Big Finish’s revival of the classic 1966-7 BBC series Adam Adamant Lives! was released last month, penned by Guy Adams, script-edited and directed by Nicholas Briggs. The new version stars Blake Ritson as Adamant, with Milly Thomas as Georgina Jones and Adams himself as William E. Simms, but those familiar with the original will notice some changed emphases in the first three episodes. Occasionally interrupted by gurgles from his young daughter, Adams chatted with Paul Simpson about resurrecting Adam Adamant for a new millennium…

 

 

The box set comprises three very different episodes – there’s a certain ‘Christmas Invasion’ vibe to the opener: Adam is lying in bed for a lot of it, the plot is going on around him, and occasionally he’s coming to the surface… and then he’s properly there at the end. I loved the worldbuilding, and Issy Van Randwyck is deliciously over the top…

She’s having fun isn’t she!

…as is Rob Whitelock as the dumb son, the “Timothy” of this world.

To write those two, I was being self-indulgent already, and then when actors get to say it all…

I’ve always thought that Blake Ritson was the perfect actor for playing Simon Templar – and this proves it. The dialogue you’ve given him would throw 90% of actors, I suspect, and come off as mannered. With him, it doesn’t.

That’s exactly it. He was always Nick’s first choice, and Blake and I chatted a lot during recording. As I’ve commented a lot on the behind the scenes CD extras, I’ve given him dialogue that he shouldn’t be able to say in the way that he does. You can throw anything at Blake – he’s absolutely phenomenal.

The first episode I wondered if the series was going to go more psychological than the original, and it clearly is. The second Milly Thomas sums it up perfectly on the extras – it’s Scooby Doo.

It’s the one romp.

In the original episode (pictured right) someone is killed with a stick of rock as I recall.

The original is more conventional than mine. The basic backbone is the same, but the whole corpse found sugar-dipped and all that, that’s all me, a bit more Avengers-y.

There’s a lot of talk about the original series having problems distinguishing itself from The Avengers. Did you find that was a problem – were there times he’s Steed?

I didn’t, because I’d set myself so many different goals. Episode 2 is what everyone thinks the series is going to be. That’s what they imagine they’re going to get, but actually it’s not because, as you say, each episode is intentionally entirely different. The first one you could say is the regeneration episode, number 2 is the romp and number 3 suddenly goes dark – well dark for this.

I did wonder if you were going to follow Adrian Hodges’ lead from the Survivors reboot and kill off a regular character from the original in the first episode…

(evil chuckle)

Even the fakeout with the theme…

Storywise, it’s been whatever I want. I was never seriously considering killing Georgina – I want to do too much with her.

Being asked to revive something, what you’ve got to ask yourself is, “Can I bring anything to it?” The main thing about Adam Adamant was it was such a wonderful idea, which personally I wouldn’t have quite done the way they did. Gerald Harper is amazing, and yet for me a little too cold. Georgina was out of touch in the sense that [at the time] you could flip the channel and find The Avengers doing for women in spy-fi television something that’s truly of its time and exciting and brilliant – I’m not holding it up as this great success for feminism but it’s an improvement on where women had been beforehand. Then look at what’s happening with Georgina on Adam Adamant. They really needed to turn over the channel and look at how to compete with this show. Making it different by having those two lack the warmth and lack the strength wasn’t necessarily the way to go.

Both were Sydney Newman shows – but he created the David Keel version of The Avengers, a much darker series.

It takes a Brian Clemens to bring a touch of warmth and kink. I like to think I’m the man who brings warmth and kink to Big Finish Audio.

As Nick explains on the extras, he had the idea of doing it, the rights came together but he was too busy and mentioned it to you. What were your initial thoughts when he said that?

We were having dinner, a business chat, and as soon as he mentioned it, I was absolutely thrilled by it. I love the gentleman adventurer as a trope, I’ve always wanted to play with that trope.

Adam Adamant was a superb idea but I thought I could bring something different to it, otherwise what’s the point of doing a cover version? I know Big Finish are brilliant at doing cover versions, and I’ve written a lot of cover versions myself and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re going to bring this back, much as Nick did with The Prisoner, we needed to do something that justified why we go again on this story.

The first thing that occurred to me, the crux of the show – is he an Edwardian adventurer that somehow has ended up in the modern day (although it’s still set in 1966)? Or is he just someone who thinks he is? That was something that was far more interesting. Can we take him on face value?

It interests me to talk about mental health and it struck me that this show could be, and in our version is, about three people who don’t quite fit in the world, find one another and start trying to be the best versions of themselves they can be. All three of them are hiding behind facades, and I wanted to play with that, discuss that.

Adam really suffers from an extremely potent and dangerous self-critical voice, his archenemy, The Face. I’m a writer so that’s very familiar to me. I just thought it would be interesting to bring elements of that into it. On the outside he’s this perfect cut glass hero, and in many ways that’s what he is, but inside, there are these fractures, and the voices that can drive all of us mad from time to time.

In the general scheme of things, you’d normally have a few more romps before you have episode 3.

The start of that feels like it’s summing up whole box sets of adventures.

It was my way of saying, “It’s OK, we’re just jumping ahead.” It’s a bit Sherlock writing – they had to do the same thing. There’s only three episodes so there’s no element of ‘let’s hold back on that – we haven’t got time, we have to get Moriarty in’. You have to write an episode 3 that feels like we’ve had a lot of this series. Three is a funny number – if it was four, you’d’ve had two romps in the middle. But I like the fact that the tone of each episode is different.

The final episode feels more novelistic – Nick Briggs comments on that about the old lady’s monologue; it doesn’t feel part of a fantasy adventure series.

There’s a tone of writing throughout – I’ve gone more verbose with this box set than I ever have before. It is more heightened; the language is not just the period touches of Adam or the theatrical excesses of Simms – the whole thing I wanted to write the sort of language I like.

You wouldn’t normally write dialogue that is that rich as consistently as I have, but if you do approach the whole as ‘this world just sounds like this’ and you have the actors that can get away with it like Blake, then it gives you more opportunity to play with language. It’s very descriptive.

Novelistic is a fair enough word – it doesn’t have that stripped down quality. Sometimes you have to pare back on the purple qualities of this stuff. This doesn’t pare back and intentionally so. I was given the wonderful task of going where I would love to go with this show. The only restriction I had was it still had to be set in the 1960s. So you embrace that.

I think those that enjoy the series will be those who know nothing about it and come to it cold. Anyone that does know the original series will notice the changes.

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing it?

Adam is constantly faced with self-questioning from his internal dialogue with his archenemy The Face; my major difficulty with writing this was my own version of that which kept trying to tell me that I shouldn’t keep going with my gut instincts and doing what I really wanted to do.

I’m used to writing very much concerned with the wishes of others – be it the audience, the production, the actors. I’m always concerned that the actors we get in have a good day and so I will talk to them and ask what they never get to do, all that kind of thing – whereas this is me going, “I’m here to purely please me”.

There is a distinct argument creatively that if you embrace that it will work, because you’re not so weird as to have tastes and desires that will be not shared by an audience. Rightly or wrongly it’s something that’s often pushed towards novels – “write for yourself, you will create a voice that others will enjoy because you’re dancing”. I was trying to do that – I’ve not done that in audio before. So the biggest difficulty was the constant fear that that was a mistake.

Of course it extends hugely to the fact I then pushed to play one of the parts. I ummed and ahhed about that a lot because I thought it was probably a really stupid thing to do but I couldn’t quite resist asking. Nick very sensibly decided that the only way forward for that was to really challenge me on that. “Are you sure you’re the right person for the job?” Which is of course a wonderfully painful thing to ask yourself and a thing I was already asking. My internal Face was quite vocal on that as well! But I carried on with the attitude I had of “just go for it, just run with your instinct”. For anyone who knows me, that is just not me, not the way I go about things; my default position would be “you’re quite right, I’m awful”.

So I did do it and was in the absurd position of working with the other two and getting to say the most ludicrous plum-soaked dialogue any actor has ever had to say.

It reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse.

Oh completely – Wodehouse is a complete influence on me, always has been.

The two things I came away with were your novel The World House and Wodehouse – there was the feel of both of them. The World House – the imagination and skewed perspective of that is in this. There’s the Dali-esque moments with Adam and the Face counterpointed with the Fabian of the Yard nastiness of the first episode with the blackmail; then a second episode of fun; and a third episode where I genuinely thought you’d killed Georgie off when the villainess says, “Why would I pay someone to do that?”

It would have been tempting; but I’m not sure storywise it was the right thing.

 

Adam Adamant Lives! volume 1 is available now from Big Finish