Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Two for the road

The Persuaders! - "The Old, the New, and the Deadly" - November 12, 1971

Ages ago, when people discovered that I had a hobby of accumulating British television, I always seemed to have the same reaction from males born between about 1957 and 1962.

"Do you have The Persuaders!? I loved that show!"

My response: "No."


I came to learn that The Persuaders! were Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as millionaire playboys who fight crime. It sounded like a jolly romp, but not anything I wanted to work terribly hard at getting a copy of, no matter how many party acquaintances were interested in a nostalgia trip.

So when my Tivo informed me that The Persuaders! was on BBCAmerica, I hit the little thumbs up button and waited. The episode that came my way was one that the Tivo likely picked out because I have Doctor Who thumbed up - the villain is played by Patrick Troughton.

I am now going to say something awful that I realized as I watched this episode. Something that I think will cause me to be shunned by the old school Doctor Who fen that I used to run with.

I don't think that Troughton was all that good with the dialects.

The story as I tried to follow it is this.

Danny (Tony Curtis) is believed to be in possession of a Nazi artifact. He is in fact, not. His ex-girlfriend is the one who has brought it with her on her honeymoon. Nasty Former Nazi (Patrick Troughton) sees the artifact is (not really) in Danny's possession and sends his henchmen after it. Hilarity ensues.

The punch line comes when the henchmen - after a few of their number have been arrested and/or killed discover that NFN was not after the Nazi artifact because it was incriminating to him (as they believed), but because NFN thought that Hitler was teh hunky and wanted to snuggle with it. So the henchmen shoot him themselves.

Much of the commentary on the show seems to come from the question of how much Curtis and Moore actually got along with each other, followed by just how drunk they actually were on set. It's hard to find a definitive answer to this other than to point you to a recent photo of the two of them at a function somewhere: