Garry Halliday

Review: Laurence Marcus

In 1960, after leaving the comfort of a full-time job in advertising, where he was part of the team that came up with the slogan "Have a break, have a Kit-Kat", John Griffith Bowen and fellow advertising copywriter Jeremy Bullmore began writing together under the joint pseudonym of Justin Blake. Their character, Garry Halliday, was picked up by the BBC, who commissioned them to write a children's adventure serial for television.

Halliday was the pilot of a commercial airline company (Halliday Charter - call sign Golf Alpha Oboe Roger George), who (not unlike Biggles) found himself solving crimes and overcoming villains. The eight TV series, which aired between 1959 and 1962, became immensely popular and spawned five spin-off novels.

In the first series, Halliday is assigned to the Amsterdam run and often returns to England at night without incident. But on one particular night, he sees something extraordinary. It could be purely an optical illusion, as neither Bill Dodds, Garry's co-pilot, nor Jean, his stewardess, has seen anything unusual. However, Garry remains convinced that something strange and rather disturbing is going on. The airport authorities do not believe his story, nor do the police. But Garry sticks to his guns.

His persistence causes alarm because 'The Voice', the mastermind of a large international crime organisation, decides that Garry needs to be silenced before he can ask any more awkward questions. Using his extensive network of criminal associates, 'The Voice' arranges for a bomb to be placed on Garry's plane. And so begins a battle of wits, which takes us on a headlong chase across Holland and a series of hair-raising adventures.

Our eponymous hero was played by the handsome character actor Terence Longdon (Coronation Street), Bill Dodds was played by the young Terence Alexander (Bergerac), and Jean was played by Ann Gudrun (aka Gudrun Ure - Super Gran) in the first six episodes, before being replaced by Jennifer Wright (The Troubleshooters). Elwyn Brook-Jones (Richard the Lionheart) played 'The Voice' – so called because he was never seen by the other characters, leaving his identity completely anonymous (even to his own gang – a bit like the head of SPECTRE in the early James Bond films). He played the role until the start of the seventh series but was replaced by Hamlyn Benson when he fell ill. Brook-Jones was able to return but tragically died in September 1962 and the character was written out of the final series, where he would have been unmasked.

Maurice Kaufman (Champion House) played one of 'The Voice's' henchmen, Sergeant Adolph Traumann, and Geoffrey Palmer (Butterflies, As Time Goes By) acted as narrator for the opening of each episode.

Assisting in the making of the series was Silver City Airways, who transformed part of their Ferryfield Airport at Lydd, Kent, for location filming. They even went so far as staging aerobatics to add more excitement to the stories, although one has to wonder what regular travellers would have thought on filming days, seeing the airport swarming with cops and robbers. Later stories that included flying and airport sequences were credited to Skyways Ltd and, finally, British United Air Ferries.

Terence Alexander left the series before it completed its run and was replaced by Australian character actor Bill Kerr (Compact) as the new co-pilot, Eddie Robbins. The final series featured stand-alone episodes rather than a serialised adventure.

Garry Halliday was a huge hit in its day, and the stories and the character were clearly not forgotten, despite the fact that the BBC hold only one surviving episode. Halliday made an appearance in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, an original graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, in 2007.