Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "ralph-smart"

Just for fun, this week we’re going to be revisiting a few obscure but memorable sci fi TV series from the 1950s. I wager most readers will have likely never heard of them or never seen them since their original broadcasts.

Today, we’re going to look at the original 1958 The Invisible Man. While there have been various invisible TV characters over the years, (including 1975’s The Gemini Man and Christopher Eccleston in 2004’s Heroes), there have been three series titled The Invisible Man. A few weeks back, we remembered David McCallum’s 1975 version, sometime down the road we might explore the 2000-2002 Syfy entry.

The original TV Invisible Man, sometimes called H.G. Wells The Invisible Man, ran on CBS and ITV from Sept. 14, 1958 to July 5, 1959. For two seasons of 26 half-hour adventures, producer Ralph Smart, best known for his work on Danger Man, a.k.a. Secret Agent, fused H. G. Wells and Ian Fleming in The Invisible Man, England’s first fanciful Secret Agent series.

The project began when ITC head, Sir Lew Grade, wanted to move beyond the success of his historically set dramas featuring characters like Robin Hood and Sir Lancelot. He wanted modern settings that would appeal to the export market, especially in the U.S. A pilot was shot featuring Canadian actor Robert Beatty providing the voice for the unseen hero, but Smart scrapped this unusable version. Viewers of the era never saw the substandard special effects of this half-hour, especially the too obvious wires used to animate moving objects. Some footage was salvaged for a revised pilot for a series now centered on Dr. Peter Brady, a British scientist who accidentally made himself invisible experimenting with light refraction.

Brady is initially declared a state secret and locked up, but eventually convinces the British government, represented by Sir Charles Anderson, to allow him to return to his laboratory and search for an antidote ("Secret Experiment"). British Intelligence recruits him for an assignment ("Crisis in the Desert"), but soon security is breached ("Behind the Mask") and he becomes a celebrity ("Picnic with Death"). Using his invisibility to help people in trouble, Brady solves crimes and fights spies.

Plots were never the point as many stories were hastily cobbled together. At first intended to be a comedy, new scriptwriter Ian Stuart Black was called in to crank out stories, and he shifted the emphasis to political thrillers. For example, one story dealt with a terrorist plot to smuggle nuclear devices into Western capitals as blackmail to enrich Communist coffers.

The main attraction of the show was the novelty of viewers seeing drinks, test tubes, or cigarettes floating in the air. They saw car doors opening and steering wheels turned by unseen hands, and bad guys duking it out with invisible fists. Special effects master Jack Whitehead created most of the situations with wires allowing glasses to rise, chairs to be jerked downward simulating a man sitting, and hats lifting from an invisible head.

Unintended events provided some unwanted drama during filming. On one occasion, a stuntman drove a car through London, the driver hiding under a false seat. Passersby thought a runaway car was loose, and chased down the vehicle. While filming another scene involving a moving car, a large arc lamp, used to brighten locations, fell and nearly hit the car carrying a stuntman and co-star Lisa Daniely, missing her by inches.

During the series run, the identity of the primary actor playing Bradey was a closely guarded secret to keep viewer interest. In 1965, while the series was still in reruns in the U.K., it was revealed a little-known actor named Johnny Scripps was usually the on-screen body, a short man who looked through buttonholes on Brady’s shirts. Tim Turner was the principal voice actor and appeared visibly in the “Man In Disguise” episode as a villain with a foreign accent. Supporting characters included Brady’s widowed sister Diane Brady Wilson (Lisa Daniely) and his young niece Sally (Deborah Watling). As the sister essentially acted as Brady’s wife, Daniely asked producers why she wasn’t cast as a spouse. She was told the networks wouldn’t want viewers speculating about an invisible man sleeping with a woman, although he did get occasional romantic moments as when Brady kissed a Russian agent (Zena Marshall). While no breakthroughs for women leads occurred onscreen, the show benefited from production supervisor Aida Young, one of the first women to serve in this position for television.

Future Avengers Ian Hendry and Honor Blackman guest starred, and future Avengers writers Brian Clemens and Philip Levine contributed scripts. Another supporting player was Desmond Lewellyn, soon to become the “Q” in the Bond series. At one point, the show had a moment of controversy when the allegedly anti-Communist plot lines drew the ire of the Labour Peace Fellowship, an organization campaigning for world disarmament. They demanded the show be dropped from the schedules, claiming it was “calculated to ferment hatred against Russia” and “a danger to East-West relations.”

In 2006, MPI Home Video released the complete series, including the unaired pilot, for DVD players in the UK including commentary tracks on the episodes “Shadow Bomb,” “Picnic With Death,” and “Secret Experiment” by Lisa Daniely, Deborah Watling, Brian Clemens and Ray Austin. Dark Sky Films issued the two seasons of b&w adventures for American audiences, but without the extras. The series is now deemed the transitional show in between ITC’s swashbuckling programs like the Adventures of Robin Hood and Ralph Smart’s Danger Man, the 1961 program that began the long run of ITC spy series.

You can order the four-disc complete series released by Network Entertainment (rated 4.6 by reviewers to date)at:
Amazon_com Invisible Man The Complete Series Ernest Clark, Tim Turner, Johnny Scripps, N-A Movies & TV