NEIL
ALSOP recalls the forgotten
heroes of TV's PATHFINDERS
|
The
activities of a wartime RAF Bomber Command airbase would seem
to be ideal material for an adult drama series, yet British
television has only once got such a venture off the ground.
In fact, given the plentitude of high-calibre World War 2 movies
produced by the British cinema industry throughout the 1950s
and 1960s, surprisingly neither the BBC or ITV seemed keen to
exploit the popularity of this period as a backdrop for episodic
video fiction for many years. Offerings such as OSS (1957) and
Court Martial (1965-66) were few and far between and had little
to do with the RAF, although BBC anthology series Moonstrike
(1963) presented 28 stand-alone tales of SOE/RAF forays into
enemy-occupied Europe, with a Westland Lysander Mk 3 being the
only recurring 'character' and becoming the star of the show.
The breakthrough came in 1970 with the runaway success of Manhunt,
London Weekend's 26-episode wartime spin on The Fugitive, concerning
a downed RAF pilot and several French Resistance fighters' struggle
to reach the coast and escape to England before the Gestapo
caught up with them. For the following two decades the number
of British television drama series set during World War 2 quadrupled,
commencing in some ITV regions on September 27, 1972, with Pathfinders,
debuting three weeks before Colditz on the BBC. Although Colditz
was a BBC in-house production, it was co-financed by Universal
Television in the US and boasted as leading men Robert Wagner
and David McCallum, both international cinema and television
stars in their early 40s at the time, conversely Pathfinders
was devised and produced by Gerry Brown for the independent
Toledo Film Organisation and bought in by some ITV regional
companies as a prop to autumn peak-time schedules.
Its stars were Scottish character actor Robert Urquhart and
domestic cinema leading man Jack Watling, one-time platoon comrades
in the 1958 cinema feature Dunkirk and by the early 1970s both
obviously around 50 years of age, but despite being familiar
faces to television viewers, in supporting roles and as guest
stars, neither had global profiles to match Wagner and McCallum.
Although Urquhart subsequently starred for six episodes as a
not-so-retired spycatcher in The Aweful Mr Goodall (1974), he
is now perhaps best remembered for his appearance as the villainous
brother of a Scottish laird in an episode of The Avengers and
Watling for his portrayal of Professor Travers in the two Yeti
serials of Doctor Who.
Pathfinders' own roll-call of guest stars includes Rutger Hauer,
Jane Seymour, Bernard Lee, Kate O'Mara, Dennis Waterman, Johnny
Briggs, Mark McManus, Anthony Valentine, Geoffrey Bayldon, Mike
Pratt, Ray Brooks, Diane Keen, Tony Selby and late-1950s American
teen idol Edd Byrnes ('Kookie' in 77 Sunset Strip). Filmed at
EMI-MGM Studios in Borehamwood, Bovingdon airfield and other
locations in Hertfordshire, and West Malling airfield in Kent,
five directors worked on the 13-episode run, including Leslie
Norman (father of film critic Barry Norman), Don Chaffey and
Jeremy Summers. Based on actual events recounted by former Pathfinder
Force (PFF) personnel and others, teleplays were provided by
the likes of Hazel Adair, Peter Ling, Bruce Stewart, Bill Strutton,
Tony Barwick and Christopher Penfold, who also acted as script
supervisor (a role he has subsequently filled for series as
diverse as Space: 1999 and Midsomer Murders).
Great efforts were made to ensure authenticity, with former
Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie, Air Vice-Marshal DCT Bennett
and Luftwaffe nightfighter ace Willi Herget retained as technical
advisors. The pilot episode Into The Fire opens with a short
pre-credit sequence, in which F/Lt Peter Curtis's Avro Lancaster
Mk 3 overshoots the runway during his first attempt to land
at RAF Oakwood, in East Anglia, cutting swiftly to the series'
late-1960s-style opening credits, mixing primary colours with
a montage of black-and-white photographic still images, all
set to Malcolm Lockyer's rousing Pathfinder Theme. With his
aircraft safely on the ground after a second attempt, Curtis
joins waiting base doctor Sqn Ldr Bruce 'Doc' Saxon (Watling),
duty officer F/Lt Dave Greenwood and an Ops Room WAAF officer
in time to observe the perfect landing of a Lancaster flown
by Wing Commander Angus 'Mac' MacPhearson (Urquhart), also known
as 'Aberdeen Angus' and 'Old Press On Regardless'.
With
MacPhearson's arrival as CO, the newly-formed 697 Squadron has
its full complement of hand-picked volunteers and is ready to
begin three weeks of training for an as-yet-undisclosed purpose.
After relaxed scenes in the mess rooms, in which the diverse
Commonwealth origins of aircrew and Ops Room staff are established,
the action shifts up a gear to the briefing room. MacPhearson's
opening speech signposts to flyers - and viewers - what can
be expected from the PFF: "Until now Bomber Command's performance
has been pretty dreadful. Only 5 per cent of bombs have fallen
within 10 miles of their planned targets. Our job is easy to
explain. We go in first, we find the target and we show the
rest of the bomber force where it is - exactly where it is,
every time. So if you get it wrong, everything goes wrong."
He then tempts fate with a personal attack on certain senior
RAF officers who believe pathfinding cannot be successfully
accomplished and who are determined for them to fail, and sure
enough within moments a message arrives ordering their first
mission brought forward to that very night. The target is to
be a shipbuilding yard, used for the construction of submarines,
in the Baltic port of Flensberg, with the fictional 697 Squadron
taking the role of real-life 83 Squadron in the historic first
PFF operation on the night of August 18/19, 1942. With both
Saxon and Greenwood along for the ride, with MacPhearson's blessing,
697 Squadron takes to the skies in earnest halfway through the
episode. Problems with flak fail to slow its progress but increasing
density of cloud ultimately forces MacPhearson to abort the
mission before reaching the aiming point - and to add injury
to indignity it is not long before Luftwaffe nightfighters from
the Frisian Islands are attacking the homeward-bound PFF bombers.
Undeterred by onboard fires, damaged controls and wounded aircrew,
all of the 697 Squadron Lancasters return safely to base, leaving
MacPhearson to close proceedings with a defiant tirade against
the antagonistic superiors who will be gloating over the failure
of the mission. The scarcity of Lancasters available for filming
was overcome by the use of 14 large-scale, radio-controlled
flying models, specially made for the series at a cost of £2,000
each, and actors performing relevant dialogue in front of mocked-up
sections of a full-scale Lancaster, all skillfully edited together
with wartime colour and blue-filtered black-and-white footage
of the bombers taking off and in the air, and of aircrew and
ground crew close to Lancasters on the ground.
Putting aside some unconvincing colonial accents, a modicum
of anachronistic upper crust banter and Lockyer's occasionally
excessively-patriotic incidental score, Into The Fire is an
effective introductory episode focusing on Curtis and MacPhearson's
Lancaster crews, yet strangely the direction of rest of the
series quite literally took dramatic turns from this successful
scenario by concentrating on a different single aircrew each
week. As a consequence no RAF characters appear in more than
three episodes apiece, apart from MacPhearson and Saxon(and
even they are effectively relegated to supporting roles in most
episodes), so in certain respects Pathfinders develops into
an anthology show and stands on the strengths or weaknesses
of individual storylines rather than of the series as a whole.
This
would not have been a problem if most had matched the calibre
of Sweets From A Stranger, showcasing the efforts of F/Lt Doug
Philips (Christopher Casenove) to prove his belief in the need
for a 'Master Bomber' to control an operation above the aiming
point, dovetailed into the tale of a Danish scientist's determination
to get the British to bomb a German jet engine research and
development facility. However, although Fog, Sitting Ducks,
Nightmare and For Better For Worse also meet expectations, the
remaining episodes, covering subjects ranging from the bizarre
consequences of an ace pilot's mid-operational mental breakdown
to downed aircrews' experiences adrift in a dinghy in the North
Sea or on the run in Germany or interred in a POW camp, are
a long way from what Pathfinders' audience had come to expect
from Into The Fire.
So, with an inconsistency of visual storytelling and obvious
lack of character development for viewers to relate to, and
without even having been screened in all regions of the ITV
network, 697 quickly became a ghost squadron flying into the
television limbo engendered by poor ratings. And for a long
time, all that remained of its existence were arrangements of
Lockyer's Pathfinder Theme, recorded by the Ron Goodwin Orchestra
for a 7-inch single (Columbia DB 8938), by Ike Isaacs for his
14 Great TV Themes LP (Decca Eclipse ECS 2163) and by assorted
miltary bands; a short-lived Look-In comic strip; and Sphere
Books' paperbacks of William Buchanan's novel Pathfinder Squadron,
adapting Into The Fire, Fog and Sweets From A Stranger, and
a reprint of Bennett's 1958 autobigraphy Pathfinder, which capitalised
on the television series logo.