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Post by pulphack on Dec 19, 2008 10:53:55 GMT
thanks johnny, it's something i've always been a bit curious about.
both dept s and jason king have been released by netwerk on dvd. i have a few episodes of the latter on vhs (one tape was sent to me by a mate who included a note saying 'how come we thought THIS was the epitome of macho when we were kids??!!'), and they really are crap. wyngarde's ego runs rampant, the storytelling is non-existant, and the only good thing is some of the bitchy dialogue.
dept s i have on two german dvd boxes, which have the original and the dubbed. i'm devastated to learn they rewrote the dialogue, andy, as i was trying to pick up some german by watching them in both. no, really. anyway, the thing about dept s is that wyngarde's worst excesses were reined in, and part of his charm is the way he bounces off joel fabiani (particularly) and rosemary nicholls. according to Robert Sellars' ITC book, wyngarde was always being pulled up by main director cyril frankel for going ott; as to his relations with the other leads, he hated rosemary nicholls, but fabiani though he was a great laugh. to be honest, i think the fame went to his head a bit, as he was a well-respected theatre actor, but had only done a few movies that were mostly low budget, and had also had several supporting roles in ITC shows (you can see him to best effect in episodes of The Saint and The Baron).
the success of the king character in dept s, coming quite late, was a little much. and he always wanted to be a star - there's a section in JG Ballard's autobiography where he recalls knowing Wyngard under his real name when they were both young lads in an internment camp, and Cyril (to his mum) had his career mapped out at fourteen.
but there's no excuse for that album. at all. bloody terrible (though i am biased as he kills Neville Thumbcatch, which is a great tune in the Attack version, sitting nicely next to the wonderful Mr Pinmody's Dilemma - which is about a deafmute who communicates with his hands, and would have been another ott vehicle for our Cyril)...
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Post by andydecker on Dec 19, 2008 20:05:18 GMT
pulphackconcerning Dept S and so on, let me clarify some things. At the time here in Germany we had three channels which I guess you can compare in parts with the BBC. They were and are regulated by law, nurturing the culture, broadcasting information, etc. Compared to all the private networks which think Big Brother is a cultural achievement they are a bastion of culture and of course conservative to the mark. So they had a only a few foreign series on their schedule, dubbed without subtitles - each and every tv-series is dubbed in Germany - but there was a strong sense of what was deemed appropriate for the public. So they did always a selection. Especially with british series everything deemed too strange or far-out ot violent wasn´t bought. For instance The Avengers - which was a huge success - missed a hand ful of eps, which were only 25 years later dubbed and broadcast. Dept. S missed eps 3; 13; 17;20;23;24,25. Jason King missed 13 eps. I don´t know if they are included on the german dvd sets, on tv they were never shown. Also I assume they were cut for lenght, here they clocked at 45 minutes. I never was a fan of Dept S, but liked the twist opening. And Wyngarde was kind of okay in the context of the group, alone he was insufferable. The dubbing of Dept S was relatively straight. Jason King they went more for the funny (or what was thought of funny at the time, today it is painful). The worst offender in this regard was The Persuaders. They exagerated the comedy a hundred-fold - but this was hugely successful at the time. This re-tooled version even got an award. It is hard to describe how it sounded, I imagine the dialogue would remind one of an Carry On-movie. One pun after the other, and who cares if it was appropriate for the story or not. Personally I think this made a terrible series even worse. So Dept S I guess is safe to see and hear the dubbing. But be warned nobody speaks like that today. Especially not to woman.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 23, 2008 18:31:23 GMT
thanks for that, andy. it's very odd to consdier that germany had such censorship when it was also so pregressive in other ways - for instance, i understand that many underground bands (kraut rock alert!) had the manager as an extra member or had one of the band handle those duties as it was actually illegal to have a manager - something to do with exploitation of labour (at leats, that's what i'v gleaned from reading the Freeman brothers on German rock). i note in your piece about Malko in PF8, and also in your Groovy Age piece on horror pulps, that it was quite a restrictive culture in a number of ways. a very starnge time for those of us used to the UK and it's own - er - idiosyncracies.
as for accentuating the humour - hey, i've seen some schoolmadchen and hausfrau report (excuse the atrocious spelling) films, so i figure i've got an idea of that strain of german humour!
funnily enough, there was a time when i dated four german girls in succession - my grasp of the language and the its source may very well account for the brevity of that dating...
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Post by andydecker on Dec 24, 2008 23:42:28 GMT
yes, it´s a funny old world, innit? Of course there is - and was - no state censorship in Germany. This is actually written into the the constitution. But there is a very real initiative to promote self-censorship in the form of editing or not buying the foreign rights in the first place, and the problem is of course what is deemed appropriate for minors. Which is a matter of the zeitgeist. Stuff which never would seen the light of the day in the 80s is accepted today. It works like this. Media which are brought to attention to the appopriate boards - which are staffed by teachers, social-workers and so on - and are thought harmful for minors are put on an index. That action prohibts the publisher to advertise for said object and also prohibits the publisher from selling it through outlets where minors can get them. (There is a second stage if media is thought to infringe on criminal law; stuff like that is illegal to sell.) Say the new Iain Banks lands on the index. It still can be sold, but not any longer at a normal bookshop. It can only be sold under the counter or in adult bookshops. As you can guess for a profit orientated regular publisher this means that he can throw this edition out in the garbage. Or can you imagine a publisher like, say, Gollancz in the UK, would distribute this lone novel in a sex shop? Even if they had the necessecary distribution line? Of course said publisher can go to court and fight the ban, which they probably would in the case of Iain Banks, but hardly in the case of a number of, say, The Witches, which not surprisingly never saw a german translation Back when there was a healthy pulp market in the 70s or 80s avaiable mostly at newsstands the publishers did the same thing american comic publishers did: they established a sort of code to avoid such problems. So they edited offensive stuff out. What is offensive is of course a matter of national standards. Today those problems are less literature - the youngsters don´t read anymore - and mainly PC Games and as always movies and their ratings. As - as far as I know - is the same thing like in the UK. At least we get frontal nudity on national free tv, but a movie like SAW can´t get screened before 10 p.m. and even then only in a very edited form. Oh my god, the Schulmädchen Report Hard to imagine people paid for seeing this trash in the cinema. Compared to that American Pie is a sophisticated comedy
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Post by pulphack on Feb 7, 2015 15:07:12 GMT
Having pared my unread pile down to a mere handful, I've been revisiting some books I haven't looked at for ages over the last month or two, and after revisiting The Protectors, I decided to have a look and see if I could pop back 42 years and pair it up with The Adventurer, as I originally got them both at around the same time. A swift look online revealed that most places want between £25-£55 for it! Good gravy, I wouldn't pay that for anything! Well, almost... However, in the middle of this I saw one dealer selling it for 25p plus 2.80 p&p, so I took the plunge.
To be honest, I didn't remember it that fondly, and the series has been terrible when seen again, so I didn't expect much from it.
How wrong I was! In just 128pp Mr Burke whips through three scripts, tying them together nicely and adding a layer of internalising that gave the character a depth the wooden Gene Barry could only dream of. With 30pp less than the Protectors book, which dragged from the same series faults as the Adventurer (paper-thin plots and rushed storylines in the 25 min running time) it's tauter and tighter, and really was a lot of fun on a wet afternoon.
Another fine example of how John Burke could take the slightest of material and make it come to life far more than it did on the small screen.
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Post by ripper on Mar 8, 2015 13:55:03 GMT
Hi PulpHack, I was just wondering if any of the other 60s ITC series such as The Champions, Department S and The Baron had tie-in books published. I haven't ever come across any, but the series were quite popular at the time.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 9, 2015 6:00:07 GMT
Morning, Rip
The only thing about writing this at six am is that my typing is even worse than usual, so please excuse any typos I miss...
The sixties ITC series were surprisingly poorly served by tie-ins: no Department S, which I would have treasured. There was one Champions book, which goes for something like £40 when it does turn up. It was written by John Garforth, who was responsible for four Avengers tie-ins, which were rather good, and also until last year was the last man to write a Sexton Blake (the tie-in for the Horned God '78 tv series). I have no idea what the Champions book is like - his Avengers books are great fun, and the Blake is awful (but then the Avengers were original stories, and the Blake tv scripts were awful, so it's understandable). He died last year, but his Amazon page is still there as he kindled loads of his plays, and the bio piece he wrote himself is well worth a look.
The Baron is an odd one - while The Saint had tie-in editions of old books and some new books featuring TV stories from Hodder, the same publisher didn't seem to do this for Creasey's books (they didn't for the ITC series of Gideon, either). Perhaps this was because the TV Saint was similar in style and background to Charteris' original (though the author certainly didn't feel this as the series progressed!), while Creasey's Baron was an ex-jewel thief antique dealer with a penchant for helping lame ducks who became an American ex-cattle baron turned antique dealer and part-time spy, losing all his supporting cast at the same time (no Josh Larraby, Lorna Mainwaring, Bill Bristow, etc all of whom were vital to the continuing back stories, as in many Creasey series).
I've never come across books for Randall & Hopkirk or Man In A Suitcase, either. Gerry Anderson had it sussed, though - Armada paperbacks for most series to go with the comics and annuals!
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Post by dem bones on Mar 9, 2015 7:51:08 GMT
There were at least five 'Danger Man' paperbacks, too. Have read only one of them, Storm Over Rockall, W. Howard Baker's truly fab exposé of what those with-it Pirate Radio beatniks are really up to. If you've not already done so, you might like to pay a visit to the excellent Danger Man site.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 9, 2015 8:20:21 GMT
Slapped wrist for me - I have two of those Danger Man books and have wittered on about them on here and in PF. Being so early in the run of ITC action shows, I forget DM was one of ITC's - a feeble excuse, but the only one I can offer!
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Post by ripper on Mar 9, 2015 10:40:35 GMT
Thank you very much for the info, PulpHack. What a shame that those series didn't see any tie-ins. At prices like that, The Champions book is well out of my reach. I used to have a Danger Man tie-in--The Exterminater I think it was called--but it is long gone now. One thing I will say for those 60s ITC series is that they had some stonkingly good theme tunes. BTW only just listened to those Peter Wyngarde tracks--WOW! 'Rape' and 'Hippie and Skinhead' are just indescribable, though Wyngarde sounds like he had a good time recording them.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 9, 2015 11:23:46 GMT
David McDaniel - The Prisoner: Who Is Number Two? (NEL, 1982; originally Ace, 1969) Blurb He was free - within the village. Free to busy himself or to do nothing. Free to socialise or to keep himself to himself. Free to ask questions and listen to the gently plausible answers. Free even to try to escape. But not to leave. The Guardians saw to that. Intercepted him and shepherded him back, carefully but firmly, to be reprimanded more in sorrow than anger. Left him to try again and fail again. Why? Why this tolerance of his endless attempts to get away? Was he, unwittingly, doing just what they wanted? Continuously testing out the defences, showing up the weak spots. Were all his probings and schemings simply improving the security of their system? Would giving up be the only true rebellion he could muster?
There have been a plethora of books devoted to The Prisoner, including three paperback tie-ins; Thomas M. Disch's The Prisoner[/b] (originally Ace, 1969, Nel, 1979, and since republished several times); David McDaniel's Who Is Number Two? (Ace, 1969; NEL, 1982); and Hank Stine's A Day In The Life (Ace, 1970; Nel, 1981).
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