Ideas V

Anthony Goodman examines the formative years of

CALLAN
(continued)

The day after ‘The Worst Soldier I Ever Saw’ was recorded, Edward Woodward, Anthony Valentine, Ronald Radd, Lisa Langdon and Roger Bizley gathered in studio 2 at Teddington to re-record six scenes for insertion into the previous year’s recording of ‘Nice People Die At Home’. Between 13:45 and 19:00, that original recording was played into the studio, with the new scenes acted and intercut to make a new recording. When complete, the new version was virtually seamless, with careful attention paid to all aspects of continuity. One change made to Edward Woodward’s appearance so that he would look the same from one scene to the next, was the removal of his hair-piece. For the second series of Callan, Woodward wore a hair-piece to conceal a receding hairline, as he did in all subsequent series, but he had not worn one in the first series. It was therefore necessary to strip him of this for the re-recordings for ‘Nice People Die At Home’. While the studio crew were not necessarily those who had worked on the episode on July 12th 1967, it was Peter Duguid who came back to direct. The episode went out on March 9th 1969.

This was not to be Ronald Radd’s last appearance in Callan. He did in fact make a brief walk-on appearance in the fourth series episode ‘That’ll Be the Day’. Billed just as ‘Previous Hunter’, he attended Callan’s mock funeral, while Callan was actually being held prisoner in Moscow.

With a title like ‘Death of a Hunter’, it was not terribly difficult to deduce the outcome of the final episode in the second series of Callan before it was screened. The TV Times tried to throw up a few red herrings, by suggesting that the ‘Hunter’ of the title may have been Callan himself, or Meres, ‘hunting’ for the Section’s opposition, or perhaps it was just referring to the man, Hunter. Nevertheless, Michael Winder’s script was a fine vehicle for the disposal of a Hunter, for the second time in the series. Only the ease with which Meres is duped into believing that the Hunter has ordered Callan’s arrest comes over as a bit far fetched. Otherwise, the whole process of Callan being brainwashed into believing Hunter is a traitor, is carried off with great credibility. The script required us to see Callan’s hallucinating point of view while drugged at the warehouse, necessitating some relatively complex editing. All this material was shot and recorded on videotape, which until the advent of electronic editing, could only be physically spliced, with varying results in picture stability. The earlier episode, ‘Let’s Kill Everybody’ required editing in the opening scene featuring Bremer impaling himself on a paper spike on Hunter’s desk. This was edited physically, with major picture disturbances evident at each splice. However, for ‘Death of a Hunter’, a device called Editec was used, basically allowing a replay VT machine playing back out of sequence scenes, to synchronise to a record machine which would copy those scenes in script order, working in pretty much the same way as a pair of domestic VHS video recorders operate nowadays in synchro-edit mode. The results were seamless edits as we see Callan in the warehouse, then his point of view looking at Hunter in the familiar office. One other technical point of interest, this episode featured the first use of Outside Broadcast (OB) facilities in Callan. While all exterior scenes were shot on film, as had been the case with all previous episodes, all the warehouse scenes were recorded using one of ABC’s OB units. All other interior scenes were recorded in ABC’s Teddington studios in Broom Road, on July 10th 1968, with the OB inserts actually recorded after the main studio session, on July 16th and 17th. Overseeing this complex production as director was Reginald Collin. ‘Death of a Hunter’ finally reached viewers screens on April 16th 1969.

Unfortunately, documentation on the final scene of ‘Death of a Hunter’ is somewhat scarce, and what little there is is rather ambiguous. In the week that ‘Death of a Hunter’ was shown on ITV, the TV Times ran a small feature telling of Reginald Collin’s dilemma:

He has filmed two endings to the series... Collin told me: "Our problem is that this latest series has been fantastically successful. A year ago we felt that this would be the last of it. Now we are not so sure. The difference between the endings we have filmed is that one leaves the way open for more; the other tends to close the book. Conan Doyle solved this quite classically. He killed off Sherlock Holmes. Then following public demand, he worked it out that he wasn’t quite as dead as thought."

Indeed, the camera script for ‘Death of a Hunter’ has two different copies of the final page, but the ABC camera scripts give details only of dialogue and camera positions, so it’s not possible to tell exactly how the two endings differed. In the many years that have passed since the recording of the episode, all those involved have either forgotten what took place, or come up with conflicting versions. Watching the episode, it is hard to tell which version the final shot is. Certainly, Callan is not seen to die as such, but what is curious about that last shot is that it is taken in extreme close-up on Edward Woodward’s face, and somehow ‘looks’ very different to the rest of the scene. Even the sound ‘sounds’ different, with what seems to be a noticeable out of vision breathless panting, presumably from an unseen Meres. It is not unfeasible that this shot was recorded at a (much) later date. Curiously, the VT clock on the recording bears the date ‘8/4/69’, i.e. just eight days prior to original transmission. This, as yet, remains unexplained, but could have been a consequence of having to re-record some part of the episode just before screening.

All this notwithstanding, Callan was generally assumed to have been killed off at the end of the second series. However, it is interesting to note that following completion of the series recordings in 1968, Lloyd Shirley sent Edward Woodward a memo congratulating him on the series, and claiming:

"No rigid intention of killing off Callan, but depending on how you feel about a future series, and how our viewing audience reacts, we can take a decision at a later date."

Two later memos from Lloyd Shirley, dated February 4th 1969, and sent to Ben Marr, and James Mitchell’s agent Roger Hancock, clearly state that the idea to kill Callan off was just a publicity gimmick. One other memo of interest is that sent by Reginald Collin to Lloyd Shirley on February 18th, suggesting that they kill Callan off, but show at the start of the next season that it all took place in Callan’s mind! Of course, all this was not revealed publicly, and when Callan returned to the screen in the first half of 1970, it was celebrated by many, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who wrote for the Evening News, under the headline ‘CALLAN LIVES’,

"...and again all of us mourned for long weeks the death of Callan and rejoiced in his recall to life - nothing like it since Sherlock Holmes returned from his memorable encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Like so many of those who made The Sun charts last Monday, Edward Woodward has recently joined me at Number 10, Downing Street in showing distinguished statesmen from abroad what really makes life tick in Britain."