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  This divergence of approach was reflected in the end products. Although Doctor Who was not broadcast live, it was recorded almost as though it were, on a multiple-camera setup, with as few breaks in filming as possible and with retakes strictly discouraged. Just as in live theatre, things sometimes went a little wrong, actors occasionally bumped into the scenery or fluffed their lines – most frequently William Hartnell, who on one memorable occasion referred to ‘anti-radiation drugs’ ‘as anti-radiation gloves’ before correcting himself. The BBC considered such mistakes to be perfectly acceptable in a performance that was only expected to be viewed once; these were not works intended to be preserved for posterity, and indeed many of them haven’t survived at all, wiped from the record in order that the expensive videotape might be reused and not incur the cost of storage.

  Lew Grade, on the other hand, with his eyes fixed firmly on selling his shows around the world, insisted that they be shot on 35mm film and approached as though they were movies, using a single-camera mode of production. ‘Our shows were, in fact, seen and treated as mini-films,’ pointed out Roger Moore. And although a great deal of stock footage was used – establishing shots of Paris or London or Monte Carlo – as well as a single street set at Elstree that was re-dressed and reused in episode after episode, these elements were blended in well with the indoor scenes to give the impression of a much larger production. Other elements were borrowed from movies being made elsewhere in the studios. ‘You’d walk onto a Hammer set, for instance,’ remembered Nation, ‘and they’d been doing some big mountain-climbing thing, and I’d say, “Can we save this set for another two weeks?” And I’d write an episode to fit it.’ Consequently, the ITC shows, even without a great deal of location shooting, look almost epic in comparison with their contemporary equivalents on Doctor Who. Viewed in the light of later television, the limitations are a little obvious, but that wasn’t the impression of either viewers or critics at the ‘time: if Associated Television doesn’t take The Saint on location,’ wrote Variety, ‘it sure seems that way.’

  The key, as ever with Grade, was America, and in 1965 he proudly announced that he had sold a new extended version of Danger Man (US title: Secret Agent), together with The Saint and The Baron, to the American networks CBS, NBC and ABC respectively. The first two of these turned out to be the company’s big hits of the decade, notching up 86 and 118 episodes respectively and winning big US audiences. They also sold everywhere else – The Saint, boasted Grade in 1965, was ‘number one in Finland’ – with Moore and McGoohan purveying an international image of the English gentleman (even though Moore was the son of a South London policeman and McGoohan was an Irishman born in New York). Moore’s Templar, in particular, was one of the symbols of the age in the same way that James Bond was proving to be. Driving an exotic car – albeit a Volvo P1800, as opposed to the fictional Furillac or Hirondel of the Charteris tales – and flitting between his London mews house and his New York apartment, he was the ultimate swinging bachelor, hanging out in clubs, bars and restaurants with a succession of young women, upholding standards of justice and decency while having a thoroughly good time. He epitomised a decade that seemed enthralled by the emergence of an international jet set. If consumerism was the new faith of the post-war western world, then Simon Templar was one of its high priests. (Though this metaphor probably wasn’t what Lew Grade had in mind when he responded to a criticism that ATV didn’t produce enough religious programming: ‘We put out The Saint. What more do they want?’)

  The Baron was much less successful than those two series, losing its American network slot during its thirty-episode run and failing to get a recommission, but it sold well around the world, from Poland to Nigeria, and it still made a contribution to ITC’s $10 million of foreign earnings in 1965, a figure that grew to $15 million the following year. In 1967 and again in 1969, ITC’s parent company ATV won the Queen’s Award to Industry for exports, while Grade himself was knighted at the end of the decade. (‘I have sold everything we produce, except the weather forecast and the Epilogue,’ he boasted in 1967.) As Dennis Spooner was to point out: ‘ITC was basically an exporting company. We were earning foreign currency.’ He added, in answer to the charge from Howard Thomas at the rival ABC franchise, that Grade seemed to be straying from his Midlands audience, focusing more on Birmingham, Alabama than Birmingham, England: ‘It’s no good trying to sell a locomotive in America if you insist on building it for the gauge of track that’s relevant in Britain. I don’t see why people get upset when you do the same thing in television.’ But perhaps it was by making too many concessions to transatlantic taste that The Baron fell down; perhaps it simply wasn’t English enough, failing to play to the American perception of Britain, however distorted that might be.

  As originally conceived by John Creasey, the character of John Mannering was firmly in the mould of E.W. Hornung’s late-Victorian hero, Raffles, who had spent his days as a gentleman cricketer and his nights as a jewel thief. A ‘Mayfair bachelor and man-about-town’, Mannering’s easy passage through elevated social circles conceals a less respectable alter ego, for he is also a celebrated burglar and jewel thief, known to the police and to a mostly admiring public only as the Baron. Mannering was never as fully rounded a figure as Raffles, nor so subversive – the Wildean subtext of Hornung’s stories, for example, is absent – but he was exciting enough, displaying a physical prowess of which even that amateur boxer Sherlock Holmes would have approved: cornered by a pair of savage Alsatian guard dogs, he’s capable of rendering them unconscious with his fists. So although he was neither Creasey’s best-known hero (that was the Toff), nor his most critically acclaimed (Gideon of Scotland Yard), he was certainly popular, appearing in nearly fifty books, and he had loyal fans, among them the French poet Jean Cocteau, who was heard to murmur that the Baron was his favourite character in all crime fiction.

  Mannering’s first appearance came in Meet the Baron (1935, US title: The Man in the Blue Mask), a 75,000-word novel written in just six days to meet the deadline for a competition being run by the publisher George G. Harrap. It took the £1,000 first prize, a huge sum at a time when publishers paid an average of just £50 for a thriller novel, and, published under the pseudonym Andrew Morton, it set the struggling Creasey off on a most extraordinary literary career. Over the next four decades, he produced more than six hundred books, using a couple of dozen different pen names, and at the time of his death in 1973, some four hundred titles were estimated still to be in print. The exploits of the Baron ran right through that career (indeed the last two books in the series were published posthumously), though the character calmed down a little as the years went by. He got married and strayed from the path of crime, setting himself up as an antique dealer with a shop in Mayfair, from where he assisted the police and even his own customers, when they found themselves caught up in jewel robberies and the like. Still charismatic, he was now seen in more conventional terms as ‘Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison and Greg Peck rolled into one’. In truth, it was not such a big step for Mannering, for he had never really been criminally minded. Even when robbing country houses, he had been primarily motivated by concern for the downtrodden, particularly if they were attractive young women or distressed members of the gentry; like the Saint, he saw himself as something of a Robin Hood for the modern age and ‘he used the profit more for other people than himself’.

  By the time ITC turned to the Baron as a vehicle for a new show, Creasey’s work had already been raided for the series Gideon’s Way (1964, US title: Gideon CID), produced by Baker and Berman. It came with one huge attraction for a producer: where Leslie Charteris had insisted on retaining storyline approval for The Saint, no such restrictions were imposed by Creasey. The results were immediately apparent when the first episode of The Baron was broadcast in September 1966. To begin with, the entire history of the character, his disreputable early career as a jewel thief, had been dropped, while the name of his antique dealership (now an international
chain of shops) had changed from Quinns to the more literal John Mannering. More startlingly, he was now American, a former cattle-rancher from Texas – hence, apparently, his nickname – who had served in the war, tracking down artworks stolen by the Nazis. (Old comrades tend to refer to him as Captain Mannering, which sounded less incongruous in the days before Dad’s Army.)

  As portrayed by the American actor Steve Forrest, this Baron was courteous, good-natured and likeable; tall, broad, handsome and well-dressed. Unfortunately he was also utterly lacking in sex appeal, and despite being furnished with a decorative sidekick in the form of Cordelia Winfield (Sue Lloyd), whom he first meets while she’s taking a bath in his hotel room, he managed to avoid any hint of flirtation whatsoever. Even the 1930s original was more explicit in its acceptance that Mannering might have a sex life; after all, he had first taken up crime when his marriage proposal was spurned, and much of his early law breaking was an attempt to protect the woman he loved from the blackmailing demands of her estranged husband. Also lacking in the 1960s incarnation was the division that had once existed between the character’s two guises. When engaged in an escapade as the Baron, we were told, he used to undergo ‘a psychological change’, effectively ceasing to be John Mannering as he put on his trademark blue mask, almost as though he were one of the emerging host of superheroes. Not only the alter ego, but also the mask, were absent from the television version, who remained resolutely Mannering throughout, with only the occasional passing mention of his nickname to remind us of the show’s title.

  These changes aside, and even allowing for the fact that the stories were all new, the television Baron was still in the mould of the 1930s heroes. He is absurdly well-connected, ‘one of only three men in this country who have immediate and unquestioned access to the security vaults of the Bank of England’, and he acts on occasion as an informal agent for a government organisation known as Diplomatic Intelligence, answering to a crusty English gentleman, Templeton-Green (Colin Gordon). He also retains an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, however much he protests that his only interest is financial reward. In ‘Red Horse, Red Rider’ he finds himself trying to wrestle a statuette of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the clutches of a military dictatorship in the Balkans, in order to sell it to provide funds for the resistance. As he rides the railroads, pursued by the secret police, his companion, a beautiful young rebel named Savannah (Jane Merrow), wonders why Mannering is here at all: ‘I don’t understand you. What are you doing riding in this box-car across this godforsaken country of mine? You own three of the most exclusive antique shops in the world, you are a charter member of the jet set, you have beautiful women. Why are you doing this?’ ‘Money,’ he replies unconvincingly. ‘I’ll make a hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the Horsemen. If I have to dodge a few bullets along the way, it’s all part of the game.’ ‘Is there no other reason?’ she insists, and his reply comes as much from the twinkling of his eyes as it does from his shrugged ‘Maybe.’

  Solidarity with the oppressed is a running theme. Several of the episodes written or co-written by Nation for The Baron are relatively straightforward jewel heists, ranging from standard tales of released prisoners going back to dig up their treasure hoards, all the way up to an attempt on the Crown Jewels in the double episode ‘Masquerade’/‘The Killing’. But there is elsewhere a strong vein of broad-brush politics. In ‘A Memory of Evil’ the Baron battles an Austrian neo-Nazi group called the New Front, while in ‘Night of the Hunter’ he is back in the Balkans confronting another military dictatorship, this one presided over by a general so evil that he wears sunglasses after dark and a uniform that includes matching brown leather boots and gloves. His manners are little better than those of the French thieves in ‘Jeannine’, for he puts his cigar out in the milk jug, and when Mannering suggests that it’s not a good thing to destroy a democratic regime in a military coup, he behaves as a thriller villain should, laughing at such foolishness: ‘Democracy! Hah! It’s merely an archaic word, not a political creed.’ Again Mannering is bringing in money for the anti-government rebels.

  ‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ featured another familiar figure from the thriller library, with the mad scientist Ingar Sorenson (Kay Walsh). In a nod towards Nation’s later series, Survivors, she has developed an extremely contagious virus that kills anyone exposed to it, which she is offering to anyone in search of a biological weapon and who can meet the asking price. Voicing one of Nation’s recurrent themes, she explains her abandonment of the high principles of science. ‘A long time ago, I decided to market my work, and leave morality to the buyer,’ she says, arguing that this is the way of the modern world. ‘The defence budget of any world power could finance enough research to rid us of all our ills. But ask any government to believe that drugs are more important than rockets …’ Inevitably she kills herself accidentally with the last of her deadly bacteria, and the final portentous word is left for Mannering: ‘It’s all over. Until somebody comes up with the same thing again. Or something worse.’

  In the best plotline of the series, the double episode ‘Storm Warning’/‘The Island’ sees the Chinese government funding a plan to bring down America’s latest space rocket. By hacking into the rocket’s communication system, it is intended to change its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere so that it splashes down 1,500 miles off course, where a ship is waiting to fish it out of the ocean, hauling in the most advanced technology in the world. It’s a fiendish plan worthy of feature-film treatment (though perhaps a little too reminiscent of the James Bond movie Dr No) and the production mostly does it justice. Much of the action is set on board the waiting ship, on to which Mannering has smuggled himself in yet another attempt to rescue Cordelia. For she was not one of the more resourceful heroines of the ITC stable; captured by villains on an almost weekly basis and never allowed to do any fighting, she did display a cool, slightly ironic tone in counterpoint to Mannering’s rugged openness, but Sue Lloyd struggled to make a great deal of the role. ‘I had to make her more Lucille Ball,’ she commented later, ‘because of being ridiculously weak at the last moment.’ Mannering suffered from no such shortcomings; as adept with a sub-machine gun as with his fists, he was the action hero as all-American jock.

  Unlike The Saint, the atmosphere of The Baron was a little to one side of the carefree, wisecracking, bachelor romp through Swinging Britain. The jaunty theme tune was there, as was the jet-set lifestyle, but this was a hero who didn’t go in for womanising and who lacked the jovial repartee that had been de rigueur in British thrillers ever since Bulldog Drummond. In the absence of the self-mocking humour that Moore brought to The Saint, The Baron was a much more serious proposition. The shows had no straight-to-camera introduction and tended to end abruptly at the denouement, without an epilogue or additional explanation; there was no easing in and out of the tale, just an action-packed adventure.

  And on occasion those adventures could be very dark. The last episode of the series, ‘Countdown’, featured a fine array of evocative settings – a scrap yard, railway sidings, a film set, a crypt and a windmill – as the backdrops to five unpleasant deaths, including a man kicked out of a railway compartment in front of an oncoming train, another impaled on an antique sword, and a third being tortured with a lit cigarette before being crushed under a concrete block. If this had been The Avengers, the killings would have been depicted as witty self-parodies of the action genre; here they are treated seriously, looking forward to the violent British gangster films (Performance, Get Carter, Villain) that were to come. The same episode also included a guest appearance by Edward Woodward as a rival antique dealer, Arkin Morley, who walks on the shady side of the street and has a nice line in arrogance; asked how good his Latin is, he replies, ‘I speak it and read it with a fluency which can only come from a very superior English education.’ (Leslie Charteris, who went to Rossall School, was also fond of sideways attacks on the public school system.)

  Much of this undercurren
t of unease was attributable to the influence of Nation, who was creatively – though not personally – inclined to pessimism. It is notable that one of the few times that The Baron broke the ITC convention on using American currency is in the episode ‘The Man Outside’, in which an Italian-American gangster named Bruno Orsini (David Bauer) attempts to bring six million pounds in forged notes into the country. Orsini explains to Mannering that he’s motivated not merely by greed but by a desire for revenge, having previously been deported from Britain. ‘You know what this much fake money could do to a country’s economy, Mannering? Smash it! It could make the pound worthless,’ he rants. ‘I’m going to see this whole stinking country go bankrupt. I’m going to push in millions more notes, give them away if I have to. By the time I’m finished, the pound’ll be just so much coloured paper.’ The episode was, in a quiet way, Nation’s comment on the vulnerability of the British economy to international speculation, and was broadcast in April 1967, in the midst of a continuing currency crisis that would, later in the year, force the Labour government to devalue sterling.

  Nation’s influence can also be seen in the resourcefulness of the Baron, his ability to improvise his way out of tricky situations. It was a trait common to many of Nation’s heroes, and he evidently stockpiled any ideas he came across for later use in his scripts. Ted Ray, with whom he worked so closely at the end of the 1950s, used to tell an anecdote about an alcoholic music hall comedian of his acquaintance who sometimes ran out of people from whom to scrounge a drink. ‘If nothing else, he was resourceful. Once he went into the Gents, removed the light bulb from its socket, inserted a halfpenny, and replaced the bulb. The first person to switch on the light produced a short circuit and plunged the whole house into darkness. It was the easiest thing for Cyril to grope a bit and gobble up someone else’s pint.’ When, in ‘Storm Warning’, Steve Mannering finds himself locked in the cold room used for storing meat on the ship, he employs precisely the same trick, enabling him to slip quietly out when a crewman comes to investigate the power cut.