First watched : 1974
By the time I first caught it in the autumn of 1974 this spy series had been cancelled in the US after a five year run and what we were seeing on a Tuesday evening was the seventh and final season.
The series followed the exploits of a shadowy group of good guys the Impossible Missions Force who would take on assignments to bring down some bad guy whether in politics or crime by some form of covert mission. The team was run by Jim Phelps ( Peter Graves ) from Series Two after the original leader was written out because the producers could not accommodate the actor's religious commitments. His regular assistants - who pre-dated him in the series - were saturnine muscle man Willie ( Peter Lupus ) and electronics expert Barny played by Greg Morris, later the police chief in Vegas. The female member of the team had changed throughout the series; in the final season it was Lisa played by Linda Day George.
It famously started with a self-destructing tape outlining the mission and I always enjoyed watching that but thereafter got a bit lost. The show featured little violence hence its early timeslot ; the interest came from watching the scheme unwind and for a nine year old it was difficult to follow.
Graves returned for the late eighties re-boot of the series which I'm not sure was broadcast here. Of course since then it's become a successful film franchise despite little connection to the original series. Phelps was in the first film but became a villain and was killed off severing the only real reference to the series.
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