22/01/2025
Originally due to air in December the celebration of Lew Grade's ITC will now be broadcast on Saturday, 1 February 2025 at 8pm on BBC Radio 4
Prisoners, Saints and Persuaders: The World of ITC
Return of the Saint star Ian Ogilvy tells the story of Lew Grade's ITC company, which revolutionised British television in the 1960s and 70s. From espionage on the Riviera to surrealist thrillers filmed in Wales, and talking to actors, historians, producers and composers, this is a joyous celebration of ITC’s undoubtedly suave place in the history of pop culture.
Originally formed to produce upscale adventure, crime, espionage and sci-fi drama series for commercial British TV and syndication around the world – shot in luxurious 35mm film and moving to full colour years before BBC television - ITC produced an incredible catalogue of shows from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.
They were stylishly produced, location driven, beautifully scored and often slightly surreal. Beginning in 1955 with the fantastically successful Adventures of Robin Hood (which employed Left-leaning American writers blacklisted by the McCarthy trials in the States), by the late 1950s ITC moved to modern Cold War espionage and crime drama, producing Danger Man two years before the James Bond film franchise was launched. Ian Fleming himself was an early consultant for the series.
Other action titles followed featuring gentleman adventurers and lone wolf agents from The Saint (Roger Moore) and The Baron (Steve Forrest) to Man in a Suitcase, Randal and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Champions, The Persuaders (Tony Curtis, Roger Moore) and finally Ian Ogilvy’s Return of the Saint, produced in 1978 and filmed across Italy and the South of France. A jewel in the ITC crown was Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (1967) - a strange, psychedelic and psychologically intense series still hotly debated by fans.
Lew Grade was also the champion of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation series of the 1960s – Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray and others – a huge success for ITC and beloved by generations of children.
The Muppets followed a decade later, as Lew gave Jim Henson his first break after Sesame Street. As ITC shifted focus towards film and away from television, the company took a slightly stranger turn in the early 1970s with live action sci-fi – including UFO and Space 1999 - before commissioning the genuinely eerie titles of the late 70s which marked the end of ITC’s great television era, distributing Sapphire and Steel (David McCallum and Joanna Lumley) and finally a partnership with Hammer Studios, the genuinely nasty Hammer House of Horror which substituted the Carpathian mountains for present day England.
The story of ITC is crucial to the story of television in Britain and the arrival of commercial TV as a challenge to the BBC's monopoly. While the BBC’s Reithian mission focused on British audiences, Lew Grade understood the new medium as a truly international one, and through sales to foreign markets ITC could command huge budgets to be reinvested in high-production values, art direction and rich, cinematic scoring.
With contributions from Lew’s nephew Lord Michael Grade, ITC actors Annette Andre and Jane Merrow, ITC composer John Cameron, conductor Gavin Sutherland, daughter of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson Dee Anderson, cultural historian Matthew Sweet, television writer and former Dr Who show-runner Steven Moffat, founder of Trunk Records and curator Jonny Trunk, BFI television historian Dick Fiddy and Jaz Wiseman, author of ITC Entertained the World.
