670 Callan

First  viewed  :  Summer  1984

This  was  the  next  in  the  series  of  Channel  Four's  "classic"  repeats  although  in  this  case  they  only  started  halfway  through  when  the  series  switched  to  colour  for  the  third  season  in  1970.  I  was  aware  of  Callan's  reputation  but  it  hadn't  fired  my  imagination  in  the  same  way  as  The  Prisoner.

Callan  concerned  the  activities  of  a  small  secret  services  unit  specialising  in  black  ops  to  remove  threats  to  national  security. Callan  ( Edward  Woodward  in  his  signature  role )  was  an  assassin  who  wanted  to  be  patriotic  but  hated  the  actual  act  of  killing  and  was  constantly  questioning  himself  in  contrast  to  his  colleague  Mears  ( Anthony  Valentine ),  an  upper  class  psychopath. Their  superior  Hunter  , like  Number  Two  in  The  Prisoner , was   played  by  a   number  of  different  actors  but  most  successfully  by  William  Squire.  Callan's  only  friend  was a  low-life  police  informer  Lonely  (  Russell  Hunter )  who  somehow  always  managed  to  be  useful  to  him. Clifford  Rose  limbered  up  for  Kessler  as   Snell, the  section's  doctor  who  had  a  liberal  interpretation  of  the  Hippocratic  Oath.

Despite  the  series's  popularity,  it  retained  a  low  budget  feel. Episodes  had  a  restricted  cast  and  while  that  stopped  me  from  fully  embracing  it, I  can  appreciate  that  it  helped  to  capture  the  murky,  claustrophobic  world  in  which  these  people  operated. I  watched  it  semi-regularly  but  it  never  became  appointment  TV.