Last night on YouTube: The Baron

In our series celebrating individual episodes of British television, IVAN KIRBY considers one of the small screen’s most surprising guest turns.

‘The Legions of Ammak’ might sound like the title of a 1970s sci-fi paperback with an ample-bosomed lady on the cover, but in fact it belongs to an episode of ITC’s 1966 crime series The Baron. And what an episode it is: an object lesson in how casting the right guest actor can elevate even the dullest of programmes to the sublime.

Some background information: The Baron was the first in ITC’s long line of crime/spy series (The Saint, Danger Man, The Champions, etcetera, etcetera) to be made in colour, and was based on a series of novels by the ludicrously prolific John Creasey (author of over six hundred books, sixty-two in the Baron series alone) about crimefighting antiques dealer John Mannering (there’s a career you can’t break into nowadays).

In the books Mannering’s nickname ‘the Baron’ comes from his aristocratic heritage, but for commercial reasons he was transformed into an American for television, and played by the stolid Texan Steve Forrest. (The Baron pre-dates Dad’s Army by a couple of years but it’s quite disorienting to hear its square-jawed American hero addressed as ‘Captain Mannering’.)

For the bulk of the series Mannering was accompanied by a glamorous assistant played by future Crossroads star Sue Lloyd, who was employed for a one-off appearance but judged such a success that she was kept on; indeed her delightful performance is very often the best thing about what is rarely one of ITC’s most exciting shows. ‘The Legions of Ammak’ was one of the earliest Baron episodes to be filmed however, and at this point Mannering is assisted by a bland young man played by Paul Ferris, who would soon quit acting in favour of music, composing the scores for his doomed friend Michael Reeves’s films The Sorcerers (1967) and Witchfinder General (1968), as well as Cliff Richard’s hit ‘Visions’ (1966). It’s easy (and amusing) to read the two antique experts as a gay couple, which might have had something to do with Ms Lloyd being brought on board instead.

Anyway, the Legions of Ammak of the episode’s title is in fact a fabled pearl necklace (glance to camera) and constitutes the crown jewels of the Middle Eastern kingdom of Ammak. It’s coveted by eccentric and miserly millionaire Ofeg Cossackian, played by forty-year-old George Murcell with a sprinkling of grey intended to make him look older (a frequent tactic of the time which I can only assume worked better on black-and-white 1960s TV sets). John Mannering has struck a deal with King Ibrahim of Ammak to sell the pearls to Cossackian to fund a new hospital for Ammak’s impoverished people, and so a meeting of both parties is arranged at Mannering’s swanky London shop.

When yours truly first watched the episode, the arrival of the king was met with a gasp of both delight and discomfort, for he is played by the ever-magnificent Peter Wyngarde. A white European actor playing an Arab monarch? Eek indeed. But while this might make many of us squirm today, it was par for the course on 1960s television (Wyngarde ‘browned up’ for roles numerous times, including in The Saint and a tour of The King and I). However, there’s a twist, which lifts this episode to the realms of wonder. For after he leaves Mannering’s premises, we learn that the man presented to us as the king is in fact…a white European actor! Specifically, he’s a seedy, balding old ham called Ronald Noyes, whose remaining hair is the same brownish-yellow shade of my nan’s (to this day I’m not sure whether hers was just cheaply dyed, or simply stained with nicotine all over).

Noyes has been employed by the king’s duplicitous aide Ahmed to impersonate the monarch as part of an elaborate scheme to discredit him in the eyes of his people. The king will be painted as a venal fraud guilty of selling off Ammak’s jewels and absconding with the money in order that Ahmed and Cossackian can take over and reap the benefits of the country’s newly discovered oilfields (I said it was elaborate). Noyes has little knowledge of and no interest in this plan; he’s just in it for the money, and more importantly, the chance to give a performance.

Wyngarde also appears as the real king, and racial element aside it’s a delight to see him playing a dual role. But part of what makes ‘The Legions of Ammak’ fascinating is that he is, in effect, playing a triple role: the king, Noyes and Noyes’ version of the king. When we first see Wyngarde he’s giving it the whole ‘full of Eastern promise’ bit to an alarming extent, but we then learn that a bad performance is exactly what we’re supposed to be watching. By the time we meet the actual, Harrow-educated king, he’s completely anglicised.* And Wyngarde is very good as the real king, communicating genuine dignity during the inevitable ‘Go back to your people and make them proud’ bit at the end. As Noyes, however, he’s extraordinary.

The obvious point of comparison is Wyngarde’s better-known guest turn the following year in the Avengers episode ‘Epic’, in which he also plays a washed-up old ham, this one by the name of Stewart Kirby. Kirby has been employed along with ageing femme fatale Damita Syn** by insane movie director Z. Z. von Schnerk, who is determined to film a masterpiece that will culminate in the real live death of our heroine Emma Peel. There’s a similarity between the two performances, with Wyngarde displaying the same relish at playing an older character part. As Kirby he gets to play numerous roles in fact, as Mrs Peel finds herself trapped inside a variety clichéd silver screen scenarios: he’s a vampire, a sinister Scottish undertaker, an emperor, among many other wacky characters.

By this point The Avengers was too stylised to concern itself with anything as mundane as believable character motivation, and we have no idea why the villains in ‘Epic’ are doing what they’re doing beyond, quite simply, that they’re mad. But Ronald Noyes is Stewart Kirby as a real person, and Wyngarde makes him a completely believable human being. He has a girlfriend, a belly dancer named Sirocco (Valli Newby); she’s the reason he wants the money. The obvious thing would be for her to be a heartless gold digger, taking advantage of this old wreck, but thanks to the sweetness and charm of Wyngarde’s performance we absolutely believe that this beautiful young woman (who seems to have a much more successful career) is genuinely in love with him. Forgive the spoiler, but Ronald Noyes’s end is not a happy one, and Sirocco’s grief is genuinely touching – we can feel some of it too.

Peter Wyngarde’s story is often considered one of unrealised potential; the career of one of the great leading men of his era derailed by first his self-parodic turn as Jason King and then definitively by that fateful incident at Gloucester bus station in 1975. But he left enough of a screen legacy to show us what a terrific actor he was. The 1962 horror movie Night of the Eagle gives probably our finest glimpse of Wyngarde as a straight leading man, and Jason King is a comic lead performance for the ages. But ‘The Legions of Ammak’ proves beyond doubt that he was a character actor of the very finest degree.

* The Eastern potentate who proves to behave like a posh Englishman is a familiar trope of the time: in the Avengers episode ‘Honey for the Prince’, Zia Mohyeddin wears his cricket whites under his royal robes.

** ‘The Legions of Ammak’ shares another cast member with ‘Epic’: Isa Miranda, a real-life Hollywood star known in the 1930s as ‘the Italian Marlene Dietrich’, plays Damita Syn in ‘Epic’ and appears in ‘The Legions of Ammak’ as Ofeg Cossackian’s contemptuous wife – a small role she absolutely makes the most of.

‘The Legions of Ammak’ is available on YouTube and on DVD.

see also: