Review: The Adventurer
- Article 3 of 7
- Action TV, April 2006
Where did it all start to go wrong for ITC? The long-standing producer of ITV action series during the 60s, ITC’s honour roll of classic programmes is long and varied, taking in shows such as The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Saint and Danger Man. But by the early 70s, ITC started to run out of steam and if there’s one show that demonstrates the creative shortfall the company was facing, it is The Adventurer.
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Easily the best part of the whole series in fact is the theme tune by John Barry, which is still practically a carbon copy of his theme for The Persuaders!.
Perhaps the only other real virtue of the show was in its use of location filming. ITC was infamous for its use of stock footage and backdrops to simulate its supposedly exotic locations. It was a trend that changed in the 70s, with The Persuaders! able to muster up shoots in Italy and the South of France. The Adventurer, despite its short run-time managed to shoot an enviable number of episodes overseas, with France, The Netherlands and Germany all getting a visit from cast and crew alike. It was only when faced with locations like India and Istanbul that Scoton returned to their film library for some suitable inserts.
With that level of mediocrity, it’s hard to pick any outstanding entries in the 26-episode canon. While almost every ITC show had at least one fondly remembered, stand-out episode, you’d be hard-pushed to find anything that could even be called above-average. But there are a few that are at least a little better than the rest.
Probably the best of the episodes is Brian Clemens’ ”Action!“, which sees Bradley getting the full Ipcress treatment and being brainwashed into shooting an American general. Its pat resolution undermines much of the set-up, but it’s still more interesting that most of the other episodes combined.
”Double Exposure“ features a theme that’s also used in ”Make it a Million“ – an impostor who’s an exact duplicate of the real person. Bradley finds out an old friend of his has been replaced by a duplicate and has to expose the fake while rescuing the real Jan de Groote. This involves roping in his own stunt double, also played by Barry using a ‘cockney’ accent that makes you hanker after the authenticity of Dick Van Dyke’s. (The accent returns for ”Mr. Calloway Is A Very Cautious Man“ and implausibly is good enough to fool Parminter into thinking it’s someone other Bradley. You wouldn’t forget that accent in a hurry, believe me.)
The Dutch location filming and car chase of ”Double Exposure“ lift it above other similar episodes, but its re-use of another standard Adventurer theme – getting the villain to confess everything while a group of police officers are hiding behind nearby twigs – again undermines the preceding acts.
”Going, going…“ has Bradley fighting his own team to get to the secrets being offered by a foreign chemist. It has a couple of interesting character moments and one of Burt Kwouk’s (The Pink Panther) two appearances as generic Oriental characters in the series, but has no real pay-off other than yet another demonstration of Bradley’s immense cleverness.
”The Case of the Poisoned Pawn“ is the worst offender in that particular category. What could potentially have been an extremely interesting set-up for a story is eventually wasted through a combination of run-time and the overwhelming need of the show to make Bradley omnipotent. Asked by Parminter to break a young gambler by beating him at poker, Bradley ends up accepting a rematch, but this time at chess. The problem is that his victim is an Oxford chess blue and Bradley hasn’t played chess since he was 15. While there could have been a hundred interesting conclusions to this particular plot, Philip Broadley’s script has Bradley beating his opponent through simple skill and a week’s training by his butler. It turns out he could have been a grandmaster if only he’d practiced harder…
The two most enjoyable episodes have a common theme: they don’t feature Bradley in any significant role. ”I’ll Get There Sometime“ and ”The Solid Gold Hearse“, which also features the series’ only good fight scene, see Bradley either filming a movie or stuck in various airports during Parminter’s hours of need. So the bowler-hatted one goes into the field with Schell and Hagon, Bradley phoning in advice at appropriate moments. Hagon and Schell both shine in their expanded roles and Morse gets to ham it up magnificently. The two episodes are a glimpse at a better show that could have been made if only some different decisions had been taken. The scripts still aren’t fantastic, but at least there’s a bit more of the fun that made The Adventurer’s predecessors so much more enjoyable.
In fact, there’s only one Bradley-focused episode that could be called intentionally fun. There’s a strong comedic thread running throughout ”Return to Sender“, but the most notable element of it is the fight scene, in which Bradley’s trademark ”grab something above you, hang on, then kick the bad guys“ manoeuvre lands him flat on his back. Unfortunately, it’s inadvertently ruined by an earlier character moment, in which an unsuspecting child who wants Bradley’s autograph is fobbed off with an envelope he didn’t even write. If there’s a moment that sums up the character and the series, that would be it.
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