[Tall Guy]

One of my favourites is the Quiller theme from the short-lived mid-seventies series starring Michael Jayston. I was excited to watch it, as I’d been reading the marvellous Adam Hall books for a few years by then.

You can find all the episodes now on YouTube, and honestly it’s a pretty poor series! Only one of the episodes was based on the books (The Tango Briefing), the writing was cliched, the acting not great and it lost entirely the main attraction of the books, which is the first-person stream of consciousness that makes up the narrative. It was replaced by giving Quiller various partners to whom he could mansplain, not that it was called that then. I’m convinced that there remains a great untapped source of thriller/spy stories in the books.

The score for the TV series was drawn from the classical (in the broad sense) and light music repertoires and never really convinced. The killer main theme by Denton and Cook can still be brought to mind without any effort.