Adapting John Buchan

A conversation with Richard Broke

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I was the script editor for the TV version of The Three Hostages. I had hatched an ambitious idea for doing six separate inter-war thrillers, by six different writers, taking the 'British Hero' from the smoke of battle in the Great War into the second war. We would have stopped there, but the theory was that, had we continued, the 'British Hero' would have eventually become James Bond. The writers we were looking at were John Buchan, Dornford Yates, 'Sapper', Sax Rohmer, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace, Sydney Horler and probably others whose names I have forgotten. It was to be as much about paranoia as anything else, since the writers reflected the perceived bogeymen of the time: Asians (still called 'the Yellow Peril' in the 1950s when I was a child), Germans (always called the Boche or the Hun), mysterious Middle Easterns (how topical - a colleague said the other day that Osama Bin Laden was a pure Buchan villain), Russians, and (sad to say this) the Jews.

In 1975 I took this idea to my boss at the BBC. The whole idea was far too expensive, so we ended up doing just three of the six. The idea behind it was never unveiled, as it means nothing when you only do three. Buchan, Dornford Yates and Geoffrey Household were the three survivors.

originally published in JBJ 29 (Autumn 2003)

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