Adam Adamant Lives!
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Adam_Adamant_Lives!".

Adam Adamant Lives!
Title card from the opening titles
Format	Comedy Adventure
Created by	Donald Cotton Richard Harris
Developed by	Sydney Newman Tony Williamson
Directed by	in order of number of episodes directed Moira Armstrong Philip Dudley Ridley Scott Paul Ciappessoni Henry Safran and others
Starring	Gerald Harper Juliet Harmer Jack May Peter Ducrow Kenneth Brenda
Opening theme	sung by Kathy Kirby
Country of origin	UK
No. of episodes	29
Production
Producer(s)	Verity Lambert
Story editor(s)	Tony Williamson
Running time	50 min.
Broadcast
Original channel	BBC
Original run	23 June 1966 – 25 March 1967

Adam Adamant Lives! was a British television series that ran from 1966 to 1967 on the BBC. Proposing that an adventurer from the early 20th century had been revived from hibernation in 1966, the show was a comedy adventure that took a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of an Edwardian.

The Adamant character

The main character, Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant, was a swashbuckling Edwardian gentleman adventurer, frozen in a block of ice in 1902 by his arch-nemesis "The Face" and revived in 1966. On emerging from a hospital and collapsing on the London streets, Adam was rescued by Georgina Jones. Though in many ways a typical swinging sixties chick, Jones had grown up idolizing Adamant through tales of his turn-of-the-century exploits. Adamant soon became embroiled in the criminal world of the 1960s when Georgina was threatened after becoming witness to a murder. Subsequently, Adam rebuilt his old home on the top of a multi-story car park in central London and purchased a Mini Cooper S. During an adventure in Blackpool he acquired a manservant in the form of former music hall artiste William E. Simms. In terms of fashion, the series captured well the gradual shift in 1966-7 from the "mod" styles of "Swinging London" to the more Bohemian, eventually hippie, styles, that characterized the late sixties.

Series creation

Adam Adamant Lives! has been called by modern observers "what Doctor Who did next",¹ due to the fact that at least three Doctor Who alumni had key positions on the pilot. Most obviously, it re-teamed producer Verity Lambert with Head of Television Drama, Sydney Newman. Together, they had been at the core of decision makers who launched Doctor Who. But the series also brought Donald Cotton, who had the same year written two serials for Doctor Who, back into Newman's orbit. Cotton and partner Richard Harris would write the first script, "A Vintage Year for Scoundrels", and would thus come to be credited as co-creators.²³ Over the years, Newman himself has been cited as creator of the show. Even the BBC has at times propagated this idea, calling him the creator on some of their own pages devoted to the programme,⁴ but not on others.⁵ In truth, he is probably more correctly seen as the executive producer or as having "developed the series for television". Adam Adamant Lives! was a quick replacement for the show he had actually intended; an adaptation of the adventures of literary detective Sexton Blake. When the rights to the character dried up suddenly, it fell to writers Donald Cotton and Richard Harris, along with script editor Tony Williamson, to come up with a replacement idea.⁶ Near the end of his life, Newman indicated that he had, indeed, been significantly involved in the rewrites, suggesting that his longtime adversary, Mary Whitehouse, had been partial inspiration for the character.⁴ LIke Doctor Who that had preceded it, Adam Adamant Lives! was thus a show created somewhat by committee and circumstance.

Influences and legacy

The Avengers

With its pairing of an upper-class adventurer with a "trendy" woman of the 1960s, parallels have been drawn with competitor ITV's The Avengers. However, because the show was a last-minute replacement for another concept, the degree to which the BBC intended such similarities is unclear. One recent statement has directly addressed the issue:

In Adam Adamant Lives, we were trying to create something original. Even though it may have been aimed at a similar audience to The Avengers — any production decisions we made were not influenced by trying to imitate.⁷

—Verity Lambert, 2004, programme producer

However, a reviewer of the 2006 BBC Four retrospective, The Cult of ... Adam Adamant Lives!, detected something more to the issue when Lambert and other principals were interviewed on camera:

The genial and personable Harmer, Clemens, Harper and producer Verity Lambert all owned up to the clunking obviousness of the series' hamfisted and, in retrospect, laughable attempt to trump ABC's masterpiece. Even an otherwise impartial and unironic script compared the two shows thus: "Edwardian gent teamed with beautiful girl ... and Edwardian gent teamed with beautiful girl". The unspoken tag, of course, was that The Avengers had queered this pitch three years previously.⁸

—Paul Stump, Off the Telly review of The Cult of ... Adam Adamant Lives!, 2006

This latter view has been echoed by Avengers fans. Indeed, an Avengers-biased biography of Adamant star Gerald Harper, who also frequently guest-starred on the ITV show, flatly calls Adamant "unashamedly modelled on The Avengers". It backs up this claim by demonstrating how individual episodes of Adamant parallel those of The Avengers. Finally, it points out that in the programme's second series, Adamant was scheduled as direct competition for Avengers in some parts of Britain, making contemporary comparison between the shows inevitable for viewers.⁹

More neutral observers have generally reflected this dichotomy of perspective. Anthony Clark at the BFI notes that while the show "owes a stylistic debt to The Avengers", it was "the BBC's reply to the success of ITV's spy and action series like The Saint (1962–69) and Danger Man (1960–69)". He goes on to call the character of Adamant "more age-of-empire adventurer than spoof spy". A Television Haven review admits that while the programme as been "long cited as the BBC's answer to The Avengers", it in fact "owes more to the slick style, tone and format of Lew Grade's phenomenally successful ITC stable of action series rather than the sleek and sophisticated antics of Steed and Mrs. Peel."¹⁰

Doctor Who

Harper's portrayal of Adamant has been cited as formative to Jon Pertwee's interpretation of the Doctor. One writer opines that Pertwee's "suave, dashing portrayal was very much surfing the zeitgeist of the time, borrowing from contemporaries such as Adam Adamant Lives!, Doomwatch, Quatermass, and James Bond in the cinema."¹¹ The BBC's episode guide to Doctor Who is more specific, claiming parallels between the Third Doctor's inaugural scenes in a hospital with those of Adamant in his pilot, "A Vintage Year for Scoundrels".¹²

Austin Powers

Adamant is frequently viewed partial inspiration for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery¹³.¹⁴¹⁵ In particular, allusions are seen between the way in which Powers, like Adamant, is revived from cryogenic sleep and befriended by an attractive woman who had known of his exploits before being frozen. The formula is exactly reversed in Powers, however, in that his partner, Vanessa Kensington, is not impressed with his previous record of service, whereas Georgina Jones is a positive fan of Adamant.

Adam Ant

Singer Adam Ant appears to have derived his stage name from this programme.⁴¹⁶

Cancellation

As with the purpose of its creation, reasons for Adamant's cancellation vary according to observer. Television critic Paul Stump agrees with the conclusion of The Cult of ... Adam Adamant! that the programme went off the air because The Avengers was a "'sexier, slicker', better-funded" version of the same concept.¹⁷ However, the programme's largest fan website counters by saying that Sydney Newman, as the BBC's Head of Television Drama, cancelled the show "due to a difference of opinion between himself and his star".¹⁸ An Avengers fansite agrees with both assessments. It says that the production values didn't match The Avengers, and that, despite good ratings, "Newman wasn't happy with the show overall, and the star in particular".¹⁹

Lost episodes

There were originally 29 black and white episodes composing two series, plus one unbroadcast pilot (elements of which were used in the opening episode). The first series, with the exception of episode fourteen, was made as a mixture of 35mm film for the location sequences, and multi-camera in the studio using 625-line PAL electronic cameras. Instead of being edited on video tape, as was the usual BBC procedure, the series was edited entirely on film, with the output of the studio cameras being telerecorded. Since BBC1 was still broadcasting in 405 lines, this move was presumably to make the series more attractive for potential overseas buyers more used to ITC series, which had been shot on 35mm up until this point.

Episode fourteen of the first series, and all of the second series, were made with the usual BBC mix of tape and film, with the second series being edited on 405-line tape. Wiping by the BBC in the 1970s has resulted in no master videotapes having survived. Film recordings haven't all survived either, as, in one case, one episode on 35mm film is known to have been destroyed.

The result of all this is that only sixteen episodes remained in the archives when the BBC realised the value of such material, including the first and last episodes in broadcast order. These were mainly in the form of the original broadcast 35mm film recordings, with a handful of episodes as 16mm film recordings or reduction prints. The episode D For Destruction, thought among those lost forever, was however recovered in 2003 – it was found at the BBC in a mislabelled film can. It has since been screened every year at the Missing Believed Wiped event.

In other media

All 17 surviving episodes were released in a Region 2 DVD box set in the UK by 2entertain Ltd on 24 July 2006, complete with various bonus features, including a documentary in which Harper and Harmer were reunited after almost forty years.

Episode list

All of series one is held by the BBC, with the exception of episode 14. Series two has not fared so well, with only episodes 2 and 13 in existence.

Series 1

• 01. A Vintage Year For Scoundrels - 23 June 1966
• 02. Death Has a Thousand Faces... - 30 June 1966
• 03. More Deadly Than the Sword - 7 July 1966
• 04. The Sweet Smell of Disaster - 14 July 1966
• 05. Allah Is Not Always With You - 21 July 1966
• 06. The Terribly Happy Embalmers - 4 August 1966
• 07. To Set A Deadly Fashion - 11 August 1966
• 08. The Last Sacrifice - 18 August 1966
• 09. Sing A Song of Murder - 25 August 1966
• 10. The Doomsday Plan - 1 September 1966
• 11. Death By Appointment Only - 8 September 1966
• 12. Beauty Is an Ugly Word - 15 September 1966
• 13. The League of Uncharitable Ladies - 22 September 1966
• 14. Ticket to Terror - 29 September 1966
• 15. The Village of Evil - 6 October 1966
• 16. D For Destruction - 13 October 1966

Series 2

• 01. A Slight Case of Reincarnation - 31 December 1966
• 02. Black Echo - 7 January 1967
• 03. Conspiracy of Death - 14 January 1967
• 04. The Basardi Affair - 21 January 1967
• 05. The Survivors - 28 January 1967
• 06. Face In a Mirror - 4 February 1967
• 07. Another Little Drink - 11 February 1967
• 08. Death Begins at Seventy - 18 February 1967
• 09. Tunnel of Death - 25 February 1967
• 10. The Deadly Bullet - 4 March 1967
• 11. The Resurrectionists - 11 March 1967
• 12. Wish You Were Here - 18 March 1967
• 13. A Sinister Sort of Service - 25 March 1967

References

External links

• British Film Institute Screen Online
• Video clips from the BBC
• BBC Treasure Hunt
• Adam Adamant Lives! at the Internet Movie Database