Hunter (1967-69)

Aussie spy series. 65 x 60 mins.

Premise

Special agent John Hunter (Tony Ward), deals with the evil CUCW (Council for the Unification of the Communist World) who had its Australian headquarters at Delta Exports. Mr Smith (Ronald Morse) headed the Australian operation of the Council, and his chief agent was Kragg (Gerard Kennedy).

Hunter worked for COSMIC (Commonwealth Office for Security and Military Intelligence Coordination), in a special unit under the cover of research specialists, Independent Surveys Ltd. Hunter had a side-kick, Eve Halliday (Fernande Glyn), and worked for Charles Blake (Nigel Lovell), who headed up the organisation.

 Sample ep is here.

Ian Jones told Susan Lever:

Hunter was one of those rare instants, sort of ‘put a spoonful of stuff in the cup, add boiling water and you’ve got a show’.  It was quite extraordinary.  So Charles Spry, a friend of Hector’s, the head of ASIO, came to lunch at Crawford’s.  We had an amazing range of people who lunched at Crawford’s because we have a board meeting every lunchtime.  In effect, the family would have lunch together it was, in effect, a board meeting, an informal board meeting.  
Then, at the end of the day, we’d get the creative team together and have drinks at the close of the day which made for a very, very efficient operation.  Everybody knew what was happening all the time.  One of our luncheon guests was Sir Charles Spry and I thought about it and over the weekend, it was a Friday and it all just came together, a show about an Australian agent in a fictitious organisation.
I even got the name, COSMIC, commonwealth office with security and military intelligence coordination.  I got the idea of Hunter being a Hunter agent.  He is called John Hunter, another agent may be Charles Hunter or whatever.  It was a class of agent and few ideas floating around.  
Hector had been thinking about the same thing over the weekend, came in on the Monday and that was it.  Hunter was born and it was sold with a very good budget, quite a high budget, because the idea was we were going to travel Hunter and one of the early ideas was to take it up to Surfers Paradise, glamour venue.  
The big thing was I had conceived Hunter as a sort of almost tongue-in-cheek serial in half hour episodes with a cliff hanger every half hour and it was hopefully exciting and involving but it had this serial quality about it.  It was about the same level of reality, if I think about it, as Raiders of the Lost Ark – a little more serious.  
I think we put the first two episodes together to make the first two storylines that I had done, the first two scripts to make the first hour and we then gradually veered away from Hunter being a bit tongue-in-cheek and cliff hangerish which worked well but I still would have liked to have seen the fun half hours given a go.  
Q    Was Brigadier Spry then – I mean it seemed to me you had access to all these government sites.
A    We had the most fabulous cooperation.  After my time with ASIO, if I had been younger, I would have been into ASIO as a shot because in those days they were doing a fabulous job.  One of the things they did was show us a film they had made but never shown, a documentary on the Skripov Affair where they busted this top Russian agent who arrived in Australia after the resumption of diplomatic relations which had been broken off by the Petrov business. 
Now that was an extraordinary exercise.  Skripov who was a second deputy vice assistant cultural attaché at the Russian Embassy, sort of posting, the first agent he recruited was a female ASIO agent and the one thing they wouldn’t tell us was how the hell they managed that.  
We had this woman having dinner with Skripov in a Chinese restaurant.  She had a microphone in her bra, though being filmed from a van about 100 metres away, shooting through the front window of the restaurant with Skripov saying things like “I like to eat here because they play music and people cannot hear what we are saying” and stuff like that.  
Skripov, leaving the restaurant with the agent and she walked off one way, Skripov walked off the other way then turned the corner, stopped, came and looked back and all this stuff and fabulous stuff.  Anyway, an ASIO operative was assigned to the program and we worked very closely with him.  ASIO provided some of the props we used.  
They showed us all these great gimmicks like dead letter drops.  You go into a phone booth and light a cigarette.  You’d use your matches, light a cigarette and then the matchbox has got the material in for the dead letter drop in microfilm or who knows what and it’s also got a magnet in it.  You tap the matchbox under the coin box on the phone, have another matchbox if you’re really covering it which you produce with the other hand, walk out of the phone, putting your matchbox in your pocket, puffing your cigarette.  You’ve gone, somebody sees you’re gone, watching from a couple hundred metres away perhaps, they come down the street, take the matchbox, they’ve got the microfilm or whatever you wanted to give them.  All that stuff.  It was great.  
Some of the stories, the first story of Hunter, the Tolhurst File was based very solidly on fact, not in the nature of the material but on the mechanics of a fellow who was working on a top secret project and intercepted by some Russian agents and drugged and photographed in a compromising situation and put back in his house and these photographs were produced and he thinks he’s going mad.  
How on earth could these – because in those days you couldn’t doctor photographs the way we can today, they had comparatively crude techniques like the photo of Nate we looked at.  Yes.  The material was just astonishing.  Some of it, of course, we couldn’t use but they were very open with us and enjoyed the show.  
The only thing is they asked for approval of casting which was interesting.  They approved Tony Ward, Fernande Glyn, Gerard, of course.  He was a baddy.  He could be a rabid commo it probably wouldn’t have mattered but one actor we put up for Mr Blake was proved to be a no-no and I’ve never known why.
Q    And Gerard Kennedy was more successful than Hunter himself as an audience...
A    Very.  See I’d wanted Jerry to play Hunter.  I shouldn’t call him Jerry.  He hates being called Jerry, Gerard.  The idea was Gerard to play Hunter and Norman Yemm to play Craig, the villain.  What a double, what a double.  But Hector said, “No we’ve got to have a matinee idol good looks for a hero” and, of course, the success of Jerry, Gerard, sorry Jerry, that showed just how wrong that principle was.  I think Tony did a good job but he...Tony he worked very hard at it.  He cared about it but it wasn’t really him whereas Jerry just slipped into that role and...
Q    Villains maybe get the audiences in, right?
A    That’s right.  But then he brought the same quality to banner when he became a hero.  That was one sad thing.  When we were looking for a new show for Gerard, Channel 9 wanted to continue with Hunter but we just thought we could come up with something better for Gerard and we talked about a private I show which I was very lukewarm about and Ryan, which didn’t really work, was the result of all of that. 
I came up with an idea of Gerard leaving intelligence work.  Just think of it, ‘I’ve changed sides, I feel a bit lost’, leaves it and doesn’t know what he’s going to do and sees a middle aged guy being beaten up by a couple of hoods.  So he steps in and disposes the hoods and says to the fellow, “Look, are you alright?”  And the fellow said, “Oh, yes.  Where do you live?”  He said, “Well I’m going to back to my office” and takes this guy back to his office and he’s a private detective, we imagined played by Keith Eden with a middle aged secretary and runs this private detective business and Gerard thinks does this happen often?  
He says, “I get into a little bit of trouble and, you see, I’ve got this case going” and Gerard helps him with the case involving the hoods and becomes a fixture.  So you’ve got the middle aged private detective and the middle aged secretary and Gerard getting in there and cutting the mustard.