PAUL WELSH looks back at some black and white cult classics and remembers the Hollywood hotshots who dropped by to boost ratings

I recently read in a national tabloid that Dancing On Ice was not able to return to Elstree Studios this year as the stages were fully booked.

That bit of the article was correct but the rest should have been checked out. It stated the show had been displaced by filming on the latest Harry Potter film when in fact that finished at Leavesden weeks ago.

It also said they were waiting for the Big Brother house to be demolished when the present series finishes. A bit of journalistic checking would have revealed in fact the production company has been granted planning permission to retain the house and I suspect we have not heard the last of Big Brother.

Both television productions are the latest in a long line of television series shot at Elstree Studios since the Fifties and there was a period in the Sixties when TV series dominated the facility as film production waned.

I recently watched some surviving episodes of a police drama series of the late Fifties called Dial 999 which was made at the studio. It was about a Canadian policeman in London and starred Robert Beatty, who I had the pleasure to invite back to Elstree in 1989. The series still stands up quite well in black and white, as does the Sixties cop series Gideon’s Way, which starred John Gregson.

The two most famous series of the Sixties were of course The Saint with Roger Moore and The Avengers with Patrick Macnee. Both used many local spots to film which makes them fun to watch today.

Roger nowadays jokes that although Simon Templar travelled to many exotic places in The Saint, he usually found in real life that turned out to be the backlot and the standing street set redressed to be Panama or Paris with the aid of a potted palm tree or citreon car and a cycling onion seller.

Now TV audiences are too alert to put up with back projection and other cost-saving gimmicks but it gives a kind of quaintness to such programmes of yesteryear.

Another fun thing watching old TV series shot here is spotting stars of the future like Anthony Hopkins and Donald Sutherland way down the cast list, plus the legion of character actors that seemed to crop every time as the copper, taxi driver or suspect foreigner.

Some of the series have taken on cult status like Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in which Kenneth Cope played a ghost detective who wore a white suit. Ken once told me that whenever it got stains they covered them with tippex to save time. The series shared production crews and sets with Department S.

These productions were usually shot very fast and often each episode was completed in under two weeks. Sometimes Hollywood stars were imported to help overseas sales potential so Robert Vaughn cropped up in The Protectors, Steve Forrest in The Baron and Gene Barry in The Adventurer. Oddly enough, these were sometimes the least successful.

I remember Peter Wyngarde popped into the studio back in 1999 to meet the managing director Neville Reid and myself. A TV was on and by some strange twist of fate, it was showing a Sixties episode of The Saint with Peter guest starring so we sat and watched it.

The TV output at Elstree sometimes felt the poor relation to the glamorous high-budget feature films.

Patrick Macnee, star of The Avengers once told me: “We filmed on stage five which was not properly soundproofed and had to stop when low flying aircraft passed overhead. When Elizabeth Taylor arrived to make a film, I had to surrender my dressing room and when I got it back it had been painted a horrible puce colour and they would not paint it back as I was only a TV star.”

I guess that succinctly sums up the glamour of showbiz.