Mob rule on the Beeb
QUESTION Does anyone recall an excellent BBC crime drama from the Sixties called Vendetta? Why isn’t it available on DVD? VENDETTA ran from 1966 to 1968 in 36 black-and-white episodes. The show was written by Tudor Gates, who later co-write Barbarella (1968) and some wonderfully kitsch hammer titles such as The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Twins Of evil (1971).
The show had two main stars; italian heartthrob Stelio Candelli as Danny Scipio and Canadian-born British actor Neil McCallum as Angelo James, an American. The series was shot in Malta, which doubled up for various european cities.
Scipio is an ex-mobster, from the days when the Mafia was more Robin Hood than The Godfather.
When his family is killed in a car bomb (he’s late leaving his house), he calls down a vendetta on the perpetrators of the crime, the ‘new’ Mafia.
Angelo James’s wife is mistakenly killed by the Mafia and he also seeks revenge. Scipio invites him to participate in the vendetta. each week, either Scipio or James was featured (the other making a cameo appearance), while every third week the two were united in a joint episode. When McCallum dropped out, kieron Moore took his place as investigator Mike Hammond.
Vendetta was a dark and brooding show, and while the good guys often won, they never seemed to make any real progress against the Mafia hierarchy. The Mafiosi were uncompromising and the levels of violence quite shocking for the Sixties.
Just six episodes are thought to survive in the BBC archive: The Sugar Man, The Concrete Man, The Mercy Man, The Button Man, The innocent Man and The Honoured Man; the rest were wiped. The surviving episodes haven’t been released.
A 16mm copy of The innocent Man recently fetched £785 on eBay. At this time, it’s simply not cost-effective for the BBC to convert these old series to DVD. The show had an italian sounding theme tune by John Barry, which is available on various compilations. The incidental music was by John Baker and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Baker worked with composer Delia Derbyshire at the BBC. A talented jazz pianist working with electronic beats and tape fragments, his tense, rhythmic themes are on CD as The Vendetta Tapes.
John Collins, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks.
QUESTION Reading a book from the 1880s, I found a reference to some men still using ‘oldfashioned turnip watches’. What were these? this isn’t a timepiece made out of a vegetable. Until the second half of the 18th century, watches were luxury items; as an indication of how highly they were valued, english newspapers of the 18th century often included advertisements offering rewards of between one and five guineas merely for information that might lead to the recovery of stolen watches.
By the end of the 18th century, however, watches were becoming more common. Cheap bulky watches on a chain were nicknamed ‘turnips’ or ‘turnip watches’, the name being descriptive of the fat, round shape of the watch. There are many literary examples from the 19th century.
in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad, for instance, we have: ‘He took up the glass and looked at it, and then looked at his silver turnip, and then at the clock, and then at the turnip again…’
And in ivan Turgenev’s The Watch: ‘And he took out of his pocket a silver watch, a regular turnip, with a rose tree engraved on the face and a brass chain.’
Winston Churchill famously called his gold Breguet pocket watch ‘The Turnip’. His daughter Sarah mentions its use in A Thread in The Tapestry, when Churchill is speaking to his scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann: ‘“Prof,” he said, “Tell us in words of one syllable and in no longer than five minutes what is the quantum theory.” My father then placed his large gold watch, known as “The Turnip” on the table.’
T.E.P. Courtnay, Brailsford, Derbys.
QUESTION Who coined the term ‘the end justifies the means’? Further to the earlier answer, Mahatma Gandhi had a different and, i think, profound view of what appears to be a dichotomy. On December 26, 1924, in Young india, his weekly newspaper, he wrote ‘means and end are convertible terms in my philosophy’.
That view, of course, informed his whole use of non-violence in peaceful resistance.
in Louis Fischer’s seminal biography, The Life Of Mahatma Gandhi, he writes of the 200-mile 1930 salt march to Dandi, a peaceful protest against the iniquitous salt tax, that by symbolically taking salt from the sea shore, Gandhi ‘made the British people aware they were cruelly subjugating india, and gave indians the conviction that they could, by lifting their heads and straightening their spines, lift the yoke from their shoulders.
‘After that, it was inevitable that the British should some day refuse to rule india and that some day india should refuse to be ruled.’
That is a perfect example of means and ends being convertible.
Raj Kothari, Bridport, Dorset.