4 posts tagged “ian ogilvy”

Show us a fictional character that you have been a fan of since your childhood.
Submitted by Jack Yan.

That’s two Vox Hunts from yours truly this week. Since I wrote it, I should answer it.

   This chap would have to qualify, being the Saint I grew up with, rather than Roger Moore. I’m pretty sure that Leslie Charteris, the Singaporean-born Leslie Bowyer-Yin, intended Simon Templar to be a Chinese bloke, but just as I didn’t blink when the cinematic Felix Leiter went from a white Texan to an African–American in the James Bond films, so what if a Caucasian is the Saint?
   Since then I have seen all the colour Roger Moore episodes and read many of Charteris’s stories. I even saw the pilot where Australian actor, Andrew Clarke, played a Templar-with-a-mo, as well as the Val Kilmer movie which tried to get back to the literary character, with Simon Templar’s numerous aliases.

What fictional character do you relate to most and why?

Let’s see: what Chinese fictional character had to operate in the west, deal to the establishment, drive a rare two-door car, impersonate others, and have his adventures chronicled?
   Simon Templar.
   Pity he was always played by Caucasians on the screen, but I always thought he was Chinese, since his creator was. A new pilot is being made now, which, inter alia, Sir Roger Moore and his son Geoffrey are producing.

   TV trivia buffs might notice John Steed’s Rover SD1 from The New Avengers in the last car chase, reused here. It was also George Cowley’s Rover SD1 in the first season of The Professionals. Stingey British Leyland!

There’s now a second video from the documentary The Saint Steps in … to Colour on YouTube, detailing how scriptwriter Terry Nation would rehash his scripts for different series. This would be fine years apart, but one week he got caught out on US television when The Saint was rerun with a new episode of The Baron.
   Goodness, de Vere before he met Audrey!
   Ian Ogilvy provides the narration.

Again, from YouTube poster ZillakYT, are the first few minutes from another documentary revisiting an ITC classic—in this case, the colour episodes of the Roger Moore series The Saint. Ian Ogilvy, who succeeded Moore in the 1970s in Return of the Saint, narrates.
   The pre-title bit is hilarious, with the title card reading ‘Monte Carlo / not Elstree’. This was a nod to the fact that almost all Saint episodes, despite being set in Roma, Paris and other exotic locations, were filmed in England. What is interesting is just how angry Saint creator Leslie Charteris got with the producer, Robert S. Baker, and script supervisor Harry W. Junkin. A memorandum is read out by Ogilvy—and Charteris was pretty pissed!
   Sadly, Mr Ogilvy is cut off in mid-speech but I assume he was nearing the end of Charteris’s letter.

   (In case anyone is wondering why this post is in the Asian and Chinese groups on Vox, Leslie Charteris was originally Singaporean Chinese.)