Adam Adamant Lives!

Review by Laurence Marcus (2025)

Long cited as the BBC's answer to The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives! is, in truth, a beast of quite another stripe. Though ostensibly invited to stand alongside Steed and Mrs. Peel in the pantheon of stylish 1960s espionage and adventure series, the show owes more to the polish and populist flair of Lew Grade’s ITC output than to the surreal wit and sophistication of its better-known rival. Produced under the seasoned eye of Doctor Who alumna Verity Lambert, and with scripts guided by series creator Tony Williamson — bolstered by input from Donald Cotton and Richard Harris — the series dares to mix Edwardian melodrama and contemporary satire. The result is a curious but undeniably charming blend of period swashbuckling and Sixties swagger.

The premise is nothing if not audacious. Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant (Gerald Harper) is a dashing Victorian adventurer, betrayed in 1902 by his nemesis "The Face" (Peter Ducrow), who drugs and entombs him in a block of ice. Discovered and thawed out over six decades later, Adamant emerges into the hedonistic chaos of 1966 London — a world of miniskirts, mod fashions, pop art, and permissiveness. His saviour is one Georgina Jones (Juliet Harmer), a spirited young nightclub DJ with a keen sense of history and a schoolgirl crush on her new flatmate, having learned of his adventures from her grandfather. Together with Adamant's new valet, Simms (Jack May), a former music hall performer, the trio set out to tackle modern villains with old-world gallantry and swordplay.

Gerald Harper is perfectly cast. His Adamant is all polished courtesy and repressed fury, the embodiment of stiff-upper-lip heroism — a man who dispatches wrongdoers with such ruthless efficiency that the viewer barely questions the casual trail of corpses left in his wake. It’s a testament to Harper’s charm and presence that this darker edge of the character rarely grates. Juliet Harmer’s Georgina brings a fizzy, light-hearted counterpoint to Adamant’s flinty formality, while Jack May provides solid support as the loyal and ever-sceptical Simms.

Much of the show's appeal lies in the culture clash at its heart: the upright, honour-bound Adamant against the backdrop of swinging London — all psychedelic colours (rendered, alas, in black and white), countercultural slang, and shifting morals. The series leaned into this dichotomy, often to comic effect, with Adamant railing against modernity even as he adapts to it with surprising ease.

The music, too, deserves mention — particularly the brassy, Goldfinger-esque theme sung with gusto by Kathy Kirby, which set just the right tone of pulp glamour and bombastic adventure. Budgetary constraints, and the monochrome format, perhaps limited the visual ambition of the show, but the imagination behind it burned brightly. For all its limitations, there is a wit and exuberance at play, particularly in the scripts and the flamboyant costuming of Adamant himself — top hat, cloak, and swordstick — which would go on to influence similarly stylised television heroes, most notably Jon Pertwee’s dandyish Doctor Who and Peter Wyngarde’s irrepressible Jason King.

In short, Adam Adamant Lives! is an often-overlooked gem of 1960s British television — a show that may have borrowed the trappings of action-adventure from its ITC contemporaries, but infused them with a uniquely BBC eccentricity. While it never achieved the lasting fame of The Avengers, it remains a spirited, occasionally subversive romp that captured, in its own peculiar way, the transitional energy of its era.