The Plane Makers, Season Two

Don't worry, you haven't missed my looking at season one, it is just that, since almost all of it is lost (think '60s Doctor Who, or The Quatermass Experiment, or the first season of The Avengers) with only the pilot episode surviving, it didn't seem to warrant an article of its own.

Originally intended as a series of one-off dramas with a rotating cast of characters themed around the single setting of them all being "Plane Makers." The pilot, called Don't Worry About Me, was broadcast in 1963, making this as old as Doctor Who. The main characters here are played by Ronald "Evilest Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark" Lacey and Colin "Watson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" Blakely, but they were both long gone from the series by the time season two began.

One-off episodes do still appear in season two, and some of them are pretty good - the best of the bunch is a borderline outright comedy featuring Rodney "Likely Lads" Bewes and Barbara "Carry On films" Windsor - but they gradually give way to the serial structure I have already seen in the sequel series The Power Game.

And, speaking of which, the first episode of season two introduces us to the 'new' main character John Wilder, as played by Patrick Wymark, his first appearance fortunately not lost to posterity. Here he is the Managing Director of Scott Furlong Limited, the company that titularly makes the titular planes, and the ongoing story arc of the season concerns his struggle to keep his job in the face of opposition from his rivals, including company Chairmanny Sir Gordon Revidge and scheming MP Sir Gerald Merle.

Wilder is the same character we know and love to hate from The Power Game, and there are other familiar faces too - Don Henderson (Jack "Professor Travers" Watling) becomes a regular character partway through the season, and Pamela Wilder (Barbara Murray) makes several appearances in key episodes - as a rule, if Pamela is in it, it'll have one of the best plots of the season. And here we see the genesis of the dynamic between John and Pamela Wilder that was one of the most successful elements of The Power Game - his wife is the one opponent that John Wilder can never get the better of.

Characters that are more tied to the plane-making setting so didn't make the transition to The Power Game include test pilot Captain Forbes (Robert Urquhart, familiar to me from his multiple guest appearances in Danger Man) and Arthur Sugden (played by Reginald Marsh), a W-wording-class character who has risen to management level in the company (like the way Richard Sharpe did in the British army) and who therefore often acts as the audience's point-of-view into the world of big business, with the result that he comes across as the most sympathetic of the regulars - especially when he clashes with his boss John Wilder.

Season two of The Plane Makers has a number of very strong episodes, but it is not quite at the level The Power Game would operate at. It has a feeling of being a bridge between the stand-alone stories of the (missing) first season and the series that would follow - another example of the ensemble feel being carried on to this season is the way that regular characters will sometimes be confined to single scenes within an episode, or else only appearing by telephone (thus saving their actor the trouble of turning up at all that week).

But by the end we are left in no doubt that Wymark and Murray have made the series their own, and I am left struggling to imagine what the first season could have been like without them - guest appearance by William Hartnell (only a few months before he took the role in Doctor Who) notwithstanding!