Television: 'The Invisible Man' (1975-1976)

It's a series that got a short pilot movie, and ran for only twelve episodes before being cancelled. I have no idea why it was cancelled as it's a delight to watch now, a great concoction of humour, invisibility effects and a wonderful variety of plot types to explore. It's 'The Invisible Man', the television series featuring David McCallum from the 1970s, and if you haven't heard of it, then that's a shame.

While the pilot movie is sombre, and therefore appropriate to the original text despite being set in the 1970s (at least I assume the original text is sombre?), the twelve regular episodes are a delightful set of capers. They all positively revel in using as any practical effects as they can, and then making the best use of blue screen techniques to do everything else. It's amazing. You might get dizzy from counting the number of times the masks gets pulled off to reveal nothing, though.

The concept is this: Physicist Dr Daniel Westin, against the wishes of his computer genius wife, tests his invisibility generator on himself, and then ultimately ends up permanently invisible, and working doing missions for the corporation they work for, while trying to reverse the effect. As you begin to work through the episodes, you expect a rash of silly spy stories, but instead you get a raft of silly unpredictable nonsense! There's a reverse bank heist, a bid to stop a foreign premier's facelift being disrupted, an invasion of the corporation by a criminal mastermind, a false medium, a crooked judge (Harry Mudd!) ruling over a small town, and a corrupt prison scheme. There are still quite a few spy stories anyway, though.

It feels strange now, after corporations have in many ways become the villains in our global narrative, to have a company (The Klae Corporation) controlling and hiring out the Westins, for they work as a team, to any government entity that needs the help of the mysterious 'Klae Resource', but that's more of a problem in our minds than in the reality of the show. They go out of their way to explain that it's a family-owned business on many levels.

The main thing to take from 'The Invisible Man' is how goofy it is, and how much less time than usual that David McCallum must have spent on screen, as the leading man. He gets to do a lot of voiceover with the practical effects, and watch the lovely and talented Melinda Fee and stalwart Craig Stevens react to all effects, including with a hefty dose of mime-craft. It's delightful, and it's a shame that it didn't last longer.

'The Invisible Man' lives on. A great show, if you can handle the naivete of the past, and thrive on the comparative innocence of it all.

O.