Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series

By James Chapman

Swashbucklers is the first study of one of the most popular and enduring genres in television history – the costume adventure series. It maps the history of swashbuckling television from its origins in the 1950s to the present. It places the various series in their historical and institutional contexts and also analyses how the form and style of the genre has changed over time. And it includes case studies of major swashbuckling series including The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Buccaneers, Ivanhoe, William Tell, Zorro, Arthur of the Britons, Dick Turpin, Robin of Sherwood, Sharpe, Hornblower, The Count of Monte Cristo and the recent BBC co-production of The Three Musketeers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780719098925

James Chapman

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester

Book preview

Introduction

The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, Zorro, Ivanhoe, William Tell, Sir Francis Drake, The Black Arrow, Arthur of the Britons, Dick Turpin, Robin of Sherwood, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sharpe, Hornblower … Swashbucklers – in their various guises – have been a feature of the television landscape for over half a century. Since the emergence of the genre in the 1950s there has been a long and distinguished tradition of costume adventure series chronicling the exploits of those chivalric heroes of old: knights bold and good, dashing swordsmen, gentleman outlaws, daring sea captains and fearless masked avengers. Swashbucklers have been produced in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, and the genre has provided some of the most successful exports in television history. For example The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) – which more than any other series can be said to represent the origin of the television swashbuckler – was the first British telefilm series sold to an American network and remains to this day one of the biggest overseas currency earners in the history of British television. Furthermore the swashbuckler is a universal genre that crosses boundaries of nationhood, culture and language. The swashbuckling hero is a mythic archetype that exists in the popular folklore of all cultures. As Sidney Cole, producer of The Adventures of Robin Hood and a host of other swashbucklers, observed: ‘Robin Hood is an international symbol – he has an equivalent in practically every language.’¹

Swashbucklers sets out to map the history of this enduring but critically marginalised television genre from its origins in the 1950s to the present. In this sense the book should be understood as an addition to a growing body of television scholarship that focuses on popular drama, and especially the episodic series, as a legitimate site of critical inquiry. A decade ago in the introduction to my book Saints and Avengers (2002) – a study of the cycle of stylish British-made secret agent and adventure series during the 1960s to which the present work is in a sense both a sequel and a prequel – I suggested that popular genres had been neglected in television historiography in preference to ‘quality’ drama in the form of either social realism (what might be termed the Cathy Come Home paradigm) or costume literary adaptations (the Pride and Prejudice paradigm).² This is no longer the case. A significant trend in television studies over the last decade or so has been the emergence of what might be called the ‘new television history’, focusing on genres such as the Western, the police series, medical dramas, science fiction and fantasy adventure series. The intellectual resistance to taking popular drama seriously that I observed a decade ago seems largely to have been overcome: Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now as much a part of the television studies agenda as The Wednesday Play or Brideshead Revisited.

Yet the absence of the swashbuckler (a term that I am using to describe the telefilm costume adventure series) from histories of popular television is curious on several accounts. For one thing the swashbuckler was integral to the early history of independent television in Britain. It was ITV that led the way in the production of a cycle of half-hour telefilm costume adventure series in the late 1950s that – to a much greater degree than the critically acclaimed but now for the most part ‘lost’ live studio dramas of the time – really put British television on the international map. The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers were all sold to American networks. Yet these series have been marginalised in the television historiography of the 1950s that focuses instead on innovative live dramas such as The Quatermass Experiment and Nineteen Eighty-Four and the tradition of the single play exemplified by Armchair Theatre.³ While the preference for aesthetically and formally progressive drama is entirely understandable, this does not mean that other programme forms are not also culturally significant. Yet the adventure series has tended to be seen primarily as an economic product rather than as a cultural artefact. This tendency can be traced back to the contemporary publicity discourses of series like The Adventures of Robin Hood, which focused on their international sales. In December 1955, for example, TV Times declared: ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood, which has been sold to the United States, has brought to England a million and a quarter dollars – nearly half a million pounds.’⁴

The television swashbuckler is also important historically because the genre was at the forefront of international co-production and distribution arrangements. The pioneer in this regard was the Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP), which from the very outset sought US co-production and distribution partners for its swashbuckling series. This was necessary because the swashbuckler has usually been towards the higher end of the cost bracket for television drama production and this has necessitated international co-production. In the 1950s series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood were Anglo-American productions in terms of funding and distribution. Furthermore, it has since been conclusively established that many of the writers involved in the British-made swashbucklers of the 1950s were in fact American writers blacklisted during the anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood.⁵ In the 1970s Anglo-European co-productions enabled HTV, one of the smaller ITV companies, to make Arthur of the Britons and Kidnapped, both of which secured international distribution, while in the 1990s both ITV (Hornblower) and the BBC (The Scarlet Pimpernel) produced swashbucklers in association with US cable broadcaster the A&E Network. The international co-production contexts of many costume adventure series therefore raise important questions about economic and cultural capital in the television industry: to this extent the swashbuckler makes a particularly good case study not only for the analysis of genre but also for examining production contexts. The history of the Anglophone swashbuckler involves understanding the institutional contexts of both the British and the American television industries.

The first question to be asked in any historical study of a genre is to define it: what is (and is not) a swashbuckler? All definitions of genre are to some extent arbitrary, of course, largely because we all intuitively know what constitutes a particular genre and tend to fall back on a common-sense understanding of, say, the Western. For the swashbuckler, however, the issue is rather more difficult due to the dearth of scholarly (and, for that matter, popular) literature on the subject. In his book Swordsmen of the Screen (1977) – still the only major study of the cinema swashbuckler – Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘it is basically in form and ethos that the swashbuckler is to be distinguished from other genres. Stylization rather than realism, fictional adventures and not historical fact are the keynotes.’⁶ Unlike the Western, which is defined by its geographical and historical location, swashbucklers may be set in different historical periods and locations, including Arthurian Britain (The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, Arthur of the Britons), Plantagenet England (Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow), Renaissance Italy (Sword of Freedom), seventeenth-century France (The Three Musketeers), Spanish California (Zorro), during the French Revolution (The Scarlet Pimpernel) and the Napoleonic Wars (Sharpe, Hornblower), and even in the mythical kingdom of Ruritania (The Prisoner of Zenda). Regardless of its period and location, however, the swashbuckler features archetypal characters and situations. It is characterised by narratives of adventure, political intrigue and romance. Swordplay is also an essential ingredient: a literal definition of a swashbuckler is ‘one who makes a noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with his sword’.⁷ Sharpe, which some readers may feel does not properly belong to the swashbuckling genre because its protagonist is a plebeian rifleman rather than a gentleman adventurer, earns his inclusion here by dint of his proficiency with a sword.

The television swashbuckler shares other characteristics with its cinema equivalent. In Swordsmen of the Screen, Richards provides a cultural history of the cinema swashbuckler by charting the different lineages of the genre – including the Knights of the Round Table, the Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Three Musketeers, the Masked Avengers and the Gentlemen of the Road – in terms of their underlying ideologies and their relationship to the founding myths. Most of these lineages also inform the television costume adventure series. There have been, for instance, no fewer than six television series based on the Robin Hood story (1951, 1955–60, 1975, 1984–86, 1997–98, 2006–09) as well as various one-off plays and spoofs (such as the BBC children’s series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men). And, like the cinema swashbuckler, television has drawn extensively upon the literary roots of the genre. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for example, has been adapted for British television on four occasions (1958, 1970, 1982 and 1997). So too has Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1950, 1955 – as The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel – 1982 and 1999–2000). There have been three adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1951, 1958 and 1972–74) and no fewer than five versions of his Kidnapped (1952, 1956, 1963, 1979 and 2005). Alexandre Dumas is probably the most oft-filmed author of the swashbuckling genre with multiple versions of his classic tales The Three Musketeers (filmed in Italy in 1955, Britain in 1965, and at least twice in France, in 1959 and 1969) and The Count of Monte Cristo (filmed in Britain in 1955 and 1964, Italy in 1976, and France in 1979 and 1998).

Like the cinema swashbuckler, which can be mapped through three major production cycles – 1920–28, 1934–40 and 1946–55 – the history of the television swashbuckler is best understood as cyclical rather than as a continuous unbroken lineage. The first cycle between 1955 and 1961 – comprising The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, Zorro, Ivanhoe, William Tell and Sir Francis Drake – established the style and conventions of the genre. All but one of those series (Zorro) were British-made, though often with an American co-production partner. The emergence of the swashbuckler on television coincided with its decline in the cinema as the films became too expensive to mount at a time of declining cinema attendances. For Richards the telefilm costume series ‘pre-empted the ground hitherto occupied by the cinema swashbuckler. Small-scale, black and white, often studio-bound, these series were none the less well acted, fast-moving and entertaining, perfect pocket-sized versions of the great cinema originals.’⁸

The swashbuckler was largely absent from British and American television during the 1960s (though there was a cycle of Alexandre Dumas adaptations by the BBC in the mode of the classic serial), but it returned in the 1970s following the arrival of colour television. The second swashbuckling cycle between 1972 and 1986 included both telefilm series (Arthur of the Britons, Kidnapped, Dick Turpin, Smuggler, Robin of Sherwood) and serials shot on the more economical medium of video (The Black Arrow, The Legend of Robin Hood, Warrior Queen, Beau Geste, The Prisoner of Zenda). By the 1980s the increasing costs of production meant that the traditional half-hour episodic series was becoming uneconomical. Accordingly producers of swashbuckling television turned to alternative models. One trend was the rise of the feature-length television film either as a stand-alone ‘special’ (pioneered by the American producer Norman Rosemont with his sumptuous productions of The Count of Monte-Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask and Ivanhoe) or as series of feature-length episodes (exemplified in Britain by Sharpe, Hornblower and The Scarlet Pimpernel). Another swashbuckling cycle emerged on US cable television in the 1990s (Zorro, The New Adventures of Robin Hood, Queen of Swords) where different funding arrangements and international distribution meant the episodic format was viable once again. The most recent example of the swashbuckler has been the BBC’s Robin Hood (2006–09), which in a sense has brought the genre full circle.

I am understanding the ‘swashbuckler’ to mean a period adventure series that is set in a ‘real’ world, no matter how far removed from historical actuality. (It is interesting to note that a feature of the production discourses of many television swashbucklers has been their assertion of period authenticity: this began with The Adventures of Robin Hood and persisted until Hornblower in the late 1990s.) I am excluding sword-and-sorcery sagas with a magical element, such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Merlin and Game of Thrones. However, I am including Robin of Sherwood, where the magical theme is consistent with the popular belief in magic during the Middle Ages. To keep the length manageable, I have also focused on the Anglophone swashbuckler. The Francophone swashbuckler remains a subject for further research, especially the cycle of handsomely mounted Dumas adaptations during the 1960s and 1970s.⁹ These represent a distinct tradition in their own right that differ from Anglophone swashbucklers in several key respects including their fidelity to the source texts and their pervading mood of romantic melancholy. Here I am also influenced by the fact that these series will be unfamiliar to most readers, while many of the Anglophone swashbucklers have frequently been repeated and most have been released on DVD.

There are, inevitably, some omissions. The BBC’s live dramatisations of The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Black Arrow and Kidnapped from the 1950s are no longer extant of course.¹⁰ And even some telefilm series are currently unavailable for viewing. To my regret I have not been able to see any episodes of The Gay Cavalier (1957) or Richard the Lionheart (1961), two series by independent British producers that may (or there again may not) have provided an alternative to the dominant production template and narrative formula of ITP in the late 1950s. The Italian-made telefilm series of The Three Musketeers (1955) also seems to have disappeared from the archives – though judging by the contemporary reviews this may not be such a bad thing. The feature-length television films of The Mark of Zorro (1974) and The Corsican Brothers (1985) have remained elusive, while the 1980s Franco-American series Crossbow, a revisionist interpretation of the William Tell legend, is currently available only in pared-down form as a feature-length film called The Adventures of William Tell.

The methodology of Swashbucklers is best described as cultural-historical in so far as it is my aim to analyse the genre conventions and cultural politics of the series themselves – it is soon apparent that the swashbuckler is a rich site for representing ideologies of class, nationhood and gender (and to a much lesser extent ethnicity) – and to consider their contexts of production and reception. I have attempted to combine a broadly chronological survey of the swashbuckler with case studies of particular series that either mark significant landmarks in the genre or are representative ordinary examples. My concern throughout is to place the various cycles and lineages of costume adventure series in their institutional, ideological and cultural contexts. In particular I have paid attention to the political and cultural economies of the series discussed. In hindsight I feel that this was something I did not emphasise enough in Saints and Avengers: the content and ideological orientation of television fiction reflects to a very large extent its production arrangements, assumed audiences and the creative personnel involved in bringing it to the screen. This is particularly important for the swashbuckler due to the prevalence of international co-production and distribution arrangements. I have also looked for evidence of the contemporary reception of swashbucklers. Reviews are revealing not only of the perceived quality of television series but also how they were understood and positioned in cultural terms. American reviewers, for example, saw the British-made costume adventure series of the 1950s as alternatives to the Western. It is also instructive to consider the assumed audiences for swashbucklers. In the 1950s the US trade paper Variety saw most swashbucklers as being intended for what it termed ‘the smallfry’ and ‘the moppet mart’. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, swashbucklers were being produced for primetime audiences, while in the 1990s Sharpe was the first swashbuckler shown after the 9 p.m. watershed.

In the last analysis, however, the principal focus of any genre-based study must be on the texts themselves. In researching this book I have viewed over 500 half-hour episodes of swashbuckling television, over 100 longer episodes and the equivalent of forty feature films. It is my contention that in researching television drama one should consider as many episodes as possible so that generalisations about content and style are made in an informed manner and the examples chosen are representative. To base an analysis of The Adventures of Robin Hood, for example, on half a dozen episodes would be disingenuous in the extreme. The narrative conventions and ideological structures of popular genres emerge through repetition and variation: therefore it is necessary to consider the series in their entirety. Moreover, there are some cases, such as The Buccaneers and The Black Arrow, where the narrative formula changes during the course of the series and in so doing brings about a degree of ideological realignment in their politics. My discussion of each series is therefore based on saturation viewing. To this extent Swashbucklers has been as much a labour of love as a work of scholarship. I have ridden through the glen with Richard Greene, sailed the Spanish Main with Robert Shaw, fought tyranny and injustice with Roger Moore, ridden the King’s Highway with Richard O’Sullivan and drawn cutlasses with Ioan Gruffudd. It is my hope that readers will find the resulting book both informative and entertaining in equal measure.

Notes

1 Quoted in Leslie Mallory, ‘Robin draws his longbow – and Davy bites the dust!’, News Chronicle, 5 September 1956.

2 James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London, 2002), p. 3.

3 See, for example, John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford, 2000), Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford, 2000), and Janet Thumim (ed.), Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London, 2002). An honourable exception focusing on telefilm series – though on detective rather than costume adventures – is Dave Mann, Britain’s First TV/Film Crime Series and the Industrialisation of the Film Industry 1946–1964 (Lampete, 2009).

4 ‘Looking around’, TV Times, 11–17 December 1955, p. 4.

5 Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: un-American contributions to television costume adventure series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (2003), pp. 245–57.

6 Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen: From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York (London, 1977), p. 1.

7 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II. Ed. C. T. Onions (3rd edn) (Oxford, 1973), p. 2209.

8 Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen, p. 19.

9 The Francophone swashbuckling cycle – known in France as feuilleton de cape et d’épée – includes Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (1963), Le Chevalier d’Harmental (1966), Les Compagnons de Jéhu (1966), Thibaud ou le Croisades (1966–8), Les Aventures de Lagardère (1967), Le Chevalier Tempête (1967), D’Artagnan (1969) and Quentin Durward (1971), all produced for French state broadcaster ORTF.

10 The earliest surviving extracts are from a live serial of Robin Hood by the BBC in 1951, starring future ‘Doctor Who’ Patrick Troughton. These can be viewed online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_lcc-LNUUY (accessed 10 June 2013).

1

Exporting Englishness

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) marks the origin of the television swashbuckler. Its history is inextricably linked to the early history of the ITV network in Britain: its first episode, broadcast in the London region at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday 25 September 1955, was one of the highlights of ITV’s opening weekend. It was an immediate popular success, not only in Britain, where it regularly featured among the top-ten shows, but also in the United States where it was bought by the national CBS network. The Adventures of Robin Hood remained in production for four years and ran for 143 half-hour episodes. It was repeated with such frequency that in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was hardly ever off the airwaves in Britain. Now fondly remembered for its catchy theme song (which became a top-twenty hit for David James in 1956) and for its repertory company of stalwart British character actors in sackcloth costumes, sporting bad wigs and even worse ‘yokel’ accents, The Adventures of Robin Hood has recently attracted critical interest due to the involvement of a number of blacklisted American writers whose contributions had a significant bearing on the politics of the series.¹ The semi-American parentage of The Adventures of Robin Hood, moreover, raises important questions about the economic and cultural capital of this representation of perhaps the most quintessentially English of all popular folk heroes.

The political economy of The Adventures of Robin Hood

Steve Neale has argued that The Adventures of Robin Hood ‘was transnational in origin and appeal and in financial and institutional terms from the very outset’.² In order to contextualise the series it is necessary to consider it in relation to the production strategies of both British and American commercial television in the mid-1950s. The Adventures of Robin Hood was produced by Sapphire Films for the Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP), a subsidiary of Associated Television (ATV), one of the regional franchise operators in the ITV network which broadcast in London on weekends and in the Midlands during the week. The advent of the ITV network as a commercial rival to the monopoly of the BBC had come about through a range of factors including, but not limited to, the election in 1951 of a Conservative government that supported the principle of competition, an orchestrated campaign by theatre managers and talent agencies who wanted more television exposure for their artistes, and the building of new television transmitters, which meant that by 1953 all but the remotest parts of the United Kingdom could receive television signals.³ ITV was derided by its critics as representing the worst kind of commercial enterprise and for pandering to the lowest common denominator in taste. For its supporters, however, ITV marked the triumph of populism and consumer choice. ‘So far,’ declared the first TV Times editorial, ‘television in this country has been a monopoly, restricted by limited finance, and often, or so it seems, restricted by a lofty attitude towards the wishes of viewers by those in control’. ITV, in contrast, aimed ‘at giving viewers what viewers want – at the times viewers want it’.⁴

The Adventures of Robin Hood exemplifies two separate, though related, processes in the television industry during the 1950s: the rise of international co-production-distribution arrangements and the move into telefilm series production. Most accounts of The Adventures of Robin Hood tend to see it as exceptional: the first British series sold to a US network.⁵ Lew Grade, the flamboyant, cigar-smoking theatrical agent, was one of the driving forces behind the formation of independent television in Britain: Grade was both managing-director of ITP and deputy managing-director of ATV (later becoming its managing-director in 1962). In his autobiography Grade claimed that he committed £390,000 of ITP’s original capital of £500,000 to the production of the first series of The Adventures of Robin Hood and that it ‘grossed millions of pounds’.⁶

Although it was undoubtedly the most successful example of its kind, The Adventures of Robin Hood was by no means unique. Sapphire Films was just one of several producers at the time making telefilm series for ITV but with a view also to international sales: others active in the mid- and late 1950s included Towers of London (whose managing-director, Harry Alan Towers, was a shareholder and board member of both ITP and ATV), Danziger Productions (run by American brothers Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger) and George King Productions (King had been a prolific director of ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s, who moved into television in the 1950s). Towers produced The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1955), another costume adventure series that aired during ITV’s first week, while the Danzigers, specialists in low-budget crime films, turned their hands to television with Mark Saber (1954–55) and The Man from Interpol (1959–60).⁷ While the funding arrangements varied, the usual model was for a series to be made in association with an American partner who would provide ‘end money’ in return for the lucrative US distribution rights. The Adventures of Robin Hood was produced in association with Official Films: ITP distributed it in the western hemisphere and Official Films in the eastern hemisphere. Official Films was one of several companies specialising in selling telefilm series in the United States: others included National Telefilm Associates and Screen Gems (a television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures).

The involvement of American co-production partners in British television reflected a trend in the film industry during the 1950s. As part of the move towards so-called ‘runaway’ productions, Hollywood studios became increasingly involved in British-based production to the extent that some, such as MGM, even opened their own British production facilities. There were several reasons for this trend: cheaper production costs, especially following the devaluation of Sterling in 1949; the limitation on dollar remittances imposed by the Treasury which meant that US distributors had ‘frozen funds’ in Britain; and eligibility for a subsidy from the British Film Production Fund (commonly known as the Eady Levy, introduced in 1951), provided that the films were produced by a nominally British company using British studio facilities and with three-quarters of the labour costs paid to British workers.⁸ At this time Britain was still the most lucrative overseas market for American films and largely as a consequence of this a large proportion of ‘Hollywood British’ films were on British subjects, including costume films and swashbucklers. MGM, for example, produced a cycle of three chivalric epics – Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1953) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955) – while other studios producing swashbucklers were Warner Bros. (Captain Horatio Hornblower RN, 1950; The Master of Ballantrae, 1953; King Richard and the Crusaders, 1954), Columbia (The Black Knight, 1954), Twentieth Century-Fox (Prince Valiant, 1954), Universal-International (The Black Shield of Falworth, 1954) and Walt Disney (The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, 1952; Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, 1953; Kidnapped, 1959). Disney’s Robin Hood film, starring Richard Todd and directed by Ken Annakin, was to a large extent the template for The Adventures of Robin Hood.⁹

The reasons for US investment in telefilm production in Britain were very similar to those which attracted Hollywood to British shores. Variety observed that ‘sound and obvious economic reasons’ lay behind the growth of Anglo-American production partnerships.¹⁰ For the British producer a US partner significantly increased the likelihood of US sales, either to a network (which guaranteed a fast return on the initial investment) or through syndication (where, as Variety put it, the British partners ‘have to wait much longer before they can share in the American gravy’). The network sale of The Adventures of Robin Hood meant that ‘the British company not only acquired desperately needed product for its own use, but also hit the jackpot with their quick US return’.¹¹ At the same time British production was attractive to American partners because costs were on average 20 per cent lower in Britain and because this British-made product gave them a foothold in the British television market. The British commercial companies, regulated by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), had agreed to impose a quota of imported television (no more than seven hours a week) in response to concerns over the ‘Americanisation’ of British airwaves. (This policy was similar to the film industry, where the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 set a minimum quota of British films for distributors and exhibitors. The distributors’ quota was abolished in 1948.) A television series shot in Britain with a predominantly British cast and crew qualified, like its film counterparts, as a British production rather than an import.¹²

The Adventures of Robin Hood also exemplified the shift towards telefilm production in the 1950s. Until the advent of magnetic videotape and the introduction of Ampex video machines in the late 1950s, there were two options for television drama: live performance in the studio or shooting on film. The former was the preferred mode of production during the early years of television for a combination of economic and aesthetic reasons: it was cheaper than film and it led to the emergence of a distinctively televisual style that differentiated the new medium from cinema. Early live television drama was characterised by an aesthetic of intimacy and immediacy that privileged interiors and close ups and thus encouraged intense, character-focused psychologically oriented narratives. Thus it was that the ‘golden age’ of US television drama in the 1950s was notable for the production of social realist television plays by writers such as Paddy Chayefsky (Marty), Rod Serling (Requiem for a Heavyweight) and J. P. Miller (Days of Wine and Roses). Yet this golden age was short lived, as telefilm production was already on the increase by the mid-1950s. This process coincided with the relocation of US television production from New York to Hollywood and with the increase in the number of television stations in America after 1952 when the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on the issue of new licences. The rapid rise in the number of television broadcasters – from 108 in 1952 to 650 by 1960 – in turn led to the expansion of the syndication market. In 1957 it was estimated that the syndication market in the United States was worth $60–70 million a year.¹³ There was a demand for ‘product’ to fill airtime, especially episodic series that could be scheduled according to local circumstances.

A further advantage of telefilm series over live drama, moreover, was that it offered the possibility of sales to overseas broadcasters – sales which usually represented clear profit for their distributors. The two most lucrative overseas markets for the US television industry were Britain and Canada, partly because the programmes did not need to be dubbed but also because the markets were larger due to higher levels of television ownership than in the rest of Europe or Latin America. In 1959 Britain, with an estimated nine million sets, accounted for three-fifths of all the television sets in Western Europe.¹⁴ Variety estimated that by the late 1950s ‘those tv film distributors with good product and heads-up foreign distribution may be doing almost half their business in foreign distribution’.¹⁵

Telefilm production in Britain lagged behind America, but it was given a significant boost by the arrival of ITV. The BBC made only occasional forays into telefilm production during the 1950s, such as the detective series Fabian of the Yard (1954–56) and the adventure series The Third Man (1959–60). The latter, which borrowed only its title and the name of its protagonist Harry Lime (Michael Rennie) from Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film, was produced in association with National Telefilm Associates.¹⁶ Independent television was better placed to invest in telefilm production than the BBC – funded by advertising revenue it could more easily afford the greater costs – and from the outset telefilm production was one of its key strategies. The