The Adventurer (1972) episode 4 : Thrust and Counter-Thrust

As all proud owners of ‘Gene Barry Sings of Love and Things’ know “singing has always come naturally to the tall and handsome actor” and will of course agree with the sleeve note’s modest assessment “when you listen to the appealing songs Gene has recorded for this album, you naturally ask the question ‘Why hasn’t Gene Barry recorded an album like this sooner?’”. Of course, you didn’t think The Adventurer would deprive us of this side to the Gene Genie’s talents did you? Yes, Thrust and Counter-Thrust manages to work Gene’s singing into the proceedings.

Well originally it did anyway, however when ITV4 repeated this episode in 2005 they cut the scene in question out. No doubt just to make way for more adverts…since surely they couldn’t have possibly thought Gene’s singing was too bad to inflict on their audience…could they? However, have no fear, the DVD preserves the scene in all its intended glory, so all the Gene fans out there can enjoy it over and over again.

Proving that there really is no end to Gene’s talents, this episode opens with a fine display of fencing from the man himself, yes he is great at that as well. It has certainly got this week’s love interest, a Countess no less, all hot under the collar. Not even the aristocracy it seems can resist his trousers. Incredibly Thrust and Counter-Thrust actually gives us something of a Gene backstory, which comes pretty close to acknowledging that Amos Burke-Secret Agent and Gene Bradley are basically the same character. 10 years earlier Gene had been a secret agent before adopting the cover of being a famous actor, and the only people who fully know about Gene’s pre-acting life are Mr Parminter, the American President, the British Prime Minister ….and rather inconveniently a Russian colonel called Andreyev. Even more inconvenient is the fact that Andreyev now moves in the same social circles as Gene’s Countess girlfriend. Still this doesn’t prevent Gene from getting the whole gang together (yes, he and Catherine Schell actually have scenes together in this episode, miracles do happen) and cooking up a typically complicated mission.

Thrust and Counter-Thrust is batshit crazy, even by Adventurer standards, big hearted Gene decides to put on a song and dance show at the Moravian embassy, with himself as the star attraction. However, he has an ulterior motive for putting on the show, involving his male assistant Gavin (Garrick Hagon) who adopts the guise of Gene’s support act ‘Wild Man Jones’ a hippie musician complete with Afro wig, glue-on goatee and flower power threads. It’s a rare example of one of Gene’s co-stars getting the chance to dress more outrageously than the man himself. Naturally, Gene’s song and dance routine goes down a storm with an adoring crowd of old ladies, as the Gene Genie serenades them with one of those wonderful songs. Quite literally as he performs a song called ‘One of those Wonderful Songs’. Some jazz hands action and cane swinging ensures that this audience is soon eating out of his hands. ITV4 should hang their heads in shame for depriving their audience of this.





Gene’s old school showbiz shtick might be music to the ears of this audience, but Wild Man Jones’ incoherent piano playing bombs with the same audience. However there is a twist, Wild Man Jones’ piano solos actually contain ‘hidden messages’ in Morse code that are being overheard by the captured spy Anton Jurzyck whom Colonel Andreyev has hidden away upstairs at the Moravian embassy. Will Gene get to rescue Jurzyck from the embassy, and live to get his leg over with Euro-Royalty? Will Diane get an extra blanket for her bed during her stay at the Moravian embassy? (doesn’t Catherine Schell get all the exciting sub-plots!!) Will Gavin alias Wild Man Jones go on to cut an entire concept album containing songs full of hidden messages in Morse code? Will the audience be disappointed to discover the ‘Thrust and Counter-Thrust’ of the title has no sexual connotations whatsoever? Tune in, then drop out to discover the answers.





The first response to this episode is to wonder ‘what were they on when they wrote this?’ The second is to immediately retract that statement, since none of the makers of this episode look to have been around young people in a good few decades, let alone any mind altering substances. If you delight in seeing not remotely hip filmmakers trying to get down with the kids, only to make fools of themselves on a grand scale then you may well consider Thrust and Counter-Thrust the greatest thing since Dracula AD 1972. Man, this episode is outta sight, dig that funky gear on that cat Wild Man Jones, this Adventurer show is better than grass, Wild Man Jones rocks!!!, no need to call the fuzz, man, cause this is more mind blowing than hanging out with Johnny Alucard during a jazz spectacular at the Albert Hall!!!

Well, maybe not quite, the more The Adventurer tries to be with it, the more is reveals its aged stuffiness. Gene makes jokes about Wild Man Jones’ hair (“what does your barber say?”) and Wild Man’s clothes are meant to evoke middle aged chuckles over what the kids are wearing these days, which is rich considering the Gene Genie’s attire during the series. The brainwave for this episode probably went something like this “have you seen those youthful hooligans of today, with their long hair, jazz festivals and free love…and the music, it’s not like it was in my day, back then we had proper music like that appealing ‘Gene Barry Sings and Love and Things’ album, now that was real music, you can’t call that rot of today music, why it’s so loud it might as well be Morse code messages designed to help defecting Russian spies for all the sense it makes. Hang on!! That would make a great storyline for the Gene Barry show that Lew Grade is putting together”….and thus in that moment Thrust and Counter-Thrust was born.





Rightly or wrongly Thrust and Counter-Thrust gives the impression its makers’ only real remaining pleasure in life was making actors look stupid. Garrick Hagon sure earned his money this week for what they made him wear, Stuart Damon certainly missed out on nothing by having to sit this one out. Spare a thought too for actor David Lawton who in the role of Jurzyck spends the first part of the episode bandaged up like the invisible man and the second half in the Wild Man Jones outfit as the Adventurer gang try to smuggle him out of the embassy under the guise of a stoned out Wild Man Jones. Further suspicion that the Adventurer was just a front for the British film industry to humiliate Gene Barry on a weekly basis, is added to by the fact that this episode ends with him exiting with a woman’s hand bag over his shoulder!! Gene obviously wasn’t afraid of expressing his feminine side, had someone asked Sean Connery to sign off a James Bond film like that they’d have gotten a right clout around the ear.

 

The Adventurer (1972) episode 3: Double Exposure

What could be better than one Gene? Two Genes of course, as this episode sees Gene playing the dual role of Gene Bradley and Gene Bradley’s hitherto unknown stunt-double Frank Jordan. That’s double the fun, double the excitement, double the screen time, and yes, double the trousers, folks.

As the episode title implies, actors playing two roles is something of a theme this week, with guest star Donald Houston initially playing Jan De Groote, a Dutch businessman who has recently married Elayna (Ingrid Pitt). Unbeknownst to De Groote, Elayna is actually the ruthless secret agent ‘Hummingbird’ (“on the outside she is hummingbird, on the inside she is all vulture” sez Gene). Houston also gets to play a bad guy, who just so happens to closely resemble Jan De Groote, and whom Elayna replaces the real Jan De Groote with. While the real Jan De Groote is kidnapped and worked over by Elayna’s cronies, the fake Jan De Groote and Elayna are busy draining the real Jan De Groote’s fortune.

Never one to be outdone, Gene calls on his lookalike stunt-double Frank, and attempts to mess around with the fake Jan De Groote’s head. Mainly by staging fake assassination attempts on fake Jan, in which Frank masquerades as Gene, while the real Gene turns up with a bald cap on and takes pot shots at fake Jan. Gene’s plan seems to be to unnerve the fake Jan into leading both Genes to the real Jan. There is nothing complicated about this plot, eh?





Actually the plot of Double Exposure sort of makes sense until the introduction of Frank Jordan/Fake Gene, which brings with it a whole number of plot holes. Chiefly being, if Gene is trying to deflect suspicion away from himself by always appearing to be by fake Jan’s side during these assassination attempts, then why pose as the assassin himself? Since the assassin’s resemblance to Gene would surely just serve to throw suspicion back onto Gene. However, logic and The Adventurer are never the greatest of bedfellows.

The two Genes subplot does come across as a bit of a self-indulgence for Barry. It is as if Barry felt having another actor play two separate roles in one episode may upstage him, and insisted that two separate roles be written for him as well. Exposure to the Barry back catalogue tends to indicate that he had quite the fondness for dual roles. One of the later episodes of Burke’s Law had seen him play both Amos Burke and Burke’s Irish uncle, with as much of an overblown accent as you can imagine “top o’ the morning to ya Amos, ya sure got the luck o’ the Oiresh”, which seems to have planted the seed for this tale of two Genes.





Double Exposure does have quite a bit going for it though, there is a terrific car chase that sees Gene and Donald Houston burning rubber through the streets of Amsterdam, no doubt appeasing the Chevrolet sponsors in the process. It is hard to believe that this sequence was staged by the same director who gave us the sorry sight that was the fight scene in episode 2, which was car crash television of an altogether different variety. After years of only being able to evoke overseas settings by stock footage, The Adventurer finally sees the ITC crew get to travel to actual locations as well. This episode positively screams out “by jingo, we really did shoot this one in Amsterdam chaps, and to prove it, canals and windmills pop up in every other scene”.

Double Exposure also has the Ingrid Pitt factor on its side too. Pitt enjoys the rare distinction of being one of the few actresses with a ‘sex symbol’ reputation who didn’t get cast in The Adventurer as Gene’s love interest. Instead, she gets to sink her teeth into a femme fatale role, with Donald Houston’s wimpy, nervous wreck of a character only emphasising Pitt’s cold villainy. Of course, height could have been a factor in why there is no romantic interaction between Pitt and Barry. Pitt was only 5’5’’ which is shorter than the 5’7’’ of Hungarian giantess that is Catherine Schell. However the fact that in the three scenes they have together, Pitt is seated in two of them and in their last scene, the big confrontation between Gene and Hummingbird, neither are seen in the same shot, tends to suggest Pitt had fallen foul of Gene’s phobia of acting alongside tall women.

For someone who almost exclusively gravitated towards playing good guys, Gene appears to relish the rare opportunity to indulge in some onscreen villainy here, even if it is put on villainy. Playing two roles does seem to have given Gene his mojo back, he is positively hyperactive in this episode, running around Amsterdam airport with a gun and a bald cap on and putting the willies up poor Donald Houston. In his ‘hitman’ disguise, Gene cuts a genuinely mean and menacing figure, with a look that unintentionally anticipates the ‘what would you look like bald and unshaven’ face warping phone apps of today. To prove my point –and to also prove I have too much time on my hands-, here is what Gene looks like in this episode, and here is what the photo of Gene on the cover of ‘Gene Barry Sings of Love and Things’ looks like after being run through such an app.




….and since I can’t resist cashing in on the current craze for ‘what would you look like as a woman’ face warps…here fellas, is the fox you’ve been waiting for…Miss Jean Barry

 



Presumably playing two roles put Gene in such a generous mood that he even allows his co-stars to do something in this episode. Garrick Hagan, the longest suffering…sorry serving...actor to play the “didn’t you used to be Stuart Damon” role, gets to futz around with some Bond-esque gadgetry on the roofs of Amsterdam. Even the Hungarian giantess has something to do, crashing into Ingrid Pitt’s car and distracting her while Garrick uses some kind of magic ink to erase Jan’s signature from a number of business papers. A subplot that even the episode itself fesses up to being utterly pointless. So much goes on in Double Exposure that it nearly forgets to flatter Gene. A situation rectified in the last scene, where Frank/Fake Gene (who you’ll be unsurprised to learn shares Gene’s taste in trousers) marvels at Gene’s ability to pull the birds. Yes, men might look like Gene, they might even wear the same trousers as Gene, but there can be no bigger babe magnet than Gene himself… accept no substitute, ladies.








Gene Bradley will return in… ‘THE SPY WHO SCALPED ME’

The Adventurer (1972) episode 2: Return to Sender

Episode 2 of The Adventurer sees Gene mistaken for a friendly bear from deepest, darkest Peru who gets adopted by the Brown family and fed lots of marmalade… ok, maybe not, but Mr Barry is really rockin’ that ‘Paddington Bear’ look at the start of this episode. Return to Sender, shot under the title ‘Spy Man’s Holiday’, opens with Gene once again in grumpy git mode, this time because of the British weather. “Do you realise it’s been raining for weeks, do you know what that does for me, can’t wait to hit those beaches in France”.

Mr Parminter wants Gene to work a secret mission into his French holiday, but Gene has only one thing on his mind, indicated by a quick cut-away to a bikini-clad actress. It does tend to fly in the face of typical ITC series heroism, the message of the scene seems to be that the Gene Genie is after some tail, so leave the saving the world crap to some other guy. “There’s only one thing that interests me down there…and it’s something you wouldn’t know about” Gene bitches to Parminter…did my ears deceive me or did Gene just basically ‘out’ Mr Parminter there, and make Mr P the first, openly acknowledged to be gay character in an ITC series?. No time to ponder on that though, because Gene is goin’ where the sun keeps shinin’, through the pourin’ rain, goin’ where the weather suits his clothes, bankin’ off of the North East winds, sailin’ on summer breeze, and skippIn’ over the ocean like a stone…

Soon we are back in the French Rivera, just in time for a bit of Chevrolet pleasing product placement, as Gene drives his Chevy to a luxury hotel where he checks in for his regular ego massage. No soon as he has entered the lobby, then he is mobbed by women, all hungry for his John Hancock. Even the bad guys in this episode are in awe of the Gene Genie “hey isn’t that Gene Bradley, I’ve never been that close to a film star before…wait until I tell my Mum”.




Gene is soon back to being grumpy again though when a female corpse turns up in his bathroom “this is my bathroom you know” he moans on the blower to the long suffering Mr Parminter. In what will become a reoccurring theme in Adventurer episodes its left to Parminter to explain this week’s overly complicated plot to Gene over the phone. Michelle (Pamela Salem), a secret agent who works for Parminter, had been transporting a microchip across Europe alongside Gene’s male assistant, who used to be called Vince and be played by Stuart Damon, but is now called Gavin and played by Garrick Hagon. Unfortunately they were run off the road by two bad guys Fleming and Gorman (Patrick Mower and Donald Burton), Gavin was injured in the crash but Michelle escaped with the microchip. Unable to get in contact with Parminter, Michelle ended up at the hotel Gene is staying at, where she concealed the microchip behind a stamp then attached it to an envelope. In the midst of Gene’s impromptu autograph session in the lobby, Gene mistook Michelle for a fan and signed the envelope. Michelle then had the envelope sent up to Gene’s room, and managed to sneak into his room herself, only for the bad guys to show up as well and murder her in the bathroom. Good God, it’s only when you try to transcribe them do you realise just how convoluted and illogical Adventurer episodes are. Incredibly, the plot gets even more complicated when Gene realises that he has given away the signed envelope to a star stuck young girl called Debbie, and Fleming and Gorman show up again to kidnap this week’s love interest Valerie (Sharon Gurney).

An intended holiday trying to pull the birds in the French Rivera therefore transforms into a race against time to retrieve the microchip from Gene’s young fan Debbie, and rescue Valerie from Fleming and Gorman who have her held hostage on their yacht. The big set piece of this week’s episode though is Gene’s helicopter pursuit of Debbie’s family across the French Rivera, ending with him landing the chopper on a motorway and forcing their car to a standstill. As Gene can’t be seen to be a total bastard, who terrorises an innocent family and snatches his autograph off a little girl, he has thoughtfully brought along a signed photograph of himself for little Debbie to have instead…because let’s face it what little girl doesn’t dream of receiving a signed photograph of a 53 year old man. Lest we forget, “Gene Bradley is Everyone’s Pin-Up, and Nobody’s Fool”.




No look at ‘Return to Sender’ can ignore the fight scene that occurs midway through this episode. If it was intended as a legitimate action scene, it is quite tragic, if it was intended as the homage to old slapstick comedy that it comes across as, then it is simply fabulous. It plays something like this…girl throws a pillow at Patrick Mower which causes him to drop his gun… Gene wrestles with Patrick Mower for a while… girl hits Patrick Mower with a fake vase which makes no noise when it shatters…Gene suddenly has a handful of plant leaves which he proceeds to slap a man around the face with, to understandably no great affect…bad guy takes a swing at Gene, misses him by a mile but Gene reacts as if it had connected…Gene goes to swing on a curtain rail, but it collapses under his weight and the whole curtain falls on top of him…he then gets knocked out.

 

I still shake my head and laugh whenever I recall this scene; it is as if the scene turned out so badly that they tried to salvage it by passing it off as pure comedy. Either that or, even at this early stage, the crew were creating their own amusement by trying to make Barry look as foolish as possible without him realising it. This episode does after all open with him dressed like Paddington Bear!! The fight scene makes Barry/Bradley look like an ineffectual joke, there is even a put down from Mower at the end of the scene about how big Hollywood stars always need stuntmen to look good onscreen. A line which feels extremely meta given Barry’s extensive use of a stuntman in this scene, something that either due to ineptitude or malice the director hasn’t even bothered to disguise.

Did Gene need others to make himself look silly though? he seems to have been his own worse enemy in that respect. Ironically in his prime, circa Burke’s Law/Secret Burke/G.B. Sings of Love and Things, he was a relatively conservative dresser, smart suits, tuxedos, maybe the odd polo neck jumper. However the older he got, the wilder and dare I say more ‘adventurous’ his fashion sense became, as he attempted to turn to clothes to make himself look younger. By the end of all 26 episodes of The Adventurer you’ll be convinced that, in terms of fashion, Gene Barry was the white Rudy Ray Moore, every costume change brings a new assault on the senses. Safari jackets, oversized sunglasses, tartan suits, shirts made from old curtains, mustard coloured underwear, all form a part of the Bradley dress sense, but none can hold a candle to Gene’s taste in trousers. A piece of apparel that burned itself so deep into my psyche that I once used to post on a certain message board under the username ‘Gene Bradley’s Trousers’, such was their impact.

Rumour has it that a low-regarded, shot on 16mm ITC series will soon be making its way onto Blu-Ray, remastered in all its high definition glory for the very first time. The Adventurer certainly fits the bill of being a low-regarded, shot on 16mm ITC series, although all the smart money seems to be on the series in question being Jason King… I don’t think the world is yet ready for the sight of Gene Bradley’s trousers in HD, even in SD they are a sight to behold.




BTW: a search of the internet reveals there was a tie-in novelisation of The Adventurer, released in early 1973. One Robert Miall, who seems to have quite the career novelising ITC series, was given the task of fleshing out Return to Sender into a paperback novel (back cover blurb: “in Nice two girls brought double trouble. One was warm and willing, the other cold and contorted- a corpse on his bathroom floor.”) I can’t help feeling my life will never be fully complete until I’ve seen how Miall managed to translate the sight of Gene bitch slapping a man with a handful of plant leaves into the printed word.


 

The Adventurer (1972) episode 1: The Good Book

Quite where you begin with The Adventurer is a matter of some conjecture, the first episode on the DVD is ‘The Good Book’, which was also the first aired during the ITV4 repeats. However the IMDB identifies the first episode as being ‘Miss me once, Miss me twice, and Miss me once again’, which is episode six on the DVD. I’m inclined to think the series was shot so that it could be transmitted in any order that the broadcaster saw fit. So, confusingly for audiences there is no ‘origins’ episode to the series, no story arcs, and no two parters (the same I believe is also true of The Protectors). Therefore anyone who hadn’t bothered to catch the advanced publicity for the show or read a basic story outline in the TV guide was gonna have to play catch-up, because in its early days The Adventurer is a pretty pacy show. One that hasn’t got the time to stick around and explain any trivial matters, such as who the main characters are, or how they came to know each other, or form a crime fighting team. I would stick my neck out and say that The Good Book is the intended first episode. If only because it features a trick ‘surprise’ opening scene that only really works if this is the first episode you’re watching, and aren’t fully aware of what the main character does for a living. It sees Gene Bradley fleeing from gunmen, then seemingly being shot to death in a bullring. Only for the scene to then pan out to reveal a film crew and –surprise, surprise- it has all just been a scene in a movie that Gene is shooting. Beginning as he means to go on, Gene is rather grumpy after a day’s filming, and is having a moan at Mr. Parminter “pictures wrapped, I’m tired, I wanna go skiing” he whines.

Adventure beckons though, and soon we are off to the Cote D’Azur, where Gene seeks out ex-lover Nita (Adrienne Corri). Nita has fallen in with Armand (John Moffatt), a crime boss who possesses a code book that he is on the verge of selling to some unscrupulous general. Unbeknownst to Armand, his code book is actually a fake, and Gene and Mr. Parminter are there to undermine Nita’s credibility within Armand’s organization. This they attempt to do by staging a burglary of Armand’s safe and replacing his fake code book with the real code book, so that Armand will think the real code book is a fake code book, and that the stolen fake code book is the real code book… welcome one and all to the world of Adventurer logic.

As all Adventurer plots are required to feed Barry’s ego, Bradley gets to gatecrash the party on Armand’s yacht, and is soon being mobbed by the star stuck jet set, thrilled that they are in the company of the world famous Gene Bradley. This crowd includes Diane who has been working undercover and trying to worm her way into Armand’s inner circle. In order to maintain her cover, she too has to pretend to be awestruck to be in Gene’s company. Good God, how Catherine Schell must have hated shooting these scenes, in which her character is required to act like a giggling schoolgirl and –tee, hee- ask Gene for his autograph. Behaving like his biggest fan, she attempts to impress him by telling him that she knows his star sign is a Leo, to which Gene corrects her with “you’re wrong, I’m a Gene”. Oh, what a witty, smooth talking so and so Gene is!!!





Of course the Bradley charm also proves handy when it comes to causing tension between Armand and Nita, with devilish Gene driving Armand crazy with the knowledge that he and Nita used to have a thing going on. After all aren’t all men jealous of Gene? As there is always enough of Gene to go round, he also finds time to romance party goer Gabrielle Drake, who gets the notable honour of being Gene’s first love interest on the show. Poor Gabrielle, all those years studying at RADA, only to end up with a role that requires her to do nothing but hang on to Gene’s arm and deliver such shockingly bad dialogue as “the last time I was in a library, this little boy he took me behind the back of one of the bookshelves and made love to me”. Still, never let it be said that appearing in The Adventurer didn’t lead on to greater things. Gabrielle would soon be appearing in Val Guest’s Au Pair Girls (the Adventurer/Au Pair Girls crossovers don’t stop there either) and incredibly this episode features a very early appearance from Ben Kingsley. Not that you’d ever recognize him here with a full beard and full head of hair, plus only two lines of dialogue as Armand’s henchman. Although given how bad Gabrielle Drake’s dialogue is in this episode, maybe he should be grateful his dialogue was kept to a minimum.

 


This episode also boasts an appearance from the lesser sighted Stuart Damon, who gets only one line of dialogue. In the first sign that things were already starting to go wrong with this show, Damon isn’t even mentioned in the end credits, while Garrick Hagon is mistakenly credited with playing a role in the opening titles. Almost every second Damon and Barry share together in this episode makes for uncomfortable viewing. In one scene Gene steps out of a party at Armand’s mansion, onto the balcony, and observes that Damon’s character has shown up in a car. By rights Gene should be pleased to see him, they are after all on the same side, yet Gene shoots him the meanest look imaginable, rolls his eyes, then steps back inside to the party. Even the placement of the two actors in this scene seems grotesquely symbolic of their positions on the show. Gene as the king of the castle looking down at the unwanted intruder, Damon the isolated outsider, kept at bay from the party and the fun by Gene.

Fortunately The Good Book also brings us a much needed shot of unintended hilarity, when Diane is required to perform a daring trapeze leap into Armand’s vault. At which point Catherine Schell is replaced by an extremely masculine stuntman with legs like a rugby player, who may well be the most unconvincing woman since Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Girls.




Despite that howler, and the distasteful side-lining of Damon, The Good Book is overall an agreeable piece of lightweight escapism that offers up an idea of what the series could have been. The series opener may stick to the tried and tested ITC formula, still if it ain’t broke… don’t fix it. The Good Book’s combination of a once big time American star whose headlining of a British TV show was still a big deal, flash cars, bikini clad babes, punch ups and picturesque French Rivera locations couldn’t have been without its wish-fulfilment charm for a homegrown audience watching this on a small screen in rainy old England over a fish and chip supper. To give an idea of how the series would have originally been seen, it went out on ITV at 8:30pm on Friday nights after ‘The Comedians’ and ‘The Protectors’. A piece of alpha-male scheduling if ever there was one. I’d wager that The Good Book was one of the earliest episodes to be filmed. There is an energy and enthusiasm about the show at this point, and as they filmed away in the summery Cote D’Azur the crew must have thought they’d hit the career jackpot, Gene Barry induced malaise had yet to fully set it.