The Freeview TV channels in the UK are a goldmine of TV nostalgia. Each day they show repeats of the the crime-adventure shows made by ITC Entertainment, a company run by Lew Grade that aimed to make UK TV shows that appealed to both UK and US audiences.
As a child in the 1970s, I would watch repeats of these shows. They included Danger Man, The Saint, The Avengers, The Baron, The Prisoner, Department S, The Champions and Randall and Hopkirk. Shot on 35 mm film these shows were presented in a stylish and imaginative way, creating a world that seemed vast and exciting and full of visual flair, exotic locations and imaginative storytelling.
Edwin Astley who wrote most of the theme tunes and scores for these shows, apart from The Avengers, The Champions (he wrote the score only) and The prisoner, gave these shows added drama and energy. I was always surprised that after the 1960s he didn't write any more TV music.
Then in the early 1970s, UK TV began to dispense with these sorts of shows in favour of more realistic and gritty police procedural ones. Though earlier TV shows such as Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green were already realistic to some extent, it was not until shows like The Sweeney (shot on grainy 16 mm film) that this approach began to dominate.
The dominance of the police procedural continued through the 1980s with Juliet Bravo, The Bill and Inspector Morse, into the 1990s with Prime Suspect, Cracker, Wycliffe, Dalziel and Pascoe, Silent Witness and A Touch of Frost, and carried on into the 2000s and beyond with Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, New Tricks, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Waking the Dead, Line of Duty, Lewis, Broadchurch, Happy Valley and countless others. And though Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes had a fantasy-based premise, their execution remained firmly realistic.
While police procedurals have their own merits, there is something inherently stifling about an unbroken stream of detectives, case files, paperwork, and routine investigation, week after week, year after year—without the flair, imagination, or sense of adventure that made the ITC show so brilliant.
Seeing these older shows again on Freeview is not just nostalgia but a reminder that television used to thrill and inspire.
