Following their recent revivals of The Avengers and The Prisoner, Big Finish Productions have now made a further excursion into British television spy dramas of the 1960s with their new audio production of Callan.

Created by writer James Mitchell, Callan originally ran for four series over 1967-72. It followed the character of David Callan, a reluctant assassin compelled to carry out the ‘dirty work’ of a sinister British intelligence service known only as ‘the Section’. In its day, Callan was a true national phenomenon amongst British television viewers, described by ITV historian Jeremy Potter as ‘the favourite thriller series of its time’.

Now Callan has returned in audio form, with an initial boxset composed of four new stories having just been released and a second volume scheduled for January. As a candidate for revival, the choice of Callan is perhaps a little more daring than The Avengers or The Prisoner as, despite its national popularity, the series arguably never quite attained the same global cult status as many of its more exportable contemporaries. But time has been kind to Callan, the DVD release of all surviving episodes by Network DVD in 2010 spurring revival of interest and a new appreciation of the series’ quality.

When I wrote about Callan in my book Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama, I argued that this series, whilst lacking the lavish production resources of contemporary ITC adventure-series, was able to turn its production limitations into a considerable virtue. Steeped in the more cynical, pessimistic view of intelligence popularised over the 1960s by novelists such as John le Carré and Len Deighton, Callan crafted a vision of espionage composed of intricate plots, richly-drawn characters, sharp dialogue and an intense and claustrophobic atmosphere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these turn out to be characteristics which translate to the medium of audio drama to great effect.

Nonetheless, there were various different forms which a Callan audio adaptation might have taken. Ten episodes from the first two series remain entirely missing from the archive, and so Big Finish could simply have elected to re-enact these in order to fill the gaps, the approach they took with their initial productions of The Avengers. Alternatively, they might have adapted one or more of James Mitchell’s continuation novels, potentially opening the series out into the terrain of ‘feature-length’ plots. And, of course, they could simply have commissioned entirely original scripts, the default approach for many of their other revivals.

However, on this occasion Big Finish elected to take a particularly unique and creative approach. They set out to create four new television-style episodes, adapted from short stories written by Mitchell himself back in the 1970s. This had been a regular part of the writer’s output during this period, in parallel with his work on the television series. Following transmission of the third series in 1970, Mitchell began writing a regular series of Callan short stories for the Sunday Express. By the time that these stories concluded in 1976, they had outlasted the television series by four years, with over 40 original titles having been printed.

Although all of these stories were reprinted across two volumes of Callan Uncovered in 2014 and 2015, the Big Finish production team considered that this relatively marginalised part of the series’ history was still deserving of more attention. Adapting these stories therefore provided an opportunity to present something faithful to Mitchell’s original vision for Callan, whilst still offering stories that were relatively unknown to all but the most die-hard fans of the series.

Coming on board to adapt the stories into full-length scripts was Peter Mitchell, the son and literary executor of their original writer. The most obvious limitation provided by these stories was their brevity, with each typically having amounted to just one or two newspaper-sized pages, therefore making it necessary to significantly expand the original material. In practice, however, these stories prove to be ripe for such expansion, often containing as much narrative intrigue as television episodes, but still leaving much scope to add in the richness of character and detail of situation that made the series so compelling.

Callan was, of course, a very personal project for James Mitchell, who had written the television play from which it was derived (A Magnum for Schneider, 1967) and almost all of the first series. In Andrew Pixley’s account of the series’ production, Under the Red File, it is indicated that Mitchell would have been happy to continue as sole writer thereafter, but that the production team of the second series elected to bring in additional writers to give the series some more variety.

It is easy to speculate, therefore, that the Sunday Express short stories served as an outlet for a hugely prolific writer to use the many story ideas that the television series did not have space to accommodate. And although the short stories are frequently full of delightfully-written conversation scenes with the rich characterisation and dialogue typical of the television series, at other points they sometimes skirt over events an characters so briskly that they almost read like synopses for potential episodes, to be developed into full scripts at a later date.

We might consider File on a Deadly Deadshot, originally published 11 March 1973 and adapted as the first play in Big Finish’s Volume 1 set. Here Callan is sent by his superior Hunter to attend a shooting competition at Whitmore Hall, the Northumberland estate of Lord Marsden. Also present is Baumer, an asset for Israeli intelligence, whom Hunter believes is to be assassinated at the competition by a contract killer, his death faked as a shooting accident.

The narrative is therefore a ‘whodunit’, as Callan is tasked with identifying the undercover assassin within the classic setting of an English country house. The original short story, however, simply does not have the scope to allow us to familiarise ourselves with the suspects beyond extremely cursory descriptions, nor to draw out any suspense as Callan works to find out more about them. As such, the eventual revelation of the killer’s identity can register little impact, because the reader has never had the opportunity to get to know him.

Peter Mitchell, however, expands the narrative in a manner that seems entirely in tune with what his father might have done had he developed this scenario for television. One of the guests, for example, gains a whole new backstory as ‘Twin-Choke Charlie Tutman’, a career criminal now operating under a new identity. Although completely new to this adaptation, this is a perfect pastiche James Mitchell’s writing style, which often imaginatively intertwined the high politics of espionage with the underworld of common criminality, complete with flamboyant character names for the latter. Furthermore, when the assassin is eventually revealed at the end of the play, we are given considerably more insight into his background and motivation, expanded from a handful of throwaway lines in the original story, which gives the revelation far more dramatic weight.

In this mission, Callan is accompanied by his close associate, the petty thief Lonely, who masquerades as his valet whilst Callan himself takes on the role of a ‘flash Harry’ enjoying a taste of the high-life. This episode is therefore particularly focused on the central duo who together gave the television series so much of its heart. Edward Woodward leaves big shoes to fill as Callan, but Ben Miles perfectly captures the considerable complexities of the character; his beaten-down pessimism, his terse non-nonsense pragmatism, his sardonic wit and his hidden, almost inexpressible moral centre. Peter Mitchell’s writing of the part is also very much in tune with his father’s approach to the character. The gestures of defiance that provided some of the most enjoyable moments of the television series are present, as when Callan insists that this flamboyant nouveau riche guise requires him to have a Bentley on Section expenses, much to Hunter’s irritation.

Whilst the original Callan made Woodward into a star, conversely Big Finish deploys the biggest ‘name’ of its cast in the supporting role of Lonely. Frank Skinner, better known for his comedy work, is an inspired choice, perfectly capturing the character’s pitiful, long-suffering nature, his often surprising resilience and ingenuity, and the fundamental warmth of his unlikely friendship with Callan. The character’s eccentricities are also brilliantly conveyed by the script, which memorably introduces him taking bath in his trademark cap.

One of the great advantages of adapting stories written in the mid-1970s is in how they ooze the atmosphere of the period through all manner of subtle details that a later pastiche might struggle to recapture. In particular, the original series was especially fixated on the tensions in the British class system, at a historical moment when such ingrained hierarchies were coming under more criticism than ever before. This is key to the series’ premise, with Callan as a humble working-class figure endlessly used and manipulated by a Section dominated by privileged, Establishment insiders. The scenario of Deadly Deadshot perfectly engages with this theme, dramatizing some of the changing social dynamics of the period but also its lingering hypocrisies. Whilst Callan pretends to be a social climber relishing the chance to move amongst the well-born and well-connected, Lonely faces snobbery from the valets of the other guests.

This theme continues into the second story, File on a Classy Club. Here Callan must infiltrate another environment dominated by the privileged, in this case Renfew’s, a high-class London gambling club. His mission is to lose more money than Marty Rivers, an operative of East German intelligence, in order to disrupt the Stasi’s methods of transferring funds. The narrative that unfolds is as tricky and complex as many of the best television episodes, featuring a complex interplay of schemes hatched not only by the Section and the Stasis, but also the CIA and KGB. As such, like the other episodes, it rewards repeated listens in order to grasp the nuances of the plot.

One regular character who is very much at home in Renfew’s is Callan’s rival in the Section, the upper-class Toby Meres. Despite being one of the television series’ most popular characters, Meres had in fact only rarely featured in the Sunday Express stories, his role perhaps posing more complications than the short form could easily accommodate. Although Peter Mitchell uses him to help expand some of the stories for audio, Meres nonetheless remains more marginal to the Big Finish version than he had been during his tenures in the television version. Furthermore, whilst Tam Williams nicely captures the snobbery and arrogance of the character, this Meres seems a little more fallible and vulnerable than the one in the television series, never quite the imperious confidence than Anthony Valentine brought to the character on-screen. Although interesting as an alternative take, nevertheless one hopes that Big Finish might find ways to develop his role a little more for Volume 2.

Perhaps the oddest story in the set is the third, File on an Awesome Amateur. Here Callan is drawn into a scheme set-up by eccentric ornithologist Ms Cynthia Widgery, the ‘amateur’ of the title, to help a Russian poet defect to the West. The climactic setting of this narrative is the Venice Biennale, a surprisingly glamorous setting that it’s hard to imagine the television series attempting, and not only because of its limited production resources. On the few occasions when the series had featured narratives set overseas (albeit shot within the UK), it had generally favoured the bleak, archetypical Cold War settings popularised by le Carré and Deighton: divided Berlin in ‘Goodness Burns Too Bright’, the Iron Curtain in ‘Heir Apparent’ and Finland in ‘That’ll Be the Day’. Nonetheless, the bizarre image of the dour, cynical Callan operating amongst the flamboyant surroundings of a Venetian arts festival proves appealing for its slightly surreal quality.

The final story in the set, File on a Harassed Hunter is, as the title suggests, focused on Callan’s superior Hunter, played by Big Finish’s own Executive Producer Nicholas Briggs. Briggs’s Hunter is primarily modelled on the longest serving television incarnation played by William Squire, with the plumminess and indignation exaggerated just a touch further. Here Callan and Hunter head on a mission to Newcastle to talk to the drunken actor Evan Land in order to establish the whereabouts of a KGB hitman whom Hunter wishes to have eliminated.

There is some great humour evident in the incongruous placing of the upper-crust Hunter in the Mitchells’ native Tyneside, the intelligence chief showing his disdain towards the arts and hospitality of ‘the provinces’. However, this episode is notable for showing a more human side to Hunter than we were ever permitted to see for any of his onscreen counterparts, with considerable detail given about crucial events in his life history (taken faithfully from the original story).

Verdict: Although Callan’s regular run on television may have concluded in 1972, it is clear that James Mitchell had no shortage of further story ideas that could easily have been deployed if the series had continued. Big Finish’s new audio dramatizations provide a rich and satisfying chance to see some of these ideas developed to their fullest potential, whilst perfectly recapturing the spirit, atmosphere and intricacies of the original series. A welcome return for one of British spy fiction’s most compelling anti-heroes. 9/10

Joseph Oldham