Late last year, spurred on by a marathon viewing session of The Avengers, I became obsessed with learning more about the many other British spy and adventure series from around the same time. Some of them have been released on DVD in the US, making the exploration rather easy going. But many others were available only in the UK or Australia, and given the soaring power of the American dollar against the British pound, buying DVD box sets from England was a a mission of significant financial difficulty. Luckily, England gets into a real post-Christmas high, resulting in places like Amazon UK having sales during which you can buy British goods for 70-80% off their list price -- making them affordable even to us suckers still trading in American greenbacks.


So I bought up a whole bunch of great stuff, including The Baron, Honey West, the Man from UNCLE movie set, Man in a Suitcase, and a show called The Champions. Aside from UNCLE, and aside from having seen a photo of Anne Francis in her slinky Honey West catsuit, I knew very little about any of the series, but most of them came from the same minds and production team that gave me stuff I already knew I liked, so I was game to gamble a few pounds.

Most of these series were produced in the wake of The Avengers, by a studio called ITC. At the time, there was a political mandate that British television programming should be educational and important, resulting in a parade of dreary, black and white dramas that I'm sure were full of political and artistic merit but hardly made for a compelling reason not to go see the latest James Bond film. After The Avengers bucked the trend, ITC decided to follow suit and produce a string of big budget adventure series, filmed in color to make them more appealing both to viewers and (more importantly, perhaps) to American TV channels, and boasting superb production values in order to compete more evenly with movies. Most of the shows also starred an American so as to increase their chances of distribution in the US. To put it succinctly, it was a good time to be watching British television.

Among these shows, Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner stood out from the pack as the most ambitious -- and certainly the most bizarre, even when measured against the quirkiness on display in The Avengers. Both of these shows blended familiar espionage adventure tropes with science fiction, and in the case of The Prisoner, with rather bold social and political messages. Apparently inspired by the innovation of The Prisoner, prolific adventure series creator Monty Berman decided he wanted to do a spy series with science fiction and fantastic overtones. The result was The Champions.

While returning from a mission in China, three spies (Stuart Damon as Craig Stirling, Alexandra Bastedo as Sharron Macready, and William Gaunt as Richard Barrett) are shot down over the Himilayas, where they are rescued from certain death by a mysterious monk who happens to be a member of a lost race dwelling high in the mountains and possessed of incredible superhuman powers. In healing the three agents, the monks also imbue them with super powers, including increased resilience, strength, jumping ability, and ESP. Armed with their new powers -- but also struggling to figure out how to use them -- the trio returns to Europe and undertake a series of adventures that would, obviously, become the television show.

It's a pretty good premise, and although these fantastic elements set the show apart from other spy series of the time (at least until the Brits started pairing up cops with the ghosts of their murdered partner), they don't push it entirely into the realm of the fantastic. For the most part, it's a straight-forward espionage thriller series, albeit one where we occasionally zoom in on someone's eyes while they make "ESP face" or jump over a big rock. It's not nearly as political or intellectually challenging as the series that inspired it, but that doesn't mean it isn't a rollicking good time.

The exploits of our three heroes take them all over the globe -- realized through the usual mix of location footage and sound studios -- including Tibet, China, across Europe in pursuit of Peter Wyngarde (himself a major star of these types of series -- but we shall come to Jason King in due time), and even to the Antarctic. Plenty of action, plenty of suspense -- an all-around great show that keeps a frothy, breezy pace.

Labels: Espionage, Eurospies