Adam Adamant Lives!

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"It appears that 1966 has a great deal of capacity for a man of my talents."

A black-and-white British series running on the BBC in 1966 and 1967, which featured a Victorian adventurer frozen and returned to life in the present day. The show was originally planned to use the actual Victorian character Sexton Blake, but the BBC could not get the rights to use the character this way (although they did a Blake radio show with a normal setting) and a new name, Adam Adamant was chosen.

Betrayed by the woman Louise in 1902 to his archenemy The Face, the Edwardian adventurer Adamant is frozen and not resuscitated until 1966. He escapes the hospital and is overwhelmed by the sights of the city. He meets and helps Georgina Jones, a swinging chick and dedicated Adamant fan, who constantly becomes embroiled in adventures, which Adam considers unladylike. Saving her from a murderous protection racket was his first step in resuming his adventuring career. Adamant's home base is his old home rebuilt--on top of the upper floor of a car park (parking lot to Americans).

Subsequent episodes established more of a formula. Either Adam or Georgina would stumble upon a plot, usually involving some technofantasy element (clothes that kill their wearers, washing powder with an addictive scent, etc.). Adam would forbid Georgina to investigate, but she would anyway. Then he would have to rescue her as well as solving the case. In the better stories they would solve it together. In episode 2 Adam employed a former seaside entertainer Willaim Simms (Jack May) as a valet. One of the show's highlights was the constant bickering between Simms and Georgina.

There was never much romance between the two leads. Georgina hero-worshipped Adam to the point of stalking him (in one episode she followed him all the way to Japan and disguised herself as a geisha to get near him) but his attitude to her was always more paternal. He would, however, frequently be attracted to female villains. His blind spot was that he could never believe a woman to be capable of evil, no matter how many evil women he met.

The series was produced by Verity Lambert when Sidney Newman was BBC Head of Drama; the two were more famous for Doctor Who. It starred Gerard Harper as Adamant and Juliet Harmer as Georgina Jones. It lasted two seasons, but almost half the episodes are missing nowadays. The existing episodes were released on DVD in the UK and Australia in 2006, with script PDFs for the missing ones.

Tropes used in Adam Adamant Lives! include: