Category: Television

On the subject of ITC, I have been watching a somewhat forgotten (perhaps rightly) series called The Adventurer.

It stars American actor Gene Barry as Gene Bradley (get it?), secret agent/investigator/spy who works for some branch of the British government and who uses a cover as one of the most famous movie actors who lived. Everyone knows Gene. I mean, everyone. How he has survived as a secret agent is never explained. Gene knows everyone who is rich and famous, and has had affairs with many.

There were twenty six half hour episodes, well, after adverts it was barely 25 minutes, and comes from the early 1970s.

I don’t write that often about current tv, mainly because there’s a lot of it and it is mostly bad, or repeats of bad.

I grew up in the 1960s, when the UK had just two channels (later three), BBC and ITV.

It was a period of time when the UK produced some of the world’s greatest tv, regarded these days as classic cult tv. Many of the series are still shown on the cable channels. They were mostly, perhaps all, filmed on genuine film stock and have survived, and many have been restored and are available on box sets at reasonable prices.