In the 1960s, British television was awash with surreal, unclassifiable fantasies that have stood the test of time thanks to their sheer weirdness. While Adam Adamant Lives!, created at the BBC by Donald Cotton and Richard Harris, developed by Sydney Newman and Tony Williamson and produced by Verity Lambert (all but Williamson well-versed in small screen weirdness having worked in various capacities on Doctor Who (1963-1989)) may have lacked the shot-on-film gloss of ITV offerings like The Avengers (1961-1969) or The Prisoner (1967-1968), it remains a distinctive piece of prime 60s eccentricity and quirkiness, a rollicking adventure romp with its own very catchy Hal Shaper and David Lee penned theme song performed by Kathy Kirby.

The eponymous hero – full name Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant – was an Edwardian gentleman adventurer played by Gerald Harper. In 1902, while trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend Louise, he’s frozen in a block of ice by his arch-nemesis, the leather mask-wearing The Face (it turns out that Louise has betrayed him and is cahoots with The Face). In 1966, his perfectly preserved body is found during building works, and he’s revived and taken in by Georgina Jones (Juliet Harmer, replacing Ann Holloway who appeared in the untransmitted pilot), a young, very modern-by-60s-standards young woman who has long been a fan of tales of Adamant’s swashbuckling adventures. An expert swordsman and skilled in the martial arts, he resumes his adventuring ways in the mid-1960s, eventually coming across his old enemy The Face again.

Adam Adamant Lives!, like so many of the shows of its vintage, has many of its episodes lost thanks to the BBC’s wiping policies (the pilot, one episode of the first series and all but two of the second are long gone). It suffers slightly – only very slightly – by comparison to The Avengers (John Steed is not a million miles from Adamant) and it’s been suggested in some quarters that the similarity was the reason for the show’s premature cancellation. Which is a shame as it largely ploughs its own furrow, Adamant casting a quizzical eye at the changing social and cultural landscape of 60s Britain, his frequent bafflement no doubt reflecting that of many of the BBC’s older viewers. As satire it’s half-hearted at best, but some of Adamant’s reactions to the glittering world of 1966 London, a world full of liberated and progressive youngsters (Adamant is appalled to find that he’s alone with Georgina in her flat without a suitable chaperone) are often very funny.

Harper is excellent as Adamant, an intelligent, supremely gentlemanly and daring superhero (he even wears a cape), not afraid to take to his fists when necessary but often confused by the behaviour of the people around him. It’s a classic fish out of water tale but with a vaguely surreal twist – it never went quite as far out as The Avengers but there’s still something so terribly 60s about it, the stories playing out against a swinging London full of Mini Coopers, mini-skirts and the emerging counterculture. Perhaps the Avengers comparisons are unfair. Adam Adamant Lives! seems more content to spoof older fictional heroes (the show had been born from Sidney Newman’s inability to secure the rights to adapt Hal Meredeth/Harry Blyth’s hugely popular detective Sexton Blake) than it does with developing into an answer/riposte to the Bond films and other spy thrillers.

The show inevitably suffers from the meagre resources that the BBC had at hand at the time – it’s shot largely on videotape, in black and white, on tiny sets – but what it lacks in the colourful pizzazz of The Avengers of The Prisoner, it more than makes up for with excellent performances from the two leads (Harmer effortlessly keeps pace with the handsome and charismatic Harper as the likable Georgina and there’s a nice, strictly non-sexual chemistry between them) and Jack May completes the main trio of characters as Adamant’s new manservant, former Punch and Judy man William E. Simms.

Though the scripts could sometimes tend towards the more mundane, Adamant’s discomfort and fascination with his new time period are never far away. Directors like David Sullivan Proudfoot, Paul Ciappessoni, Moira Armstrong and Ridley Scott and writers like Brian Clemens, Robert Banks Stewart, Ian Stuart Black and the Ford brothers, Donald and Derek, come up with increasingly odd storylines as the two series progress that would eventually see the return of The Face in the middle of the second series in an episode, Face in a Mirror, now sadly among the wiped.

Packed with charm, violent action, sly humour and a fascinating leading character, Adam Adamant Lives! was a hit with the viewers, but it was doomed to die after just two series. The reasons for the cancellation aren’t entirely clear – as noted, some suggest that it simply couldn’t compete with The Avengers but others suggest that Newman and Harper fell out and that the producer was unhappy with the way the series was going, despite impressive viewing figures. But, like Adam Adamant himself, its legacy lives on – you can certainly see his influence all over the Austin Powers films (both heroes are revived from cryogenic sleep to a world they really don’t belong in) and in 2020, Big Finish started producing a series of audio adventures based on the series, with Blake Ritson as Adamant, Milly Thomas as Georgina and Guy Adams as Simms.