Crown. It could be argued that the Sapphire-produced swashbucklers demonstrate a gradual shift to the Left from the proroyalist The Adventures of Robin Hood to the republican Sword of Freedom. Indeed Sword of Freedom is almost Marxist in its association between economic and political power: the Medicis represent a corrupt aristocratic oligarchy who govern not in the interests of the people but to increase their own wealth and power. To this extent Sword of Freedom is more radical than other series: it is the whole political and social system that is rotten. The series is more ideologically complex than The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot with their simple dichotomy between good and bad. This might suggest that Sword of Freedom was made with an older audience in mind than other swashbucklers. The other particularly noteworthy feature of Sword of Freedom concerns its sexual politics. In a genre typically characterised by demure heroines and chaste romance, Sword of Freedom affords an unusual degree of prominence to female sexuality. The references are coded but quite clear. The first episode, ‘Francesca’, establishes that the enmity between Marco and Medici arises from Medici’s suspicion that Marco has seduced Medici’s sister Francesca (Monica Stevenson) when she posed for a portrait in his studio. Francesca’s rapturous expression on the canvas is suggestive of her attraction to the artist and threatens Medici’s plan to marry her to the Duke of Granada (‘We shall require assurance that your sister has remained – unworldly’, the Duke’s envoy tells Medici). Medici buys the portrait in order to destroy it and sends an assassin to kill Marco (he fails). Later, when Marco visits Francesca in her bedroom, the subtext of their dialogue is quite clear:

Fantasy factories   63 Francesca: Is the first time always the best? Marco: No, it gets better. That’s the wonder of it. Francesca: Show me. This can clearly be read as something more than a conversation about sitting for a portrait: again it is suggestive that Sword of Freedom was intended for an older audience. The greater prominence afforded to female sexuality in Sword of Freedom is also seen in the characterisation of Marco’s model Angelica. Adrienne Corri is a more sensuous actress than the likes of Bernadette O’Farrell or Patricia Driscoll in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Her performance as Angelica is knowingly flirtatious and coquettish. Angelica is a reformed pickpocket, and there is the merest suggestion that pickpocket may be a euphemism for prostitute. At the very least she is not averse to using her sexuality for her own ends. In ‘The Sicilian’, for example, a cardsharp tricks Sandro out of his money and Angelica is tasked with recovering it: she openly propositions the target (‘Are you interested in my luck or in my winnings?’) and later reports that retrieving the money ‘wasn’t hard  – there must be a shortage of women in Sicily!’ This may of course simply mean that she has picked his pocket, but is it reading too much into the dialogue to suggest that she has sold her sexual favours? This may also be the subtext of ‘Angelica’s Past’, in which Virelli, her old ‘mentor’ (pimp?), wants her to return to work for him. Angelica’s expression of shame about her old profession is open to interpretation: ‘I was his apprentice. He taught me to be a thief … I’d about forgotten that old life. Then it comes back and it claims you.’ Sword of Freedom was the last swashbuckler produced by Sapphire Films, which thereafter shifted to the contemporary adventure series with The Four Just Men (1959). This was ITP/Sapphire’s most ambitious production, shot on international locations with a rotating cast of four stars (Jack Hawkins, Vittorio De Sica, Dan Dailey, Richard Conte) and a budget of $50,000 per episode.28 Ring Lardner Jr and Ian McLellan Hunter are the only blacklisted writers who can definitely be associated with this series.29 Variety reported that by 1959 the blacklist in television ‘is rapidly disappearing’ and that it was no longer necessary to clear all those involved with the networks and sponsors.30 However, The Four Just Men would be the last telefilm series from Sapphire Films:

64   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series its production costs were too expensive for the series to make a profit.31 Weinstein returned to the United States in the early 1960s where she set up Third World Pictures, a training school for black film-makers, and campaigned against discrimination in the industry. ITP/Sapphire had led the way in the field of costume telefilm production: others would follow with varying degrees of success.

Other early Swashbucklers: The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1955), The Count of Monte Cristo (1955), Ivanhoe (1957) The ITP–Official Films–Sapphire Films partnership was the most successful example of the transatlantic co-production and distribution arrangements of the 1950s. Some other attempts at international collaboration were less successful. The Three Musketeers, for example, was an attempt to forge a co-production partnership between the United States and Italy. There is scant evidence regarding the production of this series and no episodes appear to be available. According to Variety, however, twenty-six episodes were shot in Italy in 1954–55 by Thetis Films for Italian Film Export (IFE), the international division of the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI). Official Films was the original US distribution partner but withdrew from the deal when IFE failed to deliver the first batch of episodes on time, whereupon the series was bought by ABC Film Distribution.32 It had a limited distribution, as broadcasters experienced difficulty in selling advertising. The Three Musketeers was evidently an economy-conscious production: its budget of $18,000 per episode was only half of what Sapphire had enjoyed for The Adventures of Robin Hood. Variety felt that it ‘adds nothing, detracts much’ from the oft-told story. Judging from the reviews it seems to have been an adaptation of Dumas in title only: the synopsis of the first episode bears no relation to the novel as D’Artagnan (Jeffrey Stone) is ‘commissioned by the King to rescue fair lady from the clutches of “The Flaming Arrow”, a hooded gang of ancient Kluxers’.33 It was directed by Hugo Fregonese, best known as a director of low-budget Westerns, though his filmography also included a minor swashbuckler, Mark of the Renegade (1951). ITP, for its part, was involved in two other early swashbucklers, The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel and The Count of Monte

Fantasy factories   65 Cristo. These series exemplify very different production ecologies. The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel was a ‘Towers of London’ production for ITP. Harry Alan Towers had started out as an independent radio producer who sold programmes to commercial broadcasters in Europe and America. These included The Lives of Harry Lime, for which Orson Welles recreated his famous role from The Third Man, Horatio Hornblower and The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The Scarlet Pimpernel  – alias of Sir Percival Blakeney, baronet  – was the hero of a series of books by Baroness Orczy, an Anglophile Hungarian. He had already featured in several films  – most notably Alexander Korda’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), starring Leslie Howard, and a Technicolor remake by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger called The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), starring David Niven  – when Towers acquired the radio rights from Baroness Orczy’s estate. The series was scripted by American radio writer Joel Murcott, and starred Marius Goring as the Pimpernel with David Jacobs as his sidekick Lord Tony Dewhurst. It was sold to the American NBC network in 1952, while in Europe it was broadcast on Radio Luxembourg.34 Towers, an entrepreneur who was always quick to spot an opportunity, transferred the series to television, also entitled The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with the aim of selling it to the new ITV network when it launched in September 1955. A total of eighteen episodes were shot at the National Studios, Elstree. The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel was produced by Dennis Vance and David Macdonald  – Macdonald also directed eleven episodes  – with its star Marius Goring also credited variously as co-producer or production associate. Robert Shaw was in the first episode (‘The Hostage’) as Lord Tony Dewhurst but did not appear in the rest of the series, where the regular co-stars were Patrick Troughton as Sir Andrew ffoulkes, Anthony Newlands as Lord Richard Hastings, Alexander (‘Friar Tuck’) Gauge as the Prince of Wales and Stanley Van Beers as the principal antagonist Chauvelin. Goring’s wife Lucie Mannheim appeared in several episodes as Chauvelin’s London-based agent the Countess de la Vallière, a new character who was not in the original stories or radio series. Several episodes were based directly on the radio series – ‘The Hostage’, ‘Sir Percy’s Wager’, ‘The Sword of Justice’, ‘The Winged Madonna’, ‘The Ambassador’s Lady’, ‘The Elusive Chauvelin’,

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2.4  A smug Sir Percy Blakeney (Marius Goring) again outwits his antagonist Chauvelin (Stanley Van Beers, right) in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

‘Sir Andrew’s Fate’ – with Murcott’s scripts later being adapted for television by Ralph Gilbert Bettison. Other writers for the series included Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan, who had both worked extensively in the British film industry, notably at Ealing Studios. The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel did not match the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood. It was shown in Britain in 1955–56 but was moved around the schedules and never had a regular slot.35 It was initially passed over by American buyers, though Official Films later picked it up for syndication in 1957.36 Variety was not impressed: ‘Our British cousins are capable of better telefilms, as witness “Robin Hood” and other entries. With the best of good-will, “Pimpernel” can’t be considered top-quality product.’37 At $22,000 per episode, The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel was another economy-conscious series.38 There does seem to have been a correlation between production values and popular success, especially in the US market. The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel is characterised by its threadbare sets and flat staging: the pilot episode, ‘The Hostage’, is unfortunately one of the weakest with an overabundance of underlit interior scenes. The series’ origin on radio is also a drawback: in the transfer to television the distinctive aural

Fantasy factories   67 qualities of the originals were lost without any compensating degree of visual spectacle. While radio sound effects could create an impression of the teeming streets and baying mobs of Revolutionary Paris, this was beyond the resources of the television series where the Paris mob never seems to number more than half a dozen ‘rhubarbing’ extras. Nor is there very much actual swashbuckling: the Pimpernel is a more cerebral hero than most and prefers intellect over physical force. It may also be that there was an ideological reason for the failure of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The social politics of the series are more conservative than the progressive outlook of the ITP/ Sapphire Films series. The Pimpernel is a figure of the upper classes and the ethos of the stories is the aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. Unlike other swashbuckling heroes – Robin Hood, William Tell, Zorro, Dick Turpin – the Pimpernel is cast not as a champion of the people but as the saviour of the aristocracy. The television series, like the radio series, was aware of this issue and attempted to address it with episodes where the Pimpernel rescues ordinary people as well as aristocrats from the guillotine. In ‘The Princess’, for example, he returns to effect the rescue of a servant who has been left behind by her mistress (‘They would hardly harm one of their own kind … If we had waited for her, we would all have been caught’). Ginette has been sentenced to death by Chauvelin (‘There is no point wasting time with a trial’) and believes there is no possibility of rescue (‘The Scarlet Pimpernel? He does not bother with the likes of us’). The Pimpernel, for his part, does not differentiate between rich and poor: ‘I care nothing for politics. We are all entitled to our freedom – the rich as well as the poor’ (‘The Lady in Distress’). Yet this concession to egalitarian ideals cannot disguise the fact that the character of the Pimpernel himself is an aristocratic throwback of a type that seemed increasingly outmoded following the Second World War when British films had promoted the ideology of the ‘people’s war’. Jeffrey Richards has pointed out that the Scarlet Pimpernel is essentially a figure of the Old World who has little appeal in the United States: he attributes this to the greater sympathy for the democratic ideals of the French Revolution in America than in Britain.39 The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel addresses this very issue in ‘Thanksgiving Day’, an episode that gives every impression of having been written

68   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series for American sensibilities. A new member of the US ambassador’s staff in London expresses sympathy for the French (‘I wish the government had sent me to Paris: I prefer a country where there’s a democracy instead of an old-fashioned monarchy’) and demands satisfaction when Sir Percy refers to America as ‘the colonies’. They fight a duel in which the American, Rawlinson, is slightly wounded: he and Percy become friends. When his sister is arrested on suspicion of being the Pimpernel, Rawlinson travels to Paris: he seeks out the Pimpernel to effect her rescue. Rawlinson finds that his opinions have changed after witnessing the injustices of the French Revolution at first hand: ‘In America democracy means freedom, and here a monarchy fights for freedom and democracy means enslavement.’ The episode concludes with a speech by Percy which has nothing to do with the eighteenth century and everything to do with the future of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America in the twentieth century: ‘We are leaving the Age of Reason, Mr Rawlinson, for the Age of Perplexity, where words lose their meaning. And battles are no longer between nations, nor between classes, nor between political creeds. Democracy, like patriotism, can easily be perverted as a refuge for scoundrels. The struggle is between men of good will and the destroyers. To our children, and our children’s children – may they fight well, side by side, in the ages to come.’ The Count of Monte Cristo was only slightly more successful than The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was first syndicated in America, and then shown intermittently in Britain from early in 1956. The series had an unusual production history. Seven episodes were shot at the Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood by Television Programs of America. It was nominally produced by Edward Small, an independent producer who had all but cornered the market in Alexandre Dumas adaptations – including The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) and Son of Monte Cristo (1940)  – and who was chairman of the board of TPA at the time of making the series. The first episode (‘The Affair of the Three Napoleons’) was directed by Budd Boetticher and the remaining six by Sidney Salkow, a veteran Hollywood director whose credits included several second-division swashbucklers: Sword of the Avenger (1948), Shadow of the Eagle (1950) and The Golden Hawk (1952). The rest of the series, however, comprising a further thirty-two episodes, was shot at the ABC Studios,

Fantasy factories   69 Elstree, in Britain as a co-production with ITP. It is not clear why the series moved wholesale to Britain, though Variety referred obliquely to ‘a unique sterling arrangement on the filmed-in-Britain TPA series Count of Monte Cristo’ negotiated by TPA president Milton Gordon and investors from the Bankers Trust Company.40 The producer’s role was shared between Sidney Marshall (American) and Dennis Vance (British), who also directed twelve episodes. British writers Charles Bennett and Aubrey Wisberg each wrote several episodes, while Bennett, a one-time collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, also directed twelve episodes. The Count of Monte Cristo claimed to be ‘adapted from the worldfamous classic by Alexandre Dumas’, though it is better understood as a sequel to the original novel rather than a straight adaptation. This was a strategy followed by most Monte Cristo films, including Son of Monte Cristo, The Return of Monte Cristo (1946) and Sword of Monte Cristo (1951). It is a difficult novel to adapt, as its protagonist spends eighteen years incarcerated in a vile prison and there is much metaphysical angst on his part that does not easily translate into film. In the series, therefore, Edmond Dantes, as played by American actor George Dolenz, is already established as the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo. Dolenz, at 47, made Richard Greene’s Robin Hood look positively youthful in comparison. Variety suggested that the series ‘is aimed more at adult viewers than at the kids, judging by the fact that the title character, as portrayed by Dolenz, shows his wrinkles more than most of the leading man breed’, though it added that the star’s ‘handsome maturity could easily have an impact on a goodly number of haus-fraus’.41 The fact that Dolenz’s fencing double bears no likeness at all to the star does not help the action sequences. Dantes is provided with several male sidekicks who are not in the book. Fortunio Bonanova played burly retainer Carlo in the US episodes, with Richard Cawdron taking his place as Rico, a Spanish officer, in the British-made episodes. The other sidekick, Jacopo, played throughout the series by Nick Cravat, clearly derived from Cravat’s roles alongside Burt Lancaster in The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952). Cravat, who had been a circus performer before entering films, played essentially the same role: a short, bearded, mute sidekick of extraordinary physical agility. His pantomime style of performance, communicating by gesture,

70   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

2.5  A mature Edmond Dantes (George Dolenz, centre) with his sidekicks Rico (Richard Cawdron) and Jacopo (Nick Cravat) in The Count of Monte Cristo.

endeared Cravat to juvenile audiences who were otherwise not well catered for in The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas’s novel is used as a backstory for the series, referred to in the episode ‘Return to the Chateau d’If’. Here Dantes has to rescue the Duke of Renaldi, who has been kidnapped by his fiancée’s wicked uncle who covets her fortune for himself. Renaldi is being held in the same prison where Dantes was himself incarcerated. A flashback reveals the story of how Dantes was imprisoned without trial on a false charge of treason and held for twelve years in the Château d’If, where he met fellow inmate Abbé Faria who taught him history, literature and philosophy. It was Faria who revealed to Dantes the location of the fabulous treasure of Monte Cristo, which he discovers upon his escape. Here there is a significant difference from the novel. Dumas’s character was driven by revenge on those who had betrayed him, but here Dantes is presented as a selfless avenger who believes ‘that the noblest virtue on earth was righting the wrong that has been done to another’. He has vowed to use the treasure of Monte Cristo ‘to help the needy, cure the ill, free the oppressed – to be dedicated to the cause of all mankind’. The series therefore distances itself from the revenge narrative of the book and repositions Dantes as a nineteenth-century French equivalent of

Fantasy factories   71 the millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne, alter ego of the masked crime-fighter Batman, who uses his inherited personal fortune to support his crusade against organised crime in Gotham City. There are two main narrative strategies in The Count of Monte Cristo. One has Dantes involved in political intrigue and international affairs, usually as an agent of the state. In ‘A Toy for the Infanta’ he saves the heir to the Spanish throne from the treacherous ambitions of her wicked uncle Don Carlos. In ‘The Barefoot Empress’ he foils a plot to assassinate Anna, Empress of Austria, to provoke a war between Austria and France. And in ‘The Talleyrand Affair’ he is the envoy sent to carry a letter from the king, Louis Philippe, to the foreign minister, Talleyrand. The plot hinges on a peace conference trying to avert war between France and the Netherlands. The episode brings to mind recent events in Europe as Talleyrand supports partition of the Netherlands and the creation of an independent Belgium: ‘Belgium must become a free and independent nation. If the great powers do not support such a move then war becomes inevitable.’ The other narrative  – and by and large the dominant one – features Dantes acting as an independent agent and helping those suffering injustice. In these episodes villainy is usually associated with groups or individuals who exploit their position for greed. In ‘First Train to Paris’ Dantes uncovers a plot by the Duke of Cordeaux to blow up France’s first locomotive train and force down the price of railway stock so that he can buy it up at rock-bottom price. In ‘Burgundy’ Citizen Borner runs a protection racket that extorts money from the wine-growers of Burgundy that is supposed to be used to lobby against central taxes, but with which Borner intends to line his own pocket. And in ‘The Devil’s Emissary’ Dantes frees the people of a remote valley in the French Alps from the tyranny of Signor Diabolo, an anarchist who is carrying out experiments with explosives and restricts the movement of the local population through a combination of fear and mesmerism. The social politics of The Count of Monte Cristo are consistent with other costume adventure series of the time. Its main themes are social justice and noblesse oblige. Dantes is a gentleman adventurer who has dedicated himself to fighting injustice and oppression. He is both a champion of the ordinary people  – his ability to move up and down the social scale is indicated by his friendship with Lesage, ‘King of the

72   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Beggars’ – and a defender of legitimate monarchical authority. The historical period of The Count of Monte Cristo is significant here. It would have been difficult to set a royalist swashbuckler during the reigns of either Louis XVIII or Charles X, the unpopular Bourbon kings restored to the French throne following the Napoleonic Wars. The Count of Monte Cristo, therefore, opts for the reign of Louis-Philippe, the popular ‘Citizen King’ whose authority was limited by constitutional law and who ruled not by divine right but with ‘the will of the people’. For all this ideological context, however, The Count of Monte Cristo remains a distinctly run-of-the-mill swashbuckler. Rather more successful was Ivanhoe, in ethos and production values a close relation of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Ivanhoe was a co-production between the British producer Sydney Box and Screen Gems, the television distribution arm of Columbia Pictures, which was making its first venture into overseas telefilm production and invested £1 million in the series.42 Ivanhoe again had an unusual production history. The first episode (‘Freeing the Serfs’) was shot at ABC Studios, Elstree.43 According to its star, Roger Moore, the pilot was shot in colour: ‘There wasn’t any colour in television in 1956, and so when the decision was made to go to the series, we filmed in black and white – which was undoubtedly much less expensive and undoubtedly also why the show was never repeated in later years.’44 The unit moved to California to shoot exteriors – apparently because there were no leaves on the trees in Britain during winter  – and then returned to Britain where the rest of the series was shot at Beaconsfield Studios, which Box had bought in 1956.45 The producer’s credit on the first episode is Seymour Friedman, a Hollywood B-movie director, while most other episodes are credited to Bernard Coote. Peter Rogers, the Beaconsfield studio manager, was executive producer. There is evidence to show that Waldo Salt was involved in the origin of the series and that he wrote four of the thirty-nine episodes: he may also have been the ‘Benedict Berenberg’ credited as writer and associate producer of the first episode.46 Ivanhoe was produced with a view to first-run syndication in the United States: Variety reported that the first episode ‘set a fairly high standard in production quality and indicated possibilities of a subsequent rerun in the children’s time segment’.47 It was shown in Britain in 1958.

Fantasy factories   73 Ivanhoe was an early starring role for Roger Moore, whose Hollywood film career had stalled in the late 1950s. Moore would follow it with parts as Englishmen out in the West in The Alaskans and Maverick before starring as Simon Templar in The Saint, produced by Robert S. Baker and Ivanhoe’s wardrobe manager Monty Berman. The publicity for Ivanhoe described Moore as ‘the new Errol Flynn’.48 Moore himself was later dismissive of Ivanhoe, likening his gleaming white armour to ‘a medieval fireman’.49 Yet he makes a dashing and resplendent hero, evidently relishing performing his own swordfights which are among the best staged in the swashbuckling cycle. With his boyish good looks and Brylcreemed hair, Moore’s Ivanhoe is far from the middle-aged Robert Taylor of the MGM film and closer to Robert Wagner’s Prince Valiant in the Twentieth Century-Fox film of 1954. The credits of Ivanhoe declare that it is ‘based upon the novel by Sir Walter Scott’, though it bears little relation to its ostensible source other than the historical background of England during the reign of King Richard I and the scheming of the treacherous Prince John (Andrew Keir) to usurp his brother. In a sense this is no bad thing: Ivanhoe, like The Count of Monte Cristo, is a difficult novel to adapt. Scott’s narrative is structurally flawed in so far as its protagonist spends much time off-stage recovering from wounds sustained in a joust. In this version Moore plays not Wilfred of Ivanhoe but Sir Ivanhoe of Rotherwood, with Robert Brown as his squire Gurth. The themes of the novel – the Saxon–Norman hostility and the persecution of the Jews as represented by Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca – are absent from the series. It does, however, demonstrate again the themes of class conflict and concern with social justice that characterised other swashbucklers of the time. The politics of Ivanhoe can be attributed to the agency of two figures involved in its production. The first was Sydney Box. Box had started out working in documentary – which was regarded as the progressive sector of the British film industry – and some of the feature films he produced in the 1940s, such as The Seventh Veil (1945) and Good Time Girl (1948), were notable for their engagement with the social and psychological consequences of the Second World War. Andrew Spicer argues that Box’s career as an independent producer in the 1940s can be seen as ‘espousing a socialist agenda that was idealistic but in touch

74   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series with progressive change’.50 The other key figure was Waldo Salt. Salt had been one of several writers involved with MGM’s film of Ivanhoe in 1952. This film was notable for its liberal credentials, produced under the regime of studio head Dore Schary and including, in addition to Salt, Marguerite Roberts (another CP member, also uncredited) among its various writers. It also includes what, in hindsight, clearly amounts to a parody of the HUAC hearings as the Jewess Rebecca is brought before a show trial for witchcraft and is promised her life if she will denounce the religion of Israel. It was Salt who wrote the trial scene, which was maintained by English writer Noel Langley when he prepared the final version of the screenplay in 1951.51 It was Salt, too, who was responsible for the outline of the television Ivanhoe as well as writing several episodes. He mapped out five seasons or years.52 In the first year Ivanhoe returns from the Crusades, encounters the tyranny of Prince John and resolves to fight it. The second series would have sent Ivanhoe to Europe on a quest to discover the whereabouts of King Richard and free him from his captors. In the third series Ivanhoe and Richard would return to England and unite the kingdom in order to depose John. The fourth series was to have sent Ivanhoe and Richard back to the Holy Land where they defeat Saladin with the aid of a Chinese prince who shows them the secret of gunpowder. (The use of gunpowder as a plot device features in ‘The Treasures of Cathay’, by Australian writer Bill Strutton, in which Ivanhoe foils a plan by Baron Trevil to frighten his tenants into deserting their homes by shooting rockets into the sky which they take as omens of doomsday.) In the fifth series, following Richard’s death, Ivanhoe returns to England and defeats John once and for all. The story arc would end with the signing of Magna Carta. In the event, however, only one series of Ivanhoe was made, much to the relief of its star.53 Ivanhoe follows the same narrative conventions as The Adventures of Sir Lancelot as its protagonist rides out to right wrongs in a lawless country weakened by the absence of a strong central authority. As one character remarks in the first episode: ‘These are rude times. With no king on the throne the highways are infected by thieves and robbers, and even a serf becomes restless and unruly.’ The politics of Ivanhoe to all intents and purposes rework The Adventures of Robin Hood in that the hero is both a monarchist and a champion of the poor. This

Fantasy factories   75 is established in the first episode where Ivanhoe returns to England from the Crusades to discover a power vacuum in the absence of King Richard and the peasants living in fear. Ivanhoe saves young Bart from a flogging; he frees Bart’s father Gurth, who becomes his squire; he restores his father Sir Cedric to his lawful estates; and he thwarts a scheme by Prince John to claim the throne in Richard’s absence by calling a council of noblemen to proclaim him king. At the end of the episode Ivanhoe explains why he cannot settle with his father and his childhood sweetheart Rowena at Rotherwood Manor: ‘Prince John will not rest until he has taken Richard’s throne … Throughout the land the people know only hardship and injustice. Would I be true to the vows of my knighthood if I took my leave here?’ Ivanhoe paints a social landscape of medieval England where the power of a ruthless and self-interested aristocracy is unchecked and where the peasantry is oppressed by cruel laws and heavy taxation. Ivanhoe is even more insistent than The Adventures of Robin Hood on the corruption of the barons. As the title song puts it: ‘There’s freedom on his banner, justice in his sword/He rides against the manor, where tyranny is lord.’ Several episodes more or less rework episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood. In ‘By Hook or By Crook’ Baron Courcey’s plot to evict the villagers of Maydale is foiled when Ivanhoe discovers a royal charter granting the villagers the freedom of the woodland around their village. This had been a plot device in the Robin Hood episode ‘The Charter’. In ‘The German Knight’ Ivanhoe helps a serf win his freedom and realise his ambition to be a doctor: this reworks the Robin Hood episode ‘A Year and A Day’. ‘Brothers in Arms’ sees Ivanhoe come to the aid of the monks of St Augustin who are being forced to pay exorbitant taxes to the grasping Sir Rupert de Bray. Sir Rupert demands further payment when the taxes do not reach him: it transpires they have been stolen by Sir Rupert’s own underpaid soldiers. And in ‘The Widow of Woodcote’ a gang of bandits terrorising the shire are led by an outwardly respectable widow whose avarice contrasts with Ivanhoe’s altruism (‘I’ve learned that the only way to succeed in this world is to take what I want. I let others look out for themselves’). Ivanhoe also asserts the principle of limited revolt against an unjust ruler. Resistance to the authority of Prince John is legitimated because

76   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series John is both a tyrant and a usurper. Ivanhoe leads the northern lords in a ‘tax revolt’ (‘Face to Face’) and supports the people of Tawbridge who have ‘fanned a spark of resistance to tyranny which has caught fire across the realm’ (‘Murder at the Inn’). In ‘Double Edged Sword’ John introduces a new head tax – a gold ring for every freeman in the kingdom – to swell his coffers. John plots to seize the throne by invoking the power of King Arthur’s mythical sword Excalibur, discovered by his supporter Baron Mauray. Ivanhoe proves the sword has no magical power by beating Mauray in combat and telling John: ‘The real Excalibur had no magic, only a wise king with a strong arm and the love of the people. If you would have their love, repeal the head tax.’ Ivanhoe is presented as a champion of the people – the title sequence sees him riding at the head of a column of peasants rallying to his banner – who restores stability to a troubled land.

Swashbuckling Westerns: The Last of the Mohicans (1957) and Zorro (1957–58) The success of the British-made swashbucklers of the late 1950s did not go unnoticed by US producers. TPA’s The Last of the Mohicans and Walt Disney’s Zorro can be seen as attempts to merge the conventions of the swashbuckler with the juvenile Western. The Western was the most prolific genre of telefilm production in the United States in the 1950s. Westerns were economical to produce, as they could utilise the standing sets of the Hollywood studios, while their uncontroversial content meant they were popular with distributors and sponsors. In the early 1950s television Westerns were all essentially juvenile fare: The Lone Ranger (1949–57), The Gene Autry Show (1950–56), Hopalong Cassidy (1951–52), The Cisco Kid (1951–56), The Roy Rogers Show (1952–57), Annie Oakley (1953–58), Davy Crockett (1954–55), The Adventures of Champion the Wonder Horse (1955–56) and Casey Jones (1957–58) were among the many cheaply produced syndicated Westerns that were aimed squarely at the ‘kiddie mart’. It was in the 1955–56 season, however, that the ‘adult’ Western appeared in the form of CBS’s Gunsmoke (1955–75) and ABC’s Cheyenne (1955–63) and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–61). These Westerns – and others that followed such as NBC’s Wagon Train (1957–65) and Bonanza (1959–73) and CBS’s

Fantasy factories   77 Rawhide (1959–66) – were primetime network series intended for the over-sixteens, and included more realistic content and psychologically complex characterisations than their juvenile counterparts.54 The Last of the Mohicans and Zorro were both understood as attempts to fill the gap left by the demise of the more juvenile Western series. Variety said of Zorro, for example: ‘Walt Disney’s Zorro is not another adult western … It is strictly for the kids – the “Lone Ranger” with a cape and sword – and, as usual, Disney plays it for the moppet mart.’55 The Last of the Mohicans was produced by Normandie Productions, a Canadian affiliate of Television Programs of America, in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.56 The 39-episode series was budgeted at $1 million and was the first telefilm series produced in Canada.57 It was syndicated in America in 1957 and was sold to the ITV network in Britain where ITP was the distribution partner. ITP’s involvement is a reason for placing The Last of the Mohicans in the context of the company’s other costume adventure series: on this occasion ITP was the international partner whose participation, according to TPA executive vice-president Michael Sillerman, ‘virtually ensures word wide distribution for this series’.58 The first episode (‘The Homecoming’) was produced by Irving Cummings Jr and directed by Sidney Salkow. Following episodes were all credited to producer Sigmund Neufeld and were directed by Sam Newfield, whose filmography included numerous Poverty Row Westerns also produced by Neufeld.59 The series starred John Hart (once a stand-in for Clayton Moore in The Lone Ranger) as Hawkeye and Lon Chaney Jr as Chingachgook. The Last of the Mohicans was nominally based on tales ‘from the immortal pen of James Fenimore Cooper’, though like The Count of Monte Cristo and Ivanhoe it bore little relation to its notional source. Only the first episode is set during the Seven Years War (1756–63) that provides the historical background for Cooper’s novel. It is effectively an abridged version of Cooper’s story in which Hawkeye (whose real name here is the modern, American-sounding Nat Cutler rather than Cooper’s Natty Bumppo) and Chingachgook foil an attack on Fort William Henry by the Hurons, allies of the French, and save the commander’s daughter from the lecherous attentions of the Huron spy, Ogara. Hawkeye is provided with a mother and younger brother called Tommy who are not to be found in the books. It is Tommy, rather than

78   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Chingachgook’s son Uncas, who is killed by the Hurons. At the conclusion Hawkeye turns down the offer of a commission from the grateful Colonel Thorne (‘I reckon me and army regulations, we don’t get on somehow’) and heads west of the Snowy Mountains where ‘there’s no war going on’. This is the means by which the series detaches itself from the narrative of the book and adopts instead the familiar Western motif of the hero who wanders the frontier free from any social commitments. The Last of the Mohicans adheres to the formula of the juvenile Western in so far as its two recurring themes are the narrative of conflict resolution and the morality tale of tolerance and justice for all. Hawkeye is always cast in the role of peacemaker. He acts as an honest broker when tension is brewing between settlers and natives – as in ‘The Search’, ‘The Medicine Man’, ‘False Faces’ and ‘The Stubborn Pioneer’. In ‘The Way Station’ Hawkeye prevents civil war among the Mingoes when rivalry between the warmonger Tonkawa and the gentle Quannal threatens to divide the tribe into factions. In ‘The Washington Story’ it is divisions between the colonists that threaten to spill over into conflict as a group of jealous trappers try to drive away a new arrival who has been granted the land they regard as theirs by the Crown: ‘We’re the ones that settled this country at the risk of our lives, tamed the wild redskin and we’re not gonna be pushed out by anybody.’ The lesson to be learned is always that of peaceful co-existence: ‘This is a great land we have here. Many people and many tribes. Manito smiles upon this land where all men can live together’ (‘The Search’). The other recurring theme is racial tolerance. In ‘The Scapegoat’ the proprietor of a trading post is murdered and suspicion falls on Running Bear, son of Thundercloud, chief of the Tuscarora. The settlers want to hang Running Bear on the spot, but Hawkeye intervenes to send for a judge and promises a fair trial. Running Bear is sceptical (‘Indian always guilty in white man’s court’) but in the event he is acquitted when it is revealed that the dead man’s partner is the real culprit. Hawkeye has to win over extremists among both the settlers and the Tuscarora who are set on war. In the end he is vindicated and the resolution provides ‘a lesson in justice and tolerance’. Hawkeye delivers a moralising homily: ‘It’s always good to know that men really want justice, whether it’s a white man’s court or a red man’s council.’ The situation is reversed

Fantasy factories   79 in ‘Circle of Hate’ where Hawkeye is asked by Colonel Courtney to investigate the murder of several Iroquois braves. The culprit is a young army lieutenant with an obsessive hatred of the natives (‘Every dead Indian means one less enemy’) following the massacre of his family some years earlier. Colonel Courtney realises that the only way to avert war is to hand Lieutenant Smith over to the Iroquois for punishment – ‘grim and terrible though it may be’. Hawkeye successfully pleads for leniency from Chief Thundercloud, but Smith is too consumed by hatred: he tries to kill Thundercloud and is shot dead by the chief. That The Last of the Mohicans failed to match the success of other costume adventure series in the late 1950s can probably be attributed to a combination of its clichéd scripts, its one-dimensional characterisation and the dullness of its leads. Hart plays Hawkeye as another Davy Crockett, complete with buckskin and coonskin cap, while Chaney’s Chingachgook is a travesty of the character from the books, made all the more absurd by his peculiar feathered head-gear, which resembles nothing so much as a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. Chingachgook is turned from the noble savage of the novel into an equivalent of the Lone Ranger’s sidekick Tonto. The most impressive feature of the series was its extensive location photography, prompting Variety to observe that ‘if the Hurons shot as well as cameraman Eugene Shuftan, the series would have ended with the initialier’.60 Zorro, in contrast, was altogether more successful, running for a total of seventy-eight episodes and attracting record audiences of thirty-five million a week.61 Zorro was made by Walt Disney Productions, which was one of the first Hollywood studios to realise that television could be an ally rather than a competitor. In the mid-1950s Disney entered into partnership with ABC, which invested in the Disneyland theme park in Orange County, California, and bankrolled the production of television programmes such as Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. Zorro was intended from the outset as a primetime series: in the event it would be shown on Thursdays at 8 p.m. The series was unusual in that it had two sponsors, soft-drinks company 7-Up and AC Spark Plugs, who alternated weeks.62 At a time when most juvenile series had been dropped from primetime schedules, Zorro’s strategy for maintaining its core audience was to introduce an element of seriality. As Variety explained: ‘Opening chapter of the new season lays the foundation of

80   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series an intrigue that will take several episodes to be resolved, but unlike the old cliffhangers, a smaller adventure is completely contained in each instalment while the greater story is advanced. Design is to foster repeat business on Thursday evenings in case the devoted viewer might be tempted just once to try the competition.’63 Zorro  – a masked avenger during the Spanish colonial rule over California in the early nineteenth century – had been created by writer Johnston McCulley in a pulp magazine story entitled The Curse of Capistrano in 1919. The character had quickly been adapted into film – Douglas Fairbanks Sr starred in The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) – and McCulley wrote over sixty more Zorro stories until his death in 1958. There had also been another version of The Mark of Zorro (1940) starring Tyrone Power, and no fewer than five serials produced by Republic Pictures between 1937 and 1949. Disney’s Zorro would maintain some continuity with the Republic serials. One of its directors was William Witney, Republic’s action specialist who, in collaboration with John English, had directed many of its serials – including Zorro Rides Again (1937), The Lone Ranger (1938), The Lone Ranger Rides Again (1939) and Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939) – while George J. Lewis, who played Zorro’s father Don Alejandro, had starred in Zorro’s Black Whip (1944) – though the Zorro character in that serial was actually Linda Stirling’s Barbara Meredith  – and Ghost of Zorro (1949), where he had played Moccasin, sidekick to Clayton Moore’s Zorro.64 Disney’s Zorro was shot partly on location in California, where the Mission San Luis Rey stood in for the pueblo of Los Angeles. As well as Witney, its rotating team of directors included Norman Foster, Lewis R. Foster, John Meredyth Lucas, Charles Lamont and Robert Stevenson. Stevenson would go on to direct some of Disney’s most popular liveaction films, including Mary Poppins (1964) and The Love Bug (1968). After screen testing two dozen actors – including Hugh O’Brian, Jack Kelly, Dennis Weaver and David Janssen  – a relative unknown, Guy Williams, was cast in the title role.65 Gene Sheldon played Diego’s mute servant Bernardo, while comic relief was provided by Henry Calvin as the hapless Sergeant Garcia. There were several villains during the series. The first story arc of thirteen episodes set Zorro against Commandante Monastario (Britt Lomond), an expert swordsman who seems to have

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2.6  The masked avenger of Old California: Guy Williams starring in Zorro.

been modelled on Basil Rathbone’s Captain Pasquale in the 1940 Mark of Zorro, while later antagonists were Magistrado Galindo (Vinton Hayworth) and Varga (Charles Korvin), also known as ‘The Eagle’, who plots to seize control of California with a view to auctioning the territory among competing European powers. This idea was borrowed from Zorro’s Fighting Legion, where Zorro fought an unknown villain known as Don del Oro. Disney’s Zorro is one of the better television swashbucklers, featuring sympathetic performances and some well-staged action sequences. The swordplay was supervised by Fred Cavens, the veteran fencing master who had choreographed many of the classic screen duels including The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Mark of Zorro. Guy Williams and Britt Lomond performed their own swordfights: Cavens described their fight in ‘The Luckiest Swordsman’ as ‘one of the best duels on film’.66 The series adheres largely to the narrative of Fox’s The Mark of Zorro with some modifications. Don Diego de la Vega is recalled from Spain to California by his father due to the tyranny of Commandante Monastario. Diego is an expert swordsman but realises that open opposition to a military governor will be futile. Therefore he adopts the persona of a bookish intellectual during the day (‘I’ve convinced

82   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series my father that I’m a spineless weakling’) and adopts the secret identity of Zorro – ‘the Fox’ – by night. The theme of dual identity is prominent: the apparently weak Diego is an embarrassment to his father who wishes he could be more like Zorro: ‘So often I dreamed that my son would come back from Spain and he would be like you. Now that you are so close, it’s almost like a dream’ (‘Monastario Sets a Trap’). The relationship between Diego and his father grafts a layer of œdipal tension onto the series that is finally resolved when Don Alejandro discovers his son’s secret identity in the second season. The politics of Zorro are essentially conservative in so far as Zorro’s ambition is not to overthrow the whole regime but just to remove a corrupt functionary. Diego is a gentleman (a caballero) and therefore a member of the social elite of Old California. Although as Zorro he calls himself ‘a friend of the people’ (‘Zorro Arrives’), the peasantry (peons) remains mostly invisible. It is the landowners (the rancheros) who are suffering under the burden of taxation and who find themselves dispossessed: ‘The rancheros have always lived on the king’s land – now we find we are trespassers’ (‘The Unmasking of Zorro’). It is the landed classes to whom Diego appeals in attempting to mobilise opposition: ‘You gathered here are all among the great landowners of the area … Talk to the other landowners, get them to stand together. United you can ask for the dismissal of Monastario’ (‘Monastario Sets a Trap’). It is made clear that Monastario and the other villains are abusing their power: Monastario is eventually removed from his post by the Governor of California. Diego is at pains to assert that Zorro is not a revolutionary: ‘Zorro fights only against evil and tyranny. He cannot fight against the legal acts of our government  – and whether we like it or not it is perfectly legal to sell the labour of men who have been imprisoned’ (‘Slaves of the Eagle’). Herein lies the fundamental ideological difference between the swashbuckler and the Western. And in this sense Zorro is closer to the tradition of the swashbuckler than it is to the Western. There are significant differences between Zorro and The Last of the Mohicans in this regard. In Zorro the protagonist belongs to a social elite and his aims are the overthrow of tyranny and the preservation of an aristocratic ancien régime. In The Last of the Mohicans, however, the protagonist is a classless frontiersman and the underlying narrative is the building

Fantasy factories   83 of an egalitarian society. One is about the Old World and the preservation of its values; the other is about the New World and the origins of the American nation. The Last of the Mohicans made this explicit with an episode in which Hawkeye meets a young George Washington and endorses his opposition to colonial rule (‘The Washington Story’). The second season of Zorro featured shorter story arcs and included more comedy elements with characters such as Diego’s rascally uncle (Cesar Romero) and his encounters with an American ‘mountain man’ (Jeff York). It was chiefly notable for a guest appearance by 16-yearold Annette Funicello, popular star of The Mickey Mouse Club. Zorro remained a ratings success for ABC, but, controversially, it was not renewed for a third season due to a contractual dispute between the network and the studio.67 Disney produced four one-hour specials  – ‘El Bandido’, ‘Adios El Cuchillo’, ‘The Postponed Wedding’ and ‘Auld Acquaintance’ – that were broadcast as part of the Disneyland anthology series in 1960. In addition episodes from the first season were edited into two feature films: The Sign of Zorro (1958) and Zorro the Avenger (1959). Like The Adventures of Robin Hood, Zorro became something of a merchandising bonanza with more than 500 licensed toys and games.68 The theme song (‘Zorro  – the fox so cunning and free! Zorro  – who makes the sign of the zee!’) was recorded in several versions, including one by Henry (‘Sergeant Garcia’) Calvin and another by The Chordettes. The series itself was a highly successful export, being sold to ITV in Britain in 1958 and ORTF in France in 1965. In 1983 Disney produced a short-lived sequel, Zorro and Son, starring Henry Darrow as an older Don Diego de la Vega.

ITP goes it alone: William Tell (1958) and Sir Francis Drake (1961) ITP’s success in selling three series to US networks encouraged the company to embark upon an ambitious programme of telefilm production in the late 1950s.69 It sought to diversify its output with a range of detective and contemporary adventure series  – O.S.S. (1957), The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957), The Four Just Men (1959), Interpol Calling (1959)  – and even made a foray into science fiction with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1958). It also persevered with the swashbuckler, seeking to repeat the success of The Adventures

84   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series of Robin Hood. However, the last two swashbucklers from the ITP stable, William Tell and Sir Francis Drake, were produced directly by the company itself rather than being commissioned from a contractor such as Sapphire Films. Again the different political and cultural economies were reflected in the ideologies and social politics of the series themselves. William Tell, shot at the National Studios, Elstree, and on location in Snowdonia and the Pyrenees, was budgeted at over £1 million and commissioned without a US distribution deal.70 The co-production partner on this occasion was National Telefilm Associates and the series was syndicated in America as The Adventures of William Tell in 1958. Variety punned that ‘it could hit a good core of audience’ and felt that the first episode ‘drummed up enough action to send it on its 39-week way with a good splurge of derring-do’.71 ITP regular Ralph Smart was the executive producer (also credited on some episodes as producer) and Leslie Arliss, director of several of the Gainsborough costume melodramas of the 1940s such as The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady, acted as producer. On this occasion there is no evidence that any blacklisted writers were involved. Instead William Tell relied mostly on British writers. The most prolific were the veteran film screenwriter Doreen Montgomery (who scripted thirteen episodes) and Smart himself (named writer for only three episodes, but credited with the ‘original idea’ for another five). Smart and Montgomery were responsible for over half the episodes of William Tell, which ensured consistency in content and tone. Conrad Phillips starred as Tell, with Jennifer Jayne as his wife Hedda and Willoughby Goddard as the corpulent villain Gessler.72 Nigel Green, a member of the stock company for The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, was promoted to a regular supporting role as an outlaw known as ‘The Bear’, a sort of Swiss Little John. Guest stars included Robert Shaw (‘The Trap’) and Adrienne Corri (‘The Master Spy’), while a young Michael Caine can be spotted among the extras. William Tell is the most satisfying of the ITP swashbucklers in its balance of action, characterisation and romance. It seems to have been made with a more mature viewer in mind than some others: the action sequences are more robust, and unlike The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, where Lancelot’s foes are usually only wounded, Tell’s enemies are

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2.7  A Swiss Robin Hood: Conrad Phillips starring in William Tell.

more often killed by his arrows. The series does not shy away from depicting physical injury, featuring episodes where both Tell (‘The Surgeon’) and Hedda (‘The Young Widow’) are wounded by crossbow bolts. One of the features of the series is the role accorded to Hedda Tell, who is allowed a more prominent role in terms of narrative agency, fighting alongside her husband (‘The Surgeon’) and twice effecting his rescue (‘The Baroness’ and ‘The Black Brothers’). Jennifer Jayne has probably the most proactive female role in a television swashbuckler until Judi Trott’s Marion in Robin of Sherwood. The greater realism of William Tell is also evident in its effective location shooting  – for once the lakes and mountains are the real thing rather than an artificial studio set – prompting Variety to remark that the action sequences ‘are given more sweep than the domestic brand (shot on back lots’)’.73 Above all, however, William Tell benefits from a strong dramatic axis between hero and villain: Phillips is a rugged and athletic Tell, while Goddard’s Lamburgher Gessler is a marvellous character, who catches precisely the right balance between bombast and low cunning. Gessler is a believable villain rather than a caricature – episodes such as ‘The Assassins’ show him involved in political intrigue against the Emperor of Austria – and as such he is a great asset to the series.

86   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series William Tell is faithful to the legend. Tell, often described as the ‘Swiss Robin Hood’, is the folk hero who delivered Switzerland from occupation by the Holy Roman Empire. Like Robin Hood there is no firm evidence for the existence of an actual historical person, though Tell’s exploits were celebrated in ballads from the fourteenth century. It was during the early nineteenth century, however, that the legend assumed its definitive shape through the play by Friedrich von Schiller (1804) and the opera by Gioachino Rossini (1829). If it seems unusual that the exploits of a Swiss national hero should have been celebrated by a German playwright and an Italian composer, the explanation might be found in the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. The narrative of William Tell must have resonated with Italian and German nationalists: the nineteenth century would see the unification of Italy (1861) following a war to expel the Austrians from the northern states, and the eclipse of Austria as the dominant military power in Central Europe by a unified Germany (1871). Schiller and Rossini both inform the television William Tell. Rossini’s overture is the basis of ‘The William Tell Song’ performed over the opening and closing credits by David Whitfield: ‘Come away, come away with William Tell/Come away from the land he loves so well/ What a day, what a day when the apple fell/For Tell – and Switzerland.’74 And the opening episode, ‘The Emperor’s Hat’, is a distilled version of Schiller’s play. William Tell is an inhabitant of the Swiss village of Berglan, who refuses to submit when it is occupied by Austrian soldiers representing King Rudolph of Habsburg, the Holy Roman Emperor. Tell is arrested for treason by the Austrian military governor, Gessler, when he refuses to bow to a hat placed in the town square that represents the authority of the Emperor. Gessler, hearing of Tell’s prowess with a crossbow, forces him to shoot an apple off his son’s head. (The title sequence of each episode features this incident, in which the wire guiding the crossbow bolt is clearly visible!) This is the defining episode of the William Tell story – the equivalent of Robin Hood’s archery tournament – and features in every version of the myth. The politics of William Tell are distinctive in that its protagonist is both a republican rebel and a peasant hero – the first such example in the history of the television swashbuckler. This differentiates Tell from knights like Ivanhoe and gentleman avengers such as Don Diego de la

Fantasy factories   87 Vega. Several episodes, including ‘The Avenger’ and ‘Castle of Fear’, involve Tell masquerading as a servant to a person of higher birth in order to infiltrate the household. As a peasant Tell is denied the mobility across the social order available to the likes of Edmond Dantes and Marco del Monte. The series’ republicanism is also significant. It correctly represents the late medieval Swiss Confederation as a number of cantons: the first episode concludes with representatives of three cantons (Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden) declaring their independence from Habsburg rule, as in fact they did in 1291. In this version the cantons overcome their differences to proclaim themselves ‘states united – Switzerland’. The Switzerland for which Tell fights, however, is a republic. Like Sword of Freedom, therefore, William Tell is unusual in a genre that has usually endorsed the institution of monarchy. This was possible due to its setting in Continental Europe. Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘in the immediate post-war decade republicanism in Italy and Austria could be seen primarily as resistance to Fascism rather than support for republicanism per se’.75 It is also important to distinguish between the democratic (Swiss) republicanism of William Tell and the tyrannical (French) variety represented in The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The idea of William Tell as a narrative of resistance to Fascism is irresistible when we consider its content and plot lines. William Tell moulds historical events into a narrative appropriate for post-war Europe. It is nothing if not ‘an allegory of Nazism and World War II, concerning as it did a hegemonic German power which organises slave labour camps’.76 This meaning is overlaid onto the series in a highly schematic way. Thus the Austrian occupation of Switzerland stands for the German occupation of Central and Western Europe during the Second World War. The Austrians claim their occupation is to offer ‘protection’ for the Swiss (‘You’ll have our protection whether you want it or not’), just as the Nazis attempted vainly to legitimate their occupation of small nations. The Austrian occupying forces behave like Nazis, taking hostages in an attempt to force Tell to surrender (‘The Hostages’) and rounding up the local populace for slave labour (‘The Prisoner’, ‘The Boy Slaves’). There are even references to the deportation of dissidents and undesirables to ‘prison camps’ (‘The Elixir’). It is surely no coincidence that the chief villain, Lamburgher Gessler, bears an uncanny physical likeness to

88   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering: swarthy and obese with a predilection for black uniforms. He extracts punitive taxes from the Swiss and hangs those who resist (‘The Ensign’). A parallel is being drawn here with the economic exploitation of Occupied Europe by the Nazis who needed raw materials and slave labour to support their war economy. The Austrian Grand Duke tells Gessler: ‘You were sent here to bleed the Swiss to the hilt. We need their gold. The Empire has many commitments.’ In ‘The Spider’ Donald Pleasence, who specialised in playing Nazis in films such as Night of the Generals and The Eagle Has Landed, in which he played SS chief Heinrich Himmler, plays an Austrian general who in order to crush the resistance holds women and children hostages and ‘subjects them to unspeakable cruelty’. Tell, for his part, refers to his men as ‘partisans’. The series even addresses the issue of collaboration. In ‘The Surgeon’ a wounded Tell is betrayed to the Austrians by an apothecary whom Hedda calls a ‘miserable collaborator’. Gessler rewards ‘those who are sensible and collaborate’, and appoints a quisling to the judiciary in place of Hedda’s father Judge Furst (‘Voice in the Night’). And in ‘The Killer’ the burgomaster of a small town who collaborates with the Austrians attempts to justify himself by claiming that he is protecting his people: ‘It is my duty and my privilege to stand between our Austrian masters and the people of Switzerland.’ This was the sort of argument advanced by politicians and officials in the occupied countries who remained in their posts under the Nazi occupation. ‘The Suspect’ explores the ethics of collaboration and considers the difficult choices faced by those who lived under occupation. When a shipment of arms intended for Tell is intercepted by the Austrians suspicion falls on Dagmar, a peasant girl, who has been acting strangely and cannot account for her whereabouts. A local firebrand, Waldman, demands the girl’s death (‘We’re at war and we can’t expect special treatment. We must have discipline’) despite Tell’s plea for clemency (‘Why do you think we’re trying to throw the Austrians out of this country?’). When a second arms shipment is intercepted, she is sentenced to a trial by ordeal: she will be thrown off a cliff and if she lives her innocence will be proven. The real culprit, however, turns out to be the girl’s father, Gaston, who has been provided with free passage to the next valley by the Austrians in order to collect the unique herbs that

Fantasy factories   89 can ease the pain of his sick wife. Tell leaves Gaston alone, reasoning that he has suffered enough. The overlaying of a Second World War narrative onto William Tell was surely due to the British parentage of the series. This is a characteristic distinct from those series with an American input. It was also very much a feature of British popular culture in the 1950s: this was the heyday of the British war film and even other genres often revealed the influence of the war narrative. The comic strip Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future, for example, can easily be interpreted as a disguised narrative of the Second World War.77 Elsewhere William Tell deploys themes and motifs already familiar from other swashbucklers. In ‘The Elixir’ Gessler orders the closure of a school for spreading ‘seditious knowledge’: the monk who runs it has been teaching children their letters. Tell realises the importance of education in the struggle for freedom: ‘Teaching peasants to read and write – it’s never been done before. The country owes him a great debt.’ This recalls the Adventures of Robin Hood episode ‘Brother Battle’. ‘The Magic Powder’ hinges on the discovery of gunpowder, a plot device familiar from The Adventures of Robin Hood (‘A Tuck in Time’) and Ivanhoe (‘The Treasures of Cathay’). Scientist Dr Klein has discovered ‘the greatest invention of the age’; Gessler tortures him to reveal the secret. Tell uses a charge of gunpowder to blast a hole in the dungeon wall to rescue Klein, but he dies anyway (‘He died to keep the secret – a secret that could have been disastrous’). The secret was evidently not kept long because it has been refined sufficiently in ‘Secret Weapon’ for Gessler to create a bombard that he intends to use to control a strategic mountain pass and thus divide the resistance in the north from their comrades in the south. Here the allegory is clearly with the atomic bomb: ‘The bombard is the ultimate weapon. It’s destructive power is so enormous that nothing can stand against it.’ Tell succeeds in using gunpowder to blow up Gessler’s fort. ‘The Manhunt’ draws upon a different source. This is a version of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) in which Tell is captured by Prince Maximilian (played by guest star Christopher Lee), the Emperor’s brother, who has taken over an island that provides the ‘best hunting ground in Europe’ and is obsessed with ‘hunting a quarry that thinks using a human brain’. This plot device would become a favourite

90   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

2.8  The patriotic pirate: Terence Morgan starring in Sir Francis Drake.

for the British adventure series, featuring in The Saint (‘The Deadly Game’) and Dick Turpin (‘The Fox’). Sir Francis Drake, the last of the swashbuckling cycle, followed in 1961 from the renamed Independent Television Corporation (ITC). This series had been planned since 1956, but took another five years to reach the screen.78 It was produced by Anthony Bushell – an actor who turned producer with Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet (1948) – and was shot at Elstree Studios ‘and in actual historical sites in Great Britain’. Half of its twenty-six episodes were directed by either David Greene or Clive Donner  – both new recruits to the television stable  – while of the writers Doreen Montgomery, Lindsay Galloway and Ian Stuart Black had all previously contributed to William Tell. Sir Francis Drake starred Terence Morgan as Drake and Jean Kent as Queen Elizabeth I. The regular supporting cast included Roger Delgado as the scheming Spanish ambassador Mendoza and a young Michael Crawford as Drake’s nephew, while guest stars included Raymond Huntley (‘Doctor Dee’) and Nigel Davenport (‘Gentleman of Spain’). Television critic Maurice Richardson wrote that it ‘is for those who like their history unhistorical, not to say jazzed up to the knocker’.79 It was shown in Britain on Sunday afternoons and was bought by the American NBC

Fantasy factories   91 network which picked it up as a summer replacement for Car 54, Where Are You? in 1962. Variety felt that ‘the success of the series will depend on whether there’s still a market for mindless kid’s stuff’.80 Sir Francis Drake is probably the least remembered of the ITP/ITC swashbucklers. This is a shame because it is one of the better adventure series, with excellent production values and well-staged action sequences. Its mise-en-scène has more depth than other series, eschewing painted backcloths in favour of detailed set dressings that bestow upon it the look of a feature film. And the sea battles are convincingly staged in montage sequences, through the adroit use of reasonably convincing models. The production discourse of the series made the usual claims to historical authenticity, claiming that the Golden Hind was an exact replica of Drake’s ship.81 E. Hayter Preston was credited for historical research, and some episodes are set against the background of Elizabethan politics and court intrigue. In ‘Queen of Scots’, for example, Sir Francis Walsingham seeks to implicate Mary Stuart in a conspiracy to usurp Elizabeth’s throne. Elizabeth, however, is reluctant to order Mary’s execution (‘We have no proof that the Scottish Queen has plotted against us’) and sends Drake to discover the truth. Other episodes, such as ‘The Garrison’ and ‘The Reluctant Duchess’, refer to the geopolitical situation in Europe, showing England supporting the Revolt of the Netherlands (1567–1609). However, there is no mention of the religious strife of the period: the threats to Elizabeth’s throne are presented as political rather than sectarian and they emanate from overseas (Spain) rather than at home. There is no reference in the series, for example, to internal dissent such as the Revolt of the Northern Earls (1569) or the Ridolfi Plot (1572). The principal points of reference for Sir Francis Drake are swashbuckling films such as The Sea Hawk (1940). The Sea Hawk was a rousing, patriotic costume adventure, starring Errol Flynn as Captain Geoffrey Thorpe (Drake in all but name) and directed with customary panache by Michael Curtiz. It informs both the iconography and the ideology of Sir Francis Drake. Morgan’s Drake bears a close likeness to his cinematic forebear. Drake represents gentlemanly English values (‘He is everything men say of him … He is kindly, honourable’) and is a supreme patriot committed to the defence of Queen and country. He is an implacable opponent of slavery. In ‘Slaves of Spain’, for

92   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series example, the Spaniards are using slave labour to mine gold in Tobago. Drake frees the slaves – including both natives and English seamen – and tells the admiring native girl: ‘Yana, you must build your future here where you belong. And I must sail the seas and chase the Spaniards that your people and mine can live without fear.’ Drake is characterised as a patriotic pirate who sees it as nothing less than his duty to harass the Spaniards at every opportunity – an enterprise in which Queen Elizabeth herself is complicit even if publicly she disapproves of his swashbuckling exploits. The historical narrative of Sir Francis Drake is the emergence of England as a great power. Drake is the personification of this power. In ‘The Doughty Plot’, for example, he declares: ‘We seek no war with Spain. But nor will we be cowed by the threat of invasion or the might of her fleet at sea. We don’t accept that Spain has sole domain over the oceans she sails, and there’s no English sailor afraid to tell her so.’ As with its stablemate William Tell, this might be read as an allusion to the Second World War: Sir Francis Drake rehearses the familiar narrative of England as a bullwark against the expansionist ambitions of a despotic continental power. Elizabeth is characterised as an enlightened monarch concerned with the welfare of her subjects in contrast to the tyrannical King Philip II of Spain whose overseas empire is built on slavery and economic exploitation. Here the series is at pains to assert that English colonialism is motivated not by territorial acquisition for its own sake but rather has a higher purpose. As Drake remarks in ‘The Lost Colony of Virginia’: ‘The richest land is not the one that yields the most gold, it’s the one that feeds the most men. What a sorry thing it is when Englishmen come to think like Spaniards and see no other worth in the New World but gold and gems … Great profits will accrue, not only to individuals but to the whole nation.’ There are some concessions to American audiences. Drake is sidelined in the episode ‘King of America’, which focuses on one Thomas Stukeley, who attempts to found a colony in North America. The settlers make peace with the Native Americans, but they struggle to harvest their crops and face a harsh winter. When a Spanish ship runs aground it presents the colonists  – including Drake’s nephew John  – with an opportunity to return to England. Drake is sympathetic to the idea of creating an egalitarian community (‘Perhaps it is not yet time,

Fantasy factories   93 Stukeley, to set up such an America, but it’ll come’), while Elizabeth foresees the time of the ‘Americans’ (‘Perhaps one day they shall have a kingdom that shall overshadow us all’). It is impossible to see this as anything other than a strategy to appeal to American viewers. Otherwise Sir Francis Drake deals largely in familiar stereotypes. The Spaniards are characterised as cruel and oppressive. ‘We are obliged to temper justice with severity,’ says Governor Ancuna as he prepares to hang one of Drake’s men on a trumped-up charge of theft (‘The Governor’s Revenge’). The Irish are presented as unruly and quarrelsome (‘The Irish Pirate’), and in contrast to some other series which had demonstrated a sympathetic position towards social outsiders, the Romany are nothing but thieves and cut-throats (‘The Gypsies’). ‘Gentleman of Spain’, in which Drakes joins forces with the Spaniard Don Miguel to rescue captives of the notorious Barbary pirates (‘a lawless and ferocious army of Moors, Turks and Arabs’), rehearses the familiar motif of the swarthy oriental who represents a sexual threat to a white female (‘You English women have a strange charm. It’s the skin, I suppose. Fair, like alabaster’). This episode is significant in that it suggests that England and Spain, for all their enmity, are united by their Christian faith in contrast to the ‘godless’ Turks: it conveniently overlooks the differences between Protestant England and Catholic Spain. Sir Francis Drake would be the last of the ITC swashbuckling cycle. In the 1960s the company would change direction, turning its back on the costume adventure series in favour of contemporary detective and secret agent series such as Danger Man (1960–66), The Saint (1962–68), The Baron (1965), Man in a Suitcase (1965), The Prisoner (1967), The Champions (1967) and Department S (1969).82 With The Saint it also shifted to one-hour rather than half-hour episodes which allowed more complex (albeit still quite formulaic) plotting. The success of these series would surpass even The Adventures of Robin Hood and would turn ITC into Britain’s most successful film production company of the 1960s.83 It twice won the Queen’s Award to Industry, in 1967 and 1969, and Lew Grade was knighted in 1968. ITC’s annus mirabilis came in 1965 when three series – Danger Man, The Saint and The Baron – were sold to US networks for a combined total of $10  million. This was heralded as ‘the most significant breakthrough for British tv film production in the history of the industry’.84 It would seem that ITC

94   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series intended to revive the swashbuckler as stand-alone television films: in 1967 Grade announced that Ralph Smart would produce feature-length ‘specials’ of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Scarlet Pimpernel, which ‘are likely to be budgeted at over £100,000 each’, though in the event these remained unmade.85

Coda: The BBC and Hornblower (1963) ITC’s success in selling Sir Francis Drake to an American network may well have been a factor in the BBC’s decision to produce its own seafaring swashbuckler in the form of Hornblower (1963). The BBC had made only occasional forays into telefilm production and international distribution: the detective series Fabian of the Yard (1954–56) – syndicated in the United States as Inspector Fabian of Scotland Yard – had been its first telefilm series, while The Third Man (1959), produced in association with National Telefilm Associates, had been its first international co-production. Hornblower, a fifty-minute colour pilot produced by Julian Plowden and directed by John Newland, was a co-production with Collier Young Associates for the ABC network. It was intended to test the water for what would have been a highly ambitious series based on the novels of C. S. Forester.86 Hornblower, which starred David Buck in the title role and Terence Longdon as his sidekick Lieutenant Bush, was broadcast on the ABC network in America on 28 February 1963 and on the BBC some four months later. Variety missed the US telecast but reviewed it following the British broadcast, describing the production values as ‘classy’, praising the ‘faithful and literate script’ by David Wilson, and declaring that it ‘had a highly favourable gusto and tickled the appetite for more’.87 Despite the favourable critical reception, however, Hornblower was not commissioned as a series. It would take until the late 1990s for Forester’s books to be adapted for television in the form of a series of expensive and sumptuously mounted television films. How can we account for the failure of Hornblower in contrast to the successful cycle of swashbuckling adventures that had preceded it? It was certainly not lacking in production values if the contemporary reviews are anything to go by. It might have been that the subject matter was too British for American tastes: we have seen how other naval

Fantasy factories   95 swashbucklers like The Buccaneers and Sir Francis Drake had made concessions for American audiences. There had been a Hornblower film in 1950 (Warner Bros.’s Captain Horatio Hornblower, RN), but that had featured an American male star (Gregory Peck) and leading lady (Virginia Mayo). A more general, if somewhat speculative, explanation is that the failure of Hornblower was a result of shifting tastes in popular culture. The swashbuckler was popular in the late 1950s when independent television in Britain was in its infancy and the genre offered a type of narrative that was different from what the BBC was providing at the time. However, all production cycles eventually exhaust their cultural and economic energy. By 1963 it would seem that the swashbuckling cycle had run its course: in this sense the BBC was simply too late in joining the field. In a broader sense this is symptomatic of the period in general: ITV, after a hesitant start, had proved more adept than the BBC in judging popular taste in the late 1950s and had opened up a two-to-one advantage over its publically funded rival in terms of its audience share.88 Although Hornblower might have been understood as part of the BBC’s response to the populism of ITV, the corporation would enjoy much greater success with other drama forms in the 1960s, including the police series (Z Cars) and science fiction (Doctor Who). The fate of Hornblower perhaps also reflected the changing nature of popular drama across the board. ITC, which had an uncanny knack for judging popular taste and market trends, had already shifted into the production of contemporary secret agent/detective series. This was a genre that chimed with the values of the new decade and the prominence afforded therein to style, fashion and new technology. Series like Danger Man, The Saint and ABC’s The Avengers (1961– 69) exhibited a ‘pop’ aesthetic in their content and their visual style.89 In contrast the swashbuckler was a residual genre that did not offer the possibility for engaging with a changing popular culture: to put it simply there is little scope for modish fashion in Sherwood Forest or on the Spanish Main. Hence the swashbuckler was eclipsed by the contemporary adventure series, a trend that was also seen on American television with series such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and Mission: Impossible (1966–73). This is not to say that the genre disappeared entirely. Although the BBC had abandoned its plans for telefilm production, it pioneered

96   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series what came to be known as the classic serial: the adaptation of literary texts in half-hour serial form, usually broadcast on Sunday evenings at around 5 p.m. While most classic serials were adapted from canonical English literature – Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot – there were also productions of what might be called the ‘popular classics’. In the early 1960s the BBC mounted serialisations of adventure stories by Sir Walter Scott (Rob Roy, 1961) and Robert Louis Stevenson (The Master of Ballantrae, 1962; Kidnapped, 1963). Under the guidance of Sydney Newman, who became Head of the BBC Drama Group in 1963, the BBC sought to respond to the populism of ITV without compromising its reputation for quality. This was the context for the quadrilogy of Alexandre Dumas adaptations in the 1960s – The Count of Monte Cristo (1964), The Three Musketeers (1966), The Further Adventures of the Three Musketeers (1967) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1968) – which marked the BBC’s main contribution to the swashbuckling field. The BBC serials were qualitatively and aesthetically very different from the telefilm series produced for the commercial network. They really belong more to the lineage of the literary adaptation than the swashbuckling series: they maintain a strong degree of fidelity to the source texts and emphasise psychological realism over action sequences. And they were shot on Ampex videotape rather than film which mandated more studio interiors and offered less scope for either the extensive location shooting of a series like William Tell or the filmic mise-en-scène of Sir Francis Drake. The method of production necessitated a different style of shooting to telefilm series with a greater use of close-ups and acute angles. The television critic of the Daily Mail thought The Count of Monte Cristo  – adapted by Anthony Stevens and directed by former actor Peter Hammond (he played Lieutenant Beamish in The Buccaneers) – was ‘by a long way the best classic serial, in the old 30-minute episode fashion, we have had for years’ and praised Hammond for ‘the touch of heightened, self-conscious brilliance that he brought to The Avengers’.90 Stevens and Hammond were also responsible for The Three Musketeers, starring Jeremy Brett as an unusually highly strung D’Artagnan, full of nervous energy and prone to sudden outbursts of anger. This was the most authentic version of Dumas’s novel to date and was followed by adaptations of the other Musketeers stories Twenty Years After (as The Further Adventures of

Fantasy factories   97 the Three Musketeers) and The Man in the Iron Mask with most of the same cast (though Joss Ackland replaced Brett as D’Artagnan in The Further Adventures of the Three Musketeers). This marked the first attempt to dramatise the complete adventures of the Musketeers in their entirety. It is interesting to note that the French producer Claude Barma would do the same shortly afterwards with a series of featurelength television films under the collective title of D’Artagnan (1969). However, these were shot on film and in colour, in contrast to the monochrome BBC adaptations. Otherwise the only new swashbucklers on British television during this period were dubbed French imports. These included The Flashing Blade – the English language version of Le Chevalier Tempête (1967) – and Desert Crusader – English language version of Thibaud ou le Croisades (1966) – shown as children’s serials by BBC1 in 1969 and 1971 respectively. These series were made in colour – the French state broadcaster ORTF had introduced colour in the mid-1960s before the switch over was effected in Britain  – and The Flashing Blade, in particular, was popular enough to become a staple of BBC1’s school holiday schedules until the 1980s. It would seem that, following the ambitious but failed experiment of Hornblower, the swashbuckler was now firmly associated with children’s television: and this would be the context for the genre’s revival in the 1970s. Notes 1 Some of these series remain elusive. The Gay Cavalier (1957) was produced by George King Productions for Associated–Rediffusion. It was based on a comic strip in the boys’ picture paper Comet and starred French actor Christian Marquand as highwayman Claude Duval. According to contemporary reviews Duval is here cast as a Royalist hero during the English Civil War. It sounds interesting as there are so few swashbucklers set during the Civil War, but there seem to be no extant prints of any of its thirteen episodes. Variety (14 August 1957) thought it ‘barely strong enough to sustain a children’s programme’ and reported that it had not attracted any US buyers. Richard the Lionheart (1961), produced by the Danziger brothers, at least managed thirty-nine episodes, all directed by Ernest Morris, though, like The Gay Cavalier, it did not find any US sales. It starred

98   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Dermot Walsh as King Richard I and Trader Faulkner as Prince John. Variety (6 December 1961) noted its ‘pleasing outdoor photography and brisk direction’, though felt that ‘viewers might now be attuned to something more stirring and violent’. Furthermore, several pilots were also shot, including Richard Lionheart by CBS, The Highwayman by Sapphire Films, Prince Valiant by National Telefilm Associates, and Captain Kidd and The Gaucho by Douglas Fairbanks Productions. ‘Telepix adventure kick’, Variety, 20 January 1957, p. 33. 2 ‘Flock of new telefilm series set in Britain’, Variety, 13 February 1957, p. 28. 3 ‘Telepix adventure kick’, Variety, 30 January 1957, p. 33. 4 Ibid. 5 ‘Official’s 30-day sale sprint brings $1,350,000 sales’, Variety, 31 July 1957, p. 27. 6 ‘No tint sprint for film’, Variety, 26 September 1956, p. 38. 7 ‘Estimated weekly network tv program costs’, Variety, 21 November 1956, p. 26. 8 Variety, 27 September 1956, p. 29. 9 Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “un-American” contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (2003), pp. 249–50. 10 Quoted in Kevin J. Harty, ‘Television’s The Adventures of Sir Lancelot’, Quondam et Futurus: A Journal of Arthurian Interpretations, 1: 1 (1991), p. 72. 11 Ibid. 12 Variety, 27 September 1956, p. 29. 13 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, p. 250. 14 Ibid., p. 251. 15 Variety, 27 September 1956, p. 29. 16 ‘Piracy in his pedigree’, TV Times, 14–20 December 1956, p. 8. 17 Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), p. 250 18 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, p. 250. 19 Two decades later Robert Shaw returned to piratical swashbuckling in the feature film The Scarlet Buccaneer (1976) – Swashbuckler in the United States – in which he played Captain Ned Lynch. The politics are consistent with later episodes of The Buccaneers in so far as the British governor (Beau Bridges) is presented as the villain.

Fantasy factories   99 20 ‘$60–70,000,000 domestic gross on syndicated pix seen for ‘57’, Variety, 5 June 1957, p. 27. 21 ‘Cost chart: syndicated film series’, Variety, 31 July 1957, p. 30. 22 Variety, 13 November 1957, p. 31. 23 ‘Flock of sales on “Sword”, “Decoy”’, Variety, 4 September 1957, p. 32. 24 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, p. 251. 25 ‘OF’s British sale on “Sword of Freedom”’, Variety, 26 June 1957, p. 27. 26 Tise Vahimagi, ‘Sword of Freedom’, Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1136195 (accessed 16 April 2008). 27 ‘Swash that buckle’, TV Mirror, 8 February 1958, p. 10. 28 ‘Roll “4 Just Men” as most expensive (50G) Brit series’, Variety, 21 January 1959, p. 33. 29 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, p. 254. 30 ‘Telepix producers say blacklist virtually gone’, Variety, 28 January 1959, p. 25. 31 ‘“Four Just Men” hot on sales, but how do you turn a profit?’, Variety, 12 August 1959, p. 31. 32 ‘ABC to syndicate “3 Musketeers” pix’, Variety, 5 October 1955, p. 35. 33 Variety, 28 March 1956, p. 25. 34 Jeffrey Richards, Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 215–7. 35 This prompted an amusing letter to TV Times from a Mrs Bell: ‘We seek him here, we seek him there/This family seek him everywhere/TV Times must know, so please do tell/Has Chauvelin got the “Pimpernel”?’ TV Times, 16–22 December 1955, p. 4. 36 ‘“Pimpernel” yanked out of syndication’, Variety, 9 November 1955, p. 27. 37 Variety, 6 June 1956, p. 37. 38 ‘Cost chart: syndicated film series’, Variety, 31 July 1957, p. 30. 39 Richards, Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, p. 206. 40 ‘Golden’s European TV O.O., huddles in Britain’, Variety, 10 October 1956, p. 44. 41 Variety, 21 March 1956, p. 45. 42 ‘Screen Gems to produce in Britain’, Kinematograph Weekly, 2 August 1956, p. 3.

100   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 43 ‘Screen Gems aims at 4 British-made syndicate skeins’, Variety, 11 September 1957, p. 11. 44 Roger Moore, with Gareth Owen, My Word Is My Bond (London, 2008), p. 97. 45 Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, 2006), pp. 161–2. 46 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, pp. 251–2. 47 Variety, 15 January 1958, p. 31. 48 ‘Ivanhoe – knight with the Adonis look’, TV Times, 12–18 January 1958, p. 20. 49 Sheridan Morley, with Philip and Martin Masheter, Roger Moore: A Biography (London, 1985), p. 89. 50 Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 206. 51 John H. Lenihan, ‘English classics for Cold War America: MGM’s Kim (1950), Ivanhoe (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953)’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20: 3 (1991), pp. 42–51. 52 Neale, ‘Pseudonyms’, pp. 251–2. 53 Moore, My Word Is My Bond, p. 97. 54 William Boddy, ‘“Sixty Million Viewers Can’t Be Wrong”: The Rise and Fall of the Television Western’, in Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London, 1998), pp. 119–40. See also ‘The 1955 Fall Season’, Reruns: The Magazine of Television History 1: 4 (1980), pp. 5–10. 55 Variety, 16 October 1957, p. 28. 56 Most sources, including contemporary reviews in Variety, give the title of the series as Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. This is also the title of the American DVDs issued by the Platinum Disc Corporation in 2004. The British VHS release by ITC in 1992 was entitled Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans. However, the title on the episodes themselves is The Last of the Mohicans. A voice-over at the beginning of each episode declares: ‘The immortal pen of James Fenimore Cooper brings you thrilling tales of excitement, blazing action on the early American frontier and stirring adventures filled with the daring and courage of Hawkeye – the first of the long rifles – and his blood brother, Chingachgook – “Last of the Mohicans”.’ 57 ‘“Mohicans” goes on location in Canada with 1,300-job bonanza’, Variety, 17 October 1956, p. 39. 58 ‘The increasing importance of foreign TV markets’, Variety, 9 January 1957, p. 105.

Fantasy factories   101 59 The similarity in names had caused me to wonder whether Neufeld and Newfield were the same person, though this appears not to have been the case. There does, however, seem to have been a degree of nepotism at play: the credits of The Last of the Mohicans list one Stanley Neufeld as production manager and Sig Neufeld Jr for the music. 60 Variety, 23 January 1957, p. 32. 61 Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley, The Disney Studio Story (London, 1988), p. 72. 62 ‘7-Up dickers “Zorro”’, Variety, 13 February 1957, p. 26. 63 Variety, 16 October 1957, p. 28. 64 See R. M. Hayes, The Republic Chapterplays: A Complete Filmography of the Serials Released by Republic Pictures Corporation, 1934–1955 (Jefferson, NC, 991). 65 Bill Cotter, ‘Zorro  – A history of the Series’: www.billcotter.com/ zorro/history-of-series.htm (accessed 20 February 2012). 66 ‘Fencing master cites TV Zorro as fastest study’, press release from Dick McKay (Walt Disney Productions Publicity Director), BFI Library microfiche for Zorro. 67 Cotter, ‘Zorro – A history of the series’. 68 Hollis and Sibley, The Disney Studio Story, p. 72. 69 ‘ITP’s budget of $5,000,000 for vidpix co-production’, Variety, 25 September 1957, p. 35. 70 ‘British TV in stepped-up roster’, Variety, 20 February 1957, p. 27. 71 Variety, 19 September 1958, p.42. 72 It seems to have been the practice at ITP to try out potential leads with roles in other series. Conrad Phillips had appeared in two episodes of The Count of Monte Cristo, while Jennifer Jayne had been in several episodes of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and Sword of Freedom. 73 Variety, 19 September 1958, p.42. 74 The William Tell Overture had also seen service, sans lyrics, as the theme for The Lone Ranger, a radio series of the 1930s and a television series from 1949 to 1957. 75 Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), p. 70. 76 Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel, The Ultimate TV Guide (London, 2001), p. 15.

102   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 77 James Chapman, ‘Onward Christian spacemen: Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future as British cultural history’, Visual Culture in Britain, 9: 1 (2008), pp. 55–79. 78 ‘CBS–TV Film sales has a $3,120,000 stake in Britain’, Variety, 14 March 1956, p. 42. 79 Sunday Times, 1 October 1961. 80 Variety, 4 October 1961, p. 26. 81 ‘Drake’s drum throbs again’, TV Times, 22–28 September 1961, p. 8. 82 See James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London, 2002). 83 ‘No worries ahead for Grade’s ITC’, Kinematograph Weekly, 4 February 1967, p. 14. 84 ‘Lew Grade: “The most significant breakthrough”’, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 October 1965, p. 14. 85 ‘Grade’s new target – fifty million dollars’, Kinematograph Weekly, 10 June 1967, p. 15. 86 ‘Hornblower set to sail across Atlantic’, Kinematograph Weekly, 7 September 1962, p. 17. 87 Variety, 19 June 1963, p. 23. 88 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. V: Competition 1955–1974 (Oxford, 1995), p. 265. 89 David Buxton, From ‘The Avengers’ to ‘Miami Vice’: Form and ideology in television series (Manchester, 1990), pp. 72–119. 90 Daily Mail, 21 December 1964.

3



Revisionist revivals

HTV’s Arthur of the Britons and Southern Television’s The Black Arrow, which both aired in December 1972, were the first new British costume adventure series since Sir Francis Drake in 1961.1 Like the first wave of swashbucklers between 1955 and 1961, the second wave in the 1970s was the outcome of a particular set of institutional contexts in the British television industry. These included the restructuring of the ITV network following the allocation of new franchises in the late 1960s which brought new contractors into play, changes in broadcasting policy in relation to the levy paid by ITV contractors on their advertising revenues, the switch to colour broadcasting, and technological developments that facilitated a greater amount of location shooting whether on 16-millimetre film (Arthur of the Britons, Kidnapped) or video (The Black Arrow, The Legend of Robin Hood, Warrior Queen).2 The introduction of colour broadcasting was a particularly significant factor: the appeal of costume drama was enhanced by colour as the genre offered greater possibilities for visual display than present-day dramas. The return of the swashbuckler can be seen as part of a more general resurgence of costume drama on British television, which included a cycle of handsomely mounted historical serials including The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1971), The Pallisers (1974), I, Claudius (1976) and Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978). Another reason for the revival of the swashbuckler was that, a generation on from the first costume adventure cycle of the 1950s, the genre was ripe for reinterpretation. Arthur of the Britons, for example, was a revisionist version of the Arthurian legend that was notable for its insistence on realism, while the BBC produced a new and more realist version of the Robin Hood story in The Legend of Robin Hood (1975). However, the escalating costs of production in the 1970s – partly owing 103

104   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series to colour and partly a consequence of inflationary pressure in the economy – generally meant fewer episodes than in the 1950s. While the episodic series persisted with Arthur of the Britons, and, towards the end of the decade, Dick Turpin, the trend was towards more serialised stories, including The Black Arrow, The Legend of Robin Hood, Warrior Queen and Kidnapped. Finally, this period saw the emergence of new co-production partnerships as British producers built up alliances with European broadcasters (Arthur of the Britons, Kidnapped) as well as with America. The European market for telefilm series had expanded significantly since the early 1960s when it had been miniscule in comparison to the United States. The changing production ecology of the swashbuckler impacted upon the content and style of the genre: this was reflected not only in their casting but also in the increased level of violence in some adventure series.

The once and future king: Arthur of the Britons (1972) Arthur of the Britons exemplifies the new broadcasting contexts that gave rise to the revival of the costume adventure series in the early 1970s. HTV (Harlech Consortium) was a new contract holder in the ITV network that had taken over the franchise of TWW (Television Wales and West) in 1968.3 HTV was smaller than some of the more high-profile operators: its decision to invest £500,000 in Arthur of the Britons should be seen as part of a strategy to establish itself alongside bigger rivals such as ATV and the new London Weekend Television consortium. Arthur of the Britons was HTV’s first drama series to be shown across the whole ITV network.4 HTV made a strategic decision to focus on children’s drama by producing content suitable for weekdays between the end of school hours and the early evening news. Arthur of the Britons was also sold to overseas markets, including Belgium, Holland, West Germany and Australia.5 HTV’s Programme Controller Patrick Dromgoole declared at a television sales fare in 1973: ‘The large number of countries represented this year is evidence of the increasing interest among buyers overseas in the programmes being created, and is evidence also of our own developing interest in the overseas market.’6 On the face of it HTV’s decision to focus on children’s drama was a bold strategy. As Stanley Reynolds, the television critic of The Times,

Revisionist revivals   105 remarked, ‘half a million is high stakes indeed to risk on such a fickle audience as the twelves and unders’.7 It should be seen in the context of changes in children’s programming as a whole in the 1970s. ITV had historically provided fewer hours of children’s programming than the BBC, and what it did produce was generally regarded as being of lesser quality. In its Annual Report for 1968–69 the Independent Television Authority had noted this concern and had intimated that improvements should be expected during the new franchise period.8 This is one of the reasons why the 1970s became something of a golden age for children’s drama on ITV, including such fondly remembered series as Thames’s Timeslip (1970–71) and The Tomorrow People (1973– 79), LWT’s Catweazle (1970–71) and The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972–74) and Yorkshire Television’s Follyfoot (1971–73). HTV would become a major provider of children’s drama over the next decade, producing a cycle of supernatural serials including Sky (1976), Children of the Stones (1977) and King of the Castle (1977). Arthur of the Britons, while a realist text rather than fantasy, nevertheless belongs to this lineage of bold and progressive children’s drama. The production of Arthur of the Britons once again demonstrates the shifting political and cultural economies of the television industry. The relatively generous budget was made possible by the fact that at this particular moment HTV, like other ITV contractors, found itself unexpectedly cash rich. Since the Television Act of 1964 each regional contractor had paid a levy from its advertising revenues to the Treasury. The levy had been increased in the Labour government’s Budget of 1969, only to be reduced by the Conservative government in 1970 and again in 1971. The reason given for the reduction of the levy was ‘to provide an opportunity for Independent Television to improve the quality of its programme service’.9 In 1971–72, therefore, the ITV companies had to pay less to the Treasury than they had expected: instead the funds were to be invested in production. Even so HTV was too small an outfit to mount such an ambitious undertaking itself and had to seek coproduction partners. Arthur of the Britons was produced in association with Heritage Enterprises of New York and Taurus Film of Munich. Heritage Enterprises was a distributor of dubbed European genre product, mostly horror films and Spaghetti Westerns, which released an abridged feature film from the series, King Arthur the Young Warlord,

106   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series in America in 1975, while Taurus Film was a West German producer, which had already collaborated with the BBC on the detective series Paul Temple in 1971. The overseas partner’s involvement explains the casting of German actress Gila von Weiterhausen as Jutish princess Rowena in Arthur of the Britons. Arthur of the Britons was produced by Peter Miller and shot entirely on location in the West Country: the set of Arthur’s village was built near Stroud on land belonging to the Forestry Commission. The decision to film the whole series on location was made possible by technological developments, particularly a new type of 16-millimetre Eastman film stock which offered sharper colour resolution and reduced grain.10 The switch to location shooting – a practice that would be followed by the next cycle of costume adventure series during the 1970s and 1980s – brought about a significant change in the visual style of the swashbuckler. Arthur of the Britons is particularly notable for its pictorial realism. It is as far removed from the legend of Camelot as could be imagined: Arthur’s settlement is a collection of mud huts rather than a shiny fortress; characters wear rough sheepskin rather than gleaming armour; and the props and costumes have an authentically used, dirty look. Miller emphasised the series’ authenticity: ‘We have done a lot of research, and our series is as accurate as any historian could make it.’11 Or, at least, as accurate as can be expected for a television series about a mythical English king who probably never existed. The principal writer of Arthur of the Britons was Terence Feely, who wrote eleven of the twenty-four episodes, with contributions also from David Osbourne, Robert Banks Stewart, and Bob Baker and Dave Martin, while directing duties were shared between Pat Jackson, Sidney Hayers, Peter Sasdy and Patrick Dromgoole. Oliver Tobias starred as Arthur, with Michael Gothard as his adopted Saxon brother Kai and Jack Watson as their father figure Llud. Brian Blessed (as King Mark of Cornwall) and Rupert Davies (as Saxon chief Cerdig) were recurring guest stars. An indication of the series’ ambition is that a rousing theme tune was commissioned from Elmer Bernstein, an A-list Hollywood composer whose credits included The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963). Although all shot in one block, Arthur of the Britons was broadcast in two series of a dozen episodes each.12

Revisionist revivals   107

3.1  Arthur (Oliver Tobias) and Kai (Michael Gothard) wear their hair like 1970s pop stars in Arthur of the Britons.

Arthur of the Britons can be seen as part of a revival of the Arthurian legend inspired by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical Camelot, which opened on Broadway in 1960 and was turned into a film in 1967, and which also included a low-budget British film, Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), shot in a realistic style similar to Arthur of the Britons. While Arthur of the Britons distanced itself from the fantasy aspects of the Arthurian myth – there is no Round Table, no chivalric lore, no Merlin and no magic – it also exhibited some of the counter-cultural associations that characterised the Arthurian revival. Oliver Tobias had recently starred in the London production of the ‘tribal love-rock’ musical Hair, a celebration of the counter–culture, a point picked up by contemporary reviewers. Sylvia Clayton in the Daily Telegraph, for example, described his Arthur as ‘a trendy young hairy in sheepskins, straight out of the King’s Road, Chelsea … His cool, modern good looks, as he commands the minstrel to strum what looks like a Dark Ages guitar, make his encampment seem more than ever like a hippy commune.’13 Arthur of the Britons was the first swashbuckler to present its hero explicitly as an object of male beauty: another reviewer felt that Tobias was ‘destined to become the TV pin-up of the girls of

108   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Form 3B’.14 For all the series’ assertion of authenticity, Tobias and his co-star Michael Gothard wear their hair like 1970s pop stars. Notwithstanding its anachronistic hairstyles, Arthur of the Britons provides a largely satisfying revisionist interpretation of the Arthurian legend. It detaches Arthur from the chivalric trappings of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table and instead locates him at some point in the early fifth century following the Roman withdrawal from Britain. It remains a matter of speculation whether there ever was a real King Arthur and if so when he lived. The name of Arthur emerged in ballads and chronicles during the Dark Ages, where he was cast as a warrior who fought to defend Christianised Britain against the invading Picts and Saxons and who won a great victory over the invaders at Mount Badon around AD 518. One version  – as seen in the film King Arthur (2004) – casts Arthur as a Roman general who remained in Britain and maintained a contingent of horse cavalry. Later accounts elaborated Arthur’s deeds and imbued him with magical powers. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1135) – a work of fiction that was once accepted as authentic history – declared that after Arthur’s last battle he was carried away to the Isle of Avalon where he would recover from his wounds ready to return in the hour of his country’s greatest need. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1470) was the fullest version of the Arthurian legend, synthesising a range of English and French texts into a unified narrative in which Arthur has become head of a great court and order of chivalry. This is the version of the Arthurian myth popularised in Camelot, in films such as Knights of the Round Table (1955), Lancelot and Guinevere (1962) and First Knight (1995), and in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, to the extent that the literary-romantic Arthur has now largely eclipsed the ‘historical’ Arthur. The ideological project of Arthur of the Britons is to restore the historical Arthur to centre-stage shorn of all the myth and chivalric trappings acquired over the centuries. Arthur, in this version, is a Celtic chieftain who seeks to unite his people against the Saxons who are ‘cutting down our forests, taking more of our land. None of us is strong enough to beat them on our own. We must make a pact’ (‘Arthur is Dead’). Arthur’s connection to the Romans is ambiguous. In one episode Arthur avers that he owes his fighting prowess to Roman training

Revisionist revivals   109 (‘The Challenge’), and his employment of cavalry demonstrates greater tactical knowledge than his enemies (‘The Duel’). In another episode, however, Arthur refers to having fought against the Romans to expel them from Britain: ‘I’m afraid we have no chariots. The Romans used them all running from our spears’ (‘The Girl from Rome’). The underlying narrative of Arthur of the Britons concerns Arthur’s attempts to forge a ‘Celtic alliance’ as a bulwark against the Saxons. Arthur’s principal antagonist is Cerdig of the Saxons, though he also faces challenges from other Celts such as Mordred (‘The Swordsman’) and Bavik (‘Daughter of the King’) and has to contend with an uneasy ally in King Mark of Cornwall. There are two recurring themes in Arthur of the Britons, which sit somewhat uneasily alongside one another: on the one hand the narrative of conflict resolution, and on the other hand the legitimation of violence. Throughout the series there is a tension between the desire for peace and the need for robust self-defence. Arthur is cast in the role of peace-maker: he alone has the vision to unite the rival factions among the Celts and to promote their peaceful co-existence with the Saxons. When two Saxon children are left behind by a raiding party, Arthur sends Kai – a Saxon abandoned as a child and brought up by the Celts – to return them to their own people (‘The Gift of Life’). When a pestilence threatens to wipe out the Saxons’ cattle, Arthur shares his people’s livestock with them as a gesture of friendship (‘In Common Cause’). The fullest expression of this theme is ‘The Treaty’ in which Arthur uses the threat of an invasion by an army of Scots to forge an alliance between Celts, Saxons and Jutes. The message is clear: ‘We must stop hating – and learn to respect one another.’ In the event the alliance falls apart when it is revealed that the invaders have been swept away by a storm in the English Channel. Nevertheless, Arthur remains convinced that co-existence is the only solution: ‘We were right. It didn’t happen this time. The gods, it seems, as well as the Scots were against us. But one day it will happen. If we are to survive, it must.’ The narrative of conflict resolution is a standard device of juvenile fiction of course – to this extent, at least, Arthur of the Britons harks back to The Adventures of Sir Lancelot – but in Arthur of the Britons it is undercut by an unusual insistence on fighting prowess and military skill. ‘The Challenge’, for example, includes an extended demonstration

110   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series of fighting skills as the friendly rivalry between Arthur and Kai spills over into a long duel fought with spears, lances, axes, swords, daggers and finally fists. In the absence of any central authority it is necessary to be able to fight to protect one’s land and family. In ‘Rolf the Preacher’ a former warlord who has converted to Christianity prevails upon King Mark’s men to lay down their arms and renounce violence: Mark calls upon Arthur’s help. Arthur argues that outright pacifism is not a practical outlook in the world they inhabit: ‘Rolf is right – violence is evil. And if everyone thought like Rolf, the world would be a better place. But everyone doesn’t think like Rolf, and until they do we must defend ourselves and our kin … If we do not, others will come and take our land. We will perish, and any good that we might bring into this world will perish with us.’ A similar theme is rehearsed in ‘People of the Plough’. Kai meets a Saxon farmer, also called Rolf, who has renounced violence after killing his own brother in an argument: ‘There are people of war and people of the plough … I want to be a man who never again took up a sword, who never again struck a deadly blow and took away a life given by God.’ When Kai and Rolf are captured by a tribe of Celts, however, they are made to fight each other in order to win their freedom. Kai, realising that they will both be put to death unless they fight, succeeds in provoking Rolf by implying knowledge of his wife. This does the trick: ‘Before God, no man touches my wife!’ Rolf therefore realises that violence can be justified in defence of his family. Arthur of the Britons, then, presents a world-view in which violence may be legitimate and necessary. It is not preferred for resolving disputes, but may be justified in self-defence. ‘The Pupil’ is a morality play that provides a psychological study of violence and revenge. A callow youth, Corin, appeals to Arthur to teach him how to fight so that he can protect his village against attackers. Arthur and his friends agree, and Corin proves to be a quick learner. It is revealed, however, that Corin’s motive is much more personal: as a boy he had seen his father killed by a hooded swordsman and has vowed to avenge him. In a further revelation it turns out that Arthur was the hooded swordsman and had slain Corin’s father in a fair fight. Arthur explains that fighting skill must be tempered with good judgement: ‘Skill at arms brings a great responsibility with it. Never wield a sword slyly or ignobly – be clear in your heart that your cause is just … Hate and malice are

Revisionist revivals   111 bad counsellors for the fighting man. In the end they will defeat him’. Corin, who has come to admire and respect Arthur, accepts Arthur’s account of his father’s death. They part on good terms. After he has left, Arthur and his friends wonder whether they would kill for revenge. A flashback reveals that Llud’s wife and son were killed by a Saxon raiding party that included Kai’s father, himself slain in the attack. Llud overcame his anger and raised the orphaned child as his own: ‘Would I kill for vengeance? I answered that question a long time ago.’ Arthur of the Britons may have been positioned as children’s entertainment – it was broadcast on Monday afternoons at 4.50 p.m. – but some of its content is remarkably adult in tone. The brutality of the Dark Ages is much in evidence. The first episode (‘Arthur is Dead’) climaxes in a pitched battle between Celts and Saxons in which the Saxons are mown down by the spears of the Celts and where Arthur’s sword is smeared with blood. In another episode (‘The Duel’) I counted over two dozen dead bodies. There are passing references to the rape of female prisoners that seem somewhat inappropriate for a children’s drama series. There are also references to sexual experience that would never have been allowed in a series like The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. In ‘The Marriage Feast’ Arthur  – seeking to prevent the marriage of Princess Rowena of the Jutes to King Mark – taunts his rival by insinuating that he has had knowledge of Mark’s bride-to-be: ‘You’re a lucky man, Mark. Believe me – I know.’ The most explicit sexual reference is Cerdig’s injunction to Rowena in ‘The Treaty’: ‘Time enough after the feast to sit on your haunches  – or lie on your back more likely.’ There is even an implicit suggestion of homo-eroticism in ‘The Slaves’ wherein Arthur, trying to rescue prisoners from a Saxon slave labour camp, is captured, stripped and flogged. The fact that he is flogged by his adopted brother and best friend Kai – who, as a Saxon himself, is able to impersonate one of the guards – layers a more complex dimension onto the act. Kai, who at times in the series is jealous of Arthur’s legendary fighting prowess, seems to enjoy it: ‘How do you flog a man publicly and stay the whip?’ Arthur of the Britons was a landmark in the history of the television adventure series. It was the first to be shot entirely on location, and the first to represent the barbarism and brutality of its period in unflinching detail. It marked the emergence of a new style of more

112   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series realistic and full-blooded swashbucklers that would lead ultimately to Robin of Sherwood. And it was the first starring role for Oliver Tobias, then twenty-four years old, who would return to the genre in the 1980s with Smuggler and Adventurer. The success of Arthur of the Britons was probably due as much to Tobias as to its realistic violence. Here was a hero who appealed equally to males and females: boys would enjoy the robust action sequences – Tobias and Gothard perform many of their own stunts, and are both highly proficient in sword–fighting and horsemanship – while for adolescent girls Tobias became a romantic pin-up to rank alongside such seventies icons as David Cassidy and David Essex. Arthur of the Britons was the first adventure series with a genuinely youthful protagonist rather than a mature thirty- or even forty-something leading man. To this extent it reflected a broader change in the culture of television drama during the 1970s as producers realised that audiences had become more sophisticated and culturally aware than their parents’ generation had been in the 1950s. This would be a hallmark of other swashbucklers in the 1970s and 1980s. Thames Television’s Warrior Queen (1978), a six-part serial dramatising the uprising of the Iceni tribe against the Romans in AD 60, is really more of a historical drama than an adventure series, though it bears some similarities to Arthur of the Britons and is also a rare example of a female-centred narrative. Warrior Queen was produced by Ruth Boswell, written by Martin Mellett, with direction shared by Neville Green and Michael Custance. It starred Siân Phillips as Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, with Veronica Roberts and Patti Love as her daughters Camora and Tasca, Nigel Hawthorne as Roman Procurator Catus Decianus, Stanley Meadows as Governor Paulinus and Michael Gothard donning sheepskins again as a Druid priest called Volthan. Like Arthur of the Britons, Warrior Queen was shown in the Monday teatime slot but it has not endured the passage of time nearly as well. Alistair D. McGown and Mark J. Docherty suggest that the decision to shoot on videotape rather than film was detrimental to the action sequences ‘due to the static positioning of the camera’ and consequently ‘the piece is weighty in dialogue, coming across like some kind of I, Claudius for kiddies’.15 Contemporary reviewers were also underwhelmed. For Bernard Davies:

Revisionist revivals   113 Warrior Queen, a series in which ‘authenticity is the keynote’, is an account of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, who rebelled against Roman rule in the first century AD, thereby provoking various contributions to Eng Lit and a legend not forgotten by women’s lib. I am in no position to speak of authenticity or its absence; the plot and dialogue are the reach-me-down kinds which serve in any like situation – Red Indian chiefs dealing with the white man, the Scots after Culloden, and so forth. Ancient Britons … clearly lived life at a low emotional level and spoke in a correspondingly flat fashion; we also have another stock figure  – the languid world-weary Roman tyrant.16 In fact Warrior Queen is a fairly authentic dramatisation of the known events as the Romans renege on an understanding with the deceased Iceni king Prasutagus and assert their power over the tribe by flogging his widow and raping his daughters – events that understandably for a children’s drama occur off-screen. Thereafter Boudicca leads her people in revolt, burning Camulodunum (Colchester) and Londinium before her final defeat by Suetonius Paulinus. Evidence of the serial’s attention to historical authenticity is that the warrior queen herself is referred to as ‘Boudicca’ by the Celts and in the Roman form ‘Boadicea’ by her enemies. Warrior Queen demonstrates more progressive gender politics than most children’s drama series. The casting of Siân Phillips – best known as Livia in I, Claudius – brings a degree of gravitas to the central character, while the role of female agency is prominent. Boudicca overcomes the gender prejudice of rival chief Morticus (‘The female of the species is incapable of leadership!’) in establishing her leadership of the Celts and uniting them in resistance to the Romans. Her actions are presented not as personal vengeance for her own treatment but rather as a force of destiny: ‘Here I am, an ordinary woman, leading the biggest army this country has seen into a bloody battle against a most formidable enemy. I didn’t ask to do that. Fate, or our gods, pushed me into it.’ The revolt of the Iceni is presented as an early expression of British nationalism. Boudicca exhorts her troops: ‘Britons! We have at last an army that can smash the Roman oppressor! We stand together as one people, fighting for our freedom!’ Unlike Arthur of the Britons, however, Warrior

114   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Queen evidently did not have the budget to dramatise full-scale battles. Boudicca’s army consists of three chariots, while battles with the Romans are presented in a stylised fashion using montages of stills and slow-motion effects. The sacking of Londinium takes place off-screen and is represented in radio drama fashion through sound effects rather than visuals. It would take until Boudicca (1996) – a television film coproduced by Carlton International and WGBH Boston starring Alex Kingston that was titled Warrior Queen in the United States – for the story of the Queen of the Iceni to receive the full-blooded treatment it deserved.

Revisionist Robin: The Legend of Robin Hood (1975) The Legend of Robin Hood, a six-part serial broadcast by BBC1 towards the end of 1975, was the first new Robin Hood adventure for two decades.17 It was the work of a team of writers – Anthony Stevens, Robert Banks Stewart, David Butler, Alistair Bell and Alexander Baron – produced by George Gallacio and directed by Eric Davidson. It starred Martin Potter – best known for Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) – as Robin, with Diane Keen as Marion, John Abineri as her uncle Sir Kenneth Neston, William Marlowe as Sir Guy of Gisborne, Paul Darrow as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Michael-John Jackson as King Richard I and David Dixon as Prince John. The Legend of Robin Hood was a co-production with Time-Life Films of America and was broadcast on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in the United States where it was shown alongside other BBC costume dramas such as The Forsyte Saga and Elizabeth R.18 The Legend of Robin Hood was a top-end production for the BBC and, unlike Arthur of the Britons or Warrior Queen, it was made for family rather than juvenile audiences as it was shown in the Sunday late-afternoon classic serial slot. Since the 1960s a tradition had emerged whereby Sunday teatimes were the preserve of prestigious serial dramatisations of literary classics. These included not only the accepted canon of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope but also popular classics by the likes of Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy) and James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye the Pathfinder).19 The tradition would persist into the 1980s with serialisations of P. C. Wren (Beau Geste) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of

Revisionist revivals   115

3.2  Revisionist Robin: Robin (Martin Potter) and Marion (Diane Keen) in The Legend of Robin Hood.

Zenda). While The Legend of Robin Hood was an original story for television rather than a literary adaptation, it was understood by critics within the tradition of the classic serial. Bernard Davies, for example, wrote in Broadcast: For years and years one of the central facts of life was that, at about five o’clock on Sunday afternoons, the BBC presented a serial which was pretty well compulsory viewing. It was the sort of thing that appealed to the whole family and, indeed, made viewing at that time something of a family festival. This hub of Sunday TV has, it seems to me, been inconspicuous for far too long; however, the new series which started on Sunday 23rd November suggests that at long last someone has recalled the BBC to a sense of its proper social duty. The Legend of Robin Hood, established in this slot for six weeks on BBC1, stands in the true succession of Sunday afternoon serials with something for everybody. At one level it is a plain adventure story; at another it is a display of historical characters with some refreshing novelties; at another it is a plucky re-working of what is, perhaps, our most familiar and enduring legend.20

116   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series The publicity discourse of The Legend of Robin Hood sought to differentiate it from previous versions by emphasising its realist intent. Martin Potter, for example, told the Radio Times: ‘Actually, it hasn’t been acted before. It’s been played, but not acted. Errol Flynn played it, and he played it all wrong. His people were starving, dying of plague, living in caves, terribly deprived, and yet there he was, leaping around and laughing … We’re playing this with both feet strictly on the ground, and I am not going to be a medieval Tarzan.’21 The Legend of Robin Hood was more widely reviewed than children’s drama series such as Arthur of the Britons or Warrior Queen. The reviews were generally positive but, moreover, the level of critical interest is further evidence of its status as a major drama serial rather than just a minor diversion for juveniles. The critics responded to the BBC’s attempt to position The Legend of Robin Hood as a more realistic version of the Robin Hood myth. For Peter Hennan in the Sunday Times it ‘has an honest, well-dressed and conscientiously carpentered air’, though he added that ‘so far it lacks the ingredient necessary to this tale: romantic magic’.22 Clive James in the Observer thought it ‘is a promising series. Neatly written, well acted, finely dressed and softly filmed like “Akenfield”, it comes over as kind of hip, as if the editors of Time Out had taken to the woods in order to defy the Establishment’.23 Reginald Cooper in the Evening News observed that it ‘is being presented as more of a medieval social documentary than the swashbuckling epics we have seen in the past’.24 James Thomas in the Daily Express also emphasised its realism: ‘The whole thing has great style and credibility. For once you could believe that a real Robin Hood existed.’25 Stewart Lane, television critic of the Morning Star, official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of Great Britain, observed ‘that this is due to be a more political Robin than we’ve had before’.26 Sylvia Clayton in the Daily Telegraph also focused on the ‘social and political overtones visible in the greenwood’ and referred to Robin as ‘a serious youth with decided views on the redistribution of income’.27 Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail praised its national heritage, remarking that it ‘is free from the usual Hollywood nonsense. The countryside is English, and Martin Potter’s Robin is a well-spoken, positively Oxbridge outlaw.’28 For the aptly named Chris Greenwood in the Sun, however, it took itself rather too seriously: ‘Martin Potter plays the famous Sherwood Forest outlaw

Revisionist revivals   117 with as much swagger as a drowned rat. He looks more like a truculent sixth-former in pantomime drag than the hero who, for centuries, has inspired the adventurous spirit in generations of schoolboys.’29 The Legend of Robin Hood also attracted that most uniquely British of compliments: a complaint about its violence from Mary Whitehouse. Mrs Whitehouse, writing on behalf of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the unofficial broadcasting watchdog she founded in 1965, deplored the ‘extreme violence and sadism’ of The Legend of Robin Hood. Whitehouse was particularly concerned about the effects of television violence on children: ‘The transmission at Sunday teatime, when the tiniest of children are still watching, of scenes of crude and realistic violence, including a lingering close-up shot of a dead face covered in blood, shows a total lack of any care or compassion for the young.’30 Whitehouse’s criticism of The Legend of Robin Hood should be understood in the context of what was an on-going campaign against violence in BBC programmes during the 1970s, focusing especially on the science fiction series Doctor Who. She averred that The Legend of Robin Hood violated the BBC’s own code of violence in children’s programmes – a charge she also levelled against Doctor Who  – though seemingly failed to recognise that both series were conceived as family entertainment (meaning that parents would be expected to be watching with their children) rather than as a children’s drama. The BBC responded that ‘the programme had been seen by senior executives and was considered suitable for showing in the classic series slot early on Sunday evening’.31 Viewed today The Legend of Robin Hood does not seem particularly violent, certainly not in comparison to Arthur of the Britons. The Legend of Robin Hood is a revisionist interpretation of the Robin Hood narrative that offers a very different version of events than The Adventures of Robin Hood. Indeed it sets out to distance itself from the Richard Greene series (still occasionally repeated on the ITV network even in the 1970s) as surely as the Disney film of 1952 sought to differentiate itself from the Warner Bros.–Errol Flynn film. The Legend of Robin Hood bucks the trend of other television Robin Hoods, in which Robin is usually cast as a commoner, by making him a nobleman (the Earl of Huntingdon), but, in a new variation, a nobleman who is raised as a commoner. At the beginning of the serial the baby son of the

118   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Earl of Huntingdon is entrusted to the care of ‘a humble forester [who] lives deep in Sherwood’ when his father leaves for France (‘There are some that covet his lands and title’). Robin is brought up as the son of Master Hood, the king’s forester, and only learns of his birthright as an adult when he is told by his father’s confessor Father Ambrose. Robin’s claim to the Huntingdon title and estate is recognised by King Richard, but he finds that the estate has been looted by the Abbot of Beresford. However, Robin is disinherited when he declines to join Richard’s Crusade to the Holy Land: his castle and estate are acquired by the unscrupulous Sir Guy of Gisborne. Robin takes to the forest where he encounters outlaws including Will Scarlet and Little John. The social politics of The Legend of Robin Hood are certainly more radical than The Adventures of Robin Hood. Robin is radicalised when he witnesses the abuse of peasants on his lands (‘The welfare of my landsmen is high enough in my priority’) and becomes a champion of the people against their oppressors (‘I know what’s happening in England – and I know what to do to change it!’). The principal villain, Sir Guy of Gisborne, is ‘a man steeped in blood and cruelty’. He is characterised as a sort of medieval venture capitalist in so far as he seeks to expand his lands by fair means or foul: having acquired Huntingdon’s estate he seeks the neighbouring land of Sir Kenneth Neston through marriage to Neston’s niece Marion. While Gisborne is a bully with a violent temper, the Sheriff of Nottingham is characterised instead as a cold and calculating villain who plots with the Abbot of Beresford to murder King Richard and place his brother Prince John on the throne. Again the Sheriff exemplifies the unacceptable face of capitalism: he runs a secret silver mine in the forest like a slave labour camp. Robin, in contrast, is forced to live as an outlaw on his own lands. Here the outlaws are fighting to feed themselves rather than for abstract notions of justice and liberty. They are less the ‘merrie men’ than a guerrilla army whose knowledge of the forest gives them the edge over the Norman soldiers hunting them. The Legend of Robin Hood emphasises the internal politics of Plantagenet England to a greater extent than previous versions of the story. The rivalry between Richard I and John – both characterised as much younger men than usual – is presented as a family feud: John is the jealous younger brother who is resentful when Richard appoints Longchamps as regent in his absence. An œdipal dimension is grafted

Revisionist revivals   119 onto their rivalry through their relationship with their mother Eleanor of Acquitaine (Yvonne Mitchell), who clearly prefers Richard to John. John is indecisive and is dependent on the support of the bishops and barons to assume power: he is presented as being manipulated by the Norman elites rather than conspiring for himself to usurp his brother. The Legend of Robin Hood emphasises the hatred between Saxons and Normans: more than ever this is presented in terms of class warfare. But there is also an acknowledgement of the historical processes that led to the emergence of the Norman settlement. Sir Kenneth Neston is characterised as an idealist who wishes to see an end to the antagonism and who sees his niece Marion’s marriage to Gisborne as a means of preserving the heritage of the Saxons. As he tells Robin: ‘We’re a conquered race, lad. The Normans rule us from their castles. We are many, they are few. Marry them to our daughters, and in three generations we’ll drown them in a sea of honest Saxon blood.’ The Legend of Robin Hood also establishes its difference from previous versions in its recasting of the relationship between Robin and the king. The Adventures of Robin Hood had cast Robin as a loyal servant of the Crown and protector of Richard’s throne in his absence. In this version, however, Robin and Richard are estranged when Robin opposes Richard’s plan to retake Jerusalem. Richard sees the Crusade as his ‘sacred duty’ (‘I must go to the Holy Land … The city of Christ must be restored to Christ’) but Robin argues that Richard is needed at home (‘I believe Your Grace is wrong to leave England … People look to you for guidance, sire. If you leave England, unscrupulous men will seize power and many will suffer’). Richard is characterised not as a wise elder statesman but as a capricious young despot whose favours are fickle. There are none of the unequivocal statements of loyalty to the Crown that characterised Richard Greene’s Robin: in this version Robin is outlawed by decree of the king himself who strips Robin of his title and estates. Richard’s return in the final episode brings about a reconciliation of sorts: Richard: My lord, to know you are innocent is the best news I have had since my return. Robin: Your return, sir, is the best news that the people of England have had. Times were bad in your absence.

120   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Although Robin receives the king’s pardon and his blessing to marry Marion, The Legend of Robin Hood nevertheless presents the relationship between Robin and Richard as strained. To this extent, The Legend of Robin Hood anticipates an even more radical reinterpretation of Robin’s relationship with the king in Robin of Sherwood. The conclusion of The Legend of Robin Hood is another indication of the revisionist agenda of this particular serial. For the first time on television – indeed for the first time on screen – Robin Hood dies. Robin’s death had not featured in any previous accounts – films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men and Sword of Sherwood Forest conclude with Robin’s royal pardon and marriage to Marian – but it was consistent with the ballads collected in A Lyttel Geste of Robyn Hood, in which Robin is poisoned by the treacherous Prioress of Kirklees. To this extent The Legend of Robin Hood might again be seen as a more ‘authentic’ version of the Robin Hood story. In this version the Prioress of Kirklees is Gisborne’s sister: she poisons Robin in revenge for the death of her brother. As per the legend, Robin dies in the forest: the last image is of Little John firing an arrow to mark his grave (‘Where this arrow falls, there he’ll lie’). Although it had been foretold in the first episode (‘You will never die save by a woman’s hand,’ an old crone tells Robin), the tragic ending wrong-footed some critics. Bernard Davies, for example, wrote: ‘It was a disappointing, though all too plausible, ending … And, somewhat reluctantly, I agree with them … In fact, the writers presented us with a reasonable and logically worked out account of the period and the situation.’32 It is instructive to compare The Legend of Robin Hood to Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian, which followed in cinemas in 1976.33 Robin and Marian starred Sean Connery as a middle-aged and disillusioned Robin returning to England after fighting with King Richard in France to find that Marian (Audrey Hepburn) has taken holy orders. It is a beautifully elegiac film and a meditation on the nature of myth. Like The Legend of Robin Hood it problematises the relationship between Robin and Richard the Lionheart: Robin’s loyalty to his king is presented as irrational, while Richard (Richard Harris) is characterised as a warmonger who cares little for the people of his own country. Robin resumes his old fight against the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw)

Revisionist revivals   121 but it is Robin who now seems the reactionary in contrast to the Sheriff who has learned to read and is raising taxes to build roads and undertake civic improvements. The film climaxes with a duel between Robin and the Sheriff in which Robin kills the Sheriff but is fatally wounded himself. Marian, in order to preserve his legend, gives Robin a poisoned drink, and then takes poison herself. Robin fires his final arrow (‘Where this arrow lands …’) and the lovers die in each other’s arms. Although there is no reason to believe that Robin and Marian was influenced directly by The Legend of Robin Hood (the film would have been scripted and in production by the time the television serial was shown), there are some fascinating parallels. Like The Legend of Robin Hood, Robin and Marian is shot in a style that emphasises autumnal, earth colours, while Diane Keen in the television serial bears more than a passing likeness to the young Audrey Hepburn.

Stevenson redux: The Black Arrow (1972–74), Kidnapped (1979), The Master of Ballantrae (1984) Robert Louis Stevenson had been a popular source of television drama since the early history of the medium. The BBC had produced live versions of Treasure Island in 1951, The Black Arrow in 1951 and 1956, and Kidnapped in 1952 and 1958, and in the 1950s there had been an Australian telefilm series, The Adventures of Long John Silver, in which Robert Newton reprised his role from the 1950 Walt Disney film of Treasure Island. Stevenson’s historical adventure novels were in many respects English language equivalents of Alexandre Dumas: and like Dumas their vividly drawn characters and serial structure made them ideal television material. In the 1970s and 1980s the BBC’s apparent monopoly on adaptations of Stevenson (which also included two classic serial productions of The Master of Ballantrae, in 1962 and 1975) was challenged by three adaptations from ITV: Southern Television’s The Black Arrow and HTV’s Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae. Taken together these can be seen to represent a trajectory within the swashbuckling genre as a whole, as it transformed from children’s television to primetime adult drama. For, while The Black Arrow was most emphatically juvenile fare, Kidnapped was a more expensive (£1 million) family adventure serial and The Master of Ballantrae was a prestigious

122   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series £4  million co-production with the CBS network that reflected the emergence of the heritage swashbuckler in the 1980s. Southern Television, which produced The Black Arrow, was one of the smaller ITV contractors but was a major provider of children’s programmes including The Flockton Flyer (1977–78) and Worzel Gummidge (1979–81). The Black Arrow, which premièred the same week as Arthur of the Britons, was the third television adaptation of the novel, which had also been filmed by Columbia Pictures with Louis Hayward in 1948. It was rather more conventional juvenile fare than Arthur of the Britons: Stanley Reynolds felt that it ‘has a sort of woodenness of character and great longueurs in the action’.34 The Black Arrow has been rather overlooked in the popular historiography of British television in comparison with other children’s dramas from the period. There are several reasons for this neglect, not least of which is a degree of confusion surrounding the identity of the titular character. In Stevenson’s novel, set against the background of the Wars of the Roses (1455–85), the Brotherhood of the Black Arrow are a group of outlaws led by ‘John Amend-All’ rather than an individual. The book interweaves historical fact and fiction in the tradition of Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers. The Black Arrow (subtitled ‘A Tale of the Two Roses’) focuses on Richard Shelton, adolescent ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, who learns that Sir Daniel murdered his father in order to inherit his estates. Shelton escapes, along with another ‘lad’ who is being held hostage by Sir Daniel, later discovering that ‘John Matcham’ is in fact Joanna Sedley, the ward of Lord Foxham, who has sold her to Sir Daniel for ‘a rich marriage’. As the novel progresses, with Shelton joining the outlaws, the historical background of the Wars of the Roses comes more to the fore, and Richard Crookback, the Duke of Gloucester, emerges as a major character. The Black Arrow is notable for its sympathetic characterisation of the future King Richard III, portrayed not as the hunchbacked tyrant popularised by Shakespeare but as a pragmatist who wants to end the years of dynastic strife through the establishment of a strong monarchy. At the end of the novel Sir Daniel is killed by an arrow fired by Ellis Duckworth (‘John AmendAll’), Shelton is knighted by Crookback and marries Joanna. The Black Arrow ran for three serialised stories, all broadcast over the Christmas and New Year periods.35 The first serial in 1972, scripted

Revisionist revivals   123

3.3  An adult Richard Shelton (Simon Cuff) is revealed as the mysterious masked archer at the end of the second series of The Black Arrow.

by Ben Healey, is recognisable as an adaptation of Stevenson’s book. However, the budgetary restrictions of the production, which was shot on video, meant that the Wars of the Roses take place entirely off screen: there are none of the pitched battles to be found in Arthur of the Britons. Instead the series focuses on the personal narrative of Richard Shelton. This is problematic, however, because, while William Squire provides a strong villain as Sir Daniel Brackley, the juvenile leads, Robin Langford as Shelton and Helen Stronge as Joanna Sedley, do not possess sufficient gravitas to carry the narrative. Langford in particular is a limited actor given to proclaiming his lines in the worst tradition of amateur dramatics: his Shelton is more of a hysterical brat than the maturing young warrior of the novel. The œdipal dimension of the book (Sir Daniel as the bad father, Shelton as the vengeful son) is lost. So, too, is the identity of the Black Arrow, who becomes a mysterious masked archer associated with the outlaws but not one of them. The outlaws are now led by Lawless (Eric Flynn), while the penultimate episode reveals that the Black Arrow is in the service of Crookback, thus associating him with the Yorkists. With the main incidents of the book all included in the first serial, the second in 1973, again written by Ben Healey, was no longer billed as

124   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow’ but as ‘The Black Arrow … based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous character’. This serial dispensed with the dull juvenile leads of the first and instead featured an adult Richard Shelton (Simon Cuff), who returns home after four years in France. The Black Arrow reappears, now said to be ‘a friend and protector of the people’, and assists Shelton and Lawless (now played by Glyn Owen) in their struggle against the tyrannical Captain Brock (Eddie Byrne). It transpires that Sir Daniel Brackley survived at the end of the first serial: in the concluding episode he is killed off again in exactly the same manner when he is shot by the Black Arrow. At the end of the serial, however, it is revealed that Shelton himself is the Black Arrow, but that he is a different character from the first Black Arrow: Crookback: I thought my Black Arrow was in France, working for me. Who does yours work for, Master Shelton? Shelton: For the people, my lord. My people. This can be seen as a move to detach the Black Arrow from the cause of personal retribution and the service of Richard Crookback and to reposition him ideologically as a champion of the people. However, the confusion over the character’s identity was not helped by the fact that actor Simon Cuff had appeared in the first serial as ‘chief outlaw’. The third serial in 1974, this time scripted by Anthony Read, made yet more changes to the format. Simon Cuff returned, now billed as ‘Richard Shelton/The Black Arrow’, but also acquired a juvenile sidekick in the character of Peterkin (John Sanderson), whom he rescues from the cruel nobleman Lord William. The publicity discourse attempted to position this series of The Black Arrow as a medieval equivalent of the masked crime-fighter Batman. The American series Batman (1966–68) was a popular Saturday morning favourite on the ITV network into the 1970s. According to Jack Hargreaves, Head of Children’s Programmes for Southern Television: ‘Of course they are nothing like as stylised a partnership as Batman and Robin. It’s all in deadly earnest … And Peterkin doesn’t have disguise clothes. Being a medieval peasant he doesn’t have a second set of clothes at all.’36 There were two stories in the third series. In the first Shelton and Peterkin save Lord William’s niece Anne (Roberta Tovey) when she is accused

Revisionist revivals   125 of witchcraft, while in the second they retrieve a holy artefact stolen by the outlaw Red Hal (Robert Russell). The second story is resolved in an archery contest between Shelton and the outlaw and borrows a motif from the Robin Hood legend as Shelton wins the contest by splitting Hal’s arrow with his own. By now, however, The Black Arrow had become entirely detached from Stevenson’s book. The Black Arrow has suffered in comparison to other swashbucklers on account of its lesser production values and flaccid pacing. It appears to have been shot on a shoestring and has little sense of period or location (the novel is set in Suffolk, to which Stevenson had a romantic attachment). The title sequence – in which a masked archer shoots an arrow which thuds into a tree – seems like a conscious homage to The Adventures of Robin Hood, but there the comparison ends. The action sequences are perfunctory in the extreme: it is a bloodless affair in comparison to the book. However, the major weakness of The Black Arrow was that its format remained unstable: each serial offered a different narrative and ideological formulation on the raison d’être of the Black Arrow himself. Initially he is cast as an agent of retribution: it is only from the second serial that he becomes ‘a friend and protector of the people’. In the first serial it is the outlaws who stand for ‘liberty – freedom from Sir Daniel Brackley and his kind’. There are passing references to social tension which point the way towards the more politically radical swashbucklers that were to follow in the 1980s. The outlaws are sceptical of promises made by representatives of the landed classes (‘Never came to no good holding truck with gentry … Slap us on the back today, hang us tomorrow’) and even scorn the offer of a pardon from the Duke of Gloucester (‘What’s the gratitude of kings and dukes to poor men?’). Yet the principal hero figure is the son of a gentry family and the outlaws aid him in the restoration of his lands. And at no point is it properly explained, even in the basic terms of a juvenile series, what the Wars of the Roses were fought about. Southern Television would make another venture into the swashbuckling fold with Scarf Jack (1981), a six-part serial adapted from his own children’s novel by P. J. Kavanagh. It was a variation on the masked avenger theme set in 1795 as ‘Captain Moonlight’ (Roy Budd) travels from Ireland to England to confront the villainous Hunter Gowan (Bernard Kay), whose thugs have been terrorising his tenants in Ireland. The Irish

126   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series setting and theme makes Scarf Jack more political than most children’s dramas: its sympathy for the Irish and its vaguely anti-British (or at least anti-imperialist) leanings associate it with the more radical agenda of contemporary swashbucklers such as Dick Turpin and Smuggler. With scenes of the burning of farms and the suppression of dissent in Ireland, it is impossible to detach the serial from the background of the ‘Troubles’ that had flared up in the 1970s with incidents such as ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972), which inflamed nationalist opinion, and terrorist atrocities including the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) (27 August 1979). While Scarf Jack is at pains to assert that the violence is being enacted by mercenaries, rather than by the regular British army, the parallel is, nevertheless, quite striking. Otherwise Scarf Jack is a moderately entertaining adventure serial chiefly notable for marking one of the last appearances by Richard Greene as magistrate ‘Mr Edward’ before his death in 1985. While Southern Television was content with producing children’s drama for the ITV network, HTV had loftier ambitions. Its success with Arthur of the Britons had opened the company’s eyes to the possibilities of the international market. To this end both Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae received the full treatment of top production values and ‘name’ casts for international sales. This strategy was as much economic as cultural: ITV contractors could claim a rebate on the levy paid to the Treasury from their advertising revenue if they pre-sold their series to overseas broadcasters.37 At the same time the two productions each demonstrated different cultural and political economies. Kidnapped was an Anglo-European co-production, whereas The Master of Ballantrae was produced in association with the CBS network of America. Kidnapped was a co-production with Telemünchen of West Germany and Technisor of France: it was shown on the German network ZDF and the French channel TF1 as well as across the ITV network in Britain.38 It was produced by Peter Graham Scott, a prolific television producer-director whose credits included the BBC costume drama series The Onedin Line (1971–80). Graham Scott explained the economics of the production: The ‘above-the-line’ cost to HTV (not including crews and studio facilities) was £850,000, but the Germans and French had paid

Revisionist revivals   127 £450,000 of this, leaving HTV to find £400,000. But the levy rebate was credited to 66 per cent of the whole cost of £850,000, which is £566,666, showing a paper profit of £166,666 before any income from ITV and American and Commonwealth sales, which probably amounted to a further 100 percent of the original cost.39 Patrick Dromgoole, HTV’s Director of Programmes and executive producer of Kidnapped, was at pains to claim it as a home-grown production despite the presence of international partners: ‘This is a distinguished serial in the production of which no pains have been spared. We take pride in the fact that it all began here in the West Country and was filmed over many demanding months by a West Country team of talented professionals.’40 The imperative of international sales explains the polyglot cast and crew of Kidnapped. HTV had to accept a French director, Jean-Pierre Decourt, a veteran of French costume serials such as Les Aventures de Lagardère (1967). Graham Scott disliked Decourt’s ‘old-fashioned Continental style’ with its ‘complicated and meaningless tracking shots’.41 It was left to second unit director Robert Fuest and Graham Scott himself to stage the action sequences, including the Battle of Culloden, seen in flashback in the first episode. The cast featured several foreign actors requiring dubbing, including the two romantic leads, David Balfour (played by German actor Ekkehardt Belle) and Catriona Drummond (French actress Aude Landry). Although the character of David Balfour is the focus of narrative interest, star billing went to David McCallum as Alan Breck Stewart. McCallum was an established film and television star, whose credits included The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Colditz and The Invisible Man. The publicity materials for Kidnapped cast the Glasgow-born McCallum as ‘a prodigal son of Scotland’ returning to his roots.42 In fact Kidnapped was shot on location in Wales, with the Brecon Beacons substituting for the Scottish Highlands, though Graham Scott spent a week shooting authentic Highland landscapes with doubles. The production of Kidnapped was not without its problems. Graham Scott averred that the first script, from a German writer, ‘was worse than anything I could have imagined. Stevenson’s story, with its short, easily adaptable, and filmic scenes, had been twisted into a

128   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

3.4  A prodigal son of Scotland returning to his roots: David McCallum starred as Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped.

violent horror-comic of murder, rape, and plunder that would sicken viewers and turn us into a laughing stock’.43 Graham Scott rewrote the script from scratch by the simple expedient of going back to the source text. HTV’s Kidnapped became a serialisation of two Stevenson novels, Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona, introducing the character of Catriona Drummond earlier into the narrative but otherwise maintaining the basic structure of the original stories. Kidnapped is an oftfilmed story: there had been three films – by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1938, Walt Disney in 1959 and Omnibus Films in 1971 – and three previous television serials by the BBC in 1952, 1956 and 1963. While the Disney film is generally regarded as the most faithful adaptation, the HTV version followed the 1963 television serial and the 1971 film in incorporating characters and events from Catriona. It is a largely authentic adaptation, maintaining the plot, characters and even much of the dialogue of the books. With its high production values, scenic locations, cinematic photography and fidelity to the source text, Kidnapped can be seen as an early example of the ‘heritage swashbuckler’ that was to emerge in the 1980s with sumptuous television films of Ivanhoe and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Decourt’s direction, despite Graham Scott’s misgivings, is highly pictorialist, showcasing the

Revisionist revivals   129 landscapes to good effect. Kidnapped is a story in which landscape plays an important role: David Balfour’s journey involves crossing the geographical and social spaces of the Highlands in his quest for justice and to be reunited with his true love. The crossing of boundaries and thresholds, a recurring motif of the novel, is replicated visually in the serial.44 McCallum, Belle and Landry are all excellent in their roles – Landry in particular provides a spirited performance as the wilful and passionate Catriona – and the supporting cast includes such dependable character actors as Patrick Magee (Ebenezer Balfour), Patrick Allen (Lord Advocate Prestongrange), Bill Simpson (James of the Glens) and Andrew Keir (Cluny). Unlike some swashbucklers, in which the sense of historical period is vague to say the least, Kidnapped demonstrates a strong sense of time and place. It is set in Scotland in 1751, in the aftermath of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s uprising of 1745 and the Battle of Culloden. The serial accurately represents the political situation in Scotland including the rivalry between the Highland clans and the influence of the powerful Campbell clan as allies of the English. Stevenson had based his novel on a real historical incident: the murder of Colin ‘Red Fox’ Campbell, which was blamed on one Alan Breck Stewart, and the trial of Stewart’s brother, James of the Glens, presided over by Archibald Campbell, the third Duke of Argyll. The serial dramatises these events, though absolving Alan Breck of the murder. James of the Glens is hanged as an accessory and on the gallows declares ‘I give my life that Scotland may be free: God save Prince Charlie.’ However, Kidnapped does not romanticise the ’45 Rebellion or the Jacobite cause. There is none of the simplistic Tartanry that characterises Hollywood films such as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) or Michael Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy (1995). An embittered survivor of the Battle of Culloden refers to it as ‘a black day for the Highland people. Maybe we’ll never see such a battle again – or hear the cry of freedom.’ The social landscape of Scotland represented in Kidnapped is posited on the political and economic differences between the Lowlands and the Highlands. David exemplifies the social conservatism and economic prudence associated with the Lowlands: ‘Read your Bible, look after your money, and keep clear of the king’s enemies’ is his creed. (The advice is ironic: David loses his money and falls in with a Jacobite in the form of Alan Breck.) David asserts his loyalty to the Crown (‘I am a

130   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series loyal subject of King George’) and distances himself from the political feuds of the Highlands (‘All the senseless killing of one clan by another! Who gains by it? Certainly not the Scottish people’). His progressive credentials are indicated by his intention to study law at the University of Leuven in the Netherlands. In contrast the Highlands are presented as wild and untamed. David is drawn out of his emotional reserve through his love for Catriona, whom he meets in the first episode. Catriona is a Highlander, whose Jacobite father has been imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. As Alan Breck warns him: ‘Highland women are stubborn, feckless and perverse. However, once they take a fancy to a man, there’s no power in heaven and hell will stand in their way.’ David finds himself torn between his instinct to avoid politics and his desire to help Catriona in clearing her father’s name. Breck, again, remarks: ‘So, my young friend, your heart’s in the Highlands and your head’s in the Lowlands.’ David, for his part, realises he does not belong fully to either the Lowlands or the Highlands, describing himself as ‘betwixt and between’. David’s narrative in Kidnapped – cheated of his rightful inheritance by his scheming uncle, kidnapped on a slave ship bound for the Americas, shipwrecked and rescued by Alan Breck – is one of continuous dislocation and displacement. His romantic union with Catriona – once he has detached her from the influence of her father, who turns out to be an unscrupulous rogue – represents a union of the two Scotlands. David’s Lowland pragmatism and Catriona’s Highland temperament mark the emergence of a new Scotland free from the political and social divisions of the past. Alan Breck’s narrative, which runs in parallel with David’s, is much more explicitly political. Alan, a committed Jacobite and a hero of Culloden, is associated with the romantic tradition of Tartanry and the ‘lost cause’ of an independent Scotland that existed before the Act of Union (1707). Alan is motivated by genuine ideological commitment: ‘The Jacobite cause wasn’t a matter of mercenaries fighting for gold. It was the only true justice for Scotland.’ But he finds that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s supporters in Scotland resent sending money to support the Prince’s lavish lifestyle in exile and is told by his brother that there is no support for another rebellion: ‘The clans’ll never rise again. We live here  – you don’t. The old times’ll never be back. Anyone who still thinks that is living in an exile’s dream.’ Bonnie Prince Charlie

Revisionist revivals   131 (Christopher Biggins) is here characterised as a libertine and womaniser, who uses funds from his supporters to maintain his excessive lifestyle rather than to raise another army. Alan is dismayed, when he finally reaches the Prince’s court in France, that his master has abandoned plans for another uprising: ‘We will never go back to the Highlands … We would not stand a chance. The English have made the place into an armed fortress … It is over’. Alan comes to realise that his support for the Bonnie Prince has been misplaced and is a lost cause. But he accepts the new Scotland represented by David and Catriona, remarking: ‘It’s for Scotland I’ve always fought. Now it seems I may never see the place again. But it’s your country, David and Catriona. I wish you well in it.’ The Master of Ballantrae, which followed five years after Kidnapped, demonstrated another production ecology. In the early 1980s HTV turned towards the American market, producing a number of television films in association with US networks. These included The Curse of Tutankhamun’s Tomb (1980) for NBC and Jamaica Inn (1982) and Arch of Triumph (1984) for CBS.45 The Master of Ballantrae, also a co-production with CBS, represented a genuine Anglo-American cultural economy. The American writer, William Bast, had scripted wellreceived television films of The Man in the Iron Mask and The Scarlet Pimpernel, while the British director, Douglas Hickox, had recently directed a television film of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Graham Scott acted as producer and second unit director, again staging the Battle of Culloden, while Patrick Dromgoole and Larry White were executive producers for HTV and CBS respectively. The cast of the expensive (£4  million) production was headed by Michael York and Richard Thomas as the rival brothers James and Henry Durie, with John Gielgud as their father Lord Durrisdeer, Timothy Dalton as Irish mercenary Francis Blake, Brian Blessed as pirate Captain Teach and Finola Hughes as love interest Alison Graeme. The Master of Ballantrae was again shot in the West Country, with St Catherine’s Court, a Victorian Gothic house near Bath then owned by actress Jane Seymour, standing in for the Ballantrae estate.46 In America The Master of Ballantrae was broadcast on 31 January 1984 in the Hallmark Hall of Fame slot. The Hollywood Reporter found it ‘a grandly picturesque historical romance’ with some ‘vividly executed action sequences’.47 John Gielgud (Best

132   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Supporting Actor) and Olga Lehmann (Costume Design) were nominated for Emmy Awards. In Britain it was shown on two consecutive days (16–17 April) over the Easter weekend. The Master of Ballantrae can be seen as a companion piece to Kidnapped, despite the different production contexts. The historical background of the narrative is the same (the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745) and there are some striking similarities in their content and characterisation. It is a drama of family conflict in which political divisions are mapped onto the personal rivalry between brothers James and Henry Durie. The elder brother James (Michael York) is romantic, feckless and unscrupulous, while Henry (Richard Thomas) is responsible, dutiful and dull. When news arrives of the Jacobite uprising, James rallies to his banner (‘He’s come to free us all and claim back his rightful throne’), but Henry is more equivocal (‘My heart too is with Prince Charles and the Jacobites, but my head tells me it may be wiser to remain loyal to King George’). Their father hedges his bets: ‘I fear it would be most unwise to court either or one side on this. Therefore we will do what many considerable families are doing … One son will go forth and strike a blow for King James, the other will stay here at home and beg favour with King George.’ James joins Bonnie Prince Charlie and is presumed killed at Culloden, though in fact he escapes to America with Irish mercenary Francis Blake. Henry, meanwhile, inherits the estate and marries James’s fiancée Alison (‘If you want me now, Henry, you can have me. I offer you no love, God knows, but you deserve better than you’ve had.’). However, James, now bitter and resentful, returns to Ballantrae and proceeds to bleed the estate dry. Despite his behaviour, Alison is still attracted to him (‘I’ve married a man I do not love, to learn the man I love still lives’). The Master of Ballantrae, like Kidnapped, is a reasonably authentic adaptation of the source novel, though Bast makes a number of changes which have the effect of displacing the political divisions of Stevenson’s book onto the personal rivalry and sexual jealousy between the brothers. Bast introduces a scene where Henry discovers his wife in his brother’s bed. James’s taunting of Henry (‘I’ve never known a woman who didn’t prefer me, and that pertains, as we both know, to your own wife’) provokes a duel between them. James is left for dead, though again it turns out that he has survived, this time travelling to India.

Revisionist revivals   133 Alison is reconciled to Henry when she discovers James’s diary, which reveals that he did not love her and had fathered a child with another woman. When James returns again, consumed by hatred and resentment, Henry and Alison leave for America with their son Alexander. James follows and continues to hound them. The conclusion departs significantly from the book. Stevenson had killed both the brothers in America: in the film Henry lives and returns to Ballantrae with his wife and son. But he continues to be haunted by the ghost of his brother. A servant’s comment to his young son (‘Why, if you aren’t the spitting image of your Uncle James!’) leaves a lingering doubt over the boy’s true paternity. The Master of Ballantrae is handsomely produced, including some well-staged action sequences – the Battle of Culloden and a sea battle between the pirate ship and an English man-o’-war – but ultimately it is a rather unsatisfying experience. The problem is both the characterisation and the casting. All the real adventuring and swashbuckling are done by James, who in the first half of the film is the main point of identification but who in the second half turns into the villain of the piece. This is exacerbated by the miscasting of the key roles. Michael York makes a virile and charismatic James, but is too closely associated with heroic adventure roles to make his villainy wholly convincing, while Richard Thomas – forever associated with the role of John Boy in The Waltons – is simply too bland an actor to make anything of the difficult part of Henry. The narrative interest is divided between the two brothers, but unlike Kidnapped, where David Balfour and Alan Breck represent different heroic archetypes, it is difficult to identify wholeheartedly with either James or Henry. HTV continued its strategy of producing television films and mini-series for the US market, including Jenny’s War (1985) and The Canterville Ghost (1986), and would produce one further swashbuckling series, Robin of Sherwood. In 1986 the company won the Queen’s Award for Exports, which was cited as ‘a tribute to the talented production teams who make outstanding programmes for Worldwide sales’.48 Like the Grade empire before it, however, HTV became a victim of its own success. In the late 1980s the company made some poor management decisions and invested heavily in new studio facilities. This coincided with the Thatcher government’s abolition of the rebate on the

134   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series levy, which had made investment in international co-productions viable in the first place. Although HTV held on to its franchise in the next round of awards in 1992, it would soon cease to exist as an independent company, being absorbed by the new conglomerates that emerged during the 1990s. Nevertheless, HTV’s contribution to the history of the television swashbuckler had been highly significant. After a decade-long hiatus during the 1960s, the popular success of Arthur of the Britons and Kidnapped had put the British-made costume adventure series back on the map. Notes 1 The BBC had continued its tradition of classic serials during the 1960s and 1970s. These included adaptations of Rob Roy (1961), The Master of Ballantrae (1962 and 1975), Kidnapped (1963), The Count of Monte Cristo (1964), The Three Musketeers (1965), Ivanhoe (1970) and The Last of the Mohicans (1971). 2 On the introduction of colour television, see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. V: Competition 1955– 1974 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 848–63. 3 Jeremy Potter, Potter, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. IV: Companies and Programmes 1968–80 (London, 1990), pp. 171–80. 4 ‘Three hours of network for HTV’, Broadcast, 12 October 1973, p. 4. 5 ‘More overseas sales for HTV’, Broadcast, 18 May 1973, p. 4. 6 ‘16 nations at HTV sales session’, Broadcast, 2 November 1973, p. 4. 7 ‘Arthur of Britain [sic] and Black Arrow’, The Times, 7 December 1972. 8 Potter, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. IV, p. 261. 9 Ibid., p. 28. 10 Sue Harper and Justin Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 157. 11 ‘Was this ruffian the real Arthur?’, Sun, 6 December 1972. 12 The first series began with ‘Arthur is Dead’ (6 December 1972) and ended with ‘The Prize’ (21 February 1973). The second series began with ‘The Swordsman’ (12 September 1973) and concluded with ‘The Girl from Rome’ (28 November 1973). 13 ‘King Arthur seen as kind of trendy’, Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1972.

Revisionist revivals   135 14 ‘No round table for “cowboy” King Arthur’, Daily Express, 2 December 1972. 15 Alistair D. McGown and Mark J. Docherty, The Hill and Beyond: Children’s Television Drama – An Encyclopedia (London, 2003), p. 121. 16 ‘One man’s television’, Broadcast, 6 March 1978, p. 15. 17 The Legend of Robin Hood was broadcast in six episodes of fifty minutes each between 23 November and 28 December 1975. 18 See Simone Knox, ‘Masterpiece Theatre and British Drama Imports on US Television’, Critical Studies in Television, 7: 1 (2012), pp. 29–48. 19 Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 31–53. 20 ‘One man’s television’, Broadcast, 3 December 1975, p. 13. 21 ‘Robin Hood rides again’, Radio Times, 22–8 November 1975, pp. 72–5. 22 Sunday Times, 30 November 1975. 23 Observer, 7 December 1975. 24 ‘Robin Hood is back  – right on target’, Evening News, 24 November 1975. 25 ‘Return of the real Robin Hood?’, Daily Express, 24 November 1975. 26 ‘How now Robin!’, Morning Star, 29 November 1975. 27 ‘Robin Hood with politics in new serial’, Daily Telegraph, 24 November 1975. 28 ‘I say, well-played, those merry chaps’, Daily Mail, 24 November 1975. 29 ‘Whatever happened to our heroes?’, Sun, 6 December 1975. 30 ‘“Robin Hood” violence on BBC attacked’, Daily Telegraph, 23 December 1975. 31 Ibid. 32 ‘One man’s television’, Broadcast, 12 January 1976, p. 10. 33 On Robin and Marian, see Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), pp. 210–11, and Neil Sinyard, The Films of Richard Lester (London, 1985), pp. 117–25. 34 ‘Arthur of Britain [sic] and Black Arrow’, The Times, 7 December 1972. 35 The first serial of The Black Arrow was broadcast from 4 December 1972 to 22 January 1973, the second from 5 December 1973 to 16 January 1974, the third from 24 November 1974 to 12 January 1975.

136   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 36 ‘Black Arrow and Peterkin – history’s answer to Batman and Robin’, TV Times, 23–9 November 1974, p. 70. 37 Andrew Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (London, 1997), p. 125. 38 Kidnapped was shown on the ITV network from 7 April to 30 June 1979. 39 Peter Graham Scott, British Television: An Insider’s History (Jefferson, NC, 2000), p. 244. 40 ‘Kidnapped: A classic success for HTV’, HTV West Press Information: Programme News’, 27 March 1979, BFI Library microfiche. 41 Graham Scott, British Television, p. 243. 42 ‘TV Scene’, Photoplay, 29: 9 (September 1978), p. 49. 43 Graham Scott, British Television, p. 241. 44 This point is developed, in relation to the novel, by Christopher MacLachlan, ‘A teller of tales: Further thoughts on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped’, ScotLit, 38/39 (2010): www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ ScotLit/ASLS/Kidnapped.html (accessed 5 March 2012). 45 ‘Made in mid-Atlantic’, Stills, 18 (April 1985), p. 27. 46 Graham Scott, British Television, pp. 259–60. 47 Hollywood Reporter, 31 January 1984, p. 34. 48 Graham Scott, British Television, p. 277.

4



Rebels with a cause

This chapter focuses on four British swashbucklers of the 1980s – Dick Turpin, Smuggler, Adventurer and Robin of Sherwood – that represent a distinct cycle within the genre. These series shared the same production team of writer Richard Carpenter and producer Paul Knight (Sidney Cole was also involved with all but Robin of Sherwood) and collectively they demonstrated a consistent ideology and social politics. The common motif throughout these series is their focus on protagonists who are forced into outlawry by an unjust and repressive society. They need to be understood in relation to the ideological context of Thatcherism and oppositional cultural practices in the 1980s. It is generally held that Thatcherism provoked two distinct cultural responses: on the one hand the heritage costume drama, deploying the past as a site of nostalgia but also offering space for social criticism; and on the other hand the contemporary realist drama, focusing on the sense of exclusion felt by many of the less privileged in British society at a time of high unemployment and socio-economic distress.1 This cycle of costume adventures marks a point of convergence between those two traditions, as their narratives are infused with a strong sense of contemporary politics. Their apotheosis was Robin of Sherwood, a radical reinterpretation of the Robin Hood myth for Thatcherite Britain and by any standards one of the outstanding television dramas of the 1980s.

The myth of the English highwayman: Dick Turpin (1979–81) Dick Turpin was a Gatetarn/Seacastle production for London Weekend Television (LWT), which after an uncertain start had become the largest and most lucrative of the ITV franchise operators by the end of the 1970s. Gatetarn was a partnership between Richard Carpenter, a former 137

138   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series actor who had turned writer for children’s television programmes such as Catweazle (1970), The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972–74) and The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976–77), his regular collaborator Paul Knight and veteran producer Sidney Cole. Carpenter claimed that The Adventures of Black Beauty was ‘internationally the most successful children’s TV programme ever made’.2 It was sold to over forty countries, and Carpenter and fellow writer David Butler won an award for Best Children’s Drama from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.3 Several members of the production team from The Adventures of Black Beauty  – directors Charles Crichton and Gerry Poulson, production manager Jake White, designer John Blezzard, cameraman Ken Higgins and composer Denis King – also worked on Dick Turpin. Knight intimated that Dick Turpin was seen as a follow-up to the earlier series: ‘In the same way as we took the basic idea of Black Beauty, we have taken the character of Dick Turpin and extended it within the possibilities of the period of history he lived in.’4 Michael Grade, Director of Programmes for LWT, backed the series on the condition that Turpin was played by Richard O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan was a former child actor (he appeared as the young Prince Arthur in The Adventures of Robin Hood) who achieved adult stardom in the sitcom Man About the House (1973–76). The casting of the popular O’Sullivan was done with the aim ‘of turning a rather terrifying thief into another lovable rascal in the Robin Hood mould’.5 Dick Turpin ran for twenty-six half-hour episodes  – two series of thirteen – with a further five serialised episodes shown as Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure in 1981.6 It was broadcast on Saturday evenings at 7.30  p.m. across the ITV network. Richard Carpenter wrote twentysix of the thirty-one episodes, including all the first series and all of Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure. Carpenter would also assume the lion’s share of writing duties for Smuggler, Adventurer and Robin of Sherwood. The critical reception was largely favourable. Stewart Lane in the Morning Star felt that ‘the series has great pace, convincing historical atmosphere, and O’Sullivan on this occasion seems to leave the humour to others in the cast’.7 Sylvia Clayton in the Daily Telegraph thought that it ‘looks as if much expense has been lavished on it. The riders gallop across miles of green location, and the wicked lords and callous ladies are handsomely costumed.’8 Jacqueline Newcombe in the

Rebels with a cause   139

4.1  The English highwayman: Richard O’Sullivan starring in Dick Turpin.

Evening News found it ‘riveting and light-hearted enough to enthral both young and old’ and added that ‘the series has a wonderful feeling of atmosphere which is evoked with beautiful, haunting landscapes and vividly authentic sets’.9 And Hazel Holt wrote in Television Today that ‘the 18th century settings and costumes are appealing’ and that the action sequences ‘should appeal to the early-evening family viewers – though perhaps 7.30 is a bit late for the younger ones who would enjoy it most’.10 Dick Turpin gives every impression of having been devised for a family audience and written accordingly. Turpin is provided with a juvenile sidekick, Swiftnick (Michael Deeks), as a point of identification for younger viewers. The action sequences are robustly handled – fencing master Peter Diamond was a veteran of MGM’s Ivanhoe and Knights of the Round Table, and recently had been a stunt arranger on Star Wars (1977)  – and there are sufficient swordfights and fisticuffs to keep the younger viewers entertained. O’Sullivan performs many of his own stunts and proves particularly adept with the blade: Diamond ‘put him on a par with Roger Moore twenty years ago in the Ivanhoe series’.11 At the same time, however, the series acknowledges the handsome O’Sullivan’s female fans in allowing Turpin to enjoy

140   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series amorous encounters with a succession of buxom wenches, including Black Beauty starlet Stacy Dorning and Mary Crosby, shortly before she achieved notoriety as Kristin Shepherd in Dallas. Turpin’s occasional wenching, albeit depicted with suitable restraint, is an indication of how attitudes towards permissiveness had changed since the heyday of chaste and gallant swashbuckling heroes such as Ivanhoe and Sir Lancelot. It would also have been unthinkable for either of those heroes to refer to a woman as a ‘silly slut’ (‘The Fox’) or a ‘daft trollop’ (Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure). The series also has a memorable brace of onomatopœic villains in corrupt magistrate Sir John Glutton (Christopher Benjamin) and his right-hand man Captain Nathan Spiker (David Daker). Glutton is the Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Spiker is a ‘thief taker’ who has sworn to see Turpin swing. A back-story was written into the second series, where it is revealed that Turpin had served under Spiker’s command in the army and knows he is a coward who deserted his post: Spiker is afraid that Turpin will reveal the truth and therefore has a personal motive for wanting to see him hanged. Historian and Turpin expert James Sharpe suggests that ‘[the] television Dick Turpin series was important in providing yet another repackaging of the Turpin legend, making it available in the most important medium of the late twentieth century, and, in particular, introducing Dick Turpin to yet another generation of young people’.12 Sharpe sees the series as part of the process of the mythologisation of Turpin from a villain into a folk hero in the tradition of Robin Hood. Unlike Robin Hood, however, there was a historical Dick Turpin, a vicious robber and murderer who was hanged at York on 7 April 1739. Richard Turpin, born in Essex in 1705, was a butcher by trade whose criminal career began with stealing cattle. He joined the Essex Gang of Epping Forest, a group of house-breakers notorious for their rough treatment of their victims. When other gang members were captured, Turpin took to highway robbery. In 1737 Turpin moved to Yorkshire where he assumed the name of John Palmer. Arrested for a breach of the peace, Turpin’s true identity was discovered while he languished in York gaol. He was tried for horse theft and subsequently hanged. Turpin was a product of his time, when highway robbery was a commonplace crime, but his elevation to popular folklore took place across the next two and a half centuries. The origins of the Turpin legend

Rebels with a cause   141 might be seen during his last days in the condemned cell at York where, according to contemporary accounts, he entertained lavishly. The first biography of Turpin was published in the same year as his death. The exploits of Turpin and other highwaymen such as Claude Duval (executed in 1670)  and James MacLaine (executed 1750)  were celebrated in ballads during the eighteenth century, which served to elevate them from common thugs to gallant ‘Gentlemen of the Road’. The myth of the English highwayman, like that of Robin Hood, can be seen as a response to changing historical conditions: the highwayman became a heroic figure at a time of unpopular government and social inequality. The most important phase in the transition of Turpin from common criminal to popular hero was the publication of William Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood in 1834. Ainsworth invented perhaps the most famous incident of Turpin’s career: his epic overnight ride from London to York to escape his pursuers that resulted in the death of his exhausted horse Black Bess within sight of York Minster. (It is generally agreed by historians that the ‘Ride to York’ was undertaken by William Nevison, a.k.a. ‘Swift Nicks’, in 1676 in order to establish an alibi for a robbery in Kent.) Turpin was reinvented as a romantic hero by the Victorians in a cycle of novels, poems, plays and penny dreadfuls throughout the nineteenth century. There were several silent films, including one with Western star Tom Mix (1925), and talking pictures in 1933 (with Victor McLaglen) and 1951 (The Lady and the Bandit with Louis Hayward). Such was the extent of Turpin’s rehabilitation that in 1965 Walt Disney could produce The Legend of Young Dick Turpin, which crossed the Turpin myth with The Adventures of Black Beauty: Dick takes to the road to save his beloved horse from a wicked aristocrat.13 Carpenter’s Dick Turpin demonstrates an awareness of the myth around the character and employs it to good effect. The series is set in 1740, after Turpin’s (supposed) execution, the first episode revealing that the man hanged at York was an imposter. (An ingenious idea, given that Turpin’s notoriety had led to other highwaymen assuming his name. In the first episode Turpin himself is held up by another highwayman claiming to be ‘Dick Turpin’.) Turpin wears the iconic attire of the highwayman of popular legend: tricorne hat, black cloak, leather boots. The atmospheric title sequence, with a gallows silhouetted against the night sky and Turpin astride his horse in the moonlight, establishes

142   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the mood. Turpin never utters the line ‘Stand and deliver’; his command to the stagecoach is always to ‘Stand!’ The role of the popular media in mythologising the figure of the highwayman is acknowledged. In ‘JailBirds’, for example, Turpin is reading a book entitled The History of the Lives of the moft Noted Highway-Men, Foot-Pads, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifts and Cheats of both Sexes, in and about London, and in other Places in Great Britain, for about forty Years Past. This is an indication of the extent of historical research undertaken for the series: there was an actual book of that title, by Alexander Smith, published in 1714.14 This can be seen both as an authenticating device and as evidence that Carpenter was fully aware of the mythology of the highwayman. ‘The Hero’, wherein Turpin aids a gauche youth to win his sweetheart’s love, is replete with references to the Turpin myth. ‘You really shouldn’t trust all you read in the broadsheets’, Turpin tells the highwaymanworshipping young woman, pointing out that the ride to York so often attributed to him was undertaken by Nevison. And in ‘The Hostages’ Swiftnick is dismayed that all the popular ballads are about Turpin and is delighted when one of the children he rescues from Glutton recites a doggerel verse about him. Elsewhere, however, Dick Turpin also draws upon another folk hero: Robin Hood. Or, rather, it draws upon the myth of Robin Hood as represented in The Adventures of Robin Hood, from which it borrows several archetypes and motifs. It would seem reasonable to assume that the influence of Sidney Cole can be detected here. So, just as Richard Greene’s Robin Hood returned from the Crusades to discover that his estates had been seized in his absence, so, in the first episode, ‘Swiftnick’, it is revealed that Turpin is a soldier who returned to find that he has been dispossessed in his absence: ‘That was a nice home-coming after fighting for England’s freedom, wasn’t it? Glutton took everything: farm, everything. All neat and legal, of course, while my parents starved to death. A right royal welcome back, that was!’ Thus Turpin is provided with moral legitimacy for his outlawry, as well as motivation for taking up arms against Glutton. Several plot devices are very similar to The Adventures of Robin Hood. The abuse of land rights and lordly privileges is a recurring theme. Thus Turpin protects villagers against illegal taxes raised by a local despot (‘The Champion’)

Rebels with a cause   143 and thwarts Glutton’s attempt to enclose common land and prevent the people from grazing their cattle (‘The Judge’). ‘The Imposter’, in which Glutton attempts to discredit Turpin by employing a thug to commit crimes in Turpin’s name (‘Turn the people’s hero into a villain … When we hunt him down I want every door shut in his face’) employs the same plot device as used in the episodes of ‘The Intruders’ and ‘The Vandals’ in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The politics of Dick Turpin, however, are more radical than The Adventures of Robin Hood. What had been at stake in The Adventures of Robin Hood was the abuse of privilege by corrupt and self-interested parties, but Robin never sought to overturn the social system. In Dick Turpin, however, it is society itself that is rotten: Turpin’s enemies are the privileged classes (aristocracy and gentry) and representatives of authority (judiciary and military). ‘The Judge’ is a particularly didactic example of contrasting social attitudes. Turpin sides with the common people against the landed classes: ‘The gentry, they’re grabbing everything they can lay their hands on. It’s happening all over the place. They’re squeezing out the small holders like apples in a cider press.’ Glutton, however, seeks to preserve social privilege: ‘The lower classes have lost all sense of their place in life. High wages, that’s at the root of it! The poorest labourer expects meat at least once a month!’ That the class politics of Dick Turpin are explicitly left-wing is left in no doubt by the thoroughly unsympathetic representation of both the aristocracy and the military. The aristocracy are invariably venal and often sadistic. The two-part story ‘The Fox’ is basically a reworking of The Most Dangerous Game: Turpin is captured by the mad Lord Manderfell, who sets him loose in order to hunt him with a pack of hounds. The military are merely sadistic. ‘The Whipping Boy’, for example, features the ruthless Colonel Moat who shoots vagrants and hangs poachers without trial in his attempt to impose order – behaviour too extreme even for Spiker. Dick Turpin also demonstrates its radicalism in its attitude towards criminality. In contrast to much juvenile fiction, which tends to assert individual responsibility, Dick Turpin lays the blame for crime and deviancy on society at large. To this extent it is informed by contemporary (1970s) discourses on criminal justice in asserting that crime is a

144   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series social problem caused by deprivation and social exclusion. Turpin has been criminalised by society: Mary: Isn’t there any justice? Turpin: Mary, you know there isn’t. Maybe if there was, I wouldn’t be on the road. The reason there is no justice is because the law is administered by the ruling classes. When Turpin faces the noose in ‘The Hanging’ he declares: ‘The law is like a flimsy cobweb. It catches the small flies and lets the big ones buzz right through. And if there was any justice left in the country, it would be you three beauties up here not me.’ (The ‘three beauties’ are Glutton, Spiker and the Lord Lieutenant who have sentenced Turpin to hang.) And in Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure he tells the feisty American heroine who has come to England seeking justice that money is ‘the only law in England. It opens doors, even buys magistrates. Do you blame me for taking the law into my own hands by putting it in my pocket?’ Here the implication is clearly that the law offers no protection to the poor and that it serves only the wealthy and privileged classes. This is virtually tantamount to a Marxist critique of society: the underlying narrative of Dick Turpin is one of class struggle. Dick Turpin, then, represents society as rotten, infested with corruption that breeds injustice. The England of Dick Turpin is a nation riven with factional strife and political vendettas. Glutton owes his position to the patronage of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister whose control of official patronage kept him in power for two decades. Further evidence of the extent of historical research that informs the series is that it refers to the Whig–Tory rivalry of the eighteenth century. Glutton is both a Tory and a Jacobite who, it is revealed, has pledged support for Bonnie Prince Charlie as the ‘rightful king of England’. In ‘The Turncoat’ Glutton holds one of Turpin’s friends hostage until Turpin recovers an incriminating letter from Glutton to the Young Pretender. In ‘Blood Money’ Glutton, wanted for treason, saves his own neck by incriminating his fellow Jacobites. The two-part ‘Sentence of Death’ borrows a motif from The Adventures of Robin Hood as Turpin saves the Count of Wittenberg, the young cousin of George II,

Rebels with a cause   145 from murderous highwayman Barnaby Husk. Unlike Robin, however, Turpin displays no sense of duty towards the Crown and scorns the offer of a pardon from the Duke of Hesse. Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure even suggests some sympathy for republicanism. This five-part serial, which brought the series to a satisfactory conclusion by offering Turpin the possibility of a new life and identity in America, focuses on Jane Hardy (Mary Crosby), who arrives in England carrying letters from her father to the Attorney General Lord Melford. Jane’s father has evidence that Sir Basil Appleyard, the Governor of Maryland, has lined his own pockets in taxes and has cheated the Crown. Hardy is described as ‘an agitator’ and is associated with independence for the colonies (‘He stirred up the people of Maryland against the Governor and the Crown’). The chief villain, Appleyard’s henchman Noll Bridger, sent to waylay Jane and prevent her from delivering the letters, is a reactionary opposed to any move towards independence: ‘This is 1740 … The British will rule America for another two hundred years.’ Jane is kidnapped by brigands in Bridger’s service but is rescued by Turpin, who, despite disavowing any interest in politics, helps her retrieve the letters. Recalling the later episodes of The Buccaneers, Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure sympathises with the grievances of colonists living under corrupt and autocratic rule in the name of the Crown. Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure is a full-blooded, rip-roaring costume romp that is replete with pouting aristocratic ladies, comely wenches and heaving bosoms in the best tradition of the Gainsborough melodramas. The production values are high – the serial is shot in the style of a feature film – with more locations and crowd scenes. There are some changes from the series. Swiftnick is maintained, though in a diminished role, but the regular villains Glutton and Spiker are absent. Turpin’s amorous exploits are more explicit than before: he is seen bedding two women (Lady Melford and Jane Hardy) and the dialogue is ripe with innuendo (‘If you’re content then I’m satisfied’; ‘I thought you came to rob me’). The ‘name’ supporting cast – Patrick Macnee as Lord Melford, Susan Hampshire as Lady Melford, Wilfred Hyde White as Appleyard, Oliver Tobias as Noll Bridger and Donald Pleasence as the leader of a secret society known as the Knights of St Catherine – suggests that Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure was produced with

146   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series wider international sales in mind. It also anticipated a revival of the highwayman film, signalled by a sexed-up remake of The Wicked Lady (1983), directed by Michael Winner and starring Faye Dunaway in the Margaret Lockwood role, and an anodyne adaptation of Barbara Cartland’s romantic novel The Lady and the Highwayman (1988), one of the last forays into film production by Lord Grade. In its representation of a deeply divided society, Dick Turpin was very much a text of its time. Britain in the late 1970s was beset by severe social and economic problems: rising crime, high unemployment and industrial unrest. These came to a head in the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79 when a series of public-sector strikes brought the country to a virtual standstill and paved the way for the election of a Conservative government with a reformist agenda. If anything, however, social and economic problems worsened in the early 1980s. Unemployment reached two million in August 1980 and passed three million in the spring of 1982 – the highest level since the early 1930s. And in the summer of 1981 there was a spate of violent race riots in inner-city areas such as Brixton in London, Toxteth in Liverpool and Moss Side in Manchester, provoked by the cultural insensitivity of the police and fuelled by a sense of social exclusion among unemployed young, black urban males. The themes of Dick Turpin, particularly the suggestion that crime is caused by the politics of poverty and social exclusion, clearly had parallels for early Thatcherite Britain.

The outlaw as hero: Smuggler (1981) and Adventurer (1987) Smuggler, comprising thirteen half-hour episodes broadcast across the ITV network in 1981, was Gatetarn’s follow-up to Dick Turpin, demonstrating equally high production values and similar social politics.15 Paul Knight and Sidney Cole were the producers, this time for HTV West, with Richard Carpenter writing seven episodes and John Kane and Bob Baker providing the rest. Dennis Abey, Jim Goddard and Charles Crichton were the directors. Smuggler was a vehicle for Olivier Tobias, returning to swashbuckling for the first time since Arthur of the Britons. Female critics were evidently still taken with his saturnine good looks: the Daily Mirror’s Hilary Kingsley suggested that the ‘grown-up girls in the office’ would ‘be happier if that opening shot …

Rebels with a cause   147

4.2  A brooding Oliver Tobias as Jack Vincent in Smuggler.

could be held rather longer (say ten minutes)’.16 Tobias starred as Jack Vincent, a former naval officer turned smuggler, with Lesley Dunlop as his romantic interest Sarah Morton and Hywel Williams Ellis in the juvenile sidekick role of Vincent’s light-fingered accomplice ‘Honesty’ Evans. Smuggler was shot entirely on location on the north Devon coast. It was broadcast on Sundays at 4  p.m. Sun reviewer Margaret Fenwood felt that ‘the whole thing looked expensive, authentic and full of promise’.17 Like Dick Turpin, Smuggler is a lively adventure series featuring some well-sketched characterisations. Its sources are films such as Jamaica Inn (1939), Moonfleet (1955) and Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow (1963), rather than any specific person or legend. The series is set at some point during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars: several references to the imminent renewal of hostilities with France suggest that it probably takes place during the period of the Peace of Amiens (1802–03). Jack Vincent is a former naval officer who has resigned his commission: it is revealed that he disobeyed orders not to attack a larger French vessel which resulted in heavy losses and serious damage to his own ship (‘An Eye for an Eye’). Vincent now plies his trade as a smuggler, running contraband along the Devon coast. His adversaries are the ‘Sharks’ – Customs and Excise officers – and a rival gang of

148   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series smugglers and wreckers led by the Kemble brothers. In the first story (‘The Right Price’) Vincent rescues a young boy named Honesty Evans from a shipwreck – the vessel has been deliberately run aground by the Kembles who moved a beacon on the shore – and meets Sarah Morton, the granddaughter of Captain König (Peter Capell). Sarah and Honesty rescue Vincent when he is tied to a stake by the Kembles and left to drown as the tide comes in. There is less emphasis on romance than Dick Turpin and no suggestion of sex – no doubt reflecting the afternoon rather than evening timeslot  – though the action sequences are plentiful and robustly handled. That a contemporary dimension was being overlaid onto Smuggler from the outset is suggested by HTV’s press release: ‘The 13 episodes are set in the early 1800s when ordinary folk were struggling under the burden of crippling import taxes – a burden lightened only by the illegal activities of smugglers.’ The protagonist is described as ‘a rumrunning Robin Hood’.18 Smuggler can be understood as a response to the economic policies of the Thatcher government. The Budget of 1979 had signalled a shift from taxation on income to taxation on spending by nearly doubling the rate of VAT (Value Added Tax) from 8 to 15 per cent, while the Budget of 1981 further increased taxes on consumption, raising £3.5 billion through additional duties on petrol, tobacco and alcohol.19 While these increases were partly offset by reducing income tax, the policy was controversial because increases in VAT and duty disproportionately affected those on lower incomes. The first episode of Smuggler refers to this very issue: Sarah: This is outrageous! Vincent: So are heavy duties and high prices, but they don’t affect you, do they? Captain Kön ig: What do you mean? Vincent: I mean you can afford to pay, while the mass of people can’t. There’s whole catches of fish rotting on the key, because fishermen can’t afford to buy salt, children running half naked in the streets because of the price of cloth. The crippling rates of duty have created a black market for a wide range of goods, including silk, brandy, rum, tobacco and tea. It is surely no

Rebels with a cause   149 coincidence that alcohol and tobacco figure prominently in the series as contraband: these have always been easy targets for governments seeking to raise revenue through so-called ‘sin taxes’. The politics of Smuggler are defiantly oppositional. It is implied that Vincent himself is from a privileged background, but his habits and manner are emphatically proletarian. He has no respect for social status and expresses an egalitarian philosophy: ‘It’s what people are, not the houses they live in’ (‘The Right Price – Part One’). He has none of the sense of duty or patriotism usually associated with the swashbuckling hero. When Sarah admonishes him for failing in his patriotic duty by refusing to re-enlist in the navy when war looms, Vincent is scornful: ‘I prefer the freedom of smuggling to the rules and regulations of the navy … Spare me the call to arms’ (‘An Eye for an Eye’). Like Dick Turpin, Smuggler legitimates its protagonist’s criminality by presenting state authority as riven with corruption. The ‘Sharks’ themselves are generally venal and corrupt. Smuggler represents the social landscape of early nineteenth-century England as one of power, wealth and privilege: ‘England’s rotten with his kind. Arrogant, merciless men, scornful of the poor and send them to wars that don’t concern them. Wars to do with power and influence, and when the wars are won, the poor come home – nothing’s changed!’ (‘Straw Man – Part Two’). And the power of the state is associated with injustice in episodes about the pressing of young men for military service (‘Press Gang’) and the fate of prisoners sentenced to transportation to a penal colony (‘The Felon’). Vincent himself is characterised as something of a reluctant altruist. He risks his life and liberty to supply contraband for all classes of society: his clientele includes both landed gentry and innkeepers. He is reluctantly drawn in to helping others, for example when Captain König is wrongly arrested on suspicion of spying for France (‘The Respectable Traitor’) or when an old smuggler known as Rummy Culbert is arrested by the Sharks (‘In at the Death’). The focus on Vincent’s outsider status and the representation of social divisions links Smuggler to Dick Turpin and can reasonably be attributed to the agency of Richard Carpenter who was the principal writer on both series. The association between the aristocracy and the military that had characterised Dick Turpin is repeated in the concluding two-part episode of Smuggler, ‘Straw Man’, where Lord Lieutenant

150   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Sir Paul Fisher, who ‘owns half the county’, and garrison commander Colonel Ward turn out to be running an organised smuggling racket on a massive scale. Vincent becomes involved when an Excise officer is murdered and he is suspected of the crime. On this occasion Vincent teams up with the hated Sharks to uncover the conspiracy. Captain Tennant tells him: ‘There is a conspiracy in the Customs service. Not the usual case of a few bribes here and there – much bigger.’ The story, and the series, ends with Vincent leaving for France as a spy. That he is still very much an outsider is emphasised by Captain Tennant’s warning that ‘if you’re caught running contraband, expect no help from us’. ‘What if I’m caught by the French?’ Vincent asks. ‘Expect to be shot,’ is the curt reply. Smuggler prompted a sequel, Adventurer, again starring Oliver Tobias, written by Richard Carpenter and produced by Sidney Cole. Adventurer was a co-production between Thames Television International and Television New Zealand (TVNZ) and was shot entirely on location in New Zealand.20 The twelve episodes were directed by Chris Bailey. Adventurer was a serial narrative rather than an episodic series, and when it came to be aired in Britain it was shown daily at 5.15  p.m. before the ITV early evening news. Media Week explained the scheduling: ‘This 12-part children’s adventure story is being shown Monday to Thursday for three weeks. It is a good piece of scheduling – the action and story might have been less effective if it had been spun out over 12 weeks.’ It added that the series ‘not only looks good and has exotic locations, but it is not full of cliches’ and suggested that it ‘is good traditional escapism, and should do well for ITV during the school holidays’.21 Adventurer is a sequel to Smuggler only in the sense that it tells the further adventures of the same protagonist: the location and situations are entirely new. It may be understood as a form of product differentiation: an attempt to ring the changes within the swashbuckling genre. Adventurer is perhaps best described as Mutiny on the Bounty meets Robinson Crusoe. The first two-part episode (‘Convict 41’) plays like an abridged Mutiny on the Bounty. It opens with Vincent, having been sentenced to transportation for life for smuggling, on a prison ship heading for the convict colony of Norfolk Island. The ship’s commander, Lieutenant Harry Anderson (Paul Gittins), is Vincent’s

Rebels with a cause   151 brother-in-law and has mistreated his sister. Anderson subjects Vincent to harsh punitive treatment, imprisoning him in the cable tier (a sort of nautical equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta) and sentencing him to fifty lashes. Believing that Vincent’s will has been broken, Anderson then tries to humiliate him further by making him his cabin boy. But Vincent is only biding his time. As the ship enters the Pacific, Vincent mounts a successful mutiny and takes control of the vessel. Anderson and the crew are cast adrift in a lifeboat: Anderson’s skill in navigating them safely to land is explicitly compared to the achievement of Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty. Meanwhile the convict ship flounders in a storm and Vincent, along with Pat Cassidy (Peter Hambleton) and George Mason (Marshall Napier), is washed up on a remote island. At this point Adventurer turns into Robinson Crusoe Down Under as Vincent and his two friends adapt to their new environment. They befriend Maru (Temuera Morrison) and are adopted by a Maori tribe. The serial chronicles their further adventures involving hostile natives, slave traders, a treasure of pearls and a crazy prophet, while all the time Anderson and his men are closing in. Adventurer has been unfairly overlooked in the popular historiography of television in comparison to the other Carpenter–Cole–Knight productions. It is distinguished by its highly pictorialist photography – comparable at its best to feature films shot in New Zealand such as The Bounty (1984) and The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) – and by a realistic period feel. It is particularly concerned to represent an authentic picture of Maori life and customs in the early nineteenth century: the credits include both a ‘Maori historical consultant’ (Dr Pat Hohepa) and a ‘Maori consultant’ (Don Selwyn). The underlying narrative of Adventurer is the emergence of cultural understanding and conflict resolution. The final episode (‘Utu’) sums up this theme. ‘Utu’ is a Maori word meaning ‘payment’ or ‘satisfaction’: both Maru (who enlists Vincent’s help in a war against a rival tribe to avenge the killing of his father) and Vincent come to realise that killing their enemy will not bring them any satisfaction. The conclusion of the serial, like Smuggler before it, is open-ended. Armstrong finally catches up with Vincent: Vincent overcomes his enemy in a (rather lacklustre) fist-fight but refuses to kill him and simply walks away. The final long shot, with the figure of Vincent dwarfed by the natural landscape, recalls the end

152   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957): here too the ending seems to be making a statement about the futility of conflict.

Radical Robin: Robin of Sherwood (1984–86) Robin of Sherwood was the most ambitious of the Richard Carpenter– Paul Knight adventure cycle (on this occasion Sidney Cole was not involved in the production). It marked a shift away from the traditional half-hour format: there were twenty-six one-hour episodes, each costing £500,000.22 Robin of Sherwood also exemplified yet another new production ecology in that it was a co-production between HTV and Goldcrest Films, which each put up half the budget. Goldcrest had been set up in the 1970s by Canadian banker Jake Eberts to provide ‘seed money’ for the development of film projects so that a package of script, director and stars could be sold to potential backers. In this way it had supported two of the most successful British films of the early 1980s, Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982). The success of these films prompted Goldcrest to enter into full-scale production in its own right with films including Local Hero (1983) and The Killing Fields (1984). It also moved into television, where its two most ambitious ventures were the HBO mini-series The Far Pavilions (1985) and Robin of Sherwood. Goldcrest’s commitment to Robin of Sherwood amounted to £7.2 million for twenty-six episodes. The first batch of thirteen cost £3.2  million, which returned a profit of £858,000, but the second batch was more expensive at over £4 million and recorded a loss of £2 million.23 Robin of Sherwood was cancelled when Goldcrest withdrew its finance. In 1985–86 it had over-invested in three expensive films – Revolution, The Mission and Absolute Beginners – which fared poorly at the box office and collectively lost £15 million.24 The production discourse of Robin of Sherwood emphasised its difference from other versions of the oft-told story. It was the first television Robin Hood to be shot extensively on location, with the West Country standing in for Sherwood Forest and Alnwick and Bamburgh castles in Northumbria providing ‘real rock and rubble castles’.25 It is also quite evident that Robin of Sherwood was understood by its producers as a tract for the times. Knight described it as ‘very un-Errol Flynn … very unromantic … a committed piece that says something

Rebels with a cause   153 about society’. Knight’s comments leave no doubt where the producers’ intentions lay: Robin is a young Saxon resistance worker fighting against the Normans. In wider terms he is the equivalent of an El Salvador guerrilla campaigning against Right-wing oppressors. What the series will show up is the vast discrepancy between the rich and the poor and the corruption and callousness of the Church … If Robin were alive today he would be a Peter Tatchell figure. He and his merry men are outcasts living from day to day, permanently on the run. There is no sunny glade for them to disport themselves in.26 There could be no clearer indication of the political meaning deliberately and schematically overlaid onto Robin of Sherwood. It was a response to Thatcherism, which in the eyes of left-wing critics resembled an oppressive right-wing regime whose social and economic policies were responsible for widening the gulf between rich and poor. Knight’s comparison to Peter Tatchell locates Robin in the context of radical political activism: Tatchell was a gay-rights activist who led a high-profile campaign against the controversial Clause 28, a section of the Local Government Act (1986) that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’. Another area where the series differed significantly from previous versions was in its introduction of a magical element. Robin becomes the adopted son of Herne the Hunter, a mysterious nature god complete with stag antlers who presents Robin with the magical Silver Arrow of the Saxons and Albion, one of the seven swords of Wayland. (Herne is played by John Abineri, thus linking Robin of Sherwood to the previous television serial The Legend of Robin Hood in which Abineri played Marian’s uncle.) Carpenter rationalised the introduction of a magical element thus: ‘This is the only English legend that doesn’t have any magic  – so I put some in.’27 This decision can be understood in two ways. On one level it might be seen as an attempt to create an authentic impression of the later Middle Ages when, as Keith Thomas demonstrated in his classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), popular superstition was widespread and belief in magic was

154   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series tacitly encouraged by the Church as a means of social control.28 This is acknowledged in the episode ‘Lord of the Trees’, when Abbot Hugo turns a blind eye to a pagan festival held in Sherwood Forest: Gisburne: I thought the church was supposed to condemn witchcraft? Abbot Hugo: We’re not talking about witchcraft, Gisburne. As long as they come to mass, have their children baptised, are married and buried as Christians, I’m not too bothered what they get up to. On another level the magical theme also reflected the revival of fantasy in popular culture, exemplified by the space opera Star Wars and its sequels, and the cycle of sword-and-sorcery films in the early 1980s such as Conan the Barbarian, Krull and Red Sonja. The relationship between Herne and his secular initiate Robin would seem to be modelled on that between Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi and his apprentice Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Another reading was suggested by Chris Dunkley: ‘Robin is a sub-messiah figure whose coming has been predicted, and Herne the Hunter plays John the Baptist.’29 The critical response to Robin of Sherwood was mixed. Reviewers were divided over its introduction of a magical theme. Sean French in the Sunday Times thought the opening episode was ‘a terrific concoction of swashbuckling adventure and dungeons-and-dragons mysticism’.30 Geoffrey Nicholson in the Observer found it ‘an acceptable little Greenwood western, nicely shot and with the action speaking louder and longer than the words’.31 This was not the view of Alexander Chancellor in the Spectator, however, who to the contrary felt there was not enough action and complained that the series’ attempts at realism did not help: ‘There is no longer enough archery and sword-fighting to keep one entertained, and in the last episode there was a Knight Templar who spoke a lot of the time in French without subtitles. It has become a bore.’32 For Maureen Paton in the Daily Express it ‘was so dismally slow and whimsical that it seemed to have been put together by an ex-hippy driven slightly dippy by the mystical cow bells ringing in his ears’.33 And Alan Coren in the Mail on Sunday thought it ‘a dingbat of the first order’ and was clearly out of sympathy with the series’

Rebels with a cause   155 entire approach: ‘Not a vestige of heroism, either romantic or smart, remains in Michael Praed’s street-wise tearaway, nor in the plucky band of Millwall supporters he has taken into Sherwood Forest in order to knock people about of an ITV Saturday night.’34 Opinion was divided, too, over the series’ contemporary elements. The use of modern language was a particular issue. Gethyn Stoodley Thomas in the Western Mail averred that ‘scriptwriter Richard Carpenter has wisely eschewed any attempt at ancient dialogue. No Middle English or Norman-French here, just simple modern stuff with a touch of Cockney and Mummerset to add flavour’.35 But Philip Purser in the Sunday Telegraph found himself out of favour with the spoken idiom: ‘Carpenter’s weaknesses have been regular lapses from good plain English into current, sloppy or – worst of all – trite English, inevitably bringing out sloppy diction and radio phone-in accents from the younger players here.’36 The 1980s saw the decline of received pronunciation and the emergence of television presenters whose speech was thought to be more reflective of society at large – especially in the area of ‘yoof’ television where the diction of presenters often irritated parents and older viewers. One aspect of Robin of Sherwood that received almost universal praise, however, was its visual style. Here the critics were unanimous. French claimed it as ‘further evidence of the astonishingly high visual quality of British TV drama now’. Stoodley Thomas thought it ‘most beautifully photographed’, describing one composition of Marion (Judi Trott) as ‘pure Pre-Raphaelite’. And Daniel Farson in the Mail on Sunday rhapsodised: ‘Seldom has our countryside been filmed to better advantage with sword play performed against a magical landscape of waterfalls and woods.’37 The emphasis on the series’ pictorial qualities – clearly an important theme of the reception discourse – locates Robin of Sherwood within the context of heritage drama in television and film during the 1980s. The pictorialist cinematography of costume drama was seen as a way of differentiating British television from American imports which, with the exception of glossy super-soaps like Dallas and Dynasty, tended towards a more low-key visual style that aimed for naturalism but often appeared under-lit. If the initial response to Robin of Sherwood was something less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic, however, the reputation and standing of

156   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the series have grown in hindsight. This might be due in part to the retrospective view of the 1980s as a second golden age of British television drama when programme-makers, radicalised by Thatcherism, produced such cutting-edge dramas as Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986).38 Robin of Sherwood might not quite make it into that exalted pantheon, but it is not far behind in the eyes of some commentators. It also came to be reappraised in response to the feature film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), which shamelessly plagiarised aspects of Robin of Sherwood. In 1986, for example, Paul Mount, writing in science fiction/fantasy magazine StarBurst, had dismissed Robin of Sherwood as ‘a load of old rubbish’ (‘It’s expensive rubbish of course – well produced, beautifully photographed, slick to the point of being greasy and carefully shrink-wrapped in its own dubious mythology – but rubbish is rubbish however it’s served up’), but five years later he felt that ‘Robin of Sherwood has certainly matured with age, refreshing in its telling of a story which has been told too often this year’ and now considered it ‘a quality British Adventure/ Fantasy series of recent vintage’.39 And for Jeffrey Richards, Robin of Sherwood is ‘superbly filmed, visually compelling, high-quality drama’ and ‘a radical, bold and wholly successful reworking of the traditional myths’.40 What, then, is the relationship of Robin of Sherwood to the Robin Hood myth? Robin of Sherwood is unique in film and television productions of Robin Hood in that it contrives to include two different Robins: Robin of Locksley (Michael Praed) and Robert of Huntingdon (Jason Connery). The change came mid-way through the series when Praed accepted an offer to star in the US soap Dynasty. Robin of Locksley, in the first series of Robin of Sherwood, is a commoner, son of Ailric, a Saxon villager killed by the Normans, who is raised by Matthew the Miller. Ailric had been a guardian of the Silver Arrow, which is passed on to the adult Robin by Herne the Hunter. This is very much a Robin of the Left: Robin of Sherwood aligns itself with the reading of Robin Hood as a proto-socialist narrative. Herne explains that it is Robin’s destiny to help the poor and oppressed: ‘I am your destiny … They are all waiting – the blinded, the maimed, the men locked in the stinking dark. All wait for you. Children with swollen bellies hiding in ditches

Rebels with a cause   157

4.3  The Hooded Man (I): Michael Praed starring in Robin of Sherwood.

wait. The poor, the dispossessed, they all wait. You are their hope.’ Robin adopts the guise of ‘Robin i’ the Hood’: Robin of Sherwood therefore presents its first Robin, in accordance with the early ballads, as a peasant folk hero. Otherwise Robin of Sherwood provides an imaginative variation on the familiar tale. In the first two-part story (‘Robin and the Sorcerer’) Robin recruits his band – a sort of medieval Magnificent Seven – comprising Marion (Judi Trott), Little John (Clive Mantle), Will Scarlet (Ray Winstone), Friar Tuck (Phil Rose), Much the Miller’s Son (Peter Llewelyn Williams) and Nasir (Mark Ryan)  – to fight the Sheriff of Nottingham (Nickolas Grace). The Sheriff is named as Robert de Raynaud and is characterised as an Anglo-Norman (‘It’s a very curious country, Gisburne. It seems to absorb people like a sponge. What do you think we are – English or Norman?’). In this version Marion is the daughter of Sir Richard of the Lea, who is believed to have been killed in Palestine (it later turns out he is alive) and ward of Abbot Hugo of St Mary’s, who is also the Sheriff’s brother. Responding, perhaps, to the rise of second-wave feminism during the 1970s, Marion has a more active role in the narrative and instead of remaining at court she lives with the outlaws and fights alongside them. Carpenter called her ‘the

158   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Patty Hearst of Sherwood Forest’.41 The marriage of Robin and Marion in a pagan ceremony presided over by Herne (in most versions they are married only after the defeat of the Sheriff and the restoration of King Richard) might be seen as a way of legitimating their relationship, which is evidently physical as well as romantic. The other characters also have a make-over. Little John is a shepherd who has fallen under a spell cast by necromancer Simon de Belleme (Anthony Valentine): sent to kill Robin, he joins him instead after Robin gets the better of him in a quarterstaff duel and breaks the spell. A major revision to the standard version is the character of Will Scarlet, played by Ray Winstone as a Cockney psychopath. Scarlet is a former soldier who is traumatised by the rape and murder of his wife by mercenaries and now driven by hate and revenge. He has adopted his surname because it is the colour of blood (‘My name was Will Scathlock. It’s Scarlet now.’) The character of Nasir is a new addition, a Saracen warrior, captured by Belleme during the Crusades and brought to England as his bodyguard. Nasir joins Robin’s band after Belleme’s death. The Saracen warrior sidekick was one of the aspects of Robin of Sherwood that found its way into Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in the character of Azeem (Morgan Freeman). The politics of Robin of Sherwood are nothing if not radical. It is informed by a popular left-wing narrative of English history that portrays the outlaws of Sherwood Forest as the defenders of an ancient liberty that has been extinguished under the rule of the Normans. In contrast to The Adventures of Robin Hood, where Robin and his men oppose specific acts of injustice, Robin of Sherwood dramatises nothing less than a full revolt against the political settlement of the Normans. In ‘Robin and the Sorcerer’ Robin makes an impassioned plea to take up arms for Englishness and liberty. He invokes the memory of the Battle of Hastings (‘That’s an old battle to bring up,’ scoffs Will Scarlet) and rouses his men to action: ‘And what’s happened to the English since, Will? I mean, where are they? Stay away from trouble? Do as you’re told and they’ll leave you alone! Is this the spirit of England?’ He explains how the Normans have suppressed the liberties once enjoyed in England: ‘Villages destroyed so that princes can hunt unhindered, the people bled white to pay for foreign wars. No voice, no justice, no England! Well, it’s time to fight back!’ Stewart Lane of the Morning Star

Rebels with a cause   159 called this ‘an almost revolutionary speech’ and it is easy to see how Robin’s call for direct action would have resonated with the British Left during the 1980s.42 What Robin is urging here is not just the overthrow of tyranny but a revolt against an entire social and political system: he has become, in effect, a class warrior. The reference to ‘foreign wars’ might be understood as an allusion to the Falklands War of 1982, which some on the left, including the Communist Party of Great Britain and organs such as the Socialist Worker, believed had been engineered by the Thatcher government to shore up its declining opinion poll ratings and to whip up a mood of popular jingoism that led to Thatcher’s triumphant re-election in 1983. There are political allusions throughout the series. In ‘Seven Poor Knights from Acre’ a renegade band of Knights Templar arrive in Sherwood seeking a stolen holy artefact. The Knights Templar are presented as a brutal paramilitary police force committed to an ideology of ‘killing for Christ’: in their first encounter they outfight Robin’s men and even the Sheriff of Nottingham is afraid of them (‘Six of the most highly trained fighting men in Europe, responsible only to the Pope, and there are another two hundred of them in Lincoln. Do you want a crusade in Nottingham?’) This coincided with the controversial use of riot police to combat ‘flying pickets’ during the bitter miners’ strike of 1984–85. Some commentators saw parallels between characters in the series and members of the Thatcher government. Stewart Lane called the thick-headed Guy of Gisburne (Robert Addie) ‘a sort of medieval Norman Tebbit’. Tebbit was the Trade and Employment Secretary who had infamously told the unemployed to ‘get on your bike’ to look for work and whose abrasive style was caricatured on the satirical puppet series Spitting Image as a leather-clad, bicycle chain-wielding bully. The radicalism of Robin of Sherwood is most evident in its attitude towards the Crown. ‘The King’s Fool’ is a highly significant episode in this regard. Richard the Lionheart (John Rhys-Davies) returns to England and, as per the standard myth, seeks out Robin in Sherwood Forest. Richard has heard of Robin and is annoyed that he is using the royal forest for his own private war with the Sheriff. Nevertheless he pardons Robin and invites him to dine at Nottingham Castle. Richard reveals his plans for war in Normandy and Robin agrees to fight with him. It is left to Little John, however, to realise that Richard has

160   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series pardoned the outlaws in order to assert his own authority in front of the Sheriff. In one of the series’ most ideologically charged scenes Little John confronts Robin: Little John: You’ve played into Richard’s hands … He’s used you. He’s used all of us … You can’t see it, can you? … He’s laughing at you. What does he care of England? How long has he ever spent here? A few months and he’s off again, isn’t he? When he’s drained the country of money … I loved you Robin. You were the hooded man, Herne’s son, the people’s hope. Now  – now you’re the king’s fool. Realising that he is being used by Richard, Robin opposes his plans for more taxation to pay for his next war (‘The poor gave willingly to pay for your freedom. How can you now …?’). Richard secretly orders the assassination of Robin and his men: Gisburne is sent to do it, but they escape and make their way back to Sherwood. The characterisation of Richard as a warmonger and a tyrant is consistent with revisionist historiography, but it represents a radical alternative to the founding myth in which the king is the embodiment of justice and defender of liberty. Whereas films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Story of Robin Hood and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves all conclude with the restoration of Richard, who pardons the outlaws, Robin of Sherwood holds out no hope for such a reconciliation. As well as representing a Robin of the Left, Robin of Sherwood also exemplifies the Green Robin Hood. It is replete with references to nature gods, druids and paganism, all of it wrapped up in a pastiche of New Age popular culture. This is most evident in the provision of a choral theme tune (‘The Hooded Man’) by the New Age folk group Clannad rather than the rousing orchestral score of other swashbucklers. Robin of Sherwood identifies Robin with a pre-Christian tradition of paganism and druidry. In ‘Lord of the Trees’ Herne presides over a pagan festival to celebrate the coming of summer and Robin participates in a ritual that ‘seals the bond between we of the forest and you of the village – between the outlaws and the oppressed’. Robin is associated with those ostracised by society, including a natural healer accused of practising witchcraft (‘The Witch of Elsden’) and a Jewish scholar versed in the ancient wisdom of the Kabala (‘The Children of Israel’).

Rebels with a cause   161 Robin of Sherwood presents a Manichean view of medieval England in which Robin represents the forces of goodness and light in their struggle against evil and darkness. Herne refers several times to ‘the powers of light and darkness’ (‘Robin and the Sorcerer’), while several episodes pit Robin against enemies with apparently supernatural powers, including a sect of devil worshippers known as the Cauldron of Lucifer (‘The Swords of Wayland’) and a witch who succeeds in resurrecting Simon de Belleme (‘The Enchantress’). The influence of The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars is evident throughout. The inspiration for the character of necromancer Simon de Belleme, for example, would seem to have been the Dark Lord Sauron of The Lord of the Rings and Darth Vader of Star Wars: he calls upon black magic (Vader’s ‘Dark Side of the Force’) and is able to draw blood from Robin without touching him. This was another motif from Robin of Sherwood that informed Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) dabbles in black magic. After completing thirteen episodes of Robin of Sherwood, however, Michael Praed left to join the cast of US soap opera Dynasty as Prince Michael of Moldavia. He was allowed a rousing exit in ‘The Greatest Enemy’, when Robin is ambushed by the Sheriff of Nottingham and is pursued by what seems like a small army. Directed by Robert Young, ‘The Greatest Enemy’ is a first-rate action-adventure and possibly one of the most violent fifty minutes in the history of family television: no fewer than twenty-eight Norman soldiers are killed before Robin makes his last stand atop a rocky outcrop and dies in a volley of crossbow bolts. However, it presented the producers with a dilemma: how to replace their star. The precedents were not good: several well-liked television series have gone into decline after replacing their original leads. It had happened to Cheyenne and Maverick in the 1950s and to The Dukes of Hazzard and Battlestar Galactica in the 1980s. The only British fantasy series to have successfully replaced its lead actor was the BBC’s Doctor Who, which invented the device of ‘regeneration’. Carpenter, however, rejected this solution for Robin of Sherwood: The first suggestion was to use magic as the excuse and resurrect him in a new body, but I thought that would look too much like Doctor Who. It was too easy, a cop out. Surely, I argued, the most important thing is the legend and the tradition of Robin Hood

162   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series persisting … Robin of Locksley is killed, but the continuity is that Herne the Hunter knows there has to be a Robin, so he chooses another. The young man he chooses is the son of the Earl of Huntingdon, which is of course the second Robin Hood legend, which arose in Elizabethan times. The Elizabethans couldn’t face the idea of a hero who was only a commoner you see! So I’ve worked both legends in, given Michael a wonderful exit, and now he’s a clothes-peg in Dynasty.43 The second Robin Hood, therefore, is Robert, the disinherited son of the Earl of Huntingdon, who appears as a mysterious hooded archer who rescues the survivors of Robin’s band at the end of ‘The Greatest Enemy’. The social differences between the two Robins are emphasised by the physical differences between the actors. Whereas Michael Praed had been dark-haired and Celtic in appearance, Jason Connery is blonde and Scandinavian-looking. For some critics Connery’s performance was as wooden as the Major Oak, but it brought an element of intertextuality to the series in that his father had starred in the film Robin and Marian: to this extent Connery was quite literally the ‘Son of Robin Hood’.44 Connery’s Robert of Huntingdon is introduced properly in the third-series opener ‘Herne’s Son’. He is characterised as an idealist who rejects the authority of his father (‘Give up this life, Robert’; ‘Not until there’s justice for all’) and is called upon by Herne to reunite Robin’s followers. Robert is torn between his belief in justice and his duty to his father; he returns to his father’s castle, while the outlaws, without a leader, disband. It is only when Marion is sexually harassed and imprisoned by the barbaric Lord Owen of Clun that Robert is spurred to action. He seeks out the other outlaws to effect her rescue. Accepted by Tuck, Robert has to persuade a sceptical Little John to follow him. John is reluctant to accept a new leader, particularly one who is a member of the aristocracy: ‘How could you understand? You ever starved? Ever been whipped because you forgot to lower your eyes when your masters rode by? No, not you – because you’re one of them!’ John fights Robert in a replay of the quaterstaff duel: the contest is a draw but John is impressed by Robert’s skill and sense of fair play. Robert’s acceptance as the new Robin Hood is sealed when Marion presents him with

Rebels with a cause   163

4.4  The Hooded Man (II): Jason Connery starring in Robin of Sherwood.

the sword Albion, thus representing continuity with Locksley. The narrative of Robert’s acceptance by the outlaws reflects the process of Connery’s acceptance by ‘the Merries’ (as the cast styled themselves), who had to adjust to the new leading man.45 The second half of Robin of Sherwood follows the thematic pattern established in the first with its balance of radical social politics and magical motifs. Although Carpenter had written all of the first thirteen episodes, the second thirteen included other writers, notably Anthony Horowitz, who wrote five episodes.46 There were several additions to the mythos. ‘The Cross of St Ciricus’ reveals that Guy of Gisburne is Robert’s illegitimate half-brother, born following an affair between Gisburne’s mother Margaret (Dorothy Tutin) and the Earl of Huntingdon. A new villain emerged in the form of Gulnar (Richard O’Brien), the former soothsayer to Owen of Clun, who leads a sect of wolfmen known as the Sons of Ferris (‘The Time of the Wolf’). Gulnar creates a clay duplicate of Robin who attempts to murder Herne: a motif borrowed from The Golem (1920) that provides further evidence of the wide-ranging cultural reference points of the series. The fantasy element of the series reached its fullest extent in Horowitz’s ‘The Inheritance’, which linked Robin Hood to another English legend when

164   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Robin encounters the ghostly apparition of King Arthur. In embracing magical fantasy to this degree Robin of Sherwood would influence, for better or for worse, later fantasy Robin Hoods such as The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997–98) and the straight-to-DVD film Beyond Sherwood Forest (2009) in which Robin fights a flying dragon. At the same time, however, Robin of Sherwood remains a serious exploration of the Robin Hood myth. The key episode in this regard is Horowitz’s ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham’, which explores the relationship between Robin and the Sheriff. King John (the third series takes place following King Richard’s death) has replaced Robert de Raynaud with the more brutal Philip Mark, ‘the Butcher of Lincolnshire’ (Lewis Collins). Horowitz suggests that the relationship between Robin and the Sheriff – like that between Batman and The Joker in Tim Burton’s film Batman (1989) – is symbiotic in so far as each needs the other to rationalise his own existence. As Gisburne tells Raynaud: ‘You made him what he is. Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. You’re two sides of the same coin … You’ll never defeat him, because he’s part of you.’ When Raynaud is captured by Robin’s men, Horowitz uses the opportunity to explore their animosity: Much: Why do you hate us? Raynaud: I hate you for what you are, and what you stand for. There’s a difference, isn’t there? You’re outlaws, thieves, murderers. But you stand for freedom, for justice, for the people. I hate you because you think so highly of yourselves. Look at you, living in this squalor! Dispossessed, doomed, but you refuse to see it. What I hate most about you is the legend that surrounds you. What are you? A motley crew. An earl’s son, a nobleman’s daughter, a giant, a bully boy. And yet the people look up to you, respect you. Why? Robin: But you haven’t told us the real reason why you hate us so intently … You’re afraid of us. The characterisation of the Sheriff of Nottingham as something more than a stock villain is one of the particular strengths of Robin of Sherwood. Later versions  – including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the BBC’s Robin Hood (2006–09) – would reduce the Sheriff to a

Rebels with a cause   165 comic villain entirely devoid of the suave menace that Nickolas Grace brings to the role. The cancellation of Robin of Sherwood after twenty-six episodes left several plot strands, notably the relationship between Robert of Huntingdon and Guy of Gisburne, unresolved. HTV was unable to continue with the expensive series once its co-production partner Goldcrest withdrew. Paul Knight tried to find a new co-production partner from America, though without success.47 Robin of Sherwood had not enjoyed any significant exposure in the US market, where it was shown on the cable station Showtime. Instead the series became one of the first to be released on home video cassette to exploit the growing market for pre-recorded films and television in the late 1980s.48 This may also have been influenced by a contractual dispute between ITV and the actors’ union Equity over the fees payable to artistes for repeat screenings which the network claimed were prohibitively expensive.49 Robin of Sherwood made a significant impact, nevertheless, upon the genre. Several of its motifs – including the proto-feminist Marion, black magic, Robin’s Saracen sidekick and his illegitimate half-brother – would feature in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991. And Anthony Horowitz also played a role in the development of Crossbow, a revisionist version of the William Tell story shot on location in France in 1986. Crossbow was that most unusual of hybrids, a Franco-American co-production, being produced by RHI Entertainment for FR3 (France Régions 3). RHI Entertainment had been set up in the late 1970s by Robert Halmi Sr and Robert Halmi Jr, and specialised in the production of television films and mini-series: its most acclaimed production was the Emmy Award-winning Western Lonesome Dove (1989). Horowitz received a ‘created by’ credit for the series, which starred American Will Lyman as Tell and Briton Jeremy Clyde as Gessler. Guest stars included Guy Rolfe (Emperor Frederick II of Austria), Brian Blessed and Robert Addie (Robin of Sherwood’s Guy of Gisburne). Nick Brimble, who would play Little John in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, had a regular part as Gessler’s soldier Horst. Crossbow acknowledged the William Tell series of the 1950s through the casting of Conrad Phillips as Tell’s mentor Stefan (‘That’s the man who taught me how to use a crossbow – he’s better than me’). Crossbow ran for seventy-two half-hour episodes,

166   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series and was shown on the Family Channel (a cable station) in America between 1987 and 1989. In Britain its scheduling was erratic with some regions showing it in the late afternoon before the ITV early evening news and others holding it back until the late evening.50 Crossbow characterises Tell as a former soldier, who has served in the Austrian army but now longs to settle into life as a farmer. He is, initially at least, a pacifist: ‘You give me a choice between war and Gessler, I’ll take Gessler any time.’ As he tells his son Matthew: ‘Your honour’s not something that can be taken away from you, son. You can lose it  – but if you do, fighting a war isn’t going to bring it back. Work, home, family – that’s what’s important.’ In this version it is Matthew who tramples the Emperor’s hat, leading to his and Tell’s arrest and the ensuing scene where Gessler – who has heard of Tell’s prowess with the crossbow – makes him shoot an apple off Matthew’s head. Tell escapes Gessler’s prison and seeks out his old army comrades – ‘the finest fighting force in the whole of the Empire’  – in order to rescue Matthew from the Emperor’s palace where he has been taken as a hostage. In this narrative, then, Tell’s reason for taking up arms against the Austrian empire is to defend his family rather than for the political cause of an independent Switzerland. Like Robin of Sherwood, Crossbow features well-staged action sequences and some convincing performances, especially Jeremy Clyde as a malevolent Gessler (‘Fear and repression [are] the twin cornerstones of good government’). The influence of Robin of Sherwood can be seen in the focus on rugged peasant heroism and the theme of the resistance fighter as a symbol. Gessler realises that to kill Tell would enhance his legend and believes that the way to beat him is to destroy him emotionally: ‘You would be more dangerous as a martyr – so you must live. But you shall watch as your friends are executed. You shall see your son beheaded, and then you shall think about it for the rest of your life.’ And like Robin of Sherwood there is a suggestion that Tell’s resistance is less a matter of individual defiance than the outcome of a deep-rooted malaise within the body politic: Emperor: So you are the man who has brought this disease to my empire. Tell: The disease was here already. I’m just the symptom.

Rebels with a cause   167 Further evidence of the intellectual ambition of the series can be seen in references to Tell and his comrades as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that suggest a sense of Biblical destiny: ‘They are not men, Highness, they are symbols. Their coming represents the end of this earthly kingdom … There is no earthly future that would be safe from them.’ This all points to Crossbow being a series of considerable cultural interest, even to the extent that one is inclined to forgive the 1980s synth-pop soundtrack. That it failed to make any significant impact, however, would suggest that by the late 1980s the half-hour episodic adventure series had exhausted its residual cultural and economic energy. Hereafter the trend in the television swashbuckler would be towards the feature-length ‘special’. Notes 1 See, for example, Lester D. Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (London, 1993). On Robin of Sherwood specifically, see Laura Blunk, ‘Red Robin: The radical politics of Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood’, in Thomas Hahn (ed.), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (Cambridge, 2000), pp.  29–39, and Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), pp. 72–5. 2 ‘Exploring the legend: An interview with Richard Carpenter’, StarBurst, 7: 11 (July 1985), p. 34. According to trade press, the first series of The Adventures of Black Beauty was ‘sold to a record 21 countries’. ‘“Black Beauty” sold to 21 countries in a year’, Broadcast, 29 June 1973, p. 4. 3 ‘Award for writers of Black Beauty’, Broadcast, 1 June 1973, p. 4. 4 ‘Team trying to follow success of Black Beauty’, Television Today, 29 December 1978, p. 14. 5 Financial Times, 10 January 1979. 6 The first series of Dick Turpin was broadcast from 6 January to 31 March 1979. The second series was split into two batches of seven (16 February to 29 March 1980) and six episodes (30 January to 6 March 1982) broken up by Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure (16 May to 13 June 1981). Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure was therefore shown out of sequence.

168   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 7 Morning Star, 4 January 1979. 8 Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1980. 9 Evening News, 24 February 1979. 10 Television Today, 18 January 1979, p. 21. 11 Dick Turpin Annual (London, 1979), p. 38. 12 James Sharpe, Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (London, 2004), p. 202. 13 The cinematic historiography of Dick Turpin is surveyed in Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), pp. 218–26. 14 Sharpe, Dick Turpin, p. 60. 15 Smuggler was broadcast weekly on the ITV network between 5 April and 19 July 1981. 16 Daily Mirror, 18 April 1981. 17 ‘What a booty!’, Sun, 9 April 1981. 18 ‘“Smuggler”  – a dashing new adventure series from HTV West’. Programme news notes dated 24 March 1981, on the BFI Library microfiche for Smuggler. 19 Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford, 1992), p. 447. 20 Screen International, 25 January 1986, p. 12. The serial was originally to have been called The Adventurer: it is possible that the definite article was dropped to avoid confusion with the ITC series of that title from the early 1970s. 21 ‘Adventure’ [sic], Media Week, 24 July 1987, p. 8. 22 There is some confusion whether there were two or three series of Robin of Sherwood. The first batch of thirteen episodes were broadcast as two series of six (28 April – 26 May 1984) and seven episodes (9 March – 13 April 1985). This was common practice for ITV at the time: Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984–5) was similarly broadcast in two blocks. The third series (thirteen episodes) was broadcast without a break (5 May – 18 July 1986). There is no explanation why, though a reasonable assumption might be that ITV was afraid that interest in the series would wane as its cancellation had already been announced and so put out all the third series in one go before this could take effect. 23 Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott, My Indecision Is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (London, 1990), p. 657.

Rebels with a cause   169 24 ‘Future of more Robin Hood hangs in balance’, Television Today, 10 April 1986, p. 17. 25 ‘Robin rides again’, Sunday Times, 22 April 1984, p. 50. 26 ‘Whatever have they done to Robin Hood?’, Mail on Sunday, 26 June 1983, p. 7. 27 Quoted in programme notes by Terry Staples for a screening of ‘Herne’s Son’ at the National Film Theatre, undated, on the BFI Library microfiche for Robin of Sherwood. 28 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971). Chapter  2, ‘The magic of the medieval church’, surveys the period before the English Reformation. 29 Financial Times, 2 May 1984, p. 21. 30 Sunday Times, 13 May 1984, p. 54. 31 Observer, 6 May 1984, p. 22. 32 Spectator, 19 May 1984, p. 38. 33 Daily Express, 31 May 1984, p. 21. 34 Mail on Sunday, 17 March 1985, p. 38. 35 Western Mail, 5 May 1984, p. 4. 36 Sunday Telegraph, 14 April 1985, p. 15. 37 Mail on Sunday, 29 April 1984, p. 37. 38 See George W. Brandt (ed.), British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge, 1993); and Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London, 2003), pp. 128–60. 39 Paul Mount, ‘TV Zone’, StarBurst, 8: 12 (August 1986), p. 38; Paul Mount, ‘Sherwood Hero’, StarBurst, 14: 3 (November 1991), p. 36. 40 Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, p. 72. 41 ‘Exploring the legend’, p. 38. 42 Morning Star, 28 April 1984, p. 4. 43 ‘Exploring the legend’, p. 38. 44 Gethyn Stoodley Thomas, for example, wrote: ‘In this first episode, “Herne’s Son”, he turns out to be Son of Sean Connery’, Western Mail, 12 April 1986, p. 9. 45 See the cast interviews in ‘The Making of Series 3’, Robin of Sherwood Series 3 Part 1 (Network DVD VFC11923). 46 Horowitz wrote ‘The Inheritance’, ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham’, ‘Crom Cruac’, ‘Adam Bell’ and ‘The Pretender’. The other new

170   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series writers were Andrew McCullough and John Flanagan, who together wrote ‘The Betrayal’. 47 ‘Robin Hood faces axe after £5m sales flop’, Sun, 24 May 1986, p. 15. 48 ‘Shock win in race to sign Robin’, Broadcast, 2 May 1986, p. 3. 49 ‘Robin Hood waylaid in forest of fees’, The Times, 27 June 1988, p. 23. 50 The series has not to date been accorded a DVD release and is available only as an edited film entitled The Adventures of William Tell (Hallmark Entertainment VFC77867).

5



Heritage heroes

Robin of Sherwood would be the last major swashbuckling series for two decades: not until the BBC’s Robin Hood in 2006 did the costume adventure return in a weekly series format. While the swashbuckler was no longer a regular feature of the terrestrial television schedules, however, it persisted in the form of one-off, made-for-television films. This trend began in the mid-1970s, when Richard Chamberlain starred in a brace of Alexandre Dumas adaptations for US television – The Count of Monte-Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask – and then gathered pace in the 1980s with new films of Ivanhoe, The Scarlet Pimpernel – both starring Anthony Andrews – and The Corsican Brothers, all backed by US networks. It continued into the 1990s with Sharpe and Hornblower, two British-made series produced as feature-length films, and a definitive French mini-series of The Count of Monte Cristo in 1998. As ever this trend needs to be understood in its institutional and cultural contexts. The increasing costs of production in the 1980s had made the swashbuckler economically unviable in the traditional episodic format – the case of Robin of Sherwood had demonstrated this – but there was still a place for one-off specials that could be promoted as a television ‘event’. These films were all characterised by their high production values, featuring location shooting, sumptuous cinematography, and elegant costumes and set dressings. They represent an alternative to the more politically radical swashbucklers of Richard Carpenter in so far as their social politics are generally conservative. Their cultural and aesthetic conservatism was an outcome of the production ecologies involved: they were co-productions that needed to satisfy both the US networks and the international partners. The style and politics of these swashbucklers associate them with the emergence of what has come to be known as ‘heritage’ drama in film and television.1 In Britain heritage 171

172   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series drama was exemplified by serials such as Brideshead Revisited (1981) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), while in the United States the advent of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1970 brought British costume dramas, such as The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs, to the attention of US audiences through its Masterpiece Theatre strand.2 The ‘heritage swashbuckler’ represented a strategy of cultural and economic differentiation: it was being identified as quality primetime drama for adult audiences rather then merely juvenile entertainment.

Primetime Dumas: The Count of Monte-Cristo (1976) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1977) The television films of The Count of Monte-Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask  – produced by Norman Rosemont Productions for ITC Entertainment  – were outcomes of two processes in the television industry during the 1970s. The first of these was ITC’s decision to change its production strategy from episodic series to stand-alone films shot either as television specials or for theatrical release. ITC had enjoyed great success in the 1960s in selling telefilm series to US networks – Danger Man, The Saint, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase and The Prisoner among them – but by the early 1970s it was becoming apparent that rising production costs were reducing the profit margins for this mode of production.3 In the 1970s ITC switched to the production of feature films and television mini-series such as Moses the Lawgiver (1975) and Jesus of Nazareth (1977). These were both produced in association with RAI, the Italian broadcaster, who would also be ITC’s coproduction partner for the two Dumas adaptations. ITC and RAI each put up half the cost, which would be recouped through pre-selling to one of the US networks with profits then coming from overseas sales. ITC’s managing-director Sir Lew Grade – who would be ennobled in 1976 – explained his philosophy thus: ‘If you spend a lot of money on a programme, the home viewer benefits. But to be able to spend a lot on a programme, you must have American sales.’4 The second process was the rise of the made-for-television film in the United States. The television film had emerged there in the mid1960s as a response to the popularity of primetime network screenings of major studio feature films such as NBC’s Saturday Night at the

Heritage heroes   173 Movies strand. The shortage of feature films new to television led to the three networks commissioning their own films. These were typically scheduled for primetime evening slots in strands such as ABC’s Movie of the Week and NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame. There were generally two types of television film. One became known as the ‘backdoor pilot’: this was a feature-length telefilm produced to test the water for a potential episodic series. ABC’s The Mark of Zorro (1974), for example, starring Frank Langella and Ricardo Montalban, was the pilot for a projected television series which in the event the network did not pick up. It was a remake of the 1940 film of the same title advertised as ‘tv’s first movie swashbuckler’.5 The other type was the stand-alone television film produced as a special ‘event’. The high ratings for some television films  – often upwards of fifty million viewers, more than twice the weekly cinema attendance in the 1970s – emboldened the networks to spend more on them. Some, such as NBC’s Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), were also released in theatrical versions overseas. The dominant genres of American television film production in the 1970s were the contemporary drama-documentary and the costume-literary adaptation.6 Norman Rosemont, the producer of both The Count of MonteCristo and The Man in the Iron Mask, was one of the leading television producers of the 1970s and early 1980s who specialised in television remakes of feature films: his filmography also includes adaptations of The Red Badge of Courage (1974), The Four Feathers (1978), All Quiet on the Western Front (1979) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982). For The Count of Monte-Cristo he recruited a stellar cast headed by Richard Chamberlain as Edmond Dantès, Trevor Howard as Abbé Faria, Tony Curtis as Mondego and Louis Jourdan as De Villefort. Chamberlain, star of the 1960s medical drama series Dr Kildare, had established his swashbuckling credentials as Aramis in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). Similar genre associations would have been evoked through the presence of Tony Curtis, who had starred in a series of cut-price swashbucklers for Universal-International in the 1950s, and Louis Jourdan, who had himself played Dantès in a Franco-Italian film of 1960. The Count of Monte-Cristo was directed by David Greene – the British director who cut his teeth on Sir Francis Drake in the 1960s before carving out

174   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series a career in American television where he co-directed the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) and Roots (1977) – from a script by Sidney Carroll. It was shot at the Cinecittà Studios outside Rome and on various locations in Italy, which accounts for the preponderance of Italian actors among the supporting cast. The Count of Monte-Cristo premièred on the NBC network on Wednesday 7 January 1976 as part of The Bell System Family Theatre. It seems to have been well received: a publication for American schoolteachers considered it ‘a production worth seeing again  – and worth recommending to your students’.7 Chamberlain and Howard were both nominated for Emmy Awards – the television industry’s equivalent of Oscars – for their performances. The film was subsequently afforded a cinema release in America and overseas. Variety, upon its theatrical release, called it ‘a creditable effort … handsomely decked out’ and demonstrating ‘a pervasive quality of earnestness’.8 In Britain critics admired its production values but generally felt it would have fared better on the small screen.9 Although it is a much condensed and simplified version of Dumas’s long and complex novel, it retains the basic story and characters. For some critics this fidelity to the source text – itself a characteristic of heritage drama – was a handicap. Richard Combs, for example, wrote in the Monthly Film Bulletin: ‘The film’s faith in Dumas as a storyteller also begins to look a little misplaced when it trips over such coincidences as the moment when Dantès gazes idly from a window with his telescope and lights on his three enemies composing the letter that will send him to the Château d’If.’10 Yet this misses the point that coincidence is a major theme of the novel: Dantès comes to regard himself as an instrument of Providence empowered by God to exact revenge upon those responsible for his unjust incarceration. The Count of Monte-Cristo maintains the moral seriousness and existential theme of Dumas’s novel. Unlike the series of the 1950s, in which Dantes had been characterised as a selfless avenger, here the focus is on his quest for revenge against the men responsible for his imprisonment on a trumped-up charge of treason. After ten years of solitary confinement in the Château d’If, Dantès meets fellow inmate Abbé Faria, whose escape tunnel has taken a wrong turn. Faria, pious and educated, warns Dantès against seeking revenge: ‘Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Edmond. Turn away from such unholy thoughts before

Heritage heroes   175 they destroy you.’ Faria, on his deathbed, reveals to Dantès the secret of the treasure of Monte Cristo, long thought lost, pledging him to use the wealth ‘in good and holy ways’. Dantès escapes by taking Faria’s place in a burial sack thrown into the sea and finds the treasure. Dantès, though, sees no incompatibility between honouring Faria’s wish and his personal vendetta: ‘Abbé Faria, I promise you by the God I have so long forsaken, I promise you I will build your hospitals and house your old – I promise you there will be a hundred good things in all the abandoned corners of the earth, and all in your name. And I promise you, Edmond Dantès – imprisoned in the prime of life, branded from the world for fourteen years – I promise you, Edmond Dantès, you shall have your revenge.’ However, the second half of the film omits entirely Dumas’s sub-plot of the young lovers Maximilian and Valentine and focuses entirely on how Dantès exacts his revenge with little reference to his charitable deeds. The Man in the Iron Mask, which premièred on NBC on 17 January 1977, was very much a companion piece to The Count of Monte-Cristo.11 Richard Chamberlain starred again, this time in the dual role of Louis XIV and his (fictional) twin brother Philippe, with Louis Jourdan as D’Artagnan. Again Rosemont assembled a ‘name’ cast, including Ralph Richardson as loyal minister Colbert, Patrick McGoohan as the scheming Fouquet and Jenny Agutter as Louise de la Villière. There was again a combination of a British director (Mike Newell) and American screenwriter (William Bast), while a sign of the prestige attached to the production was the recruitment of the veteran film cinematographer Freddie Young, three-time Academy Award-winner for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter. The Man in the Iron Mask was shot on locations in France, including the royal palace at Fontainebleau, with interiors at Twickenham Studios in London. The promotional discourse of the ‘multi-million-dollar production’ emphasised the attention to period detail (‘Some 400 costumes, valued at well over £100,000, clothed the principal actors and the scores of extras involved in magnificent Court sequences’) and the authenticity of the locations (‘filmed in many an historic chateau with time-mellowed walls and gardens of unbelievable elegance’).12 Again it was afforded a cinema release in overseas markets: the theatrical trailer positioned The Man in the Iron Mask in relation to the revival of the cinema swashbuckler in

176   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the 1970s (‘following the worldwide acclaim for the motion picture The Three Musketeers’) and stressed its visual splendour (‘filmed in historic settings capturing all the spectacle, all the pageantry and glamour of the court of Louis XIV’).13 The Man in the Iron Mask was well received upon its US network première. For the Hollywood Reporter it was ‘a superb retelling of the Alexandre Dumas classic’.14 William Bast and costume designer Olga Lehmann were both nominated for Emmy Awards. Like Rosemont’s production of The Count of Monte-Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask is a much abridged and simplified version of Dumas’s elaborately plotted tale. It omits, for example, all the musketeers bar D’Artagnan  – perhaps because this would confuse viewers who had seen Richard Chamberlain as Aramis in the two Richard Lester films – and reduces the complex political power plays of the novel to a much more straightforward tale of greed and ambition. It follows Edward Small’s film of The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) in characterising Louis XIV as a bad king – though in this case more for his sexual peccadilloes than the outright tyrant of Small’s film – and his brother Philippe as an idealistic and romantic hero. Bast made one particularly significant change from the novel: he turned Philippe into the elder twin – and therefore the rightful ruler. Louis knows of his brother’s existence, whereas Philippe, imprisoned in the Bastille, is unaware of his true identity. D’Artagnan rescues Philippe, trains him in court etiquette, and succeeds in substituting him for Louis who is sent to the Bastille in the iron mask he had devised for his brother. This marks a significant change from the novel in which Louis is rescued by D’Artagnan and Philippe is returned to prison. The ideological strategy of The Man in the Iron Mask is the legitimation of monarchy. In making Philippe the elder brother, the film ends not in the usurping of the throne but in the restoration of rightful monarchical authority (‘Your birthright is the throne of France’). Unlike the book, where Aramis hatches the plot to replace Louis in order to further his own ambition for the Papacy, here D’Artagnan becomes the instigator of the plot but is acting from a patriotic concern for the security of the nation and the welfare of its people: ‘Our shores are threatened from abroad, our people long for bread, and Louis writes odes to peace and dances the minuet!’ D’Artagnan acts from a sense of duty and responsibility (‘Our duty is to the people of

Heritage heroes   177 France’) in contrast to the self-interest of finance minister Fouquet and his puppet king Louis. Other changes from the novel concern its sexual politics. Louise de la Villière, a scheming royal mistress, here becomes a virtuous young woman caught up in court intrigue, while the final scene makes it clear that Louis’s wife Marie Thérèse knows that Philippe has taken her husband’s place but is content to remain queen in name and lead a separate life from her ‘husband’. The film’s conclusion therefore upholds social and sexual propriety as the audience is aware that there is no adultery either between ‘Louis’ and Louise (as ‘Louis’ is not in fact Louis but Philippe) or between Philippe and the queen. Norman Rosemont would belatedly produce a third Dumas adaptation, The Corsican Brothers, in 1985. The Corsican Brothers, previously filmed by Edward Small in 1941 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr, is a tale of love, violence and revenge set against the background of family vendettas in the early nineteenth century. Like The Count of Monte-Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask, Rosemont’s The Corsican Brothers was shot on location, this time in the south of France.15 It was directed by Ian Sharp, who had directed several episodes of Robin of Sherwood, from a script by Robin Miller. It starred British actor Trevor Eve, best known for the private-eye series Shoestring, in the dual role of Siamese twins Louis and Lucien da Franchi, with Olivia Hussey, Geraldine Chaplin, Jean Marsh, Simon Ward and Donald Pleasence in supporting roles. The Corsican Brothers premièred on the CBS network on 11 February 1985, and was shown in two parts in Britain. It was less well received than the previous Rosemont productions. Variety averred that it ‘takes itself so seriously the good floats right out of it. What should be stuffed full of gusto and vigor just looks dour.’16 And the Hollywood Reporter thought it ‘a somewhat flaccid “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production … Dialogue is often ponderous and superimposed over corny mandolin music. An omniscient narrator intervenes regularly to explain what’s going on, since action frequently fails to illumine.’17 I have not seen The Corsican Brothers since its original broadcast in Britain and so it would be disingenuous to offer any judgement on the film. According to the reviews, however, it seems to have been another handsomely mounted production that again offered a reasonably authentic but simplified adaptation of Dumas’s novel.

178   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

5.1  Ivanhoe (Anthony Andrews) and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (Sam Neill) in a duel to the death in Ivanhoe.

Romantic heroes: Ivanhoe (1982) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) In 1982 the CBS network backed a pair of three-hour swashbuckling specials, both made in Britain and linked through the casting of Anthony Andrews, the handsome English actor who had won plaudits for his performance as Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. These films again demonstrated Anglo-American political and cultural economies in so far as they were combinations of US dollars and British cultural capital. Their appearance at this time can surely be linked to the success of British-made costume dramas  – not only Brideshead Revisited but also films such as Chariots of Fire (1981), A Passage to India (1984) and A Room with a View (1986)  – with middle-brow American audiences.18 Ivanhoe was another Norman Rosemont production, with an American writer (John Gay) and a British director (Douglas Camfield). It was one of two television films produced simultaneously by Rosemont in Britain – the other was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Anthony Hopkins as Quasimodo  – and at £3  million it was firmly in the upper-cost bracket of television production.19 Ivanhoe was shot at Pinewood Studios and on locations in England, with Alnwick Castle in Northumbria standing in for Torquilstone Castle.20 As with

Heritage heroes   179 the Dumas films, Rosemont assembled a ‘name’ cast headed by James Mason as Isaac of York and supported by Olivia Hussey as Rebecca, Julian Glover as King Richard I (a role he had played in the Doctor Who serial ‘The Crusade’ in 1965) and Sam Neill as Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Camfield, an experienced television director whose credits included Doctor Who, The Sweeney and Danger: UXB, was hired specifically for his ability to shoot quickly: Because Norman was making a three-hour film in six weeks, it was necessary to have someone who could work on a very tight schedule. Having worked in television, I had the right background … If you’ve done a lot of television work, you learn a lot of tricks. I think anyone who was not used to the sharp disciplines of making 50-minute films in 10 or 11 days, such as the Sweeney’s and the Shoestring’s I worked on, would have found this very difficult.21 Camfield did admit, however, that, as he was hired only two weeks before filming started, he did not have time to refresh his knowledge of Sir Walter Scott’s book and instead had to rely on a revision aid for schoolchildren. Ivanhoe was broadcast on CBS in the United States on Tuesday, 23 February 1982 and on the ITV network in Britain on Sunday, 26 September. The reception was polite but less than ecstatic. Variety felt that the story ‘has an old-hat flavor’ but that it ‘still possesses enough starch to pass muster’.22 British reviews focused on its American parentage, though the general verdict seems to have been that it ‘was by no means as disastrous as might have been expected’.23 Broadcast thought the ‘duelling and jousting was done with considerable gusto’, but felt it was insufficiently realistic: ‘In 1982 for instance, I think we might expect Robin Hood to have mud on his tights and for the Norman castle to look less like a Heal’s window display.’24 A frequent charge levelled at heritage dramas is that their representation of the past tends to be too prettified to be convincing: the later BBC serial of Ivanhoe in 1997 would attempt to redress this through an insistence on grubby period details. Ivanhoe follows a similar strategy to Rosemont’s Dumas adaptations in that it is a condensed but broadly authentic adaptation of Scott’s novel.

180   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series It maintains the social context of the original  – the hostility between Saxons and Normans, and the persecution of the Jews – and most of the key events, including the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, the appearance of the Black Knight, the siege of Torquilstone Castle, Rebecca’s trial by the Grand Council of the Knights Templar, and the combat between Ivanhoe and Brian de Bois-Guilbert where Ivanhoe appears as Rebecca’s champion. The complex romantic and œdipal relationships of the book are maintained: Bois-Guilbert is attracted despite himself to Rebecca, who harbours an unrequited love for Ivanhoe, whose love for Rowena (Lysette Anthony) is reciprocated but forbidden by her guardian, and Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric (Michael Hordern), who is estranged from his own son because Ivanhoe joined King Richard on the Crusade. The script maintains some of Scott’s dialogue, while the actors – particularly John Rhys-Davies as the ‘gigantic’ Front-deBoeuf and Olivia Hussey’s Rebecca with her ‘exquisitely symmetrical’ face – bear a close physical likeness to Scott’s descriptions of his characters. The film’s principal flaw is also inherited from the book: Ivanhoe, wounded on the second day of the tournament, spends around an hour marginalised from the action while Rebecca tends his wounds and is absent from the main action sequence, the siege of Torquilstone. A criticism often made of heritage drama in both film and television is that its highly pictorialist mise-en-scène serves to distract attention away from the social inequalities of the past, which instead is presented as a site of sumptuous visual spectacle. Ivanhoe certainly exhibits its fair share of spectacle, especially in the tournament sequence where the colourful banners and surplices of the knights are displayed to glorious effect. However, Ivanhoe also focuses attention on social and religious divisions. An opening voice-over declares: ‘You are about to see a story of bold knights and beautiful maidens – a story of love and hatred and prejudice. Though our story is old, the love, the hatred and the prejudice are ever new.’ The themes of Ivanhoe are chivalry and social injustice. These are explored through two parallel narratives. The first is the oppression of the Saxons by the Normans  – a dramatic invention of Scott’s rather than a historically accurate picture of English society at the end of the twelfth century – and how this is resolved through the authority of the Crown. The two heroic figures – Wilfred of Ivanhoe and Robert Locksley (David Robb) – are Saxons who fight to protect

Heritage heroes   181 the throne of King Richard from the treacherous Prince John (Ronald Pickup) and his Norman supporters. Richard – who turns out to be the mysterious Black Knight who saves Ivanhoe during the tournament – stands for justice and national unity. He looks forward to a time ‘when we Normans learn to rule with fairness again’ and at the end of the film pledges that ‘from this day forward your king will seek a close union between Saxon and Norman’. The other narrative, which is not so easily resolved, is the narrative of anti-Semitism. There are many references throughout the film to the persecution of the Jews, who face hostility at all turns. As Isaac remarks: ‘Saxon or Norman, what’s the difference to us? … They both treat us like dogs.’ While differences between Saxon and Norman are overcome, there can be no union between Christian and Jew. Rebecca’s love for Ivanhoe is doomed to remain unrequited because of her race. It is the suggestion of miscegenation  – when Bois-Guilbert falls in love with Rebecca  – that brings about her trial for witchcraft. BoisGuilbert  – who had been a real villain’s villain in the MGM film of Ivanhoe in 1952  – is allowed a degree of redemption in this version, where it is suggested that in the final combat he allows Ivanhoe, still weak from his wounds, to kill him, knowing that Ivanhoe’s triumph will secure Rebecca’s freedom. Nevertheless, Isaac and Rebecca feel compelled to leave. As Rebecca remarks: ‘The people of England are a fierce race, and it is no safe abode for the children of my people.’ This layering of a contemporary perspective onto the film was picked up by some reviewers. Roy Connolly in the Evening Standard, for example, remarked that ‘the political message and its modern-day parallels came across uncluttered’.25 Anthony Andrews followed Ivanhoe with another classic swashbuckling role in The Scarlet Pimpernel, produced by David Conroy for London Film Productions, again with an American writer (William Bast) and a British director (Clive Donner). London Films, originally founded by Alexander Korda in the 1930s, had been revived in the 1970s as an independent producer-distributor, undertaking several co-productions in association with the BBC, including the popular costume drama Poldark and a serialisation of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. It owned the rights to The Scarlet Pimpernel – filmed by Korda in 1934 and again by Michael Powell (as The Elusive Pimpernel) in 1950

182   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series – and had wanted to remake it for some time. Conroy explained the reason for producing it as a television film rather than as either a theatrical feature or a television serial: If we’d have gone totally theatrical then a big studio would have had to have taken it on and we’d have lost control, and similarly if the BBC or ITV did it much the same thing would have happened. Also, it would have been a very different kind of product – if we’d gone the TV path then I doubt whether it would have been made on film, and I do believe that the scale and excitement of the story is better saved the way we are doing it.26 The Scarlet Pimpernel, featuring locations at Blenheim Palace, Milton Manor, Ragley Hall and Avington Park, was ‘one of the largest single television productions ever mounted’.27 Clive Donner, who directed episodes of Sir Francis Drake in the 1960s, and whose CV also included a brace of Dickensian television films in the 1980s (Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol), was interested because ‘it’s a kind of romantic adventure piece which I suppose is a little bit out of fashion. The whole style of the piece I find fascinating.’28 This was the first version of Baroness Orczy’s novel sponsored by a US producer since a long-forgotten silent Hollywood film of 1917. Since then all the film and television versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel had been by British producers. In the 1950s, as we have seen, Harry Alan Towers’s The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel had failed in America. The conventional explanation for this is that American audiences have little interest in the adventures of an English gentleman who rescues French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror. The 1982 film’s answer is to downplay the politics and to emphasise the romantic aspects of the story. It also draws upon the star appeal of Anthony Andrews, familiar to US audiences following the successful broadcast of Brideshead Revisited on PBS in 1981. The production discourse of The Scarlet Pimpernel sought to differentiate it from previous versions. William Bast said that he had ‘taken great liberties by weaving two of the stories together’ – the script combines the novels The Scarlet Pimpernel and Eldorado – and suggested that it had been necessary to refashion the story for a modern audience: ‘It was just a matter of taking some

Heritage heroes   183 fairly creaking old material that was a wonderful adventure tale  – in which the motivations and the characters are not very well drawn – and making the people more realistic and believable and their motivations more understandable.’29 The critical reception of The Scarlet Pimpernel would suggest that this approach was successful. The Hollywood Reporter called it ‘a lavishly mounted and consistently entertaining telefeature’ and praised Donner’s ‘buoyant approach and stylish execution’.30 Variety thought it ‘first-class escapism’, which ‘used devices that went out with melodrama – they still worked’.31 John J. O’Connor in the New York Times similarly wrote: ‘In many ways The Scarlet Pimpernel is a curiosity, the kind of thing that might be devised by Russian émigrés lobbying for the return of the czars. But, purely as fantasy, it still works devilishly well.’32 The Scarlet Pimpernel premièred on CBS on Tuesday, 9 November 1982 and on the ITV network in Britain as a Christmas Day special. It won Emmy Awards for Best Costume Drama and for Costume Design (Phyllis Dalton). There was some suggestion that it might be afforded a theatrical release, though in the event this did not happen.33 The Scarlet Pimpernel is a wholly satisfying production that perfectly exemplifies the style of the heritage swashbuckler with its literate script, sumptuous sets and costumes, and high-end production values. While it adheres largely to the familiar story, there are some intelligent modifications that make it more psychologically plausible. A weakness of the original, for example, is why the beautiful and spirited Marguerite St Just would ever fall for such an apparently spineless fop as Sir Percy Blakeney. The film provides an explanation for this, however, by showing Percy’s courtship of Marguerite (Jane Seymour), whom he meets after rescuing her brother Armand from a beating by two thugs. Andrews plays Percy as a romantic lover whose courtship of Marguerite develops over the first hour of the film (‘You must tell me all about yourself, in so much detail, but slowly, oh so slowly, so that it takes a very long time’) so that their marriage becomes a convincing romantic union. It is only following their wedding – when Marguerite is accused of denouncing the Marquis de St Cyr and sending his family to the guillotine – that the estrangement between her and Percy grows. It turns out of course that Marguerite has been framed by Chauvelin (Ian McKellen). Another addition, again psychologically plausible,

184   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

5.2  The Romantic Englishman: Sir Percy Blakeney (Anthony Andrews) and his wife Marguerite (Jane Seymour) reunited in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

is to characterise Chauvelin as a frustrated suitor who is in love with Marguerite and jealous of her choice of Percy as husband. In this way The Scarlet Pimpernel is able to present the animosity between Percy and Chauvelin as more than a solely ideological difference – again placing the personal before the politics. It would seem likely that the semi-American parentage of The Scarlet Pimpernel was responsible for the film’s refashioning of the social politics of the original. Bast counters the accusation that the Pimpernel is an elitist, rescuing only aristocrats from the guillotine, by introducing a scene early in the film that acknowledges the social inequality that led to the French Revolution. The Count de Tourney claims the aristocracy have been unfairly treated (‘Most of us are decent men, quite innocent. It is only a few who are guilty of any serious offence’), while his daughter argues that they brought about their own downfall (‘Yet we did bring it on ourselves, papa. We, the French aristocracy, with all our arrogance and excesses!’). In contrast to Alexander Korda’s film, which had emphasised Percy’s Englishness, Bast downplays the nationalism to assert that Percy acts from a sense of duty and altruism that is universal in character: Chauvelin twice refers to ‘your [particular sense of] noblesse oblige’. The ending is also significant. The 1934 film

Heritage heroes   185 of The Scarlet Pimpernel had ended with Percy and Marguerite sailing back to England on Percy’s yacht. The final word belongs to Percy and is an affirmation of his love for his country: ‘Look Marguerite – England!’ The 1982 film of The Scarlet Pimpernel similarly has Percy and Marguerite on the yacht but here the last word is Marguerite’s and reaffirms her love for her husband: ‘My own elusive Pimpernel.’ Thus a story that in the 1930s had served the needs of national pride and resistance to foreign tyranny, in the 1980s became an affirmation of romantic love and heritage values. The BBC, in the meantime, continued with the production of classic serials rather than stand-alone films. In the early 1980s it produced two adaptations of popular adventure novels, Beau Geste (1982) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1984), that fitted into the heritage paradigm. Barry Letts, who produced both serials, said that his policy was to adapt ‘old best sellers’ in a style that was different from the well-known film versions of the same stories: ‘Hollywood always built its production around star names of the time. But we are doing it through realism and accuracy.’34 Douglas Camfield directed the eight-part Beau Geste, which starred Benedict Taylor, Anthony Calf and Jonathon Morris as the three brothers, Beau, Digby and John, who join the French Foreign Legion. It is a workmanlike adaptation that emphasises the psychological motivation of the characters as much as the action. The Prisoner of Zenda, directed in six parts by Leonard Lewis, is more a genuine swashbuckler than Beau Geste. It starred Malcolm Sinclair in the dual role of Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf of Ruritania, Victoria Wicks as Princess Flavia, John Woodvine as Colonel Sapt, George Irving as Black Michael and Jonathon Morris as Rupert of Hentzau. Like Beau Geste it is a faithful adaptation that privileges characterisation over action. Hugh Herbert in the Guardian praised its ‘lavish production values’ and ‘fast direction’.35 The Prisoner of Zenda was also shown in three one-hour episodes on the Arts & Entertainment Network, an American cable channel, in the summer of 1986, when it was timed to coincide with the royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.36 It would be fair to say that neither serial displaced the definitive Hollywood versions of the same stories starring Gary Cooper (Beau Geste) and Ronald Colman (The Prisoner of Zenda) and that comparisons generally left the BBC serials wanting. Although they

186   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series were not in the same class as the swashbuckling films on the commercial channel, they were nevertheless made with high production values by the standards of BBC drama (Beau Geste, for example, cost some £600,000), while their fidelity to the source texts is consistent with the cultural strategy of the heritage swashbucklers.

Boy’s own epics: Sharpe (1993–97) and Hornblower (1998–2003) Following a decade in which swashbuckling specials had been possible only with the backing of US networks, the 1990s saw British television produce two high-quality, expensively mounted costume adventure series. In the 1990s the deregulation of British television – signalled by the Broadcasting Act of 1990  – created a new broadcasting ecology. With the industry opening up to new providers, including satellite and cable channels, and the relaxing of restrictions on the operations of ITV contractors, producers were able to develop new funding arrangements. The restructuring of the ITV network following new franchise awards in 1992 and a series of mergers between regional contractors saw the emergence of three large conglomerates  – United News and Media, Carlton Communications and the Granada Media Group  – that now dominated the network. The ‘big three’ companies were more able to invest in expensive drama productions than the smaller contractors. This was the institutional context for the production of both Sharpe and Hornblower. Sharpe was a wholly British-funded production, while Hornblower was a co-production with the Arts & Entertainment Network. They represented a combination of the television special and the episodic series in so far as each was a series of occasional feature-length films. The strategy of staggering the screenings at irregular intervals was intended to maintain the sense that each new episode was a special event. This did not go down well with some critics, however, who complained that ‘occasional’ really meant ‘arbitrarily scheduled’.37 Sharpe  – based on the series of historical novels by Bernard Cornwell – was produced by Celtic Films for Central Television. It ran for some fourteen feature-length films between 1993 and 1997, with two further two-part stories in 2006 and 2008.38 Cornwell’s novels chronicle the career of rifleman Richard Sharpe during the Napoleonic Wars: the

Heritage heroes   187

5.3  Boys’ Own Heroes (I): Sean Bean as Lt Richard Sharpe in ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’, Sharpe.

stories are to a large extent inspired by C. S. Forester’s Hornblower in that they are set against a real historical background but were written out of chronological sequence. Celtic Films was a partnership between Muir Sutherland, former sales director of Thames Television, and Malcolm Craddock, hitherto best known as producer of drama serial The Orchid House for Channel 4. Central Television – the successor to ATV as ITV franchise holder in the Midlands and itself part of Carlton Communications – agreed to back Sharpe at a cost of £1.2 million per film.39 Carlton had come under criticism from quality watchdogs for the low-brow nature of much of its programming, particularly what many regarded as a surfeit of light entertainment, and to this extent its decision to support Sharpe can be seen as an attempt to ‘quash fears that the franchise awards system would force independent channels to abandon high-quality drama in favour of cheaper, populist game shows’.40 Even with the backing of a major television company behind them, Sutherland and Craddock had to find ways of economising to keep their budget down. This meant shooting on location in Ukraine. This was only two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the infrastructure of the Soviet film industry was still largely intact. Sharpe reportedly used props and costumes from Sergei Bondarchuk’s Napoleonic epics War and Peace (1967) and Waterloo (1970).41 On location the programme makers had to contend with the presence of the local Mafia and the chronic unreliability of the Russian airline Aeroflot.42 The

188   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series biggest problem, however, came when their star Paul McGann, originally cast as Sharpe, twisted his knee during a game of football a few days into filming of the first episode ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’. Sean Bean, the Sheffield-born actor then carving out a Hollywood career as a heavy villain in films such as Patriot Games and GoldenEye, was a last-minute replacement.43 Eight feature-length films were shot in Ukraine over the next three years, after which the production base moved to Turkey. Craddock explained the decision to relocate thus: ‘Some of the leading actors found shooting in the Ukraine for sixteen weeks at a time very trying. And we wanted a change of landscape because we had to show the Pyrenees mountains.’44 Sharpe was nothing if not a streamlined production. Each episode was directed by Tom Clegg – an experienced television director whose credits included numerous episodes of The Sweeney  – with a 30-day shooting schedule. The motto of the series was ‘A big screen film for the small screen’.45 The cinematic ‘look’ of Sharpe was achieved by shooting on Super 16-millimetre using Arriflex cameras and transferring to Beta tape for editing. Half the episodes were written by Eoghan Harris, with other contributions from Nigel Kneale (the pioneering television writer of The Quatermass Experiment) and Charles Wood (writer of Tony Richardson’s 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade). The regular supporting cast included Daragh O’Malley as Sharpe’s sidekick Sergeant Patrick Harper and Hugh Fraser as the Duke of Wellington (replacing David Troughton, who appeared in the first two episodes sporting a bizarre artificial proboscis). Sharpe also provided early roles for up-and-coming British acting talent, including Daniel Craig (‘Sharpe’s Eagle’), Elizabeth Hurley (‘Sharpe’s Enemy’), Emily Mortimer (‘Sharpe’s Sword’) and Paul Bettany (‘Sharpe’s Waterloo’). Sharpe was both a popular and a critical success. It regularly drew audiences of between ten and twelve million.46 Reviewers on the whole found it rousing, old-fashioned entertainment, with the popular press, especially, often invoking the metaphor of the Boy’s Own Paper. For David Thomas in the Sunday Express, for example: ‘The 10-year-old boy in me loved every minute of Sharpe. And the thirtysomething critic had a pretty good time, too.’47 Peter Paterson in the Daily Mail was another admirer: ‘Sharpe represents schoolboy adventure  – the exhilarating beat of regimental drums, the marching step of the brutal,

Heritage heroes   189 licentious soldiery, courage, betrayal, gory battles, the perfidiousness of the French enemies, the untrustworthiness of Spanish allies – a gloriously uncomplicated, utterly politically incorrect world.’48 A. A. Gill made much the same point in the Sunday Times: ‘After the dour toothsucking, red-brick PC nanny in the back of the telly, it’s a real pleasure to have a great big chunk of old-fashioned narrative history to chew on. This is the sort of stuff that makes you excited about the past and not guilty about it.’49 A different sort of agenda informed the response of the Sun’s Gary Leboff who concluded his review of the first episode by declaring that ‘Sharpe blasted a loud message towards Shepherd’s Bush. The Beeb musket [sic] their house in order or risk their monopoly on costume drama.’50 However, there were some dissenters, who found the scripts clichéd in the extreme. John Naughton in the Observer was one: ‘The plot, such as it was, involved Sharpe leading a squad of roughnecked stereotypes on the time-honoured perilous mission behind enemy lines … Sharpe’s Rifles is the kind of thing that gives typecasting a bad name.’51 Sharpe would indeed lead his men on many more perilous missions behind enemy lines in the course of the series: this was an economic strategy more than anything in so far as side-lining Sharpe during events such as the battles of Talavera or Salamanca helped to keep costs down. John Casey in the Daily Telegraph disliked Sharpe for a different reason: that its content was so evidently informed by the present that it provided a historically inauthentic representation of history: ‘What Sharpe most reveals is a total lack of curiosity about any time other than our own. It is full of confusing signs about contemporary Britain … Like American westerns and science-fiction dramas, Sharpe is nervously preoccupied by current politics – hence the importance in the current series of Irish troops and their loyalty or treachery.’52 The production discourse of Sharpe was at pains to assert its historical authenticity. It employed self-styled ‘Rifleman’ Richard Moore – an expert on the Napoleonic Wars – as its military adviser.53 Sharpe does not flinch from presenting the brutality of nineteenth-century military life, including floggings and battlefield amputations without benefit of anaesthetic. One critic, Max Davidson, averred that ‘side by side with the corny plot was the most subtle and evocative portrait of what it felt like to be a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars’.54 However, it is an

190   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series unashamedly Anglocentric view of the Napoleonic Wars. Sharpe is set mostly in Portugal and Spain during the Peninsular War (1809–14) – a campaign regarded by military historians as something of a sideshow – while the finale of ‘Sharpe’s Waterloo’ presents the battle as a purely British victory: ‘Let’s see if we can find something for them to do’, remarks Wellington when the Prussian army arrives with the battle already won. The presentism of Sharpe mentioned by Casey is most evident in the series’ acute sense of class politics. Sharpe is an officer raised from the ranks  – he is promoted after saving the British commander-inchief Sir Arthur Wellesley from an attack by French hussars  – and a recurring theme throughout the series is the snobbery he faces from his fellow officers who consider him not ‘one of us’. Most episodes feature an upper-class officer – usually played by a ‘snob’ actor such as Julian Fellowes (‘Sharpe’s Rifles’), Michael Cochrane (‘Sharpe’s Eagle’), Jeremy Child (‘Sharpe’s Enemy’) or Nicholas Farrell (‘Sharpe’s Regiment’) – who clashes with Sharpe over some matter of discipline or etiquette. There is usually a pointed remark to the effect that Sharpe does not belong in the officer’s club: ‘We have standards here, Sharpe. An officer must behave like a gentleman, even if he is not a gentleman’ (Major Dunnett in ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’) and ‘I have yet to meet an officer who has come up through the rank and file of the army who can find it possible to fit, as it were, to be one of us’ (Colonel Windham in ‘Sharpe’s Company’). Sharpe is also, initially at least, disliked by the men under his command who exhibit a peculiar form of reverse snobbery. As Captain Murray tells him: ‘The lads don’t like an officer who’s come from the ranks. They want an officer to be privileged, to be set apart from them, touched by grace. They think of you as one of them, Sharpe, one of the damned’ (‘Sharpe’s Rifles’). The main narrative of ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’ is how Sharpe wins the respect of his ‘chosen men’ – sharp shooters whose skill with the Baker rifle has earned them a privileged place in the British army. This is another indication of the series’ commitment to historical authenticity: the Rifle Brigade had been formed in 1800 and was noted for a closer relationship between officers and men than regular infantry regiments. Sharpe is a resolutely proletarian hero: in this regard he is an unusual protagonist for a heritage swashbuckler. He is surely the only

Heritage heroes   191 swashbuckling hero ever to tell a potential love interest: ‘My mother was a whore, born in a brothel, grew up in an orphanage, and hope to die in the army’ (‘Sharpe’s Rifles’). The casting of Sean Bean – a virile and highly physical actor who plays every role from the gamekeeper Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Russian aristocrat Vronsky in Anna Karenina and warrior-prince Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in the same broad Sheffield accent – further emphasised Sharpe’s working-class origins. Author Bernard Cornwell was so impressed with Bean’s performance that in the later novels he adapted Sharpe’s background to fit the television character: ‘Once he started playing Sharpe I had him in mind as I wrote. I could hear that Yorkshire voice in my head.’55 However, the class politics of Sharpe do not translate, as one might expect, into a radical or oppositional ideology in the manner of Robin of Sherwood. Sharpe may be of lowly origin but he is no class warrior: he accepts the discipline of the army and the social order. He is an unequivocal patriot, and, for all his rough edges and blunt language – one critic observed that ‘his longest sentence strung together about six insults’ – regards it as his duty to protect all women regardless of their class or nationality.56 Sharpe suggests that to be an officer and a gentleman is not a matter of birth and upbringing but one of values and behaviour: for this reason he belongs to the family of swashbuckling heroes. The politics of Sharpe are in fact highly conservative: the stereotypes are not confined to the upper-class officers and ‘scum of the earth’ infantrymen of Wellington’s army. Sharpe presents the Napoleonic Wars as a straightforward narrative of ‘us’ against the ‘Frogs’ and at every opportunity asserts the moral and political superiority of the British over their French enemies and their Spanish and Dutch allies (‘You, sir, are a silk stocking full of shit,’ Sharpe tells the Prince of Orange in ‘Sharpe’s Waterloo’). The resort to popular stereotypes (‘Stand until you can smell the garlic!’ Sharpe tells his men in ‘Sharpe’s Eagle’) and the prominence of national epithets in Sharpe can be seen as an expression of a deeply held ideological conservatism. Is it too fanciful to suggest that the popularity of Sharpe reflected the popular xenophobia that characterised British attitudes towards Europe in the 1990s? Nowhere is the underlying conservatism of Sharpe more evident than in its gender politics. Sharpe presents a world-view in which it is

192   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the men’s role to fight, while women are characterised either as helpless maidens in need of rescue or as camp followers (prostitutes) whose role is to service soldiers’ carnal appetites. It is true that the first major female figure  – Spanish guerrilla leader Teresa (Assumpta Serna)  – is something of an exception to this rule, but as if to prove that a strong female is too problematic for Sharpe she is killed off after only four episodes. Otherwise the recurring female characters are characterised either as predatory aristocratic ladies who are after a bit of ‘rough’, such as Lady Anne Camoynes (Caroline Langrishe), or, in the case of Sharpe’s second wife Jane Gibbons (Abigail Cruttenden), as a dimwitted social climber. Jane finally leaves Sharpe for a society rake and absconds with her husband’s hard-won fortune. Sharpe exhibits what might be described as an acute anxiety about female sexuality: women are either sexually and emotionally damaged (Teresa is a Spanish aristocrat who has been raped by French soldiers) or use their sexuality for their personal advantage. Indeed there is an undercurrent of misogyny running throughout Sharpe. It is common for women to be roughly treated, yet for this treatment to be seen in some way as deserved. In ‘Sharpe’s Enemy’, for example, Sharpe is sent to rescue Lady Farthingdale (Elizabeth Hurley), who is being held by a gang of army deserters led by Obadiah Hakeswill (Pete Postlethwaite). Hakeswill humiliates Lady Farthingdale by making her strip (‘Show me yer goodies, milady’) and threatens her with rape if a ransom of 500 guineas is not paid (‘That buys the lady’s virtue, but only for five days. If you’re a minute late we’ll bust ’em, share ’em around the boys, and a good bustin’ it’ll be too.’) Sharpe, however, has recognised Lady Farthingdale as a former prostitute whose services he has enjoyed. There is a sense in which Lady Farthingdale’s humiliation is seen as a payback for her former life. However, the unpleasantly misogynist content of the episode seems to have passed unnoticed by critics who preferred to make light of the scene with facile comments about Elizabeth Hurley’s cleavage.57 The success of Sharpe prompted speculation about a possible theatrical feature film, which was first mooted in 1996.58 The plan was to film Cornwell’s novel Sharpe’s Tiger, a prequel set in India in 1803. However, the film did not materialise. According to Malcolm Craddock: ‘There was no interest in it in North America, and the US domestic market is

Heritage heroes   193 the engine which powers all cinema distribution deals and governs all the rest of the world.’59 In the event a further two stories would be made – ‘Sharpe’s Challenge’ and ‘Sharpe’s Peril’ – in 2006 and 2008. These were shot on location in India and had Sharpe and Harper combating renegade maharajahs and treacherous officers of the East India Company. They exhibit much the same social and gender politics as the regular series except that the still evident misogyny is now overlaid with an additional racial dimension: in both stories white European women are threatened with rape by their Indian captors. ‘Sharpe’s Challenge’ also includes a scene where the villainess Madhuvanthi (Padma Lakshmi) presides over the whipping of an Indian princess. These stories demonstrate higher production values than the Sharpe episodes of the 1990s, with each two-parter costing £4 million. They were made under different production arrangements. Craddock and Sutherland still produced for Celtic Films, but now the funding came from a consortium including ITV1 (which had the UK broadcast rights), BBC America (US broadcast rights), BBC Worldwide (non-US overseas rights), 2Entertain (DVD rights), HarperCollins (publisher of the Sharpe books) and the Azure Film Equity Fund.60 Hornblower  – which ran to eight feature-length episodes between 1998 and 2003 – was an even more ambitious undertaking than Sharpe.61 It also had a difficult production history. There had been previous, unsuccessful attempts to mount C. S. Forester’s seafaring yarns by the BBC in the 1960s and by Thames Television in the 1970s. Malcolm Craddock and Muir Sutherland saw Hornblower as a natural followup to Sharpe, and proposed the series to ITV Network Centre in 1995. Network Centre was a central organisation for the commissioning and scheduling of programmes on ITV, which was established in 1992. It was run by a committee of all the franchise holders but in practice its decisions reflected the priorities of the ‘big three’. Four two-hour episodes were commissioned at a total cost of £12 million. Hornblower was to be produced by Celtic Films for Meridian Broadcasting in association with the Arts & Entertainment Network  – a US cable network that like Home Box Office (HBO) had set its sights on high-end drama that would stand out from the offerings of the main US networks. However, the filming of Hornblower was beset by numerous delays, including the construction of a full-size replica of a Napoleonic-era frigate and

194   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series bad weather conditions in the Black Sea. The delays led United Film and Television to exercise its option for an ‘agreed takeover’ of the series, which it took in house: Celtic Films would receive a credit for the ‘development’ of Hornblower.62 According to its executive producer Vernon Lawrence: ‘Hornblower is without doubt one of the most expensive and technically complicated series to have been produced for television. It is a prestigious piece of work that encapsulates traditional values and standards, against a background of naval life and action.’63 The publicity materials made much of the construction of a full-sized vessel, known as the Grand Turk after boat builder Michael Turk, which took the role of the frigate HMS Indefatigable. The naval battles for Hornblower used state-of-the-art film techniques with a combination of large-scale models in the water tank at Pinewood Studios (a facility used for the James Bond films) and computer-generated special effects produced through a process known as Quantel Editbox: most of the effects sequences are so-called ‘invisible effects’, which are used to enhance model shots and to achieve visual realism.64 The production team for Hornblower brought together some top-drawer talent, including costume designer John Mollo, a double Academy Award-winner for Star Wars and Gandhi, and director of special effects photography Roy Field, who had won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Superman. Hornblower was shot on location on the Black Sea coast near Yalta and at Sesimbra, south of Lisbon. Like Sharpe it had the same director (Andrew Grieve) throughout, which ensured stylistic consistency. Ioan Gruffudd, a hitherto unknown young Welsh actor who had appeared in James Cameron’s Titanic, was cast in the title role, with Robert Lindsay as his mentor Sir Edward Pellew and Paul McGann in the later episodes as Hornblower’s friend and comrade Lieutenant Bush. Hornblower was positioned as quality drama intended for an ‘elusive, upmarket male audience’.65 The first series – ‘The Even Chance’, ‘The Examination for Lieutenant’, ‘The Duchess and the Devil’ and ‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’ – was screened in Britain in 1998–99 and averaged audiences of 8.8 million. In the United States Hornblower won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Mini-Series.66 It seems to have been this success which led to the commissioning of further episodes.67 However, it was another three years before the next episodes

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5.4  Boys’ Own Heroes (II): Ioan Gruffudd as Lt Horatio Hornblower in ‘The Duchess and the Devil’. Hornblower.

were shown: the two-part story ‘Mutiny’ and ‘Retribution’ in 2002 was followed by the final two episodes, ‘Loyalty’ and ‘Duty’, in 2003. The occasional scheduling of the series  – and the hiatus between the first and second series – meant that it never quite matched the popular success of Sharpe, though it is a superior production in all regards. The reception of Hornblower to a large extent mirrored that of Sharpe, with critics on the whole admiring it as a rousing old-fashioned adventure even if they were disinclined to take it too seriously. Paul Hoggart in The Times found it ‘charmingly unsophisticated … These lavish productions are always fun in a small-Fifties-schoolboy-playingwith-his-toys sort of way … Hornblower is just about as close as we get to a British western.’68 James Walton in the Daily Telegraph felt that ‘its determination to play such old-fashioned material absolutely straight proved wise as well as courageous’.69 For Rupert Smith in the Guardian it was ‘a delightful, occasionally exciting relief from the ordinary business of TV drama’.70 The most outspoken review came in the Sun which, again reflecting the response to Sharpe, declared: ‘Hail Hornblower! ITV’s latest drama event fires a broadside at everything that’s wrong with today’s TV. It is patriotic. It’s aimed at men. And it celebrates values telly liberals normally sneer at  – courage, loyalty, decency, duty, enterprise.’71 A few critics, such as Jasper Rees in the Independent, sneered at the scripting and acting: ‘Hornblower may have taken its brief to pack the screen with carpentry a mite too literally. The

196   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series characters are hewn from the same timber as the vessels that carry them. No wonder their creator is called Forester.’72 And one Forester pedant felt it had taken too many liberties with the original stories: Hornblower started well and I found myself enjoying the period details (correct flag etc) until the scene where Hornblower goes ashore with Mr Simpson on press gang duties. It was of absolute importance that the game of cards was whist, although this was glossed over. Whist is an important sub theme throughout the Hornblower books. The programme went rapidly down hill from that point. Hornblower’s transfer to the Indefatigable was because of his whist abilities and not because some French king had his head inconveniently chopped off. There were the needless changing of Muggeridge’s name to Matthews, Lt Eccles becoming Lt Ecclestone, the lack of mention of Hornblower’s friend Bracegirdle, the ‘rats’ episode appearing before the ‘Marie Gelante’ and not afterwards etc. It may have been an insight into the Navy at the end of the 18th century but it was not the Hornblower of C. S. Forester.73 Whist or no whist, it might be taken as a sort of back-handed compliment that Hornblower attracted the sort of nit-picking criticism about its textual authenticity usually reserved for television adaptations of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In fact Mr Bracegirdle (Jonathan Coy) does feature in ‘The Even Chance’ and other early episodes. In some respects, indeed, the most remarkable aspect of Hornblower is its fidelity to the original stories. C. S. Forester published eleven Hornblower novels beginning with The Happy Return in 1937 and ending with the unfinished Hornblower and the Crisis in 1967. The books were written out of chronological sequence: The Happy Return – basis of the 1950 Warner Bros. film Captain Horatio Hornblower RN starring Gregory Peck – has Hornblower already a full captain with his own ship. The first series of Hornblower is based on episodes from Mr Midshipman Hornblower, the fifth book published but the first in chronological sequence, chronicling Hornblower’s early days in the Royal Navy. The decision to start the television series at the start of Hornblower’s career was a bold one: the idea, clearly, was to show

Heritage heroes   197 his transformation from seasick young midshipman to inspirational leader. One cannot imagine, say, Star Trek with James T. Kirk (whom Gene Roddenberry based on Hornblower) as anything other than captain of the starship Enterprise. The realised television episodes cover Hornblower’s career from 1793 (‘The Even Chance’) to 1803 (‘Loyalty’ and ‘Duty’, based on Hornblower and the Hotspur). Ioan Gruffud’s characterisation of Hornblower is consistent with Forester: he is courageous, certainly, and proves his mettle in battle, but he is also somewhat introspective, highly self-critical and prone to selfdoubt. Although no less authentic than Sharpe in its representation of the Napoleonic Wars – the battle sequences are effectively staged and include a realistic level of detail  – Hornblower demonstrates neither the acute sense of class politics nor the casual misogyny of Sharpe. The Royal Navy is presented as a meritocracy where officers are promoted according to their skill and ability rather than their connections: Hornblower’s promotion to lieutenant is recognition for his outstanding courage and leadership. And when the obligatory aristocratic officer appears – such as Major the Lord Edrington (Samuel West) in ‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’ – he proves to be a highly competent commander who accepts Hornblower as a fellow officer. The anti-aristocratic social politics of Sharpe are displaced here onto the French. In ‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’, for example  – in which Captain Pellew is tasked with landing a party of French Royalists to foment a counter-revolution – it is the Marquis de Moncoutant (Antony Sher) who is characterised as an aristocratic reactionary (‘A republic – a country run by peasants – is a contradiction of all the natural laws’) in contrast to Hornblower’s faith in meritocracy (‘Forgive me, sir, but I have always held it that any man may better himself, no matter how humble his situation’). And there is little opportunity for misogyny, if only because women are largely absent from Hornblower’s masculine world. Hornblower himself is somewhat uneasy in female company – demonstrated when he has to escort a titled aristocratic lady back to England (‘The Duchess and the Devil’) – but in the true spirit of the swashbuckling hero he is unfailingly chivalrous in protecting the sanctity of womanhood. In contrast to Sharpe, who enjoys a series of amorous encounters and who is no novice when it comes to love-making, for Hornblower his marriage to

198   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series his landlady’s daughter Maria (Julia Sawalha) in ‘Duty’ is a more nervewracking experience than facing the enemy in battle. The recurring themes of Hornblower – which evidently appealed to the Sun’s critic  – are patriotism and the ethos of duty. To this extent Hornblower belongs squarely within that lineage of patriotic naval swashbucklers, including The Buccaneers and Sir Francis Drake. It is an unashamed testament to heroism. The role of Hornblower’s mentor Captain (later Admiral) Pellew is often to assert the code of patriotism. At the end of ‘Retribution’ he remarks: ‘Nations need heroes, Mr Hornblower. Heroes make us believe the impossible is achievable.’ Above all Hornblower is an assertion of the strength and fighting prowess of the Royal Navy. The Senior Service has traditionally been held in greater affection by the British public than other branches of the armed services. Hornblower presents the Royal Navy as the shield that protects Britain from invasion and as the instrument for the projection of British power overseas. When war breaks out with Revolutionary France, Captain Pellew tells his men: ‘The old enemy wears a new face, but whatever mask he hides behind a Frenchman is still a Frenchman and we will beat him as we always have, for there is no power on Earth that can withstand the power of the British Navy. God Save the King!’ (‘The Even Chance’). And the naval ethos privileges a sense of duty above all: ‘When we put on this uniform, Mr Hornblower, we entered into a life of adventure and adversity, but above all a life of duty – a duty to our king, our country, but above all also a duty to our men. We must always be a source of inspiration to them, Mr Hornblower, and whatever may befall us – whatever – we must never forget we are officers in His Majesty’s Navy’ (‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’). Unlike Sharpe, where the protagonist’s leadership qualities are in place from the first episode, Hornblower demonstrates the process through which those qualities are learned. He prospers under the tutelage of Captain Pellew when he is posted to HMS Indefatigable: ‘I see something in you, Mr Hornblower. If you continue in the Service in the way you’ve begun, a great future awaits you’ (‘The Even Chance’). Although doubting himself, Hornblower wins the respect of the crewmen in his section first through his concern for a wounded shipmate during an engagement with the French and then through a feat of navigation when  – having been forced to abandon a captured prize ship

Heritage heroes   199 and finding his own men outnumbered by the French crew in the lifeboat – he tricks the French into taking the wrong bearing and returning them safely to the Indefatigable. Hornblower’s style of leadership is in marked contrast to Sharpe’s ‘up and at ’em lads’: he is thoughtful and calculates the odds before risking the lives of his men. This is seen as a quality of a good leader: ‘Let us hope he does not abandon his customary caution’, remarks Major Edrington (‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’). Yet Hornblower is more than just a study in leadership. Like all great swashbuckling heroes, Hornblower stands for justice, fairness and tolerance. He stands up to tyrants whether in the form of a bullying midshipman who resents the smarter new boy (‘The Even Chance’) or a senior captain whose erratic decision-making and unfairly harsh treatment of his officers endangers the ship (‘Mutiny’). In the latter episode Hornblower justifies his participation in a move to relieve Captain Sawyer (David Warner) from his command by asserting the code of duty: ‘I believe it was our duty to restore order and discipline aboard ship, sir … It was for the good of the Service.’ Although he recognises the importance of discipline, Hornblower clearly dislikes some of its harsher manifestations. He is opposed to flogging on principle: on the one occasion in the series where he orders the flogging of one of his own men (‘Loyalty’) under the Articles of War, it transpires that he is innocent of the offence of which he has been accused. He allows his personal steward to escape punishment for striking a superior officer because it would be a hanging offence (‘Duty’). He demonstrates throughout an unwavering belief in fair play – even when it may have personally unwelcome consequences. For example in ‘The Duchess and the Devil’, where Hornblower and his men have been captured by the Spanish, Hornblower not only takes the blame for a failed escape by an impulsive crewman, knowing that it will lead to his confinement in a tiny punishment cell, but later returns to the prison having given his parole (his word as an officer and a gentleman) that he would not try to escape. On this occasion the Spanish also demonstrate a sense of fair play: Hornblower is released for his role in rescuing Spanish sailors shipwrecked during a storm. In its high-end production values, fidelity to the source texts and superbly executed action sequences, Hornblower is one of the supreme achievements of the costume adventure series. Yet in certain ways it

200   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series is a curiously anachronistic text. On the one hand Hornblower could not have been made before the 1990s: such an ambitious undertaking was possible only due to a combination of institutional and economic factors (the restructuring the ITV network creating new contractors able to invest in expensive drama production) and new technologies (computer-generated special effects to realise the sea battles). On the other hand, however, the ideological conservatism and thematic preoccupations of Hornblower seem, culturally, a throwback to the 1950s. This might explain why, for all its superior production values and its wholly admirable resistance to sending up the material, Hornblower fared slightly less well with audiences than the more populist (if ideologically problematic) Sharpe.

French connections: The Count of Monte Cristo (1998) The heritage swashbuckler was not exclusive to British and American television. Since the 1960s there had been a tradition of sumptuously produced and largely authentic adaptations of Alexandre Dumas on French television. The writer-director Claude Barma emerged as the leading television interpreter of Dumas in the 1960s, following a live studio production of Les Trois Mousquetaires on Christmas Day 1959 – a production that starred a young Jean-Paul Belmondo as D’Artagnan – with lavishly mounted serialisations of Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (1963) and D’Artagnan (1969). The latter comprised four feature-length colour films, adapting all the Musketeers adventures from The Three Musketeers until The Man in the Iron Mask. Other Dumas adaptations included Les Compagnons de Jéhu (1966), Le Chevalier d’Harmental (1966), Une fille du régent (1966) and Joseph Balsamo (1973).74 These were all produced by the French state television broadcaster ORTF (Office de la Radiodiffusion et de la Télévision Française), though some also involved co-production with other European countries: D’Artagnan, for example, was produced in association with RAI (Italy) and Bavaria Films (West Germany). They seem to have been shown widely in Western Europe but were not exported to the Anglophone world. The Francophone costume adventures of the 1960s  – or feuilleton de cape et d’épée as they are known  – can to some extent be seen as

Heritage heroes   201 precursors of the heritage swashbucklers that emerged later in Britain and America. They were very different from the style of the episodic adventure series by ITC and other producers in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Francophone swashbucklers give the impression of having been intended as prestige high-end dramas for adult audiences rather than as juvenile entertainments. (The juvenile serials did emerge later: examples include the Dumas-inspired Le Chevalier Tempête [1967] – shown in Britain as The Flashing Blade  – and the Dumas-based Les Mohicans de Paris [1973], both starring Robert Etcheverry.) There were three characteristics that distinguished the Francophone costume serials from their Anglo-American counterparts. First, they demonstrated higher production values and were more cinematic in style: their mise-en-scène has more authentic detail and their spatial compositions greater depth. Directors such as Michel Drach (one of the lesser lights of the French nouvelle vague, who directed Les Compagnons de Jéhu) and Jean-Pierre Decourt (whose many costume adventures included Le Chevalier d’Harmental and the non-Dumas Les Aventures de Lagardère [1967]) favour deep-focus cinematography and long, elaborate tracking shots. Second, most of the French serials were literary adaptations that maintained greater fidelity to their source texts than the Anglophone series of the time. This can be understood both as a strategy of cultural differentiation and as an expression of the policy of ORTF at the time to promote French literature and history.75 And third, French costume adventures afforded greater prominence to romance. While the Anglo-American swashbucklers had privileged action and had largely sidelined their female characters, serials such as Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge, Les Compagnons de Jéhu and Les Aventures de Lagardère typically afford as much space to romance as to swordplay. This may simply be a reflection of the Gallic temperament: but it might also suggest that the French swashbucklers were intended for a mature rather than a juvenile audience. In many respects the works of Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70) are ideally suited to television. Dumas is now best known as author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo but his output was prodigious, including over fifty plays and nearly a hundred novels. Dumas was a product of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. His work eschewed the level of historical detail that characterised

202   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the novels of Sir Walter Scott and instead focused on archetypal characters in pared-down historical settings. Dumas believed that the role of the historical romance was ‘to interpret history rather than to transcribe it’.76 Dumas’s focus on archetypes and rituals – his stories are replete with romantic trysts, duels, thrilling chases and improbable escapes – meant that his work has transcended nation and culture. And the serial nature of his fiction meant that it transferred more easily into television than cinema. As Claude Barma remarked: ‘The foremost feature of television is its seriality.’77 Hence the French Dumas adaptations mostly followed a serial structure. Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge, for example, comprised four episodes of 75 minutes each, and Les Compagnons de Jéhu five episodes of 60 minutes and one of 90 minutes. Les Mohicans de Paris, more a costume spy thriller than a swashbuckler, ran for 26 quarter-hour episodes. However, it would be fair to say that, other than the BBC’s classic serial adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in the 1960s, Dumas has generally not been well served by Anglophone television. ITC’s The Count of Monte Cristo bore little relation to its source, while the Norman Rosemont productions of the 1970s had compressed Dumas’s labyrinthine plots into two-hour television films. The Count of Monte Cristo is the most difficult of all Dumas’s tales to adapt due to its complex structure and multitude of sub-plots. The BBC’s twelve-part serialisation in 1964 became something of a yardstick as it was generally held that writer Anthony Stevens ‘has managed to distil the essence of the work with not too much amputation of the main body’.78 There was also an Italian adaptation in 1966: Variety described it as ‘another elegantly mounted RAI-TV serialization of a popular novel, elaborately cast, and headed for undoubted success with weekend family audiences throughout the peninsula, at least judging by the first stanza’.79 The first major Francophone version was a fourpart serialisation in 1979 directed by Denys de la Patelière and adapted by Jean Chatenet and André Castelot.80 However, it is the 1998 miniseries that has come to be regarded as definitive. Unlike previous versions, including the French and Italian adaptations, this was produced with a view to international sales including the Anglophone market. The Count of Monte Cristo became the first subtitled foreign-language series broadcast by the cable channel Bravo in the United States, where

Heritage heroes   203 it recorded an average audience across its four episodes of 1.4 million – Bravo’s ‘highest-ever ratings figures for an original’.81 As ever, The Count of Monte Cristo can be seen as a product of particular institutional and cultural contexts. One of these was the emergence of new international funding for film and television under the auspices of the European Union. The Count of Monte Cristo was produced with support from the European Union’s MEDIA programme, an initiative to help the ‘audio-visual industries’ of the member states through a system of loans and subsidies for co-productions. The Count of Monte Cristo was a co-production between TF1 (France), Mediaset (Italy) and the Kirch Group (Germany). If this recalled the production arrangements of D’Artagnan some three decades earlier, the key difference was that European television in the interim had been opened up to competition: only the French partner was part of a state-owned broadcaster. For European broadcasters, a welcome consequence of deregulation had been the creation of institutional and economic conditions in which they could pool resources to compete with US imports. At a cost of some $20 million, The Count of Monte Cristo was as expensive as a feature film: this level of investment was made possible only through the development of new funding and co-production arrangements. It was seen by some industry commentators as spearheading a European response to ‘Coca-colonisation’: The Count of Monte Cristo fits the stereotype of European television programming – long and lofty. But it also marks a crucial change in European TV. America used to own the global TV market. The United States exported Dallas and Wheel of Fortune the same way it exported McDonald’s and Coke. Europeans sulked over America’s cultural imperialism, but they couldn’t do much about it. Now all that is changing. Deregulation and new digital delivery systems are reshaping the European market. There are more channels and better technology; millions of new ad euros are flowing into the business. National media companies are partnering to create Pan-European production and distribution networks. After years of worrying that Dynasty and Baywatch would corrupt their kids, Europeans have discovered that they can do the corrupting themselves. Besides producing high-toned

204   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series entertainment like The Count, they’re now cranking out sitcoms and cop shows of their own and selling them all across the Continent.82 The Count of Monte Cristo certainly provided the sort of culturally up-market indigenous fare that could offer a bulwark against American imports. It was a television ‘event’ that won a record 57 per cent of the television audience in France and 36 per cent in Italy. To a greater extent even than the Norman Rosemont productions or the British-made Sharpe and Hornblower, The Count of Monte Cristo was made with all the production values of a major feature film. It was shot over a period of four months on locations including Paris, Naples, Malta (which doubled for the port of Marseilles) and the castles of Nandy, Saussau and Lesigny. Director Josée Dayan, who had extensive experience of making television films, called it ‘the best production of my life’. ‘It was extraordinary because it was like a game,’ she added. ‘Filming the two-hour segments in twenty-four days, with the actors, costumes, sets, so many trips, was a constant treat. We were always having fun … The muses were with us on the production.’83 The Count of Monte Cristo had star power in the presence of Gérard Depardieu and Italian co-star Ornella Muti. Depardieu was France’s leading film actor, who ever since Jean de Florette (1986) had been associated in the minds of international audiences with costume and heritage films such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Germinal (1993), while Muti was a sultry Italian sexpot best known to Anglophone audiences for her role as Princess Aura in Dino De Laurentiis’s camp extravaganza Flash Gordon (1980). Screenwriter Didier Decoin  – who would also collaborate with Dayan on television mini-series of Balzac (1999) and Les Misérables (2000) – explained how The Count of Monte Cristo was adapted to fit Depardieu’s star persona: ‘I was faithful to the text. But knowing that the hero would be played by Gérard Depardieu, it had to be more carnal. Our Dantès really loves to eat, drink, and make love. He devours life, he is sensual.’84 This sensual and carnal appetite is exemplified in the second episode, wherein Dantès courts a beautiful widow, Camille de la Richardais (Florence Darel), by offering her a sumptuous meal. The character of Camille was a new addition to the narrative by Decoin,

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5.5  Gerard Depardieu as a brooding Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo.

introduced because it seemed that Dantès needs a respectable front during his masquerade as the wealthy but mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. Another change was to have Dantés’s servant Bertuccio (Sergio Rubini) teach him social etiquette and polite manners – Bertuccio having once served a real aristocrat  – rather than his prison companion Abbé Faria. The sequence of Dantés learning how to eat and drink can again be seen as an accommodation of Depardieu’s star image and its association with consumption and sensual pleasure. Decoin’s adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo maintains the elaborate plotting and psychological complexity of Dumas’s novel  – with a total running time of six and a half hours there is space to do so – while overcoming some of its structural difficulties. The first episode opens with Dantès already imprisoned in the Chateau d’If with the circumstances of his imprisonment explained briefly in a flashback. This version dispenses quickly with all the years of its protagonist’s confinement: Abbé Faria enters after only five minutes and Dantès has effected his escape from the island after just over a quarter of an hour of the first episode. This makes good sense: eighteen years of lonely psychological angst does not easily translate into television drama. It also means that Decoin and Dayan have more space to explore what they evidently regard as the main business of the story: Dantès’s quest for vengeance upon those who betrayed him. Here the mini-series remains faithful to Dumas’s narrative, while at the same time still compressing

206   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series events and omitting some of the more incidental episodes. In contrast to the Norman Rosemont production of 1976, this Count of Monte Cristo affords space to Dantès’s philanthropy as well as his revenge. Thus he uses his fortune to save the firm of Morrel & Son from bankruptcy in return for the kindness shown by the elder Morrel towards his own father, and he facilitates the love affair of Maximilien Morrel (Christopher Thompson) and Valentine de Villefort (Julie Depardieu). Depardieu also has the opportunity – denied to most other actors cast as Dantès – of donning various disguises, including Jesuit priest Father Busoni and English banker Lord Wilmore, to conduct his charitable deeds. In this form The Count of Monte Cristo is as much a contemporary soap opera as it is a swashbuckler. Its themes – love, honour, betrayal, justice, jealousy, revenge and redemption – are played out with all the melodramatic excess of soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty. Like J. R. Ewing of Dallas, Dantès is an anti-hero who contrives to bring about the downfall and humiliation of his enemies by fair means or foul. He manipulates the stock market in order to bankrupt Danglars (Michel Aumont) and exposes Count Fernand de Moncerf (Jean Rochefort) as a liar and traitor. And he discovers the identity of the love child born of the affair between Villefort (Pierre Ardiot) and Madame Danglars (Constance Engelbrecht), which he uses to frighten them into compliance. This version also maintains the sub-plot of Valentine’s stepmother attempting to poison her in order to steal her inheritance. The highly elaborate plotting, the high level of coincidence and the complex interrelationships between characters are the very essence of soap opera. This aspect of The Count of Monte Cristo was emphasised in its promotion in the United States. According to Frances Berwick, Bravo’s Senior Vice-President, Programming: ‘Dumas’s story is timeless – it is still relevant 150 years after it was written. The Count of Monte Cristo has something for everyone. It combines the lavishness of a top–quality costume drama with an unpredictable and gripping tale that appeals to all types of audiences.’85 Otherwise this adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo differs from Dumas’s novel in two key respects. The first is the role of Providence. Dantès in the novel had seen himself as an agent of divine retribution who was enacting God’s will. In contrast, Depardieu’s Dantès rejects

Heritage heroes   207 the agency of God and asserts his own will. In one highly charged scene, he breaks into a deserted oratory – he is disguised as the priest Father Busini at the time – and declares: ‘I’m not a traitor to man or God so I’m warning You – You didn’t see fit to exercise divine justice, so I’ll do it my way! I shall be ruthless and devastating!’ In this respect Dantès shares the outlook of the duplicitous Caderousse (Roland Blanche): ‘To hell with priests! I don’t believe in your God … He doesn’t exist. If he did, the world wouldn’t be so ugly. Good people would be rewarded and bad people punished.’ This explicit rejection of divine authority can probably be explained as an expression of the secularism of the late twentieth century: it is certainly not consistent with Dumas. The other major change is to the ending. In Dumas, Dantès’s former fiancée Mercedes is left alone to rebuild her life after the revelation of her husband’s treachery and her son’s decision to join the army in an attempt to redeem the family’s honour, while Dantès has the promise of a new life with Princess Haydée, daughter of the Sultan Ali Pasha, whom he has rescued from slavery. In this version, however, Dantès and Mercedes are reunited in a conventional romantic happy ending. It is not clear why this change was made, though it is possible that an economic imperative was a factor. The Count of Monte Cristo was produced with international sales and distribution in mind: the economics of the marketplace, especially the US market which traditionally prefers happy endings, invariably triumph over fidelity to the source text, even in heritage drama. Notes 1 See Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford, 2003). 2 Simone Knox, ‘Masterpiece Theatre and British drama imports on US television: discourses of tension’, Critical Studies in Television, 7: 1 (2012), pp. 29–48. 3 Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London, 1985), pp. 192–215. 4 ‘$10  million EEC deal from Sir Lew’, Broadcast, 26 October 1973, p. 6. 5 Alvin H. Marill, Movies Made for Television 1964–2004, Vol. I: 1964– 1979 (Lanham, ML, 2005), p. 144.

208   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 6 Janet Soderberg, ‘Teleguide: The Count of Monte Cristo’, unidentified clipping on the British Film Institute Library’s microfiche for The Count of Monte Cristo (‘Prepared in cooperation with the editors of Scholastic Teacher’s Editions’). 7 Ibid. 8 Variety, 2 June 1976, p. 17. 9 This point was made in reviews by David Robinson (The Times, 30 April 1976), Derek Malcolm (Guardian, 29 April 1976), Russell Davies (Observer, 2 May 1976), Tom Hutchinson (Sunday Telegraph, 2 May 1976), John Coleman (New Statesman, 30 April 1976)  and Alexander Walker (Evening Standard, 29 April 1976). 10 Monthly Film Bulletin, 43: 509 (June 1976), p. 121. 11 ‘Rosemont’s new “Count”’, Screen International, 1 May 1976, p. 1. 12 ‘It’s that Man in the Iron Mask again’, Film Review, 27: 3 (March 1977), pp. 34–5. 13 The trailer is included on the Network DVD of The Man in the Iron Mask (VFC14825). 14 Hollywood Reporter, 18 January 1977, p. 6. 15 ‘“Brothers” starts Nice shoot’, Screen International, 13 October 1984, p. 57. 16 Variety, 13 February 1985, p. 128. 17 Hollywood Reporter, 5 February 1985, p. 3. 18 Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (London, 2002), pp. 196–200. 19 ‘Rosemont’s directors’, Screen International, 29 August 1981, p. 1. 20 ‘Three for UK studios’, Screen International, 9 January 1982, p. 13. 21 ‘Joust in time for debutant Camfield’, Screen International, 30 January 1982, p. 13. 22 Variety, 10 March 1982. 23 Evening Standard, 27 September 1982, p. 22. 24 ‘Knights and white satin’, Broadcast, 11 October 1982, p. 18. 25 Evening Standard, 27 September 1982, p. 22. 26 ‘The culmination of years of planning’, Screen International, 7 August 1982, p. 42. 27 ‘Stately setting for “Scarlet Pimpernel”’, Screen International, 19 June 1982, p. 17. 28 ‘Back to work’, Screen International, 7 August 1982, p. 42. 29 ‘New, improved Pimpernel?’, New York Times, 7 November 1982, p. 3.

Heritage heroes   209 30 Hollywood Reporter, 12 November 1982, p. 49. 31 Variety, 17 November 1982, p. 42. 32 ‘TV: “The Scarlet Pimpernel” Returns’, New York Times, 9 November 1982, p. C-14. 33 Chris Dunkley, ‘Langham Diary’, Listener, 20 January 1983, p. 13. 34 ‘Love is in the air’, Daily Express, 19 May 1984, p. 19. 35 Guardian, 19 November 1984, p. 11. 36 ‘New “Prisoner of Zenda” is presented on A&E’, New York Times, 12 August 1986, p. 18. 37 ‘Sailing the schedules’, Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1999, p. 44. 38 The 14 Sharpe films are: ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’ (5 May 1993), ‘Sharpe’s Eagle’ (12 May 1993), ‘Sharpe’s Company’ (25 May 1993), ‘Sharpe’s Enemy’ (1 June 1994), ‘Sharpe’s Honour’ (8 June 1994), ‘Sharpe’s Gold’ (12 April 1995), ‘Sharpe’s Battle’ (19 April 1995), ‘Sharpe’s Sword’ (26 April 1995), ‘Sharpe’s Regiment’ (1 May 1996), ‘Sharpe’s Siege’ (8 May 1996), ‘Sharpe’s Mission’ (15 May 1996), ‘Sharpe’s Revenge’ (7 May 1997), ‘Sharpe’s Justice’ (14 May 1997) and ‘Sharpe’s Waterloo’ (21 July 1997). The two-part stories are ‘Sharpe’s Challenge’ (23 April 2006  –  24 April 2006)  and ‘Sharpe’s Peril’ (2 November 2008 – 9 November 2008). 39 Linda Blandford, Sharpe Cut: The Inside Story of the Creation of a Major Television Series (London, 2006), p. 11. 40 ‘Return of the costume drama’, The Times, 5 May 1993, p. 30. 41 ‘Charge of Sharpe’s brigade’, TV Times, 7–13 May 1993, p. 10. 42 ‘Army for hire’, Daily Telegraph, 8 May 1993, p. 6. 43 Blandford, Sharpe Cut, pp. 7–8. 44 ‘From Russia with luck!’, TV Times, 27 April – 3 May 1996, p. 16. 45 Blandford, Sharpe Cut, p. 49. 46 Ibid., p. 14. 47 Sunday Express, 9 May 1993, p. 69. 48 Daily Mail, 26 May 1994, p. 53. 49 Sunday Times: Culture, 29 May 1994, p. 3. 50 Sun, 6 May 1993, p. 32. 51 Observer, 9 May 1993, p. 64. 52 Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1995, p. 19. 53 See the feature ‘Sharpe’s Shooting’ on the DVD of Sharpe’s Rifles (Carlton VFC06080). 54 Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1994, p. 20. 55 ‘Why Sharpe’s my love child!’, TV Times, 3–9 March 1997, p. 6.

210   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 56 Daily Telegraph, 22 May 1997, p. 40. 57 For example: ‘I used to think the Peninsular Wars were something to do with France and Spain, but it turns out they were fought over Elizabeth Hurley’s jutting geography’ (Independent, 5 June 1994, p. 23). 58 Sight and Sound, New Series, 6: 6 (June 1996), p. 33. 59 Blandford, Sharpe Cut, p. 227. 60 Ibid., p. 224. 61 The eight Hornblower films are as follows: ‘The Even Chance’ (7 October 1998), ‘The Examination for Lieutenant’ (18 November 1998), ‘The Duchess and the Devil’ (24 February 1999), ‘The Frogs and the Lobsters’ (2 April 1999), ‘Mutiny’ (24 March 2002), ‘Retribution’ (25 March 2002), ‘Loyalty’ (5 January 2003) and ‘Duty’ (6 January 2003). 62 ‘United pulls crisis drama in-house’, Broadcast, 22 August 1997, p. 8. 63 ‘Hornblower sets sail on ITV’, United Productions press release, n.d., on the BFI Library microfiche for Hornblower. 64 ‘Stand by for Mr Midshipman Hornblower’, British Film & TV Facilities Journal (Autumn 1998), p. 39. 65 ‘Zenith praises ad-friendly Hornblower’, Broadcast, 15 January 1999, p. 5. 66 ‘Hornblower wins Emmy for United’, Broadcast, 17 September 1999, p. 11. 67 ‘New Hornblower gets go-ahead’, Broadcast, 24 September 1999, p. 2. 68 The Times, 6 January 2003, p. 19. 69 Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2002. 70 Guardian, 7 January 2003. 71 Sun, 14 October 1998, p. 11. 72 Independent, 8 October 1998, p. 20. 73 Guardian, 10 October 1998, p. 20. 74 Stéphane Benassi, ‘Chronologie des adaptations de romans-feuilletons populaire à la télévision française’, CinémAction, 79 (1996), pp. 215–20. 75 Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, ‘French Television looks at the past’, in Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor (eds), The Historian, Television and Television History (Luton, 2001), p. 157.

Heritage heroes   211 76 Quoted in the introduction by Lord Sudley to the Penguin Classics edition of Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (London, 1952 [1846]), p. 15. 77 Quoted in Stéphane Benassi, ‘Du roman-feuilleton populaire au feuilleton télévisé’, CinémAction, 79 (1996), p. 164. 78 ‘“Monte Cristo” starts off skilfully’, Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1964. 79 Variety, 23 November 1966. 80 Benassi, ‘Chronologie’, p. 217. 81 ‘Bravo’s Monte Cristo counts’, Screen International, 16 July 1999, p. 8. 82 ‘Changing Channels’, Newsweek International, 7 June 1999, p. 64. 83 Quoted in the ‘Production Notes’ on the DVD Disc 1 of The Count of Monte Cristo (VFC 29314) distributed by Arrow Films. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid.

6



Millennial mavericks

While the heritage swashbuckler predominated during the 1980s and 1990s, another trend, which started on US cable television in the early 1990s, was the emergence of what, for want of a better term, might be called the postmodern swashbuckler. The postmodern swashbuckling cycle began with a remake of Zorro and continued with The New Adventures of Robin Hood and Queen of Swords  – all produced by North American cable networks – and then crossed over onto British television with the BBC’s remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel in the late 1990s. Its most recent manifestation has been the BBC’s Robin Hood of 2006–09, yet another variation on the genre’s most enduring mythical archetype, reinterpreted in this case as a youthful rebel for the early twenty-first century. The postmodern swashbuckler is characterised by irreverence, irony, pastiche, self-awareness, intertextuality, and above all by a sense of playfulness with genre conventions that suggest the material is being treated less seriously than in the heritage swashbuckler. The heritage swashbucklers had asserted their credentials as quality drama through their superior production values and a discourse of cultural authenticity; postmodern swashbucklers in contrast make no pretence to authenticity and instead flaunt their awareness of their status as genre texts. If the sources of the heritage swashbuckler had been original literary texts, the sources of the postmodern swashbuckler are other popular films and television series. The postmodern make-over of the swashbuckler can be seen as one of the periodic reformulations within the genre as it adapts to changing cultural and ideological conditions. Yet again this cycle can be understood as an outcome of new institutional contexts and shifting broadcasting ecologies. In particular the deregulation of commercial television on both sides of the Atlantic and the rise of cable and satellite broadcasters with 212

Millennial mavericks   213 different sales and distribution models has transformed the content and style of popular genres. The proliferation of channels has created a more fragmented market in which the traditional family audience has become increasingly more elusive. Consequently broadcasters have sought to produce drama for particular audiences and demographics – and the swashbuckler has been one of the genres to adapt to new cultural tastes and styles.

Cable crusaders: Zorro (1990–92), The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997–98), Queen of Swords (2000) The late 1980s and 1990s saw the weakening of the monopoly of the three major networks in the United States as deregulation allowed the emergence of new broadcasters that challenged the ‘big three’ with new programme forms and content. One development was the entry of multi-media corporations with interests in film and publishing into the television industry, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Television, launched in 1986, and Warner Bros. in 1995. Fox, with series such as the teen dramas Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place and the satirical cartoon series The Simpsons, and Warner Bros., with the teen drama Dawson’s Creek and the fantasy adventure Buffy the Vampire Slayer, succeeded in reaching demographics largely ignored by the other networks.1 Another development was the entry of subscription cable channels such as Home Box Office (HBO) into drama production. Cable television, hitherto a local medium depending on syndicated content, become a national – even global – medium following the advent of geostationary communications satellites. The economics of cable broadcasting, based on a subscription model, meant that it was less in thrall to the demands of advertisers: consequently cable broadcasters were able to provide more unusual or niche programme content than the terrestrial networks. HBO led the way in the production of original, adult-themed drama series such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos. But there were other cable providers that catered for different demographics: and this provided the context for the resurrection of the syndicated swashbuckler on American television. Zorro  – also known as The New Adventures of Zorro or simply New Zorro  – was an outcome of this new broadcasting ecology in

214   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the early 1990s. Zorro was produced by New World Productions for the Family Channel in association with Canal + (France), RAI (Italy) and Beta TV (Germany). The Family Channel was a successor to the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), founded in 1977 by evangelist Pat Robertson, which morphed first into the CBN Cable Network in 1981 and then into the CBN Family Channel in 1988. In 1990 CBN was obliged to offload the Family Channel, as its profits threatened CBN’s charitable status. The new Zorro was commissioned following the success of repeats of colourised episodes of the Disney Zorro of the 1950s. The series was shot on location outside Madrid on a 34-acre set under the supervision of producer Robert L. McCullough, former supervising producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and script editor Philip John Taylor, whose previous credits included the sitcoms All in the Family and Mork and Mindy and action series The Fall Guy. British director Ray Austin, a former stuntman and action specialist, directed fifty of the eighty-eight half-hour episodes. Zorro starred Duncan Regehr, best known for playing Errol Flynn in a 1985 television film of Flynn’s autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, as Don Diego de la Vega. Efrem Zimbalist Jr (77 Sunset Strip, The FBI) played Diego’s father Don Alejandro in the first season, after which Henry Darrow (The High Chaparral) assumed the role. Darrow had played Don Diego in the spoof Zorro and Son in 1983: his casting can be seen as an example of the intertextuality that increasingly pervaded the series as it went on. Zorro was positioned firmly as family entertainment. Executive producer Barry Rose described it as ‘a program that parents can enjoy with their kids’ and it was shown on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.2 Later episodes included on the end credits a declaration that ‘Zorro is recommended viewing by the National Education Association’. The promotional discourse of Zorro averred that ‘the plots of the episodes, while still filled with the kind of swashbuckling adventure that is the hallmark of the Zorro legend, will also historically mirror actual problems that plagued the pueblo of Los Angeles in the early 1800s. These included drought, earthquakes, and municipal corruption.’3 Critical response, however, was lukewarm at best: the new Zorro was regarded as being too much like the old.

Millennial mavericks   215 Variety, for example, felt that it ‘comes off as bright but slight; it’s 1950s tv colorized’.4 And Peter Johnson in USA Today wrote: ‘With the new Zorro series … the Family Channel continues its puzzling habit of shelling out bucks to produce something that looks and sounds just like the primitive reruns that fill the schedules.’5 It is evident both from its production history and from its content that the new Zorro took Disney’s Zorro as a conscious point of reference. The first, untransmitted pilot (‘The Legend Continues’), shot with an entirely different cast, featured a ‘new’ Zorro, a young man named Antonio de la Cruz who assumes the mantle of Zorro following the death of Don Diego de la Vega. This plot device would also feature in the film The Mask of Zorro (1998), starring Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins. When the first pilot failed to impress, however, the series was recast and reverted to a formula much closer to the 1950s series. A new pilot (‘The Legend Begins’), comprising four episodes and also released on home video as a stand-alone film, told the traditional origin story of Zorro. Don Diego de la Vega returns from his education in Spain and adopts the guise of masked avenger Zorro in order to fight the tyrannical rule of the Alcalde (Michael Tylo). There were some variations on the 1950s series – in this version Zorro’s mute sidekick is houseboy Felipe (Juan Diego Botto), while Diego/Zorro acquires a love interest in the form of Victoria Escalante (Patrice Camhi)  – but in most other key respects the characters and the basic situation were modelled on the Disney series. Sergeant Mendoza (James Victor), for example, was Henry Calvin’s Sergeant Garcia in all but name, while the introduction of a new Alcalde (John Hertzler) half way through the series was also consistent with the Disney version. Zorro also revived the tradition, dormant since the first cycle of Anglophone swashbucklers in the 1950s, of a theme song (‘Out of the night a hero must arise/ With courage that even a mask can’t disguise … A man called Zorro’) performed over the opening titles by Cathi Campo. The social politics of Zorro adhere largely to the traditional formula. Don Alejandro sends his son Diego to university in Madrid intending that he should return as ‘a mature, educated young man ready for leadership among the caballeros’. Diego studies under master swordsman Sir Edmund Kendall (played by veteran fight arranger and Zorro’s

216   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series second unit director Peter Diamond) who tutors him in the skills of fighting and swordplay: Diego: But what about everything I’ve learned here at the university? The science, history, political strategy? Aren’t those skills the most valuable? Sir Edmund: In a utopian world, yes. But in this world there is often greater value in daring, self–reliance, intrepid courage and sharp Toledo steel! Returning to California, Diego adopts the guise of Zorro – ‘friend to all those who support the cause of freedom, and the enemy to those who support tyranny’. However, one significant difference from the Disney series, where Diego/Zorro acted to defend the interests of the landowners, is that here Zorro is cast more as a champion of the people. He finds an ally in taverna-owner Victoria, who represents the voice of the people: ‘This is our land, our pueblo, and when the government no longer serves the people, then perhaps it is time for the people to do more than just speak out – perhaps it is time for the people to take action.’ Another difference from the Disney series is the space accorded in the new Zorro to the father/son relationship. This is emphasised to a much greater degree than before: Diego is characterised as a man seeking his father’s approval but unable to reveal his secret identity as it would endanger his family. The episode ‘Honor Thy Father’ includes a long soliloquy as Diego sits in vigil at his father’s bedside while Don Alejandro is in a coma after being shot by bandits: ‘As Zorro I have not always obeyed the written law, that is why I could not tell you … I know that what I have done is right. Deeds you would have been proud of, things you might have done yourself when you were younger … As Don Diego I have not always made you proud. I am Zorro, but I still need you. I still need a father.’ This theme is consistent with the values of the Family Channel, which included ‘family moments’ as well as commercials, and also reflects a trend in popular film and television during the 1980s, exemplified by films such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and the coming-of-age television series The Wonder Years (1988–93), also made by New World Productions.

Millennial mavericks   217 Zorro rehearses many of the familiar tropes of the swashbuckler, including obligatory episodes where the Alcalde tries to discredit Zorro by using an impersonator to terrorise the people (‘Double Entendre’) and where Diego is suspected of being Zorro and has to prove that he is not (‘Whereabouts’). The progressive credentials of the swashbuckler are apparent in episodes critical of the treatment of African Americans (‘Pride of the Pueblo’) and Native Americans (‘The Bounty Hunters’). This might point towards Zorro being a straightforward, relatively traditional swashbuckler. Elsewhere, however, there are variations on the standard genre conventions. Zorro stretches the boundaries of genre by including episodes featuring characters from outside the Zorro legend such as Annie Oakley (‘They Call Her Annie’) and the Three Musketeers (‘One for All’). This suggests a very casual relationship with history, despite the producers’ usual claims that the series was based on extensive historical research. Thus Annie Oakley (born 1860)  turns up in California in the early 1800s: the famous female sharpshooter is seeking the reward for killing Zorro in order to buy a farm for her father who has lost his ‘Wild West’ show. The fact that ‘Wild West’ shows of the sort described did not appear until the 1880s does not seem to have bothered the writers. In the two-part episode ‘One for All’ Diego takes a vacation to France where he teams up with Porthos, Athos and D’Artagnan – the great great grandsons of the original Musketeers – to fight a local tyrant known as the Vicomte Jussac. This suggests at least some acquaintance with Dumas: a Jussac was the Captain of the Cardinal’s Guards in The Three Musketeers. This stretching of genre boundaries in Zorro demonstrates a strategy of intertextuality that assumes a degree of cultural knowledge on the part of audiences. This is also evident in another way in Zorro in the form of episodes which consciously pay homage to popular film and television. ‘The Wizard’, for example, features as a guest star Adam West, best known as Bruce Wayne/Batman in the 1960s television series Batman, as an inventor-salesman called Dr Henry Wayne, who is employed by the Alcalde to devise a trap for Zorro. The episode includes several conscious allusions to the Batman series including a riff on its theme music and a tongue-in-cheek moment where Wayne is taken into Zorro’s equivalent of the Batcave (‘A secret cave – how splendid!’). The publicity discourse of Zorro further overlaid a level of intertextuality

218   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series onto the series by describing Zorro as ‘America’s original caped crusader’.6 The most absurd example of this strategy is the episode ‘It’s a Wonderful Zorro’, an homage to Frank Capra’s sentimental classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In this Christmas episode, Diego, suffering from a cold and excluded from the celebrations, starts to resent his alter ego (‘I’m trapped by the brilliant illusion I’ve created’) and starts to question whether Zorro has achieved anything worthwhile (‘He’s changed nothing  – absolutely nothing … Zorro has tried very hard to help the poor, but every day more people become homeless, destitute, crushed by the Alcalde’s tyranny. I think Los Angeles would be no worse off if Zorro never existed!’). This cues the appearance of the mysterious Don Fernando, who shows Diego around a Los Angeles in which Zorro never existed: Diego learns that his father is dead, Sergeant Mendoza is a beggar having been kicked out of the army, and Victoria is a madam running a brothel. Diego recognises the need for Zorro (‘If there is no Zorro, then I shall create him!’) and his faith is restored. The It’s a Wonderful Life homage also featured in other television series around the same time, including Moonlighting and the final episode of Dallas.7 The New Adventures of Robin Hood, which ran for fifty-two onehour episodes in 1997–98, was even more avowedly postmodern. Like Zorro, The New Adventures of Robin Hood was produced for an international consortium including Turner Network Television (TNT), Warner Bros. International Television, Metropole Television (France) and Baltic Ventures International.8 It was shot in Lithuania on a set that Jeffrey Richards likens to ‘a medieval theme park, the clothes like a job lot of old pantomime costumes left over from Babes in the Wood’.9 Richards is equally dismissive of the two actors who played Robin during the course of the series, Matthew Porretta (‘a charmless Latino Robin Hood’) and his successor John Bradley (‘a muscle-bound WASP hunk’). Fred Weintraub, co-executive producer with Tom Kuhn, had produced several martial arts films in the 1970s, including Bruce Lee’s final film Enter the Dragon (1973), which may explain why The New Adventures of Robin Hood often features Robin and Marion indulging in some martial arts-inspired slow-motion, high-kicking action sequences. Weintraub also seems to have had half his family on the payroll: daughter Sandra Weintraub was the supervising producer and

Millennial mavericks   219 there are also credits for Jackie Dubey-Weintraub, Barbara Weintraub and Zachary Weintraub. The New Adventures of Robin Hood was the first original primetime series from the cable broadcaster TNT, where it was shown on Monday evenings at 8 p.m. after the popular WCW Monday Nitro Wrestling. In Britain it was picked up by the newly launched Channel 5 and shown on Saturday evenings at 6 p.m. Its critical reception was mixed. Variety liked the ‘sheer campy wonderment’ and ‘sense of breezy fun’, and felt that the series ‘succeeds because the cast seems to understand it isn’t doing Shakespeare in the Park’.10 The Hollywood Reporter observed that ‘it’s packed with romping, jumping and heroic action – and kids will love it’, but on balance found it rather too juvenile and lamented the lack of moral seriousness: ‘Still, you can’t help longing for the old Richard Greene version of Robin, with its awareness of the character’s serious business and its simple division of good and evil. The new Robin and his hoods are testosterone-driven and given to testing their intricate weapons.’11 The New Adventures of Robin Hood plays fast and loose with the Robin Hood legend. In this version Robin is the son of the Earl of Locksley, an orphan cared for by the sorcerer Olwyn after his father was murdered for his land. This is established in flashback in the episode ‘The Legend of Olwyn’. The presence of Olwyn (played by guest star Christopher Lee) indicates a magical theme that is prevalent throughout the series. The New Adventures of Robin Hood  – which as the opening voice-over has it is set during ‘an era of chivalry and magic’ – is as much a sword-and-sorcery fantasy as a swashbuckler per se. While the intrusion of magic is not necessarily incompatible with the Robin Hood myth – it had been incorporated successfully into Robin of Sherwood, after all, where it was treated historically as an aspect of the popular culture of the Middle Ages – here there is no attempt to represent magic historically and it functions merely as a plot device that pits Robin and his band against all manner of sorcerers, ghouls, vampires and demons. In this context it should be remembered that the production of The New Adventures of Robin Hood was concurrent with the first season of the popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The New Adventures of Robin Hood pays scant regard otherwise to the history of the Robin Hood myth. It omits any account of the origins of Robin’s band, who are established as outlaws at the beginning

220   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

6.1  Just your average date night in Sherwood Forest: Marion (Anna Galvin), Little John (Richard Ashton), Robin (Matthew Porretta) and Friar Tuck (Martyn Ellis) in The New Adventures of Robin Hood.

of the series, and there is no room for Will Scarlet, Much the Miller’s son or even the Sheriff of Nottingham. Prince John (Andrew Bicknell) is a recurring villain, here to be found dabbling in black magic, while Sir Guy of Gisborne (Greg Porretta) is an occasional secondary villain whose hatred for Robin is explained through his being a rejected suitor of Lady Marion Fitzwalter. Marion herself – described over the opening credits as ‘the beautiful lady-warrior Marion’ – has become a whip-wielding, mini-skirted action heroine in the mould of Xena: Warrior Princess. Marion was played in the first season by Australian actress Anna Galvin, who was reportedly ‘considered too raunchy for American viewers’, and thereafter by Irish-born Barbara Griffin, who was hardly any less raunchy, being dubbed by one critic ‘the Miss Whiplash of Sherwood Forest’.12 The other regulars are Friar Tuck (Martyn Ellis) and Little John (Richard Ashton), who form a sort of comedy double act (in one episode they even impersonate Laurel and Hardy), while the influence of Robin of Sherwood is evident in the addition in some of the later episodes of Kemal (Hakim Alston), a dreadlocked African American, as an irregular member of Robin’s band.

Millennial mavericks   221 It will be clear that The New Adventures of Robin Hood made no claim or pretence to historical authenticity. Its idiom and language are not those of Plantagenet England but rather late twentieth-century America. Thus Marion is characterised as a feisty feminist who leads the women of Sherwood Forest in a ‘self-defence class’ (‘Attack of the Vikings’) and insists that Robin should wash his own clothes. Robin exhibits all the attitudes of a ‘new man’ and expresses a very modern idea of chivalry: ‘Women need to feel special. You can’t order them around, you have to ask them politely. You have to ask her how she feels about things – take an interest … And they always want to talk about everything’ (‘The Arabian Knight’). The series’ pervading presentism is most evident in its wholly anachronistic dialogue, including such unlikely medieval phrases as ‘Oh boy!’, ‘What’s your problem?’, ‘I’ll take a raincheck’, ‘Thanks for nothing’, ‘We still have a deal, right?’ and ‘It’s payback time’. Female characters speak anachronistically about ‘waiting for Mr Right’ (‘A Race Against Death’) and ‘a white picket fence and a garden’ (‘The Arabian Knight’). Little John is by far the worst offender in this regard, from his ubiquitous greeting of ‘Hey guys!’ to his repeated utterances of ‘You bet!’, ‘Let’s go get ‘em!’ and ‘Let’s go kick some butt!’ Richards condemns the blatant historical anachronisms of The New Adventures of Robin Hood as ‘evidence of a contemptuous disregard for both the myth and the audience’.13 That it has no regard for the Robin Hood myth can be seen in wholly unnecessary additions such as Little John’s hitherto unknown brother Kevin and his sister Ingrid! However, it can be argued, contrary to Richards, that The New Adventures of Robin Hood was very much in tune with the tastes of its audience. The evidence would suggest that it was intended mainly for an audience of teenagers. The promotional line for its US release, for example, was as follows: ‘Daring rescues. Thrilling chases. Narrow escapes. Just your average date night in Sherwood Forest.’ This suggests that the series set out to appeal to the same demographic as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Furthermore, the style of The New Adventures of Robin Hood is consistent with other fantasy adventures in the late 1990s, including Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–2000), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), Tarzan: The Epic Adventures (1996–97), The Adventures of Sinbad (1996–98) and Conan: The Adventurer (1997–78). These

222   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series series were all produced for international syndication: they all demonstrated much the same mixture of historical fantasy and anachronism. To this extent The New Adventures of Robin Hood was representative of a distinct trend in popular television that prevailed at the time. In particular The New Adventures of Robin Hood can be seen to have been influenced by the successful Hercules and its spin-off Xena. Hercules and Xena were consciously postmodern: they offered a heady mixture of Ancient Greek and other mythologies served up with liberal doses of cartoonish violence and camp performances. Xena, especially, became something of a cult series for both lesbian women and heterosexual men who responded in their own ways to the adventures of a dominatrix heroine and her scantily clad sapphic slave girl sidekick. They represent a fantastic rather than a historically authentic past: their mixture of Greek, Egyptian, Oriental and medieval imagery mobilises the past for symbolic and ritualistic function to explore codes of heroism, gender and sexuality.14 The New Adventures of Robin Hood adheres to the same formula. The series’ irreverent attitude towards recorded history is apparent from the first episode which pits Robin against Genghis Khan’s brother (‘Rage of the Mongols’). Among the other miscellaneous villains who rather implausibly turn up in Sherwood Forest c.1191 are Vikings (‘Attack of the Vikings’), Saracens (‘The Arabian Knight’), Amazon warriors (‘The Legend of the Amazons’) and the warrior-cult of Alexander the Great (‘The Legion’). The point here is not so much that these characters do not belong in the Robin Hood myth but rather that they are standard historical archetypes recognised by audiences regardless of whether they are appropriate for the period. Further evidence that the reference points of The New Adventures of Robin Hood are not to be found in medieval history is that so many of its episodes are clearly based on recent Hollywood films. Whereas the sources for The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s had been the medieval ballads, the sources for The New Adventures of Robin Hood are popular movies. Several episodes are essentially medieval reworkings of Hollywood action cinema. ‘The Prey’ – in which Robin is captured by a quartet of sadistic aristocrats, who set him loose in the forest so that they can hunt a human quarry – is yet another reworking of The Most Dangerous Game, whose plot had recently seen service in The Running Man (1987) and Hard Target (1993). ‘The Ultimate Army’ – in

Millennial mavericks   223 which Robin and Little John participate in a contest to find the best fighters for a mercenary army  – is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). ‘The Birthday Trap’ – in which Robin battles a gang of robbers who raid his stepmother’s castle during a celebration and incapacitates them one by one – is Die Hard (1988). ‘Bombs Away’ – in which Sir Guy of Gisborne lays a series of traps for Robin with the aid of gunpowder and a Japanese bomber – is Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995). ‘The Prison’ – in which Robin enlists the help of the only person ever to escape from a high-security castle to break back in to prevent the release of deadly phials of plague virus  – is The Rock (1996). And ‘Outlaw Express’ – Robin pursues a gang of vicious criminals who have escaped from a prison transport – is Con Air (1997). Other episodes draw upon different genres. ‘Body and Soul’ – in which Robin is killed but, as he has died too early, is sent back to Earth in another body – is Always (1989).15 ‘Day After Day’ – where a spell cast by a jealous suitor forces all the people of a small town to live the same day over and again – is Groundhog Day (1993). ‘The Time Machine’ – in which Robin helps a skateboarding time traveller from the future return to his own time – is Back to the Future (1985). ‘First Love’ – in which Robin meets his old flame Olivia, now married to Lord Beacon, a sworn enemy of Prince John  – looks further back to the classic romantic melodrama Casablanca (1942). Here the homage is quite explicit: Olivia tells a luteplaying Friar Tuck to ‘Play it Tuck, play it one more time’, and Robin even says ‘Of all the taverns in all England, she had to walk into mine.’ Perhaps the most bizarre movie reference is ‘Dragon from the Sky’, wherein Robin and his men befriend an alien creature who has crash landed in Sherwood Forest and help him to repair his spaceship before Prince John’s men capture him: this is E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Some of these sources may seem incongruous to say the least, though it should be remembered that the swashbuckler has always recycled plots from elsewhere. We have already seen, for example, that The Most Dangerous Game – possibly the most oft-remade and reworked narrative in Anglo-American popular culture – had been employed in episodes of William Tell and Dick Turpin, while the use of gunpowder, which features here in the episode ‘Bombs Away’, had served episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe and William Tell. However, the difference is that in those examples the filmic source is incidental to

224   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the series overall, which is based on the founding myths. In contrast it seems that in The New Adventures of Robin Hood popular cinema has replaced the founding myths as the principal source. In this sense it represents the most extreme case of the postmodern swashbuckler: an adventure series that is entirely a pastiche. The third – and last – of the cable swashbucklers was Queen of Swords in 2000, which lasted for only twenty-two episodes. Queen of Swords was produced by Fireworks Entertainment for the Global Television Network, a Canadian cable broadcaster founded in 1974 which could barely claim to be national, let alone global. Queen of Swords was essentially a female variant of Zorro, a strategy that was consistent with other series from the Fireworks stable, which tended to be derivative of other franchises, such as Relic Hunter (inspired by the Tomb Raider video games) and Mutant X (an unofficial version of the X-Men comics). It was shot at the Texas Hollywood Studios at Almeira, Spain, a production facility built on the back of the success of the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 70s. Queen of Swords was bedevilled by legal problems. In 2001 Sony Pictures filed an injunction, alleging copyright infringement on the grounds that Sony held exclusive rights to produce films and television series of Zorro. It claimed that Queen of Swords had copied particular aspects of The Mask of Zorro (1998), produced by Sony’s subsidiary TriStar Pictures. The lawsuit was rejected by the US District Court, which ruled that the character of Zorro had been in the public domain since 1995 (in any event there is no mention of Zorro in Queen of Swords) and decreed that it ‘does not find that Queen of Swords captures the total concept and feel of Mask of Zorro’. ‘Indeed’, the ruling added, ‘the Court finds the works to be quite different overall. Queen of Swords is a low-budget, family-friendly adventure series set in a much smaller mileu [sic] than Mask of Zorro. It does not appear to be tailored to the tastes of the sophisticated viewer.’16 However, Queen of Swords had already been cancelled by the time this verdict was delivered. It would be fair to say that Queen of Swords inhabits the same broad generic terrain as films like The Mask of Zorro and The Mark of Zorro (1940) without being a direct copy. The basic premise is much the same as the Zorro story except that the protagonist is a woman. In 1817 a young Spanish aristocrat called Tessa Alvarado (Tessie Santiago) arrives in California following the death of her father. Following a dream in

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6.2  Behind the mask: Tessa Alvarado (Tessie Santiago) adopts a minimal disguise as the Zorro-like ‘Queen of Swords’. Queen of Swords.

which her father reveals that he was murdered by the corrupt military governor Colonel Montoya (Valentine Pelka), Tessa vows to avenge him. She adopts the guise of the ‘Queen of Swords’ from the Tarot cards of her gypsy servant Marta (Paulina Gálvez). The only close parallel between Queen of Swords and The Mask of Zorro is the character of the governor’s right-hand man, Captain Grisham (Anthony Lemke), a disgraced US Army officer working as a mercenary. In fact the version of the Zorro story to which the series bears the closest relation is Republic’s serial Zorro’s Black Whip (1944). Even so there are some significant differences. Zorro’s Black Whip is really a Western: it is set in the American West in the 1870s rather than Spanish California. Republic’s serial queen Linda Stirling played Barbara Meredith, who adopts the guise of a masked avenger known as ‘the Black Whip’ when her brother is killed in the first episode: Zorro is never mentioned, despite the serial’s title. Notwithstanding the ruling of the US Supreme Court that it ‘does not appear to be tailored to the tastes of the sophisticated viewer’, Queen of Swords is nevertheless a rather more intelligent example of the genre than Zorro or The New Adventures of Robin Hood. For one thing it is a rare example of a female-centred swashbuckler. There had been occasional examples of swashbuckling heroines in cinema but not on television. It is interesting to note that female action stars of popular television have almost always been cast in fantasy genres: The

226   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series New Adventures of Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess. Even secret-agent series such as The Bionic Woman, La Femme Nikita and Alias are as much techno-fantasies as realist genres. Moreover Tessa Alvarado is not presented as possessing special abilities in the manner of a Buffy Summers or a Sydney Bristow. She prevails not through greater physical strength but rather through surprise and cunning: and her expert swords(wo)manship is the result of dedication and practice rather than a special talent. This suggests some degree of cultural conservatism in the fact that television’s ‘women warriors’ (a potentially transgressive archetype) tend to exist only in fantasy genres. This is not to say there is anything particularly transgressive about Queen of Swords: in fact the series is evidence that a female-centred action narrative does not automatically equate with feminist social politics. Tessa is characterised as a very feminine action heroine: even her eye-mask is made of feminised black lace. (Queen of Swords maintains the quaint convention of the Zorro myth in that no one recognises its masked protagonist even when the distinctive features of star Tessie Santiago, with her sultry Hispanic looks, are quite visible.) It is Tessa’s traditionally feminine qualities of care and compassion that prompt her to take up arms against Montoya and Grisham rather than any anachronistic assertion of ‘girl power’: she is spurred to action because ‘there’s so much wrong here, so much injustice’. The social politics of Queen of Swords are more inclusive than some versions of the Zorro myth where Zorro is the defender of the interests of the caballeros. The ‘Queen of Swords’ is cast as a champion of the people: she rescues the poor wretches whom Montoya uses as slave labour at a secret gold mine (‘Death to the Queen’) – a plot device that had also featured in The Mask of Zorro – and demonstrates her progressive credentials in assisting African American slaves (‘Runaways’) and Native Americans (‘Honor Thy Father’). Queen of Swords makes some reference to the circumstances that have allowed a despotic military governor to take control of California: it lays the blame partly on the weakness of central government (‘Spain is still recovering from the wounds left by Napoleon – she doesn’t care about our primitive outpost’) and partly at the door of the dons themselves who are ‘growing fat while others starve’ (‘Destiny’). But, like Zorro, the ‘Queen’ herself

Millennial mavericks   227 is no revolutionary: Tessa opposes injustice but supports both the social order and traditional gender roles. The sexual politics of Queen of Swords are rather more complex than other entries in this particular swashbuckling cycle and suggest that the series may have been intended for an older audience. As well as the recurring motif that all the characters have something to hide – as expressed in the theme song ‘Behind the Mask’ performed by José Feliciano – the series is structured around a series of power relationships between the supporting characters. This is most evident in the character of Vera (Elsa Pataky), the young trophy wife of Don Hidalgo (Tacho Gonzalez), who is also Grisham’s mistress and a former prostitute. Queen of Swords provides a psychological context for Vera’s actions rather than making her an out-and-out villain: she is presented as being controlled by men both through her marriage to a rich older husband and through the constant threat that her past will be exposed. Further evidence that the series was intended for an older audience is that the violence is less cartoonish, there is a degree of swearing and profanity, and in one episode (‘Honor Thy Father’) Tessa has to defend herself against an attempted rape. It might be that this more adult orientation was the reason for the relative failure of Queen of Swords in comparison to other swashbucklers. It is a pity that Queen of Swords did not match the success of either Zorro or The New Adventures of Robin Hood in terms of international distribution as it is a better series than both. It maintains more respect for its historical period and does not resort to pastiche or parody. While modern dialogue does creep in at times  – including ‘I bet you say that to all the girls’, ‘You took the words right out of my mouth’ and ‘All right, bitch, gloves are off!’ – it is overall less intrusive than in The New Adventures of Robin Hood. The action sequences are well handled (Tessie Santiago had four stunt doubles, including one male, who performs the famous Yakima Canutt wagon-and-horse stunt from Stagecoach and Zorro’s Fighting Legion in ‘The Hanged Man’), and the performances are sincere and convincing. It seems likely that the series’ failure to secure much of a popular following was that it fell between two stools. On the one hand it was more adult than Zorro or The New Adventures of Robin Hood, but on the other hand it did not have the camp qualities and ‘kinky’ sexuality that made a cult hit of Xena:

228   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Warrior Princess. Tessie Santiago, for all her prowess with a whip, is no match for Lucy Lawless when it comes playing a screen dominatrix. There was a coda to this cycle of swashbucklers. La Femme Musketeer (2004) was a three-hour television film produced for the Hallmark Channel. In some countries, including Britain, it was shown in two parts. The Hallmark Channel had been formed in 2001 through a merger of two cable broadcasters, the American Christian Television System and the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network, but had since dropped all religious content in favour of family entertainment, including original films and mini-series. La Femme Musketeer was another Weintraub family affair: written by Sandra Weintraub and co-produced by Fred Weintraub, with Zachary Weintraub as second-unit director and Jackie Dubey-Weintraub as associate producer. It was shot in Croatia and featured an impressive cast, including Michael York (reprising his role as D’Artagnan from three Richard Lester films: The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers and The Return of the Musketeers), Christopher Cazenove (Athos), John Rhys-Davies (Porthos), Nastassja Kinski (as Milady-esque aristocratic assassin Lady Bolton) and Gerard Depardieu (Cardinal Mazarin). La Femme Musketeer would seem to have been inspired by Bertrand Tavernier’s (wholly superior) film D’Artagnan’s Daughter (1994), but in place of the beautiful and talented Sophie Marceau the television film has the beautiful Susie Amy in the central role of Valentine D’Artagnan. Miss Amy was hitherto best known for her role as the ‘WAG’ Chardonnay in the soap opera Footballer’s Wives, which, as it was broadcast on a British satellite channel, Sky One, remained mercifully unseen by most of the viewing public. Any degree of period authenticity is undercut by the same level of scripting skills the Weintraubs had brought to The New Adventures of Robin Hood: these include such choice lines as ‘I’ll be down in a minute’, ‘What do you think the odds are we’ll get out of this one?’, ‘All right boys, we’re out of here’, ‘They don’t call it French kissing for nothing’, and ‘Heavenly father, it’s me, Etienne, I know I haven’t checked in for a while …’ La Femme Musketeer is a distinctly non-canonical swashbuckler – Alexandre Dumas does not even rate a credit – and, in its blatant disregard for the source texts (D’Artagnan has no daughter and in the early 1660s the Musketeers were involved in the affair of The Man in the Iron Mask), it is entirely representative of the postmodern phase

Millennial mavericks   229 of the genre. Yet one has only to compare it to the definitive French version of all the Musketeers stories, Claude Barma’s excellent and largely faithful D’Artagnan (1969), to realise that on this occasion the 150-year-old original source texts provide more excitement, romance and psychological depth.

Revisionist remakes: Ivanhoe (1997) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1999–2000) In Britain the BBC had not ventured into the swashbuckling field since The Prisoner of Zenda in 1984 – one of the last examples of the Sunday teatime classic serial tradition. In the late 1990s it returned to the field with two expensively produced but in their ways very different adaptations of swashbuckling classics. The first of these was Ivanhoe, which the corporation had previously produced as a classic serial in 1970. Ivanhoe was positioned in publicity as the spearhead of a major investment in costume drama by the BBC following the success of its much-loved adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995. According to the Acting Head of Drama, Ruth Caleb: ‘We are delivering successful programmes on a scale which has the chiefs at ITV under increasing pressure from their advertisers … The BBC’s unique funding enables us to take risks, build on potential success and offer unsurpassed range.’17 Ivanhoe certainly had all the hallmarks of prestige historical drama: the six-part serial – like ITV’s Hornblower a co-production with the A&E Network – exhibited all the expensive production values that a budget of £6 million could buy. Yet this would be very different from the heritage swashbucklers. For, while it avoided the excesses of the postmodern swashbucklers, Ivanhoe exhibited similar presentist characteristics in what can only be described as a loose approach to the process of adaptation. Ivanhoe was produced by Jeremy Gwilt, directed by Stuart Orme and according to the credits was ‘adapted from Sir Walter Scott’s novel by Deborah Cook’. However, the series’ own production discourse sought to distance it from the source text. Gwilt insisted that he did not want to produce a ‘too pretty’ version of the story – immediately distancing this Ivanhoe from the MGM Robert Taylor film of 1951 and Norman Rosemont’s television film with Anthony Andrews in

230   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 1982 – and instead claimed that ‘the visual context for this kind of piece is set by recent feature films such as Braveheart and Rob Roy … We have tried to rise to the challenge with a robust and earthy production. I didn’t want this to be a romanticised view of the twelfth century. I wanted it to be authentic.’18 The 1990s had seen a cycle of big-budget historical adventure films  – including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Rob Roy (1994) and Braveheart (1995)  – characterised by an aesthetic of what might be described as ‘dirty realism’ consisting of a supposedly naturalistic visual style with subdued, often drab colours and a worn look to props and costumes. There was also a greater attention to unpleasant details (bad hair and teeth, for instance) and a more realistic representation of violence. The visual style of Ivanhoe exemplifies this dirty realism, with its preponderance of earth colours and Stuart Orme’s preference for shooting in the rain, while the ‘robust and earthy’ qualities are evident in references to a lack of personal hygiene and the seemingly ubiquitous mud and animal dung. There is violence too: the first episode opens with a brutal flogging – what one critic dubbed ‘a scene from Lawrence of Sherwood, where the half-naked hero is being lashed, T. E. Lawrence style, by a camp Austrian sadist’ – and the second includes a bloody mêlée shot in slow motion in the style of Sam Peckinpah.19 However, as several reviewers were to point out, this insistence on authenticity was entirely at odds with Scott’s highly romanticised and historically inauthentic novel. Nancy Banks-Smith, for example, contended that Scott’s novel ‘touches reality at no known point. But romance has been out and realism in for a long time now, and everything is done knee-deep in mud.’20 Thomas Sutcliffe similarly disliked the ‘dour grittiness’ and questioned why the producers had bothered with Scott in the first place: ‘If you wanted anything like a realistic view of medieval England, you would do better to start from scratch rather than attempt to rescue Scott’s welter of historical inaccuracies from its playroom associations.’21 And Judy Rumbold complained that ‘the language was as impenetrable as the layer of grime that coated everything’ and felt that it ‘suffered from being too authentic’.22 These responses may be compared to the criticism levelled at the 1982 Ivanhoe that it had not been dirty enough: critics are, after all, a notoriously difficult group to please.

Millennial mavericks   231 Ivanhoe was, then, nothing if not revisionist in its reinterpretation of the source text. This extended to the claim that not a single line of Scott’s dialogue remained in the television series.23 Deborah Cook made a number of changes to Scott’s narrative. She introduced a back-story to explain the enmity between Ivanhoe (Steven Waddington) and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (Ciaran Hinds), revealing that both had been captured by Leopold of Austria and tortured to reveal the whereabouts of King Richard. It is believed that Ivanhoe betrayed Richard; in fact, BoisGuilbert is the one who is now haunted by a guilty conscience. There is no obvious rationale for this addition, other than to allow the inclusion of a gratuitous flogging scene in the first episode. An even more bizarre addition to Scott’s narrative comes in the last episode where Eleanor of Aquitaine (Siân Phillips) berates her feuding sons as ‘curdle-brained ninnies’ and delivers a decidedly modern lecture on the virtues of kingship: ‘John may be a miserable little runt but at least he’s been here. He kept the country from bankruptcy and he dragged it from the chaos in which you [Richard] left it. You are two sides of the same flawed coin – weak, stupid and selfish. But I forgive you, for you both sprang from my womb and I must in part bear the responsibility. Embrace and forgive each other.’ Quite apart from the anachronistic language (and this, remember, in a series that asserted its historical authenticity), this scene serves no clear purpose other than to detach this Ivanhoe from the cult of Richard the Lionheart and to embrace instead a revisionist view of Richard as a bad king who pursued foreign wars at the expense of good government at home. Otherwise Cook entirely recasts the cultural politics of Ivanhoe to reflect present-day attitudes towards war, gender and ethnicity. Ivanhoe is characterised as sickened by war, and disillusioned by the violence of the Crusades. His description of the sacking of Acre bears no relation to Scott: ‘The Temple Knights rode through the streets cheering, their armour glinting in the sun, their leader crying “For God and Christendom”  – on the point of his lance was the head of a girl he’d raped, no more than twelve.’ The character of Rowena (Victoria Smurfitt) is entirely changed from the passive maiden of the book to a feisty proto-feminist who is not afraid to voice her opinions: ‘By God, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, if I were a man I would take up the shield of Ivanhoe, ride against you at your tournament tomorrow, and show you

232   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series the true nature of Saxon valour!’ The most significant change, however, is to the racial politics of the book. It is not only that the anti-Semitic language is toned down (for example ‘a dog of a Jew’ becomes ‘a begging Jew’) but also that the complexities of anti-Semitism as described by Scott are simplified. Scott’s novel is an exploration of racial prejudice that is not entirely outside such prejudice itself: anti-Semitism was a fact of life for the nineteenth century as it was for the twelfth. In the adaptation, however, anti-Semitism, rather than being understood historically as an expression of the society and culture of the times, instead becomes a moral yardstick that differentiates the good characters (who are sympathetic towards the Jews) from the villains (who despise them). Cook also develops the relationship between Ivanhoe and Rebecca (Susan Lynch) in a way that ‘allows Ivanhoe to fall in love with Rebecca in a storyline that is not just politically correct but historically inaccurate’.24 It might be argued that this version of Ivanhoe is actually less effective as a critique of racial prejudice because the part of Isaac of York (David Horovitch) is downgraded from the book. In contrast the role of Beaumanoir, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar (Christopher Lee), is significantly elevated: he is characterised as a religious extremist and unrepentant ideologue (‘How far has this infection spread? How many must I burn?’). These modifications to the book might be seen as just another example of how the adaptation of literary texts can reflect the ideological climate of the present. In the particular case of Ivanhoe, however, there might have been a more specific contemporary meaning. Several critics pointed out that Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party, had selected Ivanhoe as his favourite book on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. This prompted a reading of the Ivanhoe series that related it to the modernising project of New Labour. Ian Parker, for example, remarked that ‘Ivanhoe is Tony Blair’s favourite book, and this adaptation is a New Walter for a New Britain’. ‘In tonight’s first episode’, he amplified, ‘the most obvious acts of modernisation are a snog after about half an hour, and the decision to jazz up Rowena, beautiful Saxon heiress, by giving her the modern virtue of feistiness.’25 John Sweaney went further in claiming the series as marking the Centre-Left’s reclamation of national identity from the Tory Right. Noting that Scott had been a favourite author of the conservative ‘Young England’ movement in the

Millennial mavericks   233 nineteenth century, he drew a parallel between Cedric’s call for a ‘Saxon brotherhood’ and the rhetoric of Eurosceptic politicians: National myths are curious things. If the Young Englanders of the last century had a contemporary reincarnation, they would no doubt be card-carrying members of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, who see a Norman Yoke [sic] where most people only see the centre of an egg … Ivanhoe’s defence of the underdog perhaps flows naturally from his kinship with the people under the Norman boot. His loathing of the evil traitor Sir Brian flows from a sense of personal betrayal. But when it comes to the rescue of the Jew, Isaac of York, Ivanhoe is not complying to any blood bond of kinship or ethnicity. He is simply acting on his sense of common decency.26 It is true, certainly, that Ivanhoe includes a degree of what might be construed as Eurosceptic rhetoric, as the returning King Richard (Rory Edwards) sends the Templars packing with an entirely anachronistic assertion of English independence: ‘You go tell the Pope that I govern this country, and that whether I be heretic or no, I shall not suffer interference from Rome.’ Although this may not be the most persuasive reading, it does demonstrate yet again how certain popular fictions can be reinterpreted to meet the ideological circumstances of the present. Thus, in the 1950s, the Roger Moore series of Ivanhoe had represented the last flowering of the order of chivalry before the onset of the Swinging Sixties, while in the 1980s the Anthony Andrews film had recast Ivanhoe as a romantic heritage drama. Now in the late 1990s Ivanhoe was seen to serve the ideological project of New Labour in promoting a vision of national identity that was both patriotic and socially inclusive. The television history of The Scarlet Pimpernel has broad parallels with Ivanhoe. In the 1950s it had functioned as Cold War cultural propaganda (The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel) and in the 1980s it had also been refashioned as heritage drama. In the late 1990s it would have yet another makeover as a postmodern period romp. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a co-production between BBC Birmingham, London Films and the A&E Network. London Films, which held the screen

234   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series rights, had harboured ambitions to remake The Scarlet Pimpernel for some time. In the late 1980s it had announced a deal to produce a series of half-hour episodes in association with the French broadcaster FR3 that it hoped would be shown in syndication through the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.27 In the event that series did not materialise (one wonders how a French co-production partner might have affected the material) and it was another decade before the remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel came to fruition in the form of six ninety-minute television films. The Scarlet Pimpernel can be seen as the BBC’s response to ITV’s Sharpe and Hornblower. It is set during very nearly the same historical period (the French Revolution), it was shot mostly on overseas locations (the Czech Republic, with Prague doubling effectively for Revolutionary Paris) and it adopted the format of a series of feature-length episodes. The first three episodes, broadcast in 1999, were all written by Richard Carpenter and directed by Patrick Lau. The second batch of three episodes all had different writers (Matthew Hall, Alan Whiting, Rob Heyland) with direction shared between Graham Theakston and Simon Langton. Richard E. Grant starred as Sir Percy Blakeney, with Elizabeth McGovern as Marguerite and Martin Shaw as Chauvelin.28 In contrast to Ivanhoe, which seems to have been pitched towards adult viewers, The Scarlet Pimpernel was intended as a primetime family drama. According to London Films’ sales director Andrew Luff: ‘I think it is a classic story suitable for a family audience. There is bravery, romance and swashbuckling but we have seen no new versions for fifteen years now. So it is fresh, too. It is about time we had another go at it.’29 Like the 1950s series the writers invented their own stories based on Baroness Orczy’s characters: while the first episode is recognisably an adaptation of the novel and play of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the subsequent episodes are all new stories. Even the first episode makes some significant modifications to the source text. Carpenter built upon an idea from the 1982 version in which Chauvelin was a rejected suitor of Marguerite’s: now they are former lovers so that the enmity between Percy and Chauvelin is overlaid with a degree of sexual jealousy. The role of other members of the ‘league’ is diminished  – indeed Tony Dewhurst (Jamie Bamber) is callously shot dead in the first episode by Chauvelin – while the role of Robespierre (Ronan Vibert) is built up

Millennial mavericks   235

6.3  ‘They seek him here, they seek him there …’ Richard E. Grant in his element as the apparently foppish Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

into a suitably machiavellian antagonist. The second batch of episodes was without Martin Shaw or Elizabeth McGovern, with Marguerite’s off-screen death during childbirth at the beginning of ‘Ennui’ allowing Percy thereafter to play the field as a born-again bachelor. The Scarlet Pimpernel was distinguished throughout by high-class production values and convincing period mise-en-scène, while Richard E. Grant excelled as Sir Percy: the actor’s theatrical narcissism and cutting wit recasts Percy as something of a rake in contrast to the more romantic Leslie Howard or Anthony Andrews characterisations. It is clear that Percy and Marguerite enjoy a mutually fulfilling sexual relationship, while they also engage in verbal sparring in a manner reminiscent of the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s (‘Dance with my wife, madam? I doubt society would tolerate such an affectation’). However, the tone of the series overall is uneven. On the one hand the publicity discourse sought to position The Scarlet Pimpernel as ‘the 18th-century “James Bond” superhero’.30 This parallel was further overlaid with the music from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service used for the series’ trailers. And the series would characterise Sir Percy as a Bond-like hero with a penchant for witty one-liners and recourse to a variety of gadgets including a coat with secret pockets and skeleton keys in a false heel. These aspects are particularly prominent in the second batch of episodes that include a rocket-fired grappling hook and

236   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series a submersible diving bell (‘Ennui’) and ‘a device to create an explosion out of all proportion to its size’ (‘Friends and Enemies’). On the other hand this light-heartedness contrasts with a quotient of violence that exceeds previous versions. In the first episode, for example, Chauvelin tortures one of the Pimpernel’s men, James Danby, to death, and sends his agent Fumier to slit the throat of his informer Minette Roland when he thinks she has betrayed him. There seems to have been a conscious decision to tone down the violence in the second batch of episodes: the guillotine still carries out its grisly work but without quite so much visible blood. The postmodern characteristics of The Scarlet Pimpernel are of a different order from those of, say, Zorro or The New Adventures of Robin Hood in that the playfulness with genre conventions does not extend to outright anachronism. While there are in-jokes aplenty, they are appropriate for the period. In ‘Friends and Enemies’, for example, Percy commissions a ‘painter fellow’ to paint Blakeney Hall and its gardens: this cues a characterisation of J. M. W. Turner as a chirpy Cockney. For art historians Turner’s painting ‘Blakeney Hall In the Mist’ exemplifies the artist’s abstract style: the joke is that Blakeney Hall is nowhere to be seen. In the same episode there are references to Benjamin Franklin (‘There is nothing more certain to Robespierre than death and taxes’) and to the invention of over-arm bowling as Percy has to lob a grenade over a high railing (‘You should bowl like that in your silly game!’, ‘Oh no, it would never do for cricket!’). These references are incidental to the plot: they provide the viewer with the satisfaction of spotting cultural references without undermining the period authenticity of the series through anachronism. In this sense The Scarlet Pimpernel demonstrates that it is possible to be playful and postmodern without insulting the intelligence of viewers: there are no references to Casablanca or E.T. and the series is immeasurably the better for it. The Scarlet Pimpernel may have seemed an unusual subject for Richard Carpenter, given that his scripts for Dick Turpin, Smuggler and Robin of Sherwood had suggested an affinity for plebeian protagonists and social outsiders. Sir Percy Blakeney, with his high-­society connections, hardly sits in the same tradition as Turpin or Jack Vincent. However, the politics of The Scarlet Pimpernel are subtly refashioned so that echoes of Carpenter’s social radicalism can be heard. While

Millennial mavericks   237 the Reign of Terror is presented in all its horror and brutality, with lower-class victims sent indiscriminately to the guillotine alongside the aristocracy, the series suggests some sympathy for the original principles of the French Revolution. Carpenter makes Marguerite a moderate republican who opposes the tyranny of Robespierre and the Jacobins: ‘My republicanism is that of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson  – not Robespierre’s terror!’ (‘Valentin Gautier’). Hence Carpenter is able to able to express sympathy for republicanism while also presenting the Pimpernel in opposition to tyranny and bloodshed in the traditional fashion. Carpenter even suggested that a political meaning was overlaid onto ‘Valentin Gautier’, in which Denise Black plays revolutionary ideologue Gabrielle Damiens as a (heavily disguised) caricature of Margaret Thatcher: ‘She’s a leather-clad, nun-whipping, terrifying provincial rebel leader … They discussed it on set with Denise, and as soon as she was told about Margaret Thatcher it all came together.’31 Elsewhere this version of The Scarlet Pimpernel addresses the charge that its hero is an aristocratic elitist in several ways. In ‘Ennui’ (by Matthew Hall) he rescues feisty Annette de Martignac but is unable to help her parents who have been imprisoned by Robespierre. The Martignacs are Federalists who support the principle of a constitutional monarchy and who have voluntarily relinquished much of their wealth. Annette challenges the Pimpernel’s reason for selecting those whom he saves: ‘My fellow prisoners were brave and principled Federalists. I was at least going to my death with honour. Your buccaneering whim has shamed me. What will they think of me now as they go to the guillotine?’ In Carpenter’s ‘A King’s Ransom’ the Pimpernel rescues the Dauphin  – the infant son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – who has been imprisoned in the Egalité Orphanage, where he is made to recite that his father was ‘the enemy of France’ and his mother ‘a foreign whore’. The ideological indoctrination of the young boy again highlights the unacceptable extreme of revolutionary fervour. It turns out that the Dauphin has been kidnapped by Chauvelin as political ballast in a power struggle with Robespierre. Even Chauvelin has become disillusioned with the course the revolution has taken: ‘Everyone who had made this revolution has been destroyed – it’s out of control!’

238   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series The reception of The Scarlet Pimpernel was mixed. The Times called it a ‘lavish and classy production [that] has plenty of poetic humour and strong acting’.32 Matthew Bond in the Daily Telegraph felt that ‘the production values … appeared to be those of a big budget feature film rather than Sunday night television drama’ and that Richard E. Grant’s performance ‘was spot on’.33 However, for Christopher Dunkley in the Financial Times it was an uneven combination of ‘beautiful locations and costumes, the occasional exciting action sequence inside over-long scripts, little sense of style, and nowhere near enough pace’.34 Several reviewers felt that the series seemed unsure about whether it was meant as a straight adventure or as a spoof. Stephanie Merritt in the Observer found it ‘a costume drama sending up both itself and the genre, but only partially; the derring-do is audaciously larger than life but the blood and cruelty are – were – shockingly real’.35 John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph thought it ‘neither one thing nor another – enjoyable piece of fluff or stark historical drama’.36 James Walton in the Daily Telegraph elaborated upon this point: These days, I reckon, there are three ways of making a successful screen version of classic swashbuckling material. You can, of course, just send the whole thing up, making the fact that people ever took this tat seriously into your central joke. If you’re feeling braver – as the makers of ITV’s Hornblower so commendably were – you can trust the power of old stories and play it absolutely straight. Finally, and trickiest of all, you can combine these two approaches in order to end up with something both exciting and funny. The Scarlet Pimpernel seems to be aiming for option three; but instead of blending pastiche and proper narrative, it merely hovers uncertainly  – and, in the end, fatally  – between them.37 While The Scarlet Pimpernel was far from a failure, the BBC’s hopes for a ratings success on the scale of ITV’s Sharpe or Hornblower were soon dashed. The first series, broadcast in the primetime Sunday evening drama slot, drew only a 25 per cent audience share and prompted the BBC to issue a statement to the effect that it ‘never expected or even hoped to win the lion’s share of the audience’.38 It was a full twenty-one

Millennial mavericks   239 months before the second series reached the screen, by which time The Scarlet Pimpernel had been moved to a mid-week slot which suggests the BBC was unsure how and where to position it. The BBC’s confusion over where to position the costume adventure series was also evident in a three-part serialisation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (2005). This was shown on Sunday evenings at 5.45 p.m. in the traditional classic serial slot – a slot that had, however, been largely defunct for some years. Kidnapped was ‘a South Pacific production for CBBC’: South Pacific Pictures was a New Zealandbased television production company that had recently made the critically acclaimed children’s film Whale Rider (2002), while CBBC was the BBC’s new designation for the children’s programme period before the early evening news. The publicity discourse of Kidnapped positioned it so emphatically as being a children’s adventure serial – including an interview with James Anthony Pearson, who played David Balfour, on the children’s magazine programme Blue Peter with presenter Konnie Huq dressed as a pirate – that it may have deterred adult viewers from watching what turned out to be an enjoyable and unpretentious adaptation. Its cast – including Iain Glen as Alan Breck, Adrian Dunbar as Ebenezer Balfour, Paul McGann as Colonel MacNab and Gregor Fisher as James of the Glens – certainly belied its status as a children’s drama. Writers Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle followed the HTV adaptation of 1979 in adding the character of feisty heroine Catriona Drummond (Kirstin Coulter Smith) from Stevenson’s sequel, while another addition to the original was a group of trackers known as the ‘Long Mile Gang’, who pursue David and Alan across the Highlands. Kidnapped demonstrates how the style and technique of television drama had changed since the previous adaptation some twenty-six years before. It is faster-paced and less pictorialist than its predecessor, employing aerial photography for its panoramic shots and CGI for enhancement. Director Brendan Maher explained that he wanted to keep the image uncluttered: ‘We needed the landscape to have a major impact. You end up with clear skies, mountain ranges and whatever Davie’s standing on.’39 Maher also seems to have based some compositions on David Lean’s film of Oliver Twist (1948), particularly the foreboding rainlashed shots of David’s arrival at his Uncle Ebenezer’s Gothic house. Kidnapped had a better cast and higher production values than most

240   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series children’s dramas and could easily have been shown in a later slot when it might have attracted a wider audience. As it was the serial seems to have passed largely unnoticed.

Return of the hoodie: Robin Hood (2006–09) The next revival of the television swashbuckler demonstrated a symmetry of sorts with the origins of the genre. In 1955 ITV had positioned The Adventures of Robin Hood as Sunday-evening family viewing: the series had been one of the outstanding popular successes of early British commercial television. In 2006 it was the BBC that resurrected the outlaw of Sherwood Forest as Saturday-evening family entertainment. Again this was the outcome of a particular set of institutional and cultural contexts. In the early 2000s Saturday-evening television, once the highlight of the weekly schedules, had become the least-watched day of the week.40 This was widely blamed on the prevalence of celebrity-led ‘reality tv’ shows and tired light-entertainment formats that no longer appealed to the traditional cross-generational family audience. Consequently Saturday-evening television had become ‘a ratings disaster and a cultural wasteland’.41 This changed in 2005 with the success of the BBC’s revival of its iconic science-fiction adventure series Doctor Who. Doctor Who succeeded in appealing across generations and was credited with rediscovering the elusive family audience. It was the outstanding success of Doctor Who that persuaded the BBC to commission a new Robin Hood series  – its first excursion into Sherwood Forest since The Legend of Robin Hood in 1975. Shortly after the first series of Doctor Who had completed its run, BBC1 Controller Peter Fincham announced: ‘We are developing and hope to do a Robin Hood. It’s another iconic family drama brand that once in a generation is good to look at.’42 Robin Hood was produced for BBC1 by Tiger Aspect Productions with a budget of £8 million for thirteen forty-five-minute episodes.43 In the event it would run for three series, totalling thirty-nine episodes. Tiger Aspect, founded by Peter Bennett-Jones, was one of the new generation of independent producers that had emerged in Britain following the Broadcasting Act of 1990, producing programme content for both the BBC and the ITV network. It was best known for comedies such as

Millennial mavericks   241 The Vicar of Dibley and Mr Bean, though it had signalled its ambition to move into drama with two Sherlock Holmes television films (The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking) for the BBC in the early 2000s. Dominic Minghella and Foz Allan were the executive producers of Robin Hood, with Minghella, the younger brother of late film director Anthony Minghella and creator of the popular ITV comedy-drama series Doc Martin, also writing seven episodes. The production team included several who had also worked on new Doctor Who, including directors Graeme Harper and Douglas Mackinnon and writers Paul Cornell and John Fay. Like the US cable swashbucklers, Robin Hood was filmed entirely overseas, near Budapest in Hungary, and it exemplified technological changes in the production of television drama in that it was shot digitally (using Panasonic Varicam) and in high definition rather than on celluloid film. Tim Palmer, one of three directors of photography on the first series, explained that Varicam was preferred over the alternative Sony system because it ‘seems to have a more natural filmic look’.44 The series made headlines for the wrong reasons when several master tapes were stolen before transmission: the BBC later denied this was a publicity stunt.45 The production discourse of Robin Hood positioned it as a modern, even postmodern, interpretation of the familiar story. According to John Yorke, the BBC Head of Independent Drama: ‘The pitch that came to us was Robin Hood as Pirates of the Caribbean, so it’s a more postmodern version. There’s a lot of Errol Flynn in there – Errol Flynn meets Johnny Depp, as Keith Richards.’46 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been an unexpected box-office smash hit: its mixture of action, comedy and pastiche had signalled a shift away from the Rob Roy and Braveheart style of historical adventure films that had influenced the BBC’s Ivanhoe in 1997 towards a more playful style of genre parody in which period authenticity was very much secondary to postmodern self-awareness. There is even some evidence to suggest that Robin Hood set out to appeal to the same teenage demographic as The New Adventures of Robin Hood. Jonas Armstrong, who played Robin, said: ‘I think we’ve come up with something cool that’s both modern and medieval, with a bit of street [sic]. I’ve even got a hoodie!’47 The ‘hoodie’ had become the fashion garment of choice for some young people and the object of a minor moral panic in the British

242   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

6.4  Robin the hoodie: Jonas Armstrong starring in Robin Hood.

media which associated ‘hoodies’ with criminality. Robin Hood would milk this association by representing its protagonist as young, defiant and anti-authoritarian. In fact all the principal outlaws – with the exception of Gordon Kennedy as Little John – were played by actors in their early twenties, including Sam Troughton as Much, Joe Armstrong as Allan-A-Dale and Harry Lloyd as Will Scarlett. Jonas Armstrong claimed that he saw Robin as ‘a bit of a geezer’ and based his characterisation on celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.48 Otherwise the producers were keen to overlay a contemporary perspective onto Robin Hood. The series was produced at a time when popular opinion was turning against Britain’s participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the bitter counter-insurgency warfare that persisted for years thereafter. Minghella saw this as the context for Robin Hood: ‘There are some really obvious parallels with our world … It’s about a guy coming back from a foreign war he doesn’t believe in to find that all is not well … The thing that is different about our Robin Hood is that he’s essentially a pacifist.’49 Keith Allen, who played Vasey, the Sheriff of Nottingham, claimed that he based his character on the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown: ‘The Sheriff is very politically ambitious and sees himself as the future dictator of England – which is where the Gordon Brown reference comes in! I just watch the news every night and I see a calculating, devilish person at work.’50 This claim should perhaps be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt: Allen would play the Sheriff as a pantomime villain with

Millennial mavericks   243 a penchant for one-liners who bore little outward resemblance to the dour ‘Son the Manse’ Brown. The critical response to this youth-oriented remake of Robin Hood was equivocal. For some reviewers, such as Pete Clark of the Evening Standard, it was ‘a wonderful return to a golden age when men were Robin, the baddies were corrupt local government, trees were diseasefree, and Marian could still be a maid after five years of voluntary inactivity’.51 Other critics were less impressed, however. John Plunkett in the Guardian found it ‘pretty lame’ and thought that ‘in trying to make it modern and appealing to today’s youth, they somehow managed to strip any romance or sexiness from it’.52 The youthfulness of Robin and his gang prompted several reviewers to make facetious play about boy pop bands. Reviewing the third series, for example, Guardian blogger Will Hodgkinson remarked that ‘Jonas Armstrong’s Hood looks like a member of a boy band that got lost in the woods after a team-building weekend and has been forced to live on nothing but hair gel’.53 The Robin Hood website Bold Outlaw felt that ‘Armstrong’s Robin comes off as the youth you might meet at the video arcade’, while the rest of the outlaws all had ‘the same generic “boy band” look that Robin does’. This reviewer, for one, evidently disliked the postmodern elements of Robin Hood: ‘The tone of the series can be wildly inconsistent … characters will speak formally with no contractions, but then use modern slang.’54 And Paul Hoggart in The Times thought the hero was outclassed by the villains: ‘Armstrong as the rather understated Robin Hood should still be moodily cheeky enough to find his way onto the bedroom walls of a few hundred thousand pubertal girls, and Lucy Griffiths as Marian is inevitably feisty. But the villains steal the show, with Richard Armitage’s Guy of Gisborne off-setting Keith Allen’s gags as the mocking, heavily sarcastic Sheriff.’55 The challenge for every new version of Robin Hood in either film or television is to distance itself from previous versions while still retaining enough of the core elements of the founding myth. The ideological and cultural flexibility of Robin Hood has supported narratives presenting Robin as an arch royalist (The Adventures of Robin Hood) and as a proto-socialist revolutionary (Robin of Sherwood). The BBC’s Robin Hood represents a sort of half-way house between those interpretations. Robin in this version is the youthful Earl of Huntingdon (as

244   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series he had been in The Legend of Robin Hood), who returns home after five years of fighting in the Third Crusade to find that Vasey, the new Sheriff of Nottingham, is ruling the shire with a fist of iron. Robin and his servant Much are Saxons, though the series overall is less insistent on the Saxon–Norman enmity than previous British television versions of the story. Robin is disinherited when he challenges the Sheriff, and his Locksley estate is handed to Sir Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage). Robin suggests a degree of war weariness (‘I do not know why Englishmen travel two thousand miles to fight evil, when the real cancer is right here’), and, while he always remains loyal to the king, he is not averse to reminding him of his responsibilities. In the episode ‘We Are Robin Hood’, for example, he tells King Richard (Steven Waddington): ‘I’ll remember you as the king who spent too long at war. It’s clouded your judgement. You’ve forgotten your people at home.’ Like Robin of Sherwood, Robin Hood is at pains to offer a new interpretation of the old legend. Whether this amounts to legitimate product differentiation or wholly unnecessary meddling with the founding myth is a moot point. Perhaps the most significant departure is in the character of Marian (Lucy Griffiths). In this version Marian is the daughter of Edward of Knighton, the old Sheriff of Nottingham, a just man who has been deposed by the usurper Vasey. It would seem that the writers may have confused Robin Hood with The Black Arrow: in no other version of the legend does Marian adopt the guise of a masked archer known as the ‘Night Watchman’, who proves as adept with the bow as Robin himself. This can be understood as a device to allow Marian a more proactive role while keeping her for narrative reasons in Nottingham Castle rather than living with Robin in Sherwood Forest: it is a matter of opinion whether it adds anything to the legend. Allan-A-Dale is recast from the lovelorn minstrel of popular folklore to become a small-time thief and chancer: he changes allegiance in the second series as an informer for Gisborne before re-joining the outlaws. There was initially no room for Friar Tuck or Prince John. This time the Saracen who joins Robin – seemingly de rigueur since Robin of Sherwood and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – is a girl, Djaq (Anjali Jay), hiding under the guise of her dead brother. Djaq is in love with Will Scarlett, who remains with her in the Holy Land at the end of the second series. Keith Allen’s Vasey follows the trend established by Alan

Millennial mavericks   245 Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to portray the Sheriff in a camp, pantomime style. It seems to be the modern way, but it makes the Sheriff a less plausible villain than Alan Wheatley’s urbane and cunning antagonist in The Adventures of Robin Hood. It is left to Richard Armitage’s Gisborne to be a real villain, though even here the character is softened by his unrequited love for Marian. The sources for Robin Hood seem to have been an eclectic mixture of the traditional and the new. Some aspects of the myth are present, such as the archery contest (‘Turk Flu’) and the Sheriff’s plot to forge an alliance of noblemen against the king (‘For England …!’). Others, such as the quaterstaff duel between Robin and Little John, are inexplicably absent. Some stories rework episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, such as the castle scientist who discovers the secret of gunpowder (‘A Thing or Two About Loyalty’) and the Sheriff’s attempt to discredit Robin in the eyes of the people by having an impostor commit crimes in his name (‘Who Shot the Sheriff?’). Unlike The Adventures of Robin Hood, however, there is no real attempt at any sense of historical authenticity. In fact Robin Hood is notable for its highly eclectic mobilisation of historical periods and motifs. Its promotional materials drew attention to the use of modern costumes: ‘Green tights have been replaced with suspiciously trendy medieval attire, including combat trousers, desert boots and even a hoodie for the lead character.’56 Richard Armitage’s costume as Gisborne, for example, is a black leather long coat that seems more appropriate for the Sherwood Forest chapter of the Hell’s Angels than a medieval tax collector. Nor is there any good reason for Robin to wield a Saracen scimitar and a recurve bow rather than a traditional English longbow: again this seems to be change for the sake of it rather than one with any narrative or historical rationale. Like The New Adventures of Robin Hood, this Robin Hood is infected by presentisms and modern slang in its dialogue. These include ‘You’re out of your depth’, ‘You’re not serious!’, ‘You need to calm down’, ‘My point still stands’, ‘Just dropping in on you’ and ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to read other people’s mail?’ The worst offender in this regard is Keith Allen’s Sheriff of Nottingham, whose lines include ‘Oh, yippee!’, ‘La-di-da-di-da’, ‘Come to daddy’ and ‘That’s quite enough of the gobbledygook’. Perhaps the last remark was ad-libbed after Allen had read the script? While it is tempting to dismiss this simply as

246   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series laziness on the part of the writers, it can also be understood as a strategy for positioning Robin Hood as a thoroughly contemporary adventure series rather than a period piece. Again, whether this strategy is successful is largely a matter of taste. There is some evidence that, in the first series at least, a political dimension was being overlaid onto Robin Hood. In the early episodes there is an explicit political subtext concerning the ‘War on Terror’. In Robin’s first meeting with the Sheriff (‘Will You Tolerate This?’) he expresses doubt over the legitimacy of the Crusade in terms that recall the debate over Britain’s decision to join the US invasion of Iraq in 2003: Sheriff: The king needs funds to fight our Holy War. Robin: Is it our Holy War, or is it Pope Gregory’s? Sheriff: We stand shoulder to shoulder with Rome. This is a clear echo of Tony Blair’s statement that Britain would stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the United States in the War on Terror: simply substitute George W. Bush for Pope Gregory and the meaning is clear. Later in the series, Robin encounters a traumatised soldier suffering from post-traumatic shock (or ‘Crusader sickness’) and a Saracen death squad who are equated with suicide bombers in so far as their mission is to ‘kill – or die in the attempt’ (‘Peace? Off!’). Again there is a clear parallel with the present: Allan: War in the Holy Land is two thousand miles away, it’s not our problem. Robin: No, Allan, you’re wrong. War is here – it’s right here in the forest. Robin is marked out as progressive in his desire for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East (‘Every day good men like Harold are destroyed out there. Only peace can put a stop to this’), whereas the Sheriff is characterised as a warmonger who wishes to perpetuate conflict for his own ends (‘War is so much more profitable than peace!’). Robin Hood refers explicitly to the political rhetoric of the War on Terror. There is a clear association between the actions of the Sheriff,

Millennial mavericks   247 who declares a ‘war on terror’ (‘Who Shot the Sheriff?’), and the ideological justification offered by the British government for the introduction of new anti-terror legislation that in the eyes of many critics amounted to an infringement of civil liberties. The Sheriff compares Robin to a terrorist: ‘I have heard that there are camps in the Holy Land where men are taught to hate their own land, to wreak havoc and destruction. Maybe that is what happened to Robin’ (‘Sheriff Got Your Tongue’). In the same episode Gisborne defends imprisonment without trial: ‘He is an outlaw. You see, in these straitened times the Sheriff has made special provision. Outlaws are classed as enemies of war, thus we can hold them without trial and we can execute them without trial.’ Robin Hood is sceptical in the extreme of the ideological legitimation offered for the War on Terror. It is entirely coincidental that Anjali Jay, the actress who plays Djaq, bears more than a passing likeness to Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights organisation Liberty and a staunch opponent of the extension of state power through anti-terror legislation.57 It will be clear that the political subtext in Robin Hood is entirely overt: the message is in no way hidden or disguised. Minghella confirmed this when he said: ‘We want to be crowd-pleasing. This isn’t Play for Today. We want people to enjoy an action adventure, but if you do want to find contemporary parallels I want you to do so relatively easily … It’s an adult and a family show.’58 Similar topical references were also a feature of the new Doctor Who: its 2005 episode ‘Aliens of London’, for example, had referred to the notorious claim in the ‘September Dossier’ of 2002 that Saddam Hussein’s regime was capable of deploying weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes. The degree of scepticism expressed towards the ideological legitimation for the War on Terror in Robin Hood and Doctor Who might just be a case of writers using popular drama as a vehicle for political satire. However, there is another possible explanation, albeit entirely speculative, that it was also an expression of the institutional culture of the BBC at the time. In May 2003 Radio 4’s Today programme had suggested that the British government had ‘sexed up’ its dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to support the case for intervention in Iraq. The source of this information, United Nations weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, was later found dead in unusual

248   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series circumstances – an apparent suicide. A judicial inquiry by Lord Hutton absolved the government of any blame but severely censured the BBC, causing the downfall of both its Director-General Greg Dyke and its Chair of Governors Gavyn Davies. However, it soon became apparent, following the invasion of Iraq, that the Today report had been substantially correct. To this extent the political references in Robin Hood might be understood in a rather different context: the BBC had good reason to be sceptical of the Blair government. However, the political subtext of Robin Hood should perhaps not be taken too seriously. It seems to have been a topical aside rather than a genuine political statement: and in any event such references did not persist beyond the first series. Elsewhere, indeed, the series seems to have been at pains to distance itself from politics and instead to embrace the postmodern strategies of pastiche and intertextuality. This can be seen in several ways. There are references throughout to modern popular culture that make no sense at all in a medieval context and would seem to have been included for no reason other than to provide a moment of recognition for the audience. For example, Eric Clapton’s song ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ (‘I shot the sheriff/But I didn’t shoot the deputy’) is referenced in the Robin Hood episode ‘Who Shot the Sheriff?’, when the would-be assassin thinks he has succeeded in his mission (‘I did it – I shot the Sheriff!’), only for the Sheriff to reveal that it was a double (‘No, you shot the deputy – my lookalike!’). At the same time, however, some of the references are so oblique that in all probability they would have passed over the heads of many viewers. An episode entitled ‘Lardner’s Ring’ suggests that the writer (John Fay) was familiar with the backstory of The Adventures of Robin Hood – especially as he also includes a character called Lawrence McClellan, which had been one of the writing pseudonyms used by Ring Lardner Jr – though it is doubtful whether this would have meant anything to a large proportion of the audience. (Lardner, incidentally, turns out to be a carrier pigeon which Robin uses to send a message to King Richard in the Holy Land. It also prompts a Dick Dastardly turn from the Sheriff of Nottingham, who declares: ‘We must catch the pigeon! Catch the pigeon!’). The BBC had seen Robin Hood as another potential blockbuster in the mould of Doctor Who: in the event it did not quite match up to those expectations. Its first and second series attracted respectable

Millennial mavericks   249 audiences, with averages of 6.6 million and 5.8 million viewers respectively. However, the third series in 2009 saw a drastic decline, with a series average of only 4 million and a low of 2.4 million for the final episode. This may have been due in some measure to moving Robin Hood from the autumn schedules to the early summer: the low figure for the last episode was certainly affected by it clashing with a match featuring home favourite Andy Murray in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships.59 However, the declining audience also coincided with a narrative shift in the content of the series itself. Lucy Griffiths had decided to leave at the end of series two: instead of recasting Marian, the character was killed off when Gisborne stabs her in a jealous rage when she declares her love for Robin instead of him. This was a radical departure from the founding myth and prompted much criticism.60 Consequently the third series is darker in tone, with Robin initially turning his back on his men and seeking revenge, only to find himself later in the series forced into an uneasy alliance with Gisborne when  – in a twist that recalls the third series of Robin of Sherwood  – it is revealed that they both have a mutual half-brother in the character of Archer (Clive Standen), the illegitimate son of Robin’s father and Gisborne’s mother (‘Bad Blood’). With Keith Allen appearing less frequently, a new villain was introduced in the character of Prince John (Toby Stephens), while Robin has new romantic interests in Locksley villager Kate (Joanne Froggatt) and Gisborne’s estranged sister Isabella (Lara Pulver), who becomes the new Sheriff. Friar Tuck (David Harewood – the first black actor to play the role) makes a belated entrance, though as more of a spiritual healer than the traditional monk. With Jonas Armstrong and Richard Armitage also leaving at the end of series three, the concluding episode saw the deaths of Gisborne and Robin  – the latter killed by Isabella’s poisoned sword in yet another departure from the traditional narrative – as well as Vasey and Isabella. It had been intended that, as in Robin of Sherwood, the mantle of ‘Robin Hood’ would pass to another: accordingly the final episode includes a scene where the dying Robin appeals to his brother Archer to ‘make sure this doesn’t finish here because this is where you belong …These men are your brothers now. Our work is not finished yet’ (‘Something Worth Fighting For’). Robin then walks alone into the forest to die,

250   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series Armstrong becoming the third Robin Hood to die on British television after Martin Potter and Michael Praed. Sally Wainwright, writer of At Home With the Braithwaites and The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, was reported to have been approached to take over as the ‘showrunner’ of Robin Hood and told the press: ‘I want to model Robin Hood more on Doctor Who, in terms of quality of script and quality of direction.’61 However, following the conclusion of the third series the BBC announced that it had decided not to commission further episodes as ‘we feel that the show has reached its natural conclusion’ with Robin’s death.62 It would be fair to say that, for all its slick production values and its postmodern self-awareness, Robin Hood failed to displace either The Adventures of Robin Hood or Robin of Sherwood as the definitive television interpretations of the Robin Hood legend. It never quite found the consistency of tone and style that characterised the former and fell some way short of the intelligence and quality of the latter. Nevertheless it demonstrated that the narrative of Robin Hood could be made relevant to the cultural and ideological circumstances of the early twenty-first century. And it showed that the swashbuckler is capable of reinventing itself for a modern television culture. It will surely not be the last example of its kind. Notes 1 Michele Hilmes, ‘US Television in the Multichannel Age’, in Michele Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book (London, 2003), pp. 64–5. 2 New World Productions Zorro official website: ‘Zorro: Family Channel New Release’, www.newworldzorro.com/presskitinfo/ geninfo.html (accessed 19 June 2012). 3 Ibid. 4 Variety, 7 February 1990, p. 160. 5 New World Productions Zorro official website: ‘Articles’, www. newworldzorro.com/articles.html. 6 New World Productions Zorro official website: ‘Zorro: Family Channel New Release’, www.newworldzorro.com/presskitinfo/geninfo.html.

Millennial mavericks   251 7 The third season of Moonlighting featured a Christmas episode entitled ‘It’s a Wonderful Job’, in which Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) wishes she had never taken over the detective agency. The final episode of the regular series of Dallas in 1991 was a bizarre inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life in which a less-than-heavenly messenger confronts an apparently suicidal J. R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) with a vision of a world in which he had never existed. 8 The credits are byzantine in the extreme and I have not been able to untangle them all: ‘A co-production from Tarnview Limited, Dune S.A. and Metropole Television in association with Warner Bros. International Television Production, Productions et Editions Cinématographiques Françaises S.R.L., Baltic Ventures International Limited and Weintraub/Kuhn Productions with the participation of the Centre National de la Cinématographie.’ 9 Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), p. 77. 10 Variety, 3 March 1997, www.variety.com/review/VE1117906062 (accessed 23 March 2012). 11 Hollywood Reporter, 18 September 1998, p. 24. 12 Julia Hartley-Brewer, ‘Maid in America: Miss Whiplash of Sherwood Forest’, Evening Standard, 31 July 1997. 13 Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, p. 78. 14 See Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy (eds), Athena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors (New York, 2003). 15 Always (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1989)  was itself a remake of A Guy Named Joe (dir. Victor Fleming, 1944). 16 ‘Sony Pictures Entertainment v. Fireworks Entertainment Group, 137 F. Supp. 2d 1177’, United States District Court, C.D., California, Western Division, 5 April 2001, http://scholar.google.com/scholar_ case17573994030226630818 (accessed 25 February 2013). 17 ‘Tale of chivalry tops BBC drama’, Independent, 12 September 1996, p. 9. 18 ‘A knight for the Nineties’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January 1997, p. A-6. 19 ‘If you go down to the woods today’, Independent on Sunday, 19 January 1997, p. 16. 20 ‘True romance’, Guardian, 13 January 1997, p. 21.

252   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 21 ‘Review’, Independent, 13 January 1997, p. 11. 22 ‘It’s war between Filthy and Smelly’, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 January 1997, p. 29. 23 ‘A knight for the Nineties’, p. A-6. 24 ‘TV Ivanhoe purges Scott’s Jew-haters’, Observer, 12 January 1997, p. 3. 25 Observer, 12 January 1997, p. 75. 26 ‘Ivanhoe, jousting for New Labour’, Observer, 19 January 1997, pp. 1–4. 27 ‘London Films clinches Pimpernel series deal’, Broadcast, 5 May 1989, p. 12. 28 The first series consisted of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ (24 January 1999), ‘Valentin Gautier’ (31 January 1999) and ‘A King’s Ransom’ (7 February 1999). The second series was ‘Ennui’ (18 October 2000), ‘Friends and Enemies’ (25 October 2000)  and ‘A Good Name’ (1 November 2000). 29 ‘Once more into the breech with Pimpernel’, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 1997, p. 4. 30 ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, BBC press release, undated, on the BFI Library microfiche for The Scarlet Pimpernel. 31 ‘BBC’s Pimpernel drops the acute French accents’, Daily Telegraph, 26 August 1998, p. 5. 32 The Times, 27 October 2000, p. 75. 33 Daily Telegraph, 25 January 1999, p. 30. 34 Financial Times, 25 October 2000, p. 24. 35 Observer, 24 January 1999, p. 14. 36 Sunday Telegraph, 31 January 199, p. 8. 37 ‘Will no one rescue this Pimpernel?’, Daily Telegraph, 26 October 2000, p. 46. 38 ‘Pimpernel – hit or miss?’, The Stage, 4 February 1999, p. 3. 39 ‘Kidnapped – Brendan Maher, Director’, BBC Press Office, 4 February 2005, www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/2005/02_ february/04/kidnapped_maher.shtml (accessed 7 May 2013). 40 ‘Saturday night TV least popular’, BBC News, 29 August 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/entertainment/3190783.stm (accessed 17 December 2012). 41 ‘How Saturday night television rediscovered its magic touch’, Observer, 21 September 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/ sep/21/television (accessed 17 December 2012).

Millennial mavericks   253 42 ‘Hood the new Who?’, The Stage, 14 July 2005, www.thestage.co.uk/ news/2005/07/hood-the-new-who (accessed 10 April 2013). 43 ‘Robin Hood returns to British TV’, BBC News, 3 April 2006, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ entertainment/4871688.stm (accessed 10 April 2013). 44 ‘Robin Hood’, British Cinematographer, 19 (January 2007), p. 14. 45 ‘Stolen Robin Hood tapes recovered’, BBC News, 8 September 2006 http://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/entertainment/5329212.stm (accessed 10 April 2013). 46 ‘News extra’, TV Zone, 2020 (June 2006), p. 15. 47 Ibid. 48 ‘Robin hoodie’, Daily Telegraph: Review, 16 September 2006, p. 5. 49 ‘Robin and the boyz in the wood’, The Times: The Knowledge, 16 September 2006, p. 40. 50 ‘Chancellor inspires Keith Allen’s Sheriff in BBC1’s new Robin Hood’, TV Times, 22–8 September 2006, p. 4. 51 ‘One hoodie we all would like to hug’, Evening Standard, 27 September 2006, p. 15. 52 Guardian: G2, 1 January 2007, p. 19. 53 ‘Robin Hood: easily replaced by another Archer’, Guardian, 16 June 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/jun/16 (26 April 2013). 54 Bold Outlaw, www.boldoutlaw.com.bbcrobinhood/ (accessed 26 April 2013). 55 ‘Old villains steal new show’, The Times, 7 September 2006, www. thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/2006/sep/07 (accessed 26 April 2013). 56 ‘Robin Hood given modern makeover’, BBC News, 8 September 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5326734.stm (accessed 25 April 2013). 57 This likeness was noted by Caitlin Moran in The Times: ‘Robin’s hooked up with Little John, and a Saracen alchemist called Jack [sic], who’s a chick, and looks like Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty. ‘Merry men pierced by time’s arrow’, The Times, 27 November 2006, p. 2006. 58 ‘Robin and the boyz in the wood’, p. 42. 59 ‘Robin Hood axed by BBC’, Telegraph, 3 July 2009, www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5727638/Robin-Hood-axed-by-BBC (accessed 25 April 2013).

254   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series 60 ‘They’ve killed Maid Marian’, BBC Nottingham, 31 December 2007, www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2007/12/31/killing_ maid_marian_feature.shtml (accessed 25 April 2013). 61 ‘Wainwright to “reinvent” BBC’s Robin Hood’, The Stage, 7 January 2009, www.thestage.co.uk/news/2009/01/exclusive-wainwright-toreinvent-bbcs-robin-hood (accessed 25 April 2013). 62 ‘BBC kills off Robin Hood series’, BBC News, 3 July 2009, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8132101.stm (accessed 25 April 2013).

Conclusion The enduring place of the swashbuckler in popular television culture was demonstrated once again in 2014 when the flagship of BBC1’s New Year drama schedules was an expensively mounted ten-part series entitled The Musketeers. This was – surprisingly perhaps – the first Britishmade adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic since the mid-1960s. In fact it was an adaptation only in the loosest sense of taking the main characters and historical situation of the novel and then fashioning entirely new plots around them. Hence the series is set against the background of factional strife in seventeenth-century France and focuses on the efforts of the Musketeers to thwart the political ambitions of a machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu (Peter Capaldi). The Musketeers was ‘created and written by Adrian Hodges’ and was first touted as early as 2007 as a possible alternative to Robin Hood in the Saturday-evening family drama slot. In the event it was scheduled in a post-watershed Sunday 9 p.m. slot, which allowed the series to include slightly more adult content in terms of sex and violence. This, it might be said, is consistent with the source material: the second half of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers is notably darker in tone than the first. While the series overall has a certain unevenness of tone, it was nevertheless a significant popular success. It averaged a respectable 6.3 million viewers and has been sold to seventy-eight countries. At the time of writing a second series has been commissioned – though this will be without Peter Capaldi due to his casting as the new ‘Doctor Who’. The Musketeers exemplifies all the hallmarks of the early twentyfirst-century costume adventure series. It foregrounds high-end production values and state-of-the-art digital camera effects: the ‘look’ of the series is nothing if not slick and polished. Its style owes more to the recent cinematic incarnations of the Musketeers (there had been 255

256   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series further films of The Three Musketeers in 1993 and 2011 and of The Man in the Iron Mask in 1998)  than to the source novel. The 1993 film, starring ‘Brat Pack’ actors Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland, seems to have been a particular point of reference. Hence the series foregrounds the wenching and drinking exploits of the Musketeers as much as their swordplay, and they are characterised as high-spirited young men first and only secondarily as loyal servants of the king. The casting of a mixed-race actor (Howard Charles) as Porthos – rather like the black Friar Tuck of Robin Hood – might be seen either as a welcome challenge to the hegemonic whiteness of other versions or as a token piece of political correctness depending upon one’s view. Like other recent examples of the genre, The Musketeers is full of anachronistic dialogue: ‘What’s going on?’, ‘Would you believe it?’, ‘I hardly get to see you these days’, ‘Now that’s the way to make an entrance’ and ‘Any time you want your sword polished, handsome, just let me know’ are not phrases found even in the loosest translation of Dumas. Hence the idiom and language of The Musketeers are those of the present rather than the period in which it is set (unlike, for example, the films directed by Richard Lester, which had managed a perfectly acceptable version of vernacular dialogue without resorting to modern slang). As tempting as it is to see this as evidence of laziness on the part of the scriptwriters, its prevalence in contemporary swashbucklers would suggest that it has become a conscious part of a strategy to reinvent the genre for the cultural tastes of modern audiences. Yet at the same time as reinventing the genre for the modern day, The Musketeers is also part of a lineage that extends back to the early history of television as a mass medium. This survey has mapped the cultural and institutional histories of swashbuckling television since the 1950s. The question that remains to be asked by way of conclusion is why the genre has proved so durable for so many years. It has outlived other once-popular action-based genres: the Western, for example, more or less disappeared as a staple television genre in the 1970s. Even the emergence of fantasy sword-and-sorcery adventure series – Hercules, Xena, Merlin, Game of Thrones – has not displaced the costume swashbuckler in the landscape of popular television drama. This is no small achievement for a genre often regarded as being essentially conservative – both culturally and aesthetically – and whose social politics are

Conclusion   257 rooted in old-fashioned ideological values and class structures. Indeed the perceived conservatism of the swashbuckler may help to explain the neglect of the genre in television historiography: most academic critics tend to prefer analysing texts that are deemed in some way politically or formally progressive. There seem to be no historical or geographical limits to the popularity of the swashbuckler: from The Adventures of Robin Hood to The Musketeers the genre has been exported to television markets around the world. It is testament to the success of the British-made swashbucklers of the 1950s that Walt Disney produced its own home-grown version in Zorro – which in its own turn became a successful export. The swashbuckler also appeals across gender and different age groups. It offers pleasure for both male and female spectators. For male viewers the swashbuckler offers the spectacle of heroism, action and adventure (not to mention beautiful maidens), while for female viewers it provides a touch of romance and the visual pleasures of costume drama (including the spectacle of male beauty in handsome costumes). And the swashbuckler also appeals to child and adult viewers alike. In this sense the swashbuckler can be seen as having developed institutionally from juvenile entertainment to mainstream family drama. In the 1950s the US trade paper Variety tended to position most swashbucklers as being for ‘the smallfry’ or ‘the moppet mart’, though even so the casting of middle-aged stars such as Richard Greene (The Adventures of Robin Hood) and George Dolenz (The Count of Monte Cristo) suggests that producers may have had an eye on older viewers too. A second wave of British swashbucklers in the early 1970s (Arthur of the Britons, The Black Arrow) were also produced for younger viewers, but the advent of the internationally packaged television movie from the middle of the decade signalled a change of strategy. The television films of the later 1970s and 1980s saw the swashbuckler shift into primetime with expensive production values giving a clear indication that these films were no longer ‘just for kids’. In the 1990s Sharpe became the first primetime costume adventure series containing an ‘adult’ level of sex and violence: a flash of Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts would surely be deemed unsuitable for children in most households. Another reason for the continuing appeal of the swashbuckler is that it has proved more amenable than some other genres to cultural and

258   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series ideological reinvention. The various different versions of the Robin Hood myth between the 1950s and the 2000s are evidence of the genre’s potential for remakes and renewal. The ability of the swashbuckler to respond to changes in the wider social and political landscape demonstrates the ideological flexibility of a genre that has too often been regarded as static and fixed. It is a truism that all popular culture is informed by and responds to the historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed. The swashbuckler is no exception: it has been employed as a vehicle for commentary on the politics of the Cold War (The Adventures of Robin Hood), the emergence of counter-cultures (Arthur of the Britons), the social and economic policies of Thatcherism (Robin of Sherwood), the politics of New Labour (Ivanhoe) and the War on Terror (Robin Hood). The swashbuckler has also adapted to other trends in popular culture: thus the 1980s saw the ascendancy of the heritage swashbuckler, while the 1990s saw the emergence of a cycle of postmodern swashbucklers whose points of reference were not the founding myths or literary source texts but other popular films and television series. The fundamental reason for the longevity of the Anglophone swashbuckler, however, is that it features archetypal characters who remain timeless and universal in their appeal. In this sense it matters little whether Robin Hood is characterised as a constitutional royalist (The Adventures of Robin Hood), as a class warrior (Robin of Sherwood) or as a symbol of disenfranchised youth culture (Robin Hood): the point is that in all these guises he remains a defender of liberty and a champion of the poor and oppressed. The swashbuckling hero has a particular appeal for Anglophone cultures where the ethos of chivalry has offered a dominant ideal of masculinity for much of the twentieth century. The literary historian John Fraser has explored this phenomenon in his book America and the Patterns of Chivalry: The family of chivalric heroes has been by far the largest and most popular one in twentieth-century American culture, and its members, in whole or in part, have entered into virtually everyone’s consciousness. They include, naturally, the legion of knightly Westerners in print and celluloid sired by Owen Wister’s The Virginian and their Indian counterparts. They include Robin Hood, Errol Flynn’s especially, and Zorro, and the Scarlet

Conclusion   259 Pimpernel … They include the officers and gentlemen of Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and the gentleman rankers of Beau Geste, and the First World War aviators of Dawn Patrol, and clean-cut American fly-boys like Steve Canyon … They include gentleman knights like Prince Valiant and Nature’s gentlemen like Tarzan and Joe Palooka … They include gentlemanly English actors like Ronald Colman and George Sanders, and gentlemanly American ones like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and William Powell, and all those immortals, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, and the rest, who have epitomized native American gallantry and grace.1 It seems to me that the lineage Fraser describes has been as much a feature of British popular culture as American, not least because of the high profile of American films and television series in Britain: to this extent it can be understood as an Anglo-American family of chivalric heroes. And it is a taxonomy to which we can the names of Sir Lancelot, Ivanhoe, Sir Francis Drake, Dan Tempest, Dick Turpin, Horatio Hornblower and even Richard Sharpe. What about the charge that the swashbuckler is a conservative genre? On the face of it the politics of the swashbuckler might seem conservative in the extreme: it promotes a world in which legitimate authority is upheld and it endorses institutions such as monarchy and the Church. The swashbuckling hero may act to protect the throne of an absent king (The Adventures of Robin Hood) or to assert monarchical authority over the realm (The Adventures of Sir Lancelot). He may be defender of the king (The Three Musketeers), a saviour of the aristocracy (The Scarlet Pimpernel) or a protector of the rights of the landed classes (Zorro). Its promotion of an ethos of chivalry, honour, duty and social responsibility has led to the swashbuckler sometimes being regarded as a residual genre whose values are rooted in the past. And in its resort to mythic archetypes and ritualised narratives, the swashbuckler exemplifies perfectly the role of popular genres in supporting and helping to construct society and its values and customs. To this extent the swashbuckler may be seen as an instrument of hegemony in that it endorses certain ideologies and value systems. However, on closer inspection the politics of the swashbuckler are perhaps not quite so rigidly conservative as they might initially seem. As

260   Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series I undertook the extensive viewing required for this book I was struck by how often the swashbuckler has been a site of progressive social politics. The classic swashbuckling hero is usually cast as a champion of the poor  – this extends back to The Adventures of Robin Hood  – and there is evidence of a liberal outlook towards social outsiders and ethnic minorities. There is clearly a sense of class awareness in series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe where the gentry are generally associated with avarice and abuse of the feudal system. The opposition to slavery that informs The Buccaneers and the republican sympathies of Sword of Freedom may be attributed to the input of blacklisted writers whose left-wing politics undoubtedly influenced the scripts.2 But this outlook was evidently a feature of the genre as a whole: Sir Francis Drake is no less insistent on the tyranny of slavery than The Buccaneers and William Tell also features a republican hero without either having any known input from blacklistees. The swashbuckling hero invariably opposes tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of an ideological regime (The Scarlet Pimpernel), foreign occupation (William Tell), aggressive invaders (Arthur of the Britons), a scheming politician (The Musketeers) or a local military despot (Zorro), but some have gone further. What is at stake in the more politically radical swashbucklers of the 1970s and 1980s is no longer the abuse of lordly privileges or a corrupt local bureaucracy but rather an entire social and political system that is rotten to the core. The radicalism of Dick Turpin, Smuggler and Robin of Sherwood can be seen not only in their representation of outlaws as heroes but also in the total absence of the just state or monarchical authority that had featured in earlier series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood. The enduring appeal of the swashbuckler, the range of its narrative templates and the ideological flexibility of its format mean that it is a genre always ripe for renewal. For this reason it seems highly unlikely that we have seen the last of Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel on our television screens. The swashbuckler fulfils both an emotional and an ideological need: it meets our desire for adventure and romance while offering faith in a world where justice triumphs and selfless heroism is its own reward. As long as there is injustice, tyranny and oppression in the world, the swashbuckler will return to popular television.

Conclusion   261 Notes 1 John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge, 1982), p. 12. 2 Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “un-American” contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (2003), pp. 245–57.

Select bibliography Primary sources, including archival materials, trade papers and reviews, are referenced fully in the endnotes to each chapter. Where newspaper articles are cited without a page number, the source is the British Film Institute Library’s microfiche on the series concerned. ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, Reruns: The Magazine of Television History, 1: 4 (October 1980), p. 7. Anderson, Lindsay, ‘Notes from Sherwood’, Sight & Sound, 26: 3 (Winter 1956/57), pp. 159–60. Barzman, Norma, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2003). Benassi, Stéphane Benassi, ‘Chronologie des adaptations de romans-feuilletons populaire à la télévision française’, CinémAction, 79 (1996), pp. 215–20. Blandford, Linda, Sharpe Cut: The Inside Story of the Creation of a Major Television Series (London: HarperCollins, 2006). Boddy, William, ‘“Sixty million viewers can’t be wrong”: The rise and fall of the television Western’, in Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 119–40. Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. IV: Sound and Vision 1945–55 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). ——The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. V: Competition 1955–74 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2003). Buxton, David, From ‘The Avengers’ to ‘Miami Vice’: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Caughie, John, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60 (rev. edn) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Chapman, James, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). 262

Select Bibliography   263 ——‘The Adventures of Robin Hood and the origins of the television swashbuckler’, Media History, 17: 3 (2011), pp. 273–87. Chibnall, Steve, and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2009). Cooke, Lez, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003). Creeber, Glen (ed.), The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001). Dick, Bernard, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989). Early, Frances, and Kathleen Kennedy (eds), Athena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Eberts, Jake, and Terry Olott, My Indecision is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Eddington, Paul, So Far, So Good: The Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996). ‘Exploring the legend: An interview with Richard Carpenter’, StarBurst, 7: 11 (July 1985), pp. 34–9. Fraser, John, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Friedman, Lester D. (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (London: UCL Press, 1993). Gianakos, Larry James, Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle 1959–1975 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1978). ——Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle 1947– 1959 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1980). Giddings, Robert, and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001). Girouard, Mark, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). Grade, Lew, Still Dancing: My Story (London: Collins, 1987). Graham Scott, Peter, British Television: An Insider’s History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000). Hahn, Thomas (ed.), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000). Harper, Sue, and Vicent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Harper, Sue, and Justin Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Harty, Kevin J., ‘Television’s The Adventures of Sir Lancelot’, Quondam et Futurus: A Journal of Arthurian Interpretations, 1: 4 (1991), pp. 71–9. Hayes, R. M., The Republic Chapterplays: A Complete Filmography of the Serials Released by Republic Pictures Corporation, 1934–1955 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991). Higson, Andrew, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

264   Select Bibliography Hilmes, Michele, (ed.) The Television History Book (London: British Film Institute, 2003). Holliss, Richard, and Brian Sibley, The Disney Studio Story (London: Octopus, 1988). Home, Anna, Into the Box of Delights: A History of Children’s Television (London: BBC Books, 1993). Hutchings, Peter, Terence Fisher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). ‘Interview with Sidney Cole’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), pp. 260–6. Jacobs, Jason, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Johnson, Tom, and Deborah Del Vecchio, Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996). Knight, Stephen, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Knox, Simone, ‘Masterpiece Theatre and British drama imports on US television: Discourses of tension’, Critical Studies in Television, 7: 1 (2012), pp. 29–48. Lenihan, John H., ‘English classics for Cold War America’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20: 3 (1992), pp. 42–51. Lewis, Jon E., and Penny Stempel, The Ultimate TV Guide (London: Orion, 1999). McFarlane, Brian, Lance Comfort (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,1997). McGown, Alistair D., and Mark J. Docherty, The Hill and Beyond: Children’s Television Drama – An Encyclopedia (London: British Film Institute, 2003). MacLachlan, Christopher, ‘A Teller of Tales: Further Thoughts on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped’, ScotLit, 38: 39 (2010), www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ ScotLit/ASLS/Kidnapped.html (accessed 5 March 2012). Mann, Dave, Britain’s First TV/Film Crime Series and the Industrialisation of the Film Industry 1946–1964 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). Marill, Alvin H., Movies Made for Television 1964–2004, 4 vols (Lanham, ML: Scarecrow Press, 2005). Marks, Louis, ‘Hood Winked’, Listener, 18 January 1990, p. 8. Marwick, Arthur, British Society Since 1945 (3rd edn) (London: Penguin, 1996). Moore, Roger, with Gareth Roberts, My Word Is My Bond (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2008). Morgan, Kenneth O., The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Moseley, Roy, with Philip and Martin Masheter, Roger Moore: A Biography (London: New English Library, 1985).

Select Bibliography   265 Neale, Steve, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “un-American” contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (August 2003), pp. 245–57. ——‘Transatlantic ventures and Robin Hood’, in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), pp. 73–87. Potter, Jeremy, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. III: Companies and Programmes 1968–80 (London: Macmillan, 1990). Richards, Jeffrey, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). ——‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), pp. 65–80. ——‘The politics of the swashbuckler’, in James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 119–36. ——Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Robb, David, ‘Naming the right names: Amending the Hollywood blacklist’, Cineaste, 22: 2 (1996), pp. 24–9. Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1987). Rogers, Dave, and S. J. Gillis, The Rogers & Gillis Guide to ITC (Shrewsbury: SJG Communications, 1997). Rose, Brian G. (ed.), Television Genres: A Handbook and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). Sellers, Robert, Cult TV: The Golden Age of ITC (London: Plexus, 2006). Sendall, Bernard, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. I: Origin and Foundation 1946–62 (London: Macmillan, 1982). ——Independent Television in Britain, Vol. II: Expansion and Change 1958–68 (London: Macmillan, 1983). Sharpe, James, Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (London: Profile, 2004). Sibley, Brian, and Richard Hollis, The Disney Studio Story (London: Octopus, 1988). Smith, Anthony (ed.), Television: An International History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Spicer, Andrew, Sydney Box (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) Street, Sarah, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (London: Continuum, 2002). Stubbs, Jonathan, ‘The Eadly Levy: A runaway bribe? Hollywood production and British subsidy in the early 1950s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6: 1 (2009), pp. 1–20. Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).

266   Select Bibliography Thumim, Janet (ed.), Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). Vahimagi, Tise, British Television: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 1996). ——‘Swashbuckling TV’, Screenonline. www.screenonline.irg.uk/tv/9d/1136123/ index.html (accessed 8 February 2012). Veyrat-Masson, Isabelle, ‘French television looks at the past’, in Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor (eds), The Historian, Television and Television History (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2001), pp. 157–60. Walker, Alexander, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Harrap, 1985). Warren, Patricia, British Film Studios: An Illustrated History (London: B.T. Batsford, 1995). Winckler, Martin, ‘Zorro: Généalogie d’un héros’, Génération Séries, 31 (2000), pp. 20–28.

Index Page numbers in bold relate to figures ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 50, 76, 79, 83, 94, 173 ABC Film Distribution, 64 ABC Studios (Elstree), 68–9, 72 Abey, Dennis, 146 Abineri, John, 114, 153 Ackland, Joss, 97 Addie, Robert, 159, 165 Adventurer, 112, 137, 138, 150–2 Adventures of Black Beauty, The, 105, 138, 141 Adventures of Champion the Wonder Horse, The, 53, 76 Adventures of Legardère, The: see Aventures de Legardère, Les Adventures of Long John Silver, The, 121 Adventures of Quentin Durward, The, 13 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1938 film), 28–9, 81, 117, 120, 160 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1955–60 tv series), 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10–43, 49, 54, 58, 62, 64, 66, 74–5, 89, 118, 125, 142–3, 158, 222, 223, 240, 245, 248, 250, 257, 260 Adventures of Sinbad, The, 221 Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The, 2, 5, 49–55, 51, 58, 62, 74, 84, 108, 111 Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The, 5, 12, 49, 64–8, 66, 87, 182, 233 Adventures of William Tell, The: see William Tell

Against All Flags, 55 Agutter, Jenny, 175 Ainsworth, William, 141 Alaskans, The, 73 Alias, 226 Allan, Foz, 241 Allen, Keith, 18, 242–5 Alston, Hakim, 220 Altman, Mischa, 21 Amy, Susie, 228 Anderson, Lindsay, 18–19 Andrews, Anthony, 171, 178, 182, 184, 229, 233, 235 Annakin, Ken, 13 Annie Oakley, 76 Anthony, Lysette, 180 Associated Television (ATV), 11 Ardiot, Pierre, 206 Ardmore National Studios, 40 Arliss, Leslie, 84 Armchair Theatre, 2 Armitage, Richard, 243, 245 Armstrong, Jonas, 241, 242 Armstrong, Joe, 242 Arnatt, John, 18, 42 Arthur of the Britons, 3, 5, 103–12, 107, 117, 122, 134 Arts & Entertainment Network, 3, 186, 196, 229, 233 Ashton, Richard, 220 Aumont, Michel, 206 Austin, Ray, 214 Aventures de Legardère, Les, 127, 201 267

268   Index Avengers, The, 95 Azure Film Equity Fund, 193 Bailey, Chris, 150 Baker, Bob, 106, 146 Baker, Robert S., 73 Baltic Ventures International, 218 Bamber, Jamie, 234 Banderas, Antonio, 215 Bandit of Sherwood Forest, The, 29, 31 Bandits of Corsica, The, 18 Banks Stewart, Robert, 106, 114 Banks-Smith, Nancy, 230 Barma, Claude, 97, 200, 229 Baron, The, 93, 172 Baron, Alexander, 114 Barr, Patrick, 29 Bartrop, Rowland, 60 Barzman, Norma, 21, 22 Bast, William, 131, 175, 176, 181–3 Batman, 124, 217 Bavaria Films, 200 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 3, 11, 15, 24, 94–7, 185–6, 229, 239 BBC America, 193 BBC Birmingham, 233 BBC Worldwide, 193 Beaconsfield Studios, 72 Bean, Sean, 187, 188, 191 Beau Geste, 185–6 Bell, Alistair, 114 Belle, Ekkehardt, 127 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 200 Benjamin, Christopher, 140 Bennett, Charles, 69 Bennett, Compton, 18 Bennet-Jones, Peter, 240 Benson, Martin, 60 Berman, Monty, 73 Bernstein, Elmer, 106 Bernstein, Walter, 16, 20 Berry, John, 21 Berwick, Frances, 206

Beta TV, 214 Bettany, Paul, 188 Beyond Sherwood Forest, 164 Biggins, Christopher, 131 Bionic Woman, The, 226 Birt, Daniel, 18 Bishop, Terry, 18 Black Arrow, The, 5, 8, 103, 121–5, 123 Black, Denise, 237 Black, Ian Stuart, 90 Blackbeard the Pirate, 55 Blair, Tony, 232, 246 Blanche, Roland, 207 Bleasedale, Alan, 156 Blessed, Brian, 106, 131, 165 Blezzard, John, 138 Boetticher, Budd, 68 Bonanova, Fortunio, 69 Bonanza, 76 Bond, Matthew, 238 Bondarchuk, Sergei, 187 Boswell, Ruth, 112 Botto, Juan Diego, 215 Boudicca, 114 Boys from the Blackstuff, 156 Bower, Dallas, 51, 52 Box, Sydney, 49, 72–4 Bradley, John, 218 Branch, Sarah, 40 Braveheart, 129, 230, 241 Bravo Channel, 202–3 Brett, Jeremy, 96 Brideshead Revisited, 2, 172, 178, 182 Brimble, Nick, 165 British Broadcasting Corporation: see BBC British Film Production Fund, 12 Broadcasting Act (1990), 186, 240 Brown, Gordon, 242–3 Buccaneers, The, 2, 5, 8, 49–50, 55–9, 56, 95, 198, 260 Buck, David, 94 Budd, Roy, 125

Index   269 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2, 213, 221, 226 Bush, George W., 246 Bushell, Anthony, 90 Butler, David, 114, 138 Butler, R. A., 35 ‘Butskellism’, 35–6 Byrne, Eddie, 124 Caine, Michael, 84 Caleb, Ruth, 229 Calf, Anthony, 185 Calvin, Henry, 80, 83 Camelot, 107–8 Camfield, Douglas, 178–9, 185 Camhi, Patrice, 215 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: see CND Campo, Cathy, 215 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 77 Canal +, 214 Canutt, Yakima, 227 Capaldi, Peter, 255 Capell, Peter, 148 Capra, Frank, 218 Captain Horatio Hornblower, RN, 13, 95, 196 Captain Scarlett, 18 Carlton Communications, 114, 186–7 Carpenter, Richard, 137–8, 146, 149–50, 153, 161–2, 171, 234, 236–7 Carroll, Sidney, 174 Casey Jones, 53, 73 Casey, John, 189 Cassidy, David, 112 Catweazle, 105, 138 Cavens, Fred, 81 Cawdron, Richard, 69, 70 Cazenove, Christopher, 228 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 10, 20, 23, 76, 126, 131, 177–8 Celtic Films, 186–7, 193–4 Central Television, 187

Chakrabarti, Shami, 247 Challenge for Robin Hood, A, 42 Chamberlain, Richard, 171, 173–6 Champions, The, 93 Chancellor, Alexander, 154 Chaney, Lon, 77, 79 Channel 4, 42 Chaplin, Geraldine, 177 Charles, Howard, 256 Chettle, Henry, 27 Chevalier d’Harmental, Le, 200–1 Chevalier de Maison Rouge, Le, 200–1 Chevalier Tempête, Le, 97, 201 Cheyenne, 26, 76 Child, Jeremy, 190 Children of the Stones, 105 Cinecittà Studios, 174 Cisco Kid, The, 76 Clannad, 160 Clapton, Eric, 248 Clark, Pete, 243 Clayton, Sylvia, 107, 116, 138 Clegg, Tom, 188 Clunes, Alec, 55 Clyde, Jeremy, 165–6 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), 39 Cochrane, Michael, 190 Cole, Sidney, 1, 16, 36, 40, 50, 55, 59, 137–8, 142, 146, 150 Collier Young Associates, 94 Collins, Lewis, 164 Colman, Ronald, 185 Colonel March of Scotland Yard, 15–16 Columbia Pictures, 13, 72, 122 Combs, Richard, 174 Compagnons de Jéhu, Les, 200–1 Conan: The Adventurer, 221 Connery, Jason, 156, 162, 163 Connery, Sean, 120 Connolly, Roy, 181 Conroy, David, 181–2 Cook, Deborah, 229, 231

270   Index Cooper, Gary, 185 Cooper, James Fenimore, 77 Cooper, Reginald, 116 Cooper, Terence, 55 Coote, Peter, 72 Coren, Alan, 154–5 Cornell, Paul, 241 Cornwell, Bernard, 186–7, 191 Corri, Adrienne, 60, 63, 84 Corsican Brothers, The, 7, 171, 177 Coulter Smith, Kirstin, 239 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1955), 5, 49, 68–72, 70, 202 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1964), 96, 202 Count of Monte-Cristo, The (1976), 171–5, 202 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1998), 171, 200–7, 205 Court, Hazel, 58 Coy, Jonathan, 196 Crabtree, Arthur, 18 Craddock, Malcolm, 187, 192–3 Craig, Daniel, 188 Cravat, Nick, 69–70, 70 Crawford, Michael, 90 Crichton, Charles, 138, 146 Crimson Pirate, The, 55–6, 69 Criterion Films, 15 Crosby, Mary, 140, 145 Crossbow, 7, 165–7 Cruikshank, Rufus, 17 Cruttenden, Abigail, 192 Cuff, Simon, 123, 124 Cummings, Irving, 77 Curtis, Tony, 173 Curtiz, Michael, 29, 91 Cushing, Peter, 40 Custance, Michael, 112 D’Artagnan, 97, 200, 229 D’Artagnan’s Daughter, 228 Daker, David, 140 Dalton, Phyllis, 183 Dalton, Timothy, 131

Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, 89 Danger Man, 93, 95, 172 Danziger Productions, 12 Dallas, 140, 155, 206, 218 Darby O’Gill and the Little People, 30 Darel, Florence, 204 Darrow, Henry, 83, 214 Darrow, Paul, 114 Davenport, Nigel, 90 Davidson, Eric, 114 Davidson, Max, 189 Davies, Bernard, 112–13, 115 Davies, Gavyn, 248 Davies, Rupert, 106 Davy Crockett, 26, 53, 76 Day, Robert, 18, 55 Dayan, Josée, 204 de Havilland, Olivia, 28 Dearth, John, 19 Decoin, Didier, 204 Decourt, Jean-Pierre, 127, 201 Delgado, Roger, 97 Deeks, Michael, 139 Depardieu, Gérard, 204, 205, 228 Depardieu, Julie, 206 Department S, 93 Depp, Johnny, 56 Derek, John, 29 Desert Crusader: see Thibaud ou le Croisades Desert Hawk, The, 18 Diamond, Peter, 139, 216 Dick Turpin, 5, 90, 104, 126, 137–46, 139, 149, 236, 260 Dick Turpin’s Greatest Adventure, 145–6 Dickinson, Thorold, 16 Dickson Carr, John, 15 Dixon, David, 114 Docherty, Mark J., 112 Doctor Who, 2, 117, 161, 179, 240, 247 Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow, 147 Dolenz, George, 69, 70, 257

Index   271 Don Q, Son of Zorro, 80 Donner, Clive, 90, 181–2 Dorning, Stacy, 140 Doyle, Bev, 239 Drach, Michel, 201 Dragnet, 15 Driscoll, Patricia, 17, 63 Dromgoole, Patrick, 104, 106, 127, 131 Dubey-Weintraub, Jackie, 219, 228 Dumas, Alexandre, 5, 64, 69–70, 96, 172–7, 200–3, 228, 255 Dunbar, Adrian, 239 Duncan, Archie, 17, 29 Dunkley, Chris, 154, 238 Dunlop, Leslie, 147 Dyke, Greg, 248 Dynasty, 156, 161, 206 Eady Levy: see British Film Production Fund Ealing Studios, 16 Eaton, Michael, 22, 36 Eberts, Jake, 152 Eddington, Paul, 19 Edge of Darkness, 156 Edward and Mrs Simpson, 103 Edwards, Rory, 233 Einstein, Albert, 39 Elizabeth R, 103, 114 Ellis, Martyn, 220 Elstree Studios, 90: see also ABC Studios (Elstree), National Studios (Elstree) Elusive Pimpernel, The, 65, 181 Engelbrecht, Constance, 206 English, John, 80 Enter the Dragon, 218 Essex, David, 112 Esmond, Jill, 29 Etcheverry, Robert, 201 Eve, Trevor, 177 Fabian of the Yard, 15, 94 Fairbanks, Douglas Jr, 177

Fairbanks, Douglas Sr, 56, 80 Family Channel, 214, 216 Farrell, Nicholas, 190 Farson, Daniel, 155 Fay, John, 241, 248 Federal Communications Commission, 14 Feely, Terence, 106 Fellow Traveller, 22 Fellowes, Julian, 190 Femme Musketeer, La, 228 Fenwood, Margaret, 147 Field, Roy, 194 Fincham, Peter, 240 Fireworks Entertainment, 224 First Knight, 108 Fisher, Gregor, 239 Fisher, Terence, 18, 40 Flame and the Arrow, The, 21, 69 Flashing Blade, The: see Chevalier Tempête, Le Flockton Flyer, The, 122 Flynn, Eric, 123 Flynn, Errol, 28, 32, 73, 91, 117, 214 Follyfoot, 105 Ford, John, 19 Foreman, Carl, 20 Forester, C. S., 94, 193, 196–7 Forsyte Saga, The, 114, 172 Foster, Lewis R., 80 Foster, Norman, 80 Foundation Films, 15 Four Musketeers, The, 173, 228 Four Just Men, The, 63–4, 83 Fraser, Hugh, 188 Fraser, John, 258–9 Fregonese, Hugo, 64 French, Sean, 154 Friedman, Seymour, 72 Fuest, Robert, 127 Funicello, Annette, 83 Further Adventures of the Three Musketeers, The, 96

272   Index Gaitskell, Hugh, 35 Gallacio, George, 114 Galloway, Lindsay, 90 Galvin, Anna, 220 Game of Thrones, 6, 256 Gatetarn, 137–8, 146 Gauge, Alexander, 17, 65 Gawain and the Green Knight, 107 Gay Cavalier, The, 7, 49, 97 Gay, John, 178 Gene Autry Show, The, 76 Geoffrey of Monmouth: see Monmouth, Geoffrey (of) Ghost of Zorro, 80 Glen, Iain, 239 Gill, A. A., 189 Gielgud, John, 131 Gittins, Paul, 150 Global Television Network, 224 Glover, Julian, 179 Goddard, Jim, 146 Goddard, Willoughby, 84–5 Goering, Hermann, 88 Gold, Lee, 21 Gold, Tammy, 21 Goldcrest Films, 152, 165 Golden Hawk, The, 68 Gonzalez, Tacho, 227 Gordon, Milton, 69 Goring, Marius, 65, 66 Gothard, Michael, 106, 107, 112 Grace, Nickolas, 157, 165 Grade, Lew, 11, 93–4, 146, 172 Grade, Michael, 138 Graham Scott, Peter, 126–8, 131 Granada Media Group, 186 Grant, Richard E., 234, 235 Gray, Willoughby, 19, 55 Green, Neville, 112 Greene, David, 90, 173–4 Greene, Nigel, 40, 51, 84 Greene, Richard, 8, 17, 18, 24, 32, 40, 60, 117, 126, 142, 219, 257 Greenwood, Chris, 116 Grieve, Andrew, 194

Griffin, Barbara, 220 Griffiths, Leon, 16 Griffiths, Lucy, 243 Gruffudd, Ioan, 8, 194, 195 Guest, Val, 40 Gunsmoke, 15, 26, 76 Gwilt, Jeremy, 229 Hackett, Hal, 17, 25 Hackney, Alan, 41 Hair, 107 Hall, Matthew, 234, 237 Hallmark Channel, 228 Halmi, Robert Jr, 165 Halmi, Rovert Sr, 165 Hammer Film Productions, 40, 42 Hammond, Peter, 55, 96 Hampshire, Susan, 145 Harewood, David, 249 Hargeaves, Jack, 124 HarperCollins, 193 Harper, Graeme, 241 Harris, Eoghan, 188 Hart, John, 77, 79 Hawthorne, Nigel, 112 Hayers, Sidney, 106 Hayter, James, 29 Hayward, Louis, 50, 122, 141 HBO (Home Box Office), 193, 213 Healey, Ben, 123 Hennan, Peter, 116 Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, 6, 221–2, 256 Heritage Enterprises, 105 Hertzler, John, 215 Heyland, Rob, 234 H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, 83 Hickox, Douglas, 131 Higgins, Ken, 138 Highwayman, The, 50 Hinds, Ciaran, 231 Hitchcock, Alfred, 69 Hodges, Adrian, 255 Hodgkinson, Will, 243 Hoggart, Paul, 195, 243

Index   273 Hohepa, Pat, 151 Holt, Hazel, 139 Hopalong Cassidy, 76 Hopkins, Anthony, 215 Hordern, Michael, 180 Hornblower (1963), 94–5 Hornblower (1998–2003), 3, 6, 186, 193–200, 195, 229, 234, 238 Horovitch, David, 232 Horowitz, Anthony, 163, 165 Howard, Leslie, 65, 235 Howard, Trevor, 173–4 HTV (Harlech Television Consortium), 103–5, 126–34, 152 HUAC (House UnAmerican Activities Committee), 19–20, 36–7, 54, 55 Hughes, Finola, 131 Hunt, Martita, 29 Hunter, Ian, 29 Huntley, Raymond, 90 Hurley, Elizabeth, 188, 192, 257 Hussey, Olivia, 177, 179–80 Hyde, Kenneth, 60 Hyde White, Wilfred, 145 Hylton, Jane, 51 I, Claudius, 103 Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP), 3, 11, 49, 59, 64, 69, 77, 83–4 Independent Television (ITV), 3, 10, 24, 42, 83, 95, 103–5, 186–7 Independent Television Authority (ITA), 13, 105 Independent Television Commission (ITC), Independent Television Corporation (ITC), 42, 90, 93–4, 172 Ingham, Barrie, 42 Inspector Fabian of Scotland Yard: see Fabian of the Yard Interpol Calling, 83 Irish Film Finance Corporation, 40 Irving, George, 185

It’s a Wonderful Life, 218 Ivanhoe (1952 film), 13, 21, 74, 139, 181 Ivanhoe (1958 tv series), 5, 39, 49, 72–6, 223, 233, 260 Ivanhoe (1982 tv film), 128, 171, 178, 178–81, 233 Ivanhoe (1997 tv serial), 179, 229–34, 241 Jackson, Michael-John, 114 Jackson, Pat, 106 Jacobs, David, 65 Jamaica Inn, 147 James, Clive, 116 James, David, 10 Jay, Anjali, 244, 247 Jayne, Jennifer, 84–5 Jesus of Nazareth, 172 Jewel in the Crown, The, 172 Johnson, Peter, 215 Jourdan, Louis, 173, 175 Judd, Edward, 51 Kahn, Gordon, 21 Kane, John, 146 Kavanagh, P. J., 125–6 Kay, Bernard, 125 Karloff, Boris, 15 Keen, Diane, 114, 115 Keir, Andrew, 61, 73 Kennedy, Gordon, 242 Kennedy Martin, Troy, 156 Kent, Jean, 90 Kidnapped (1979 tv serial), 5, 104, 121, 126–31, 134 Kidnapped (2005 tv serial), 239–40 King Arthur the Young Warlord, 105 King of the Castle, 105 King, George, 12, 49 King, Denis, 138 King’s Thief, The, 60 Kingsley, Hilary, 146 Kingston, Alex, 114 Kinski, Nastassja, 228

274   Index Kirch Group, 203 Kneale, Nigel, 188 Knight, Paul, 137–8, 146, 152–3, 165 Knights of the Round Table, 13, 52, 108, 139 Knowles, Bernard, 18 Korda, Alexander, 65, 181 Kuhn, Tom, 218 Kurosawa, Akira, 54 Kurti, Richard, 239 Lady and the Bandit, The, 50, 141 Lakshmi, Padma, 193 Lamont, Charles, 80 Lampell, Millard, 55 Lancaster, Burt, 21, 56, 69 Lancelot and Guinevere, 158 Landry, Aude, 127 Lane, Stewart, 116, 158–9 Langella, Frank, 173 Langford, Robin, 123 Langland, William, 26 Langley, Noel, 74 Langrishe, Caroline, 192 Langton, Simon, 234 Lardner, Ring, 21–2, 37, 51, 63, 248 Last of the Mohicans, The (1957 tv series) 49, 76–9, 82–3 Last of the Mohicans, The (1992 film), 230 Lawrence, Vernon, 194 Leboff, Gary, 189 Lee, Bruce, 218 Lee, Christopher, 89, 219, 232 Lean, David, 239 Lees, Robert, 20 Legend of Robin Hood, The, 5, 30, 103, 114–21, 115, 153, 240 Legend of Young Dick Turpin, The, 141 Lehmann, Olga, 132, 176 Leigh-Hunt, Ronald, 51 Lemke, Anthony, 225 Lester, Richard, 173, 176, 228, 256 Letts, Barry, 185

Lewis, George J., 80 Lewis, Leonard, 185 Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The, 76 Lindsay, Robert, 194 Llewelyn Williams, Peter, 157 Lloyd, Harry, 242 Local Government Act (1986), 153 Lomond, Britt, 80–1 London Films, 181–2, 233 London Weekend Television (LWT), 104, 137–8 Lone Ranger, The (1938 film serial), 80 Lone Ranger, The (tv series) 26, 76 Longden, John, 19 Longden, Terence, 94 Losey, Joseph, 20 Love, Patti, 112 Luff, Andrew, 234 Lyman, Will, 165 Lynch, Susan, 232 McCallum, David, 127, 128 McCarthy, Joseph, 15 ‘McCarthyism’, 36–8 McCulley, Johnson, 80 McCullough, Robert L., 214 McDermott, Hugh, 29 Macdonald, David, 65 McGann, Paul, 188, 194, 239 MacGinnis, Niall, 40 McGoohan, Patrick, 51, 175 McGovern, Elizabeth, 234–5 McGown, Alistair D., 112 McKellen, Ian, 183 McKern, Leo, 19 Mackinnon, Douglas, 241 McLellen Hunter, Ian, 21–2, 51, 63 Macnee, Patrick, 145 Magnificent Seven, The, 54 Maher, Brendan, 239 Malleson, Miles, 39 Mallory, Leslie, 24 Malory, Sir Thomas, 51, 108

Index   275 Man About the House, 138 Man from Interpol, The, 12 Man from U.N.C.L.E., The, 95 Man in a Suitcase, 93, 172 Man in the Iron Mask, The (1939 film), 68, 176 Man in the Iron Mask, The (1968 tv serial), 96 Man in the Iron Mask, The (1977 tv film), 171, 175–7 Man in the Iron Mask, The (1998 film), 256 Mannheim, Lucy, 65 Manoff, Arnold, 20 Mantle, Clive, 157 Marceau, Sophie, 228 Mark of the Renegade, 64 Mark of Zorro, The (1920 film), 80 Mark of Zorro, The (1940 film), 80, 81, 224 Mark of Zorro, The (1974 tv film), 7, 173 Mark Saber, 12 Marks, Louis, 22 Marlowe, William, 114 Marsh, Jean, 177 Marshall, Sidney, 69 Martin, Dave, 106 Mask of Zorro, The, 215, 224–5 Mason, James, 179 Master of Ballantrae, The, 12, 121, 131–3 Maverick, 73 Meadows, Stanley, 112 Mediaset, 203 Men of Sherwood Forest, 40 Meredyth Lucas, John, 80 Meridian Broadcasting, 193 Merlin, 6, 256 Merritt, Stephanie, 238 Metropole Television, 218 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 12–13, 52, 73, 229 Mickey Mouse Club, The, 79, 83 Miller, Peter, 106

Minghella, Dominic, 241, 242, 247 Mission: Impossible, 95 Mitchell, Yvonne, 119 Mohicans de Paris, Les, 201 Mollo, John, 194 Monmouth, Geoffrey (of), 108 Montagu, Ivor, 16, 36 Montalban, Ricardo, 173 Montgomery, Doreen, 84 Moonfleet, 147 Moonlighting, 218 Moore, Clayton, 77, 80 Moore, Richard, 189 Moore, Roger, 8, 72–3, 139, 233 Morgan, Terence, 90, 90–1 Morris, Jonathon, 185 Mortimer, Emily, 188 Moses the Lawgiver, 172 Most Dangerous Game, The, 89–90, 143, 222 Mount, Peter, 156 Munday, Anthony, 27 Murcott, John, 65 Musketeers, The, 255–6 Muti, Ornella, 204 National Studios (Elstree), 65, 84 National Telefilm Associates, 12, 15, 84, 94 National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, 117 Naughton, John, 189 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 50, 65, 76, 90–1, 131, 172–3 Neale, Steve, 10 Neill, Sam, 178, 179 Nesbitt, Derren, 41, 51 Nettlefold Studios, 16, 19, 50, 55 Neufeld, Sigmund, 77 New Adventures of Charlie Chan, The, 83 New Adventures of Robin Hood, The, 164, 212, 218–24, 220, 228, 241

276   Index New Adventures of Wonder Woman, The, 226 New Adventures of Zorro, The: see Zorro (1990–92) New Zorro: see Zorro (1990–92) Newcombe, Jacqueline, 138 Newell, Mike, 175 Newfield, Sam, 77 Newland, John, 94 Newlands, Anthony, 65 Newman, Sydney, 96 Newton, Robert, 56, 121 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2 Niven, David, 65 Normandie Productions, 77 O’Connor, John J., 183 O’Farrell, Bernadette, 17, 63 O’Malley, Daragh, 188 O’Sullivan, Richard, 8, 138–40, 139 Official Films, 12, 17, 50, 59, 66 Oliver Twist, 239 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 235 Onedin Line, The, 126 Orczy, Baroness, 3, 65, 182, 234 ORTF (Office de la Radiodiffusion et de la Télévision Française), 83, 97, 200–1 Orme, Stuart, 229 Osbourne, David, 106 O.S.S., 83 Owen, Glyn, 124 Ox-Bow Incident, The, 38 Pallisers, The, 103 Parker, Ian, 232 Pataky, Elsa, 227 Paterson, Peter, 188–9 Paton, Maureen, 154 PBS (Public Broadcasting System), 114, 172 Pearson, James Anthony, 239 Peck, Gregory, 95, 196 Pennington Richards, C. M., 42, 55 Perl, Arnold, 55

Phillips, Conrad, 84, 85, 165 Phillips, Siân, 112, 231 Pickup, Ronald, 181 Pinewood Studios, 178, 194 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 241 Pleasence, Donald, 28, 88, 145, 177 Plowden, Julian, 94 Plunkett, John, 243 Polonsky, Abraham, 16, 20 Porretta, Matthew, 218, 220 Postlethwaite, Pete, 192 Potter, Dennis, 156 Potter, Martin, 114, 115, 116, 250 Poulson, Gerry, 138 Powell, Michael, 65, 181 Power, Tyrone, 80 Praed, Michael, 156, 157, 161, 250 Pressburger, Emeric, 65 Preston, E. Hayter, 91 Preston, John, 238 Pride and Prejudice, 2, 229 Prince Valiant, 13, 52 Prisoner, The, 93, 172 Prisoner of Zenda, The, 185–6, 229 Purcell, Roy, 55 Purdom, Edmund, 60 Purser, Philip, 155 Quatermass Experiment, The, 2, 188 Queen of Swords, 6, 212, 224–8, 225 RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), 64, 172, 200, 214 Rains, Claude, 28 Rapf, Maurice, 21 Rathbone, Basil, 28, 81 Rawhide, 77 Reed, Carol, 15 Rees, Jasper, 195–6 Regehr, Duncan, 214 Republic Pictures, 80 Return of Monte Cristo, 69 Reynolds, Stanley, 104–5, 122 RHI Entertainment, 165

Index   277 Rhys-Davies, John, 159, 180, 228 Richard the Lionheart, 7, 49, 97–8 Richards, Jeffrey, 4, 5, 24, 67, 156, 218 Richardson, Maurice, 90 Richardson, Ralph, 175 Rickman, Alan, 18, 161, 245 Rob Roy, 129, 230, 241 Robb, David, 180 Roberts, Marguerite, 74 Roberts, Veronica, 112 Robertson, Pat, 214 Robin and Marian, 120–1, 162 Robin Hood, 6, 18, 164, 171, 212, 240–50, 242 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 18, 41, 156, 158–61, 164, 230, 245 Robin of Sherwood, 5, 85, 133, 137, 138, 152–65, 156, 163, 171, 177, 191, 219, 236, 250, 260 Rochefort, Jean, 206 Rogers, Peter, 72 Rogues of Sherwood Forest, 29, 31 Rolfe, Guy, 165 Rose, Barry, 214 Rose, Phil, 157 Rosemont, Norman, 6, 172–9, 229 Rossini, Gioachino, 86 Roy Rogers Show, The, 76 Ruben, Albert G., 50, 60 Rubini, Sergio, 205 Rumbold, Judy, 230 Russell, Robert, 125 Russell, William, 51 Ryan, Mark, 157 Saint, The, 73, 90, 93, 95, 172 Salkow, Sidney, 68, 77 Salt, Waldo, 21, 55, 58, 60, 72, 74 Santiago, Tessie, 225, 226, 228 Sapphire Films, 11, 50–64 Sasdy, Peter, 106 Sawalha, Julia, 198 Scarf Jack, 125–6

Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1934 film), 65, 181, 184–5 Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1982 tv film), 128, 171, 181–8, 184 Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1999–2000 tv series), 212, 233–9, 235 Schary, Dore, 74 Schiller, Friedrich von, 86 Scott, Adrian, 21, 51, 54 Scott, Peter Graham: see Graham Scott, Peter Scott, Sir Walter, 4, 28, 96, 179–80, 229–30 Screen Gems, 12, 72 Sea Hawk, The, 91 Seaton, Bruce, 5 Selwyn, Don, 151 Serna, Assumpta, 192 Seven Samurai, 54 Seymour, Jane, 183, 184 Shadow of the Eagle, 68 Sharp, Ian, 177 Sharpe, 4, 8, 187–93, 197, 234, 257 Sharpe, James, 140 Shaw, Martin, 234–5 Shaw, Robert, 8, 55, 56, 65, 84 Sheldon, Gene, 80 Sher, Antony, 197 Shuftan, Eugene, 79 Sign of Zorro, The, 83 Sillerman, Michael, 77 Sinclair, Malcolm, 185 Singing Detective, The, 156 Sir Francis Drake, 5, 49, 84, 90–3, 94, 96, 103, 173, 182, 198, 260 Six Wives of Henry VIII, The, 103 Sky, 105 Small, Edward, 68, 176, 177 Smart, Ralph, 22, 55, 84, 94 Smith, Cyril, 51 Smith, Rupert, 195 Smuggler, 5, 112, 126, 137, 138, 146–50, 147, 236, 260 Smurfitt, Victoria, 231 Spicer, Andrew, 73–4

278   Index Spitting Image, 159 Son of Monte Cristo, 68–9 Sony Pictures, 224 South Pacific Pictures, 239 Southern Television, 103, 121–6 Squire, William, 123 Star Trek, 197 Stephens, Toby, 249 Stevens, Anthony, 96, 114, 202 Stevenson, Monica, 62 Stevenson, Robert, 80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 5, 96, 121–34 Stirling, Linda, 80, 225 Stoodley Thomas, Gethyn, 155 Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, 13, 29, 117, 120, 160 Stronge, Helen, 123 Strutton, Bill, 74 Sutcliffe, Thomas, 230 Sutherland, Muir, 187, 193 Sweaney, John, 232–3 Sword of Freedom, 5, 49–50, 59–63, 60, 87 Sword of Monte Cristo, 69 Sword of Sherwood Forest, 40–3, 120 Sword of the Avenger, 68 Tatchell, Peter, 153 Taylor, Benedict, 185 Taylor, Don, 40 Taylor, Philip John, 214 Taylor, Robert, 73, 229 Tarzan and the Mermaids, 30 Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, 221 Taurus Film, 105–6 Tavernier, Bertrand, 228 Tebbit, Norman, 159 Technisor, 126 Telemünchen, 126 Television Act (1964), 105 Television New Zealand, 150 Television Programs of America (TPA), 68, 76–7

TF1 (Télévision Française 1), 126, 203 Thames Television International, 150 Thatcher, Margaret, 146, 159, 237 Thatcherism, 153 Theakston, Graham, 234 Thetis Films, 64 Thibaud ou le Croisades, 97 Third Man, The, 15, 94 Thomas, David, 188 Thomas, J. Parnell, 37 Thomas, James, 116 Thomas, Keith, 153 Thomas, Richard, 131 Thompson, Christopher, 206 Thompson, Howard, 41 Three Musketeers, The (1955 tv series), 7, 64 Three Musketeers, The (1967 tv serial), 96 Three Musketeers, The (1973 film), 173 Tiger Aspect Productions, 240–1 Time-Life Films, 114 Timeslip, 105 Tobias, Oliver, 106, 107, 112, 145, 147, 150 Todd, Richard, 13, 29 Tomorrow People, The, 105 Tovey, Roberta, 124 Towers, Harry Alan, 12, 65, 182 Towers of London, 12, 65 Treasure Island, 55, 121 Trott, Judi, 85, 157 TriStar Pictures, 224 Troughton, David, 188 Troughton, Patrick, 9, 65 Troughton, Sam, 242 Trumbo, Dalton, 20 Turk, Michael, 194 Turner Network Television, 218 Tutin, Dorothy, 163 Twentieth Century-Fox, 13, 52, 73, 128 Twickenham Studios, 55, 59, 175

Index   279 Tylo, Michael, 215 United News and Media, 186 United Film and Television, 194 Univeral-International Pictures, 13 Vahimagi, Tise, 60 Valentine, Anthony, 158 Van Beers, Stanley, 65, 66 Vance, Dennis, 65 Vibert, Ronan, 234 Victor, James, 215 Waddington, Steven, 231, 244 Wagner, Robert, 73 Wagon Train, 76 Wagonmaster, 19 Wainwright, Sally, 250 Walt Disney Corporation, 13, 29, 76, 79, 121, 128, 141 Walton Studios, 59 Walton, James, 195, 238 War and Peace, 187 Ward, Simon, 177 Warner Bros., 13, 28, 95, 213, 218 Warrior Queen, 104, 112–14 Waterloo, 187 Wednesday Play, The, 2 Weinstein, Hannah, 15–16, 20–2, 25, 64 Weintraub, Barbara, 219 Weintraub, Fred, 218, 228 Weintraub, Sandra, 218, 228 Weintraub, Zachary, 219, 228 Weiterhausen, Gila von, 106 West, Adam, 217 West, Samuel, 197 WGBH Boston, 114 Wheatley, Alan, 17–18, 32, 245

White, Larry, 131 Whitehouse, Mary, 117 Whiting, Alan, 234 Wicks, Victoria, 185 Wilberforce, William, 58 Wilde, Cornel, 29 William Tell, 5, 39, 49, 83–90, 85, 96, 165, 223, 260 Williams, Guy, 80, 81 Williams Ellis, Hywel, 147 Winstone, Ray, 157 Wilson, David, 94 Wilson, Michael, 21, 55 Wisberg, Aubrey, 69 Witney, William, 80 Wood, Charles, 188 Woodvine, John, 185 Woolf, Victor, 19 Worzel Gummidge, 122 Xena: Warrior Princess, 6, 220–2, 226, 256 You Are There, 20 Young Mr Lincoln, The, 38 York, Michael, 131, 133 Young, Freddie, 175 ZDF (Zweiten Deutsche Fernsehens), 126 Zimbalist, Efrem, 214 Zorro (1957–58), 5, 76–7, 79–83, 214 Zorro (1990–2), 212–18 Zorro and Son, 83, 214 Zorro Rides Again, 80 Zorro the Avenger, 83 Zorro’s Black Whip, 225 Zorro’s Fighting Legion, 80, 81, 227

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